Why would this fictional character, shown in this setting and in this line of evolutionary progress, create such an a priori problem for some, to the point of forbidding efforts at close acquaintance? It wasn’t always so. Joseph Horowitz, in his book Wagner Nights (see below), recounts some of the prominent responses to our hero upon the complete cycle’s introduction to the American public^(I). The common theme among these respondents was the identification of Siegfried with the spirit of the American frontier and of American optimism and unrestrained individualism in general, and with ” . . . a cultural belief—in untutored instinct, in self-made success, in ‘America.’ Call Siegfried Davy Crockett, who fought and rejected his tyrannical father; who refused education; who roamed the wilderness; who courted and selected his future wife without adult guidance.” (See pp. 146-148 and ff.)

That was a mere 120 years ago. But that is enough to leave these attitudes on the far side of, first, WW1, with its strong anti-German sentiment and ban on Wagner performances and, in fact, all German-language performance; second, the melding of chosen parts of the Wagnerian ethos, and of the festivals at Bayreuth, with National Socialism and Hitler himself, and their co-opting of Wagner’s music, in the 1930s; and third, WW2 and its aftermath, with the assertions of the presence of genocidal anti-Semitism in Wagner and his works. Certainly these are sufficient in themselves to explain a widespread hesitancy to embrace Wagner (or, more accurately, a certain image of Wagner) in general, and his New Man hero in particular. And now in America we are in a time when virility run amok is, to say the least, unfashionable as never before, frontier adventurism is deplored as imperialist expansionism, and a big blond outlaw nationalist, not named Davy, rules by breakage. Siegfried has been handed a lot of baggage to bring with him into our world. So it’s good if we can travel at least some distance back into his, relieving both him and us of at least some of the load. See above.

How did Wagner intend his hero to be performed? Of course there’s guidance in the verbal and musical text—that is, the score—but as always, that leaves much unanswered. And with all reverence due to scholarship, when it comes to performance it’s axiomatic that one can’t play a symbol, an idea, or an abstracted force. One must play a person. The question is of what sort, and how. Apart from the internal evidence of his works, the richest single source of Wagner’s views on stage personification is his lengthy essay called Actors and Singers. This dates from 1872, long after the writings that include his seminal thoughts on the Ring, and thus represents his ripened views on the subject. Like all of us who write about singingacting, Wagner faced the lack of a word that comfortably combines the two integral functions—a lack that reflects the tendency of these functions to resist unification in practice. He settled on the term “Mime,” intended in a meaning far from our everyday usage, and he states at the outset that this term extends to “the Bandsman;” that is, the orchestral musician is also to be considered a singeractor.