English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Ragnarök, cyclical end of the Scandinavian gods 0:12 Good evening to all the comrades, to all the friends, to all the faithful. I'm a bit troubled this evening, well, troubled. There's an end to everything, but in principle we should be completing our acquaintance for most of it. And our listening-viewing, our listening to the Ring. And here, alas, in fast-forward, but even so you'll see, a bit in the same spirit as the previous session, we've taken care — I thank the technical crew, in particular Pierre-Alain who does virtuoso work at this level — we've taken care to select extracts. It's substantially quite long.
1:04 Well, I'll speak to you a little in voice-over from time to time. If there are those who rightly find that sacrilegious, they have the link and will be able to watch it afterwards quietly without me, with all the more attention since they'll be a bit better informed about the ins and outs of this dramatic tangle. So we're going to tackle almost the whole third act, if you will, so the last act of the last drama of the tetralogy, Twilight of the Gods, or Götterdämmerung, as it's called.
1:54 I'm not going to launch into a great dissertation, you'll find it anyway — put Twilight of the Gods into Wikipedia, wherever you like, or a musicology site, there are some, or an encyclopedia. There are all sorts of things. There is one thing to say in particular, that the mythological material Wagner bases himself on to speak of a fall of the gods is not a fantasy of his own — it's the famous Ragnarök of the Scandinavians, isn't it? In Scandinavian mythology there are gods who spend their time killing each other, either among themselves or with their respective enemies, with all kinds of spirits, demons, and animal totems.
2:41 To go quickly, they end up swallowing themselves up in a final catastrophe that is an end of a cycle. That's how it is — a cyclical mythology, as archaic mythologies often are, isn't it? There's no progress, there isn't. And so the gods plunge into a final catastrophe called Ragnarök. You find in it the old Indo-European root Ragn that you find in Rajasthan, the land of kings in India.
3:12 Yes, it seems far off, but it's the same languages as ours. And in Latin, king is Rex, Regis, Reg, Ragn, isn't it? Raja, Maharaja, that is, great king, Maharaja, Magna in Latin, Charlemagne. Well, anyway, so I don't stray too far — we're talking about Twilight of the Gods, but already you can see how much there would be to say, thousands of pages; again, it's not necessary that we be together to become acquainted with all of that.
3:47 In an age when you have data banks that would have made the intellectual workers of past times dream, if I may say so, and of course everyone else too. So we're going to — since we gave you an outline, I'm quite glad it appeared, that it was published — I'll start by saying in the outline that we come back to the beginning, the cyclical aspect. The whole Ring began right at the rise of the curtain after the tremendous prelude of universal becoming, with more than 100 measures, 124 measures on a single chord.
4:36 It began with the three Rhine daughters frolicking in the water. We're going to find them again here, but in a different key. So it's not a return to square one. You can already sense more of a spiral than the circle of eternal return to zero. Like bees that make the same pentagonal or hexagonal cells — it doesn't matter which — for millions of years. There's no progress at that level. It's not a value judgment, they don't need progress.
The return of the Rhinemaidens, in a melancholic tonality 5:19 And... the tonality is not the same. What's the difference? It's a bit more melancholic. And for good reason, you can guess — the gold still hasn't been returned to the Rhine and we're coming to the end. They were joyful when they were frolicking around the gold, which they guarded in a rather contingent way, isn't it — except that here, the eldest of the three tells them, "Be careful, you're chattering here, when we were told to guard the gold." I remind those who are jumping on the train mid-journey, at the beginning of The Rhinegold, when talking about the first scene, at the moment of speaking about the last ones, she reveals by chattering the secret of the gold — that whoever can forge a ring with this gold, whoever knows the magic that allows one to forge the ring with this Rhine gold, that ring will give him power over the world.
6:18 There you go, the rest you know, The Lord of the Rings, isn't it? That's been fairly well popularized. And here we find them without the gold, so they have a melancholic side. There's a nostalgia, she keeps weeping over the lost gold somewhere. I'm summarizing a bit beforehand, purely factually, I'm not giving an interpretation or saying that means this or that — no, I'm telling you the course of events. And she weeps for the lost gold, and I'm giving you the order of events as far as the story goes, and at the same time general remarks about the music we hear, but without interpreting it.
7:01 Throughout this whole scene where she weeps for the lost gold, and even beyond, the song of the Rhine daughters, of the three daughters, has pre-Debussyan harmonies. It's Debussy who is going to be the great break that will, for some — there's almost a consensus on this point — inaugurate twentieth-century music, so-called contemporary music, practically. You'll see, the harmonies already — it's in the air — are pre-Debussyan, and that fits very well with the aquatic element, by the way.
7:40 And they're a bit melancholic like that until — this is an opportunity, as I was saying about the music for Wagner, to let us hear all sorts of themes that you should have in your ear by now from listening to excerpts, but which appear a bit as if from a distance. Like recollections, like reminiscences. The theme of the gold, the theme of the ring, of course the theme of the Rhine's waters, and above all their own theme, incessantly.
The leitmotifs, an example of rigor for the sciences of history 8:19 Let me point something out — I've already done so once, but so quickly that I'm afraid it went unnoticed. I recall that the reference to Wagner and the Ring is here present in order to try to anchor, on a precise example, in the here and now, our great general theme — this time about how to make so-called human sciences, sciences of history, as rigorous as the hard sciences, even if it's not the same kind of rigor, of course.
8:50 We've seen how much it could not and should not be the same, it's not the same purposes. And finally, let's take as an example the fact that they have achieved a certain rigor. I'll give you an example here. I was playing the theme of the Rhine daughters. On the notes of the perfect chord, like this. As is often the case, the fundamental themes of quite simple beings are like that. It's not a very complicated theme, unlike — it's not the mysterious harmonies of the helmet. Well, now I'll play the theme of the bird.
9:29 It has nothing to do with it, the bird — it's depicted. Look, that's the bird's theme. It's the same theme, there's a rhythmic difference, that's all. There's a rhythmic difference, the notes don't have quite the same duration, do they? There they're very even with the Rhine daughters, they're more — they chirp a bit more in the bird's theme.
10:06 There you go. In short, what am I showing? That one is what's called in mathematics the transform of the other, the transformation of the other. All it took was a rhythmic modification and you get the other one, isn't it? A single parameter. I say this as a reminder that we're not here only to be at a concert, even if I'm delighted that we're listening to this immense work — as I believe it's the fairest judgment one can pass on it — this tetralogy has its longueurs. A four-day work has its longueurs, but it also has its peaks, and those peaks are among the summits of Western music. There you go, that's a judgment one encounters fairly often and which is fairly fair, regarding music before it evolved in the twentieth, twenty-first century, for better or for worse, but often for the better too. I'm not one of those who stop consuming classical music at the end of the nineteenth century.
11:10 Far, far from it. But anyway, we're not here to talk about my tastes. So there's this tonality of the three Rhine daughters, a bit more melancholic, but now they recover their side — I won't say completely, but their more cheerful side — as soon as Siegfried arrives. Because we're on the bank of the Rhine, on the edge of a great forest, and Hagen — whom you saw last time with his schemes, isn't it, Hagen who did everything to make Siegfried forget Brünnhilde the Valkyrie, I was going to say the love of the century, the almost timeless love, heroic love par excellence, that absolute couple — makes him forget the Valkyrie, with a potion that induces amnesia, and another aphrodisiac potion, as we'd say today, isn't it, that immediately makes him.
Siegfried flirts with the Rhinemaidens 12:09 It's a moment of falling in love with Gutrune, Gunther's sister. I remind you that Gunther is impotent, without a wife, and his sister Gutrune, for the moment, is married to no one. She suffers from being the sister of a king whose bachelorhood somewhat dims his glory. It's not exactly radiant, prolonged bachelorhood. There, to sum up very quickly. So Hagen has arranged this — don't worry — Gutrune will marry Siegfried, he'll make him fall in love with a potion. And as for Gunther, he will be the husband of the most beautiful woman, the most prestigious one a king could boast of possessing — that's the Valkyrie, Brünnhilde. I remind you that when we say "the Valkyrie," it's Brünnhilde, because she has nine sisters, like the Muses — they're all daughters of Wotan, whom Wotan had with the earth, a bit like Uranus in Greek mythology, isn't it, impregnated the earth, if I may put it that way.
13:07 Except that the others, we see them from time to time, the Ride of the Valkyries, all that, they have a very episodic role, except precisely this one, and also Waltraute, who comes to tell her what becomes of her father, at the end of the first act of Twilight, but that's not our subject. Brünnhilde is the Valkyrie, Wotan's favorite daughter. She is the equivalent, as I've already told you, to set things in place, I won't go back over it, of what Athena is for Zeus. She too a virgin, a warrior, isn't she?
13:43 So, I told you she becomes more cheerful when Siegfried appears. What's he doing there, Siegfried? Hagen, in his trickery, invented, used the pretext of a hunt. Siegfried immediately volunteers, let's go hunting. It's a common pastime of these royal families. So off they go hunting and he gets a bit lost in the forest. Well, "lost" — I mean he's alone, he's strayed a bit from the main body of Gunther's men, among whom is Hagen. And he suddenly shows up there on the bank of the Rhine. And all happy, the Rhine daughters, who were a bit melancholic, see a man arriving.
14:23 They know very well who it is, it's Siegfried, and so does he. And we'll see that he is not insensitive to the charms of the Rhine daughters. There's a kind of sentimental unraveling of Siegfried. He was a one-woman man, the Valkyrie's man, then with a potion — you'll tell me it's not his fault, she'll do him justice later, the woman, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. With a potion, he becomes Gutrune's husband. And let's continue the series and the downward slide.
14:54 And now you're going to see that there are very clear allusions. I'm going to anticipate on the text you'll see scrolling by. He flirts. He'd like to flirt with the Rhine daughters. But he has the ring on his finger. And the Rhine daughters — he'd like to go swimming with them. The Rhine daughters say to him, "Yes, but then what will you give us in exchange?" They know very well what happened to them. They're alluding to the ring. I'm summarizing events for you.
15:31 Siegfried is ready to give it to them. For him, the ring has no market value, etc. You find again the algebra that governs the whole Ring, whether it's gold or love. Even when it's a love like this, a passing little eros, like this libidinal attraction Siegfried feels for the naiads, which they wouldn't return. These girls who — how did Nerval put it when he was in the bay of Marseille, at a time when sea bathing wasn't common? Every morning I would find myself in the bay, before the laughing islands of the Gulf, the Château d'If island, all that, with a young Englishwoman whose — I quote — whose supple body cleaved the green water around me. For the one who wrote "I have dreamed in the grotto where the mermaid swims," nothing is accidental.
16:18 Now, one of you told me exactly this — I give him credit, isn't it — told me, it's our friend Steiner, I don't pronounce Steiner the German way, I don't know, I don't know whether by his first name he's on this side or the other side of the Rhine, but I mean S-T-E-I-N-E-R, who makes very pertinent remarks on the musical field and who sees a connection with the Undines. In my discussion of Mignon, for those who have followed — and I know there are many of you, I take this opportunity to thank you because we've never had as much audience as our format, I won't say short because I can still make progress toward shorter, meaning still an hour, but anyway toward the shortened format we've developed in our analytical reveries, particularly in Mignon.
17:07 And as Mignon sings, and she is even a song, the famous ballad she sings on Goethe's text, and which so many musicians have tried to set to music with varying degrees of success. And here, for once, it's not even Schubert, who nevertheless has no equal in the lied genre, but it's Hugo Wolf, a bit later, end of the nineteenth century, who no doubt produced the best rendering, the best musical realization of Mignon's poem. So we're not very far off.
17:42 So there's this curious exchange, you see, they tease each other a bit, it's like courtly flirtation, as we'd say in French, marivaudage. You see, it's neither hard, nor crude in language, it's all very young. Siegfried is a young innocent, basically, innocent in the psychological sense. The three Rhine daughters, as we've seen, are a bit like Mignon, they're between childhood and maturity, between animality — the Undines, the mermaids, a fish tail after all. They're halfway between animality and humanity, they babble more than they speak. We've seen that, which is why I won't linger.
18:28 It needs to be recalled now. And so they tease each other in this tone, and at the moment when Siegfried says to them, "Alright, you want the ring? I'll give it to you," that's when she drops the mask. They had let him believe, for the sake of the flirtation game, that she wanted the gold. But no, she says, "It's not to us that it must be given, the gold must be returned to the Rhine." So Siegfried doesn't understand — for him it would have been of interest to give it in exchange for a nice swim with the naiads.
18:58 No, with the Nixies, as they're called, isn't it, beyond the Rhine. They say no, it's not us it must be given to, it's to the Rhine. And as that changes things, they have the misfortune of adding, "If you don't give it back, it brings misfortune, that's how it is, Siegfried." They tell him, "If you don't give it back, you'll die within the day." And that's exactly what shouldn't have been said, since he — I've never known fear. Let me back up a bit. Wotan had predicted that only someone who has never known fear would be able to cross the circle of flames protecting the Valkyrie's sleep, and would be able to awaken and possess his favorite daughter.
He who has not known fear, and the play of genders 19:45 Even if he opposes it at the last moment, but that's another story, quite common. Only someone who has never known fear. And Siegfried, when the bird tells him, "Only someone who has never known fear can cross the flames and it guides him toward Brünnhilde's rock," the fool who has never known fear, that's me! I quote word for word! When he arrives, when he has crossed the flames, the flames don't scare him, the dragon didn't scare him, nothing scares him.
20:21 But when he arrives and sees this sleeping figure — I say "this figure" because at first he thinks it's a man — he sees a warrior in armor protected by a shield. It's extraordinary, we haven't seen all that, one can't see everything. With his sword, to ease its breathing, it looks a bit constricted, he breaks the strap holding the breastplate and sees, for the first time, a woman. And there he leaps back in terror — for the first time he knows fear — crying "Das ist kein Mann, this is not a man."
20:56 I tell you this because it's rather interesting, this play of genders and sexes that we've already seen in Mignon last time. I remind you that an anthropologist wrote about the theme of the androgyne in Wagner, and don't forget that Siegfried himself is the incestuous son of twin brother and sister. There, I'm pointing out all these oddities, or these incongruities with traditional morality in any case, which are quite common in Wagner.
21:28 So why am I summarizing all this? To get to the point where, since they try to scare him and he doesn't like being scared, he says, "Since that's how it is, I'm keeping it." And if you think fear is going to intimidate me — he keeps the ring. And that ends the scene with the Rhine daughters, so I'll continue my progression now. They leave, a bit frightened, saying, "But the poor fellow, he doesn't understand, let's leave him to his folly, he hasn't understood after all, we warned him, etc." Their song fades away, in an increasingly Debussyan manner, with harp notes and aquatic texture.
22:02 And then suddenly we hear horn calls. The men are looking for him. And suddenly we see arriving the whole company of Hagen on this bank of the Rhine. I'll tell you right away that we don't see the river. Patrice Chéreau has a very interesting idea, which is to show the river metonymically. That is, we see the great wall of a dam. We're on a dam. So we're not on the bank of the Rhine, at least not on the lateral banks, but on a transversal edge.
22:32 And so, Hagen and Siegfried are in fine form, he's a bit sheepish, saying, "I'm sorry, I have no game, I let the game escape, a dwarf must have hidden it from me." You see, there's yet another supernatural matter. A dwarf, a kobold, an imp, like garden gnomes, must have stopped me from finding game. I only found water game. You see the allusion to the Rhine daughters? "I only found water game." Well, anyway, they chat among men.
23:04 And Hagen and the men, everyone is surprised to see him empty-handed, him, the super-hero. Hagen has the spoils of the hunt brought forward, and that's when I called it the cynegetic carnage. It's terrifying, we see stags, roe deer going by, being tossed down like that. You sense that blood isn't far off. Gunther, who is present, hugs the walls a bit. He's ashamed, he knows perfectly well it's a trap set for Siegfried. He has sworn Siegfried's death to avenge — I'll skip that — but since he's a coward, isn't he, he doesn't have Hagen's assurance.
The language of birds, anamnesis, and Siegfried's death 23:49 And there, to go quickly, Hagen says to Siegfried, "By the way, Siegfried, it seems you understand the language of birds." That rumor spreads like wildfire, this man who understands the language of birds. I remind you that when Siegfried kills the dragon, he takes his sword, which still has dragon's blood on it, and putting his fingers to his mouth to wipe them, contact with the dragon's blood suddenly makes him understand the language of birds. Take it however you like.
24:26 So, back to it. "It seems you understand the language of birds." So everyone settles in, they ask him to tell how it happened, and Siegfried is going to tell his life story. Wait, if he tells his life story, he can't, since he drank a potion of amnesia. So in the middle of the account, you'll see, I'm telling you in advance, at the moment when he says "I'm thirsty," Hagen prepares him a drink that restores memory. I know it's a bit complicated, Twilight of the Gods, not really. There's a potion we saw in the second act that he drank, which gave him forgetfulness, and now a memory-restoring one, because Hagen needs Siegfried to go all the way in his memory, to the point of telling how he woke the Valkyrie, how he reached the summit — it's the very word for it — of his journey, what the rock held.
25:21 The Valkyrie sleeps atop a rock. "Auf hohem Felsen sie schläft," she sleeps on a high rock — "auf hohem Felsen." And of course, in doing so, he admits that he possessed the one who is now Gunther's wife, the king's wife, whereas everyone thought it was Gunther who had caught the Valkyrie by his own strength. No one knows there was a trick. And thanks to the helmet that allows one to change shape, it's Siegfried who, taking on Gunther's features — I remind you, so we don't get confused — since only he can cross the flames, took the Valkyrie and brought her to Gunther.
26:07 So it's as he goes to the end of this memory, when he reaches this memory, that we get one of the most beautiful passages, this kind of self-anamnesis, this autobiography in the mode of recollection, where the most melodic themes return. And it's at the moment when he says he couldn't help giving a kiss that awakens the beautiful sleeper — it's at that very moment, of course, that Hagen, with his spear in his back, kills Siegfried. I'll go quickly. I'll spare you the events that follow, but there's nothing left but to restore the great final scene.
The Valkyrie orders the finale; the myth of Eros and Psyche 26:48 The final scene, what is it? Well, above all, who is it? I'm not asking what, I'm asking who. Well then, all the characters — you can forget them, the gods, the giants, the dwarfs, the dragon — there's only one character left who reigns and commands the whole finale. And it's this woman who was the most betrayed, the most magnificent — it's the Valkyrie. It's she who will throw the torch that will set ablaze the palace of the gods, thus precipitating the twilight of the gods, and the blaze will gradually sink into the waters of the Rhine.
27:25 But before she throws the torch, before she sets it ablaze, she takes Siegfried's ring, which she wears on her finger, and returns it to the Rhine daughters, throwing it into the waters of the Rhine. There, and so the palace of the gods sinks little by little, but I'll tell you more when we get there about the musical themes we hear, because there's a rather staggering combination of themes. And the last image we see is an almost stroke-of-genius idea by Patrice Chéreau: to show humanity — you and me, neither dwarfs nor giants, ordinary everyday people, in a crowd, a crowd that floods the stage. The gods have disappeared, the reign of man begins. For better or for worse, but now, it's man's turn. There you go.
28:19 I think we can... No, no, I was forgetting the essential thing. The fact that Wagner decides to close all this with the tale of a woman who says "now I understand everything." "Now I understand everything, in the mourning I am in." "I am the woman who has the revelation of everything, when even the men do not know." "Alles weiss ich, I know everything." She arrives at absolute knowledge, that's why I put it in the plan, if you like. How is it that he could entrust this role of the final liquidation of the actions of the characters from the palace of the gods, of everything you like, to a woman?
28:58 Well, I'll give you the answer through a text. I won't overdo the epithets and hyperbole, but even so. Listen, I won't tell you who it's by. There are two characters in it, there's a couple. If you know the site, you know the story of Eros and Psyche—I've replaced the characters' names with Eros and Psyche because they're the same roles. Let me remind you that in Greek mythology, Eros, like all the gods, gets a bit bored on Olympus; he prefers the wives of men, our wives, our sisters, our mothers, our lovers—the gods prefer shepherdesses. They're up there on Olympus, they see a shepherdess. Plenty of stories like that.
29:37 Or the nymphs. You know, Apollo chased the nymph Daphne who, at the last moment, to avoid being caught by Apollo, turned into a laurel tree. And which has never ceased to perfume us since. And here we have the myth of Eros and Psyche. You remember, the pitch is simple. Eros, ravished in the literal sense, carries off upward this shepherdess who until then was with her sisters, her cousins, tending the sheep, as throughout the Mediterranean, and she arrives in a kind of material paradise where she gets everything one could want, all her wishes are granted, and he comes to visit her every night, he comes to love her every night; he sets only one condition, that she must never try to see him, she must never try to see him, to identify him.
30:28 Namely that her lover is the God of Love himself, which isn't bad. But we know it, of course; she must not know it. So naturally, in the mythological theater, since she gets a bit bored, the God allows her to go back periodically to see her relatives, doesn't he? And then he takes her back, and so she chats. And she tells her relatives, you can't imagine what I'm living, it's an extraordinary lover, I'm in a palace, I mean, I have everything...
31:00 I get everything I want, always my cheeks like a baby's, in short. And that makes the others a bit jealous. And they end up sowing doubt. It's exactly what's going to happen with the couple in the text I'm about to read. The doubt, by telling her "wait, if he doesn't want you to see him, it's because something's not right." What does that mean? That he perhaps has a nose like this, or that he's monstrous? They end up sowing doubt. And the doubt becomes so unbearable that one night, after the ecstasy, while her lover sleeps, she takes—she can't see him, she's sure of it in the darkness—she takes a lamp, but a lamp from that era, it's not EDF. She takes a lamp, not a flashlight, an oil lamp. And she sees the most beautiful young man one could imagine.
31:48 She trembles with emotion, and trembling, she lets fall a drop of boiling oil onto the body of the God, who wakes up and of course everything disappears. It's the failure of this couple. It's the same story here. But then, what the author says—the reasons why the woman sought to know, because we say, that silly little thing, she should have enjoyed it instead of listening to the slander of her sisters, that's just like women. You see, one could draw a banal and slanderous conclusion regarding the fair sex. So, I'll read the text and I'll tell you the author afterward.
Reading of Wagner's A Communication to My Friends 32:26 This woman who—careful, it's a subordinate clause that never ends—this woman who, this woman who, there's a suspense before the main clause. This woman who, with clear knowledge of what she is doing, throws herself to her ruin through the necessity of love. Who? Subordinate clause. Even while she is in the grip of the voluptuousness of adoring, prefers to destroy herself if she cannot entirely grasp the one she loves. Even though she knows nothing of his life, nothing at all, she doesn't even know his name. The one she loves. This woman who, from the day she meets Eros, has condemned herself to perish by causing the other to perish. This woman, that's Psyche in the myth. The soul.
33:06 This woman who can love only in this way and not otherwise. Who, through the very explosion of her jealousy, manages and only thus to pass from the rapture of adoration to the fullness of love, manifesting through her own downfall this fullness to the one who still does not understand her. This magnificent woman before whom Eros could only withdraw—I leave you to imagine whatever connotations you like of that verb—his particular nature, meaning that of a god, forbidding him to understand her, this woman, and here's the main clause, I had now discovered her.
34:00 The author wanted to write a work whose hero is Eros, and so he's obliged to speak, among other things, of Eros's adventure, of his relationship with Psyche. And it's in looking at this Psyche's character that he saw that she was perhaps more important than his hero himself. It's by digging into her character that the playwright discovered—I continue with the text—this marvelous woman, I had now discovered her.
34:34 And Eros, so my first goal, the first center that was meant to be the center of my work, Eros—look how beautiful the image is—was the lost arrow, shot in the direction of that treasure I had only sensed. So farewell Eros, but I exchanged his loss for the certainty of having now discovered the true feminine. I'll read you an incredible text.
35:06 Incredible, well, incredible—I'll tell you right away, I won't tell you the author, but it will guide some of you—I'll tell you the period when it was written. It was written in 1851. Listen closely. But I exchanged his loss, Eros's, for the certainty of having now discovered the true feminine, the one who must bring me, as well as the whole world—so here we leave the personal anecdote—liberation, once masculine egoism, we'd say today masculine domination, patriarchy, once masculine egoism, even in its noblest form, shall be broken.
35:53 Psyche, the woman I had not understood until then, this purest and most necessary expression of the involuntary, made of me, in so many words, a complete revolutionary. We've moved from the psychological to the political. She was the spirit of the people from whom I also expected, as an artist, my liberation. Incredible text.
36:24 So what does he do? You see, this is to show you that it was somewhat in the air at the time, that Wagner entrusts a woman with the task of bringing the final revelation and settling everything that had remained unresolved. I can now tell you who the author is. I didn't want to say it before because when you know who the author is, you're influenced by preconceptions. Even if you barely know this author, he's associated with images that distort the attention one should give to the details of the text before us.
36:58 Excuse me, but here I'm addressing my fellow teachers. I've often asked—I've served on baccalaureate juries, for example—I've often asked that for the text commentary we not give the author's name. Say it's a text by Rousseau, to continue my pedagogical digression, say it's a text by Rousseau—even a relatively serious student who only knows his exam-prep question will, after 'Rousseau says this,' try to fit in his exam-prep question about Rousseau, without noticing that in that particular text, Rousseau might for once be saying something very unusual compared to what he usually says, perhaps even contradicting some of his own theses. So nothing beats fidelity to the signifier, one might say, in another field, to the text.
37:49 I can tell you now, it's Wagner himself who wrote that in 1851 in a text called "A Communication to My Friends." I'll take this chance to show you this book again—I don't much like the cover, far from it, may the illustrator forgive me—which has the advantage, published by Gallimard, of containing the main essays, not all of them, because he was a chatty fellow, he wrote many theoretical essays, especially during his years in exile, when he couldn't yet compose, and had quite a few material troubles.
38:30 He compensated by writing theoretical works on music and on musical theater. So it very largely contains the essential ones, in particular Opera and Drama, the famous one—this is an excerpt from that text, A Communication to My Friends, written at the moment when he had finished his three youthful operas—these are still operas, the Romantic operas, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin. They're legends, so to speak. And he moves to myth starting with the Ring and the Rhinegold. But he hadn't yet composed the tetralogy, he had it in mind.
39:08 And the tetralogy was originally to be called Siegfried's Death. That's what we'll see this evening. Siegfried's Death. And in fleshing out this death, trying to understand how he came to be in a position to be killed by Hagen, he traced things back, going backward, and said "so I need to start by explaining his youth," which gives us Siegfried, his parents, the unfortunate parents of Siegfried who are the heroes of Die Walküre, the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde.
39:41 And then, to introduce all this, something that happens far off, well before men appeared on Earth, in the time when there were only gods, giants, and the underground world—The Rhinegold. So you see, he went a bit backward for this. So the text, you see, he made it that way, retrospectively. But the music followed the normal order. He started by composing The Rhinegold first, then Die Walküre—the music, that is. And you'll have another chance to see, as we saw at length last time, that having interrupted, as I mentioned last time, he took nearly 12 years over the composition of the Ring, because his interests, as they say elsewhere, were directed toward other subjects.
Tristan, The Mastersingers, and the loosening of the writing 40:32 In the meantime he wrote his two absolute masterpieces—even those who aren't very Wagnerian say there's nothing more beautiful in his output than Tristan and Die Meistersinger, the two most human works of Wagner, if you like. Now, these two works considerably loosened up his writing; they would open the door to Debussy and even later to Schoenberg—that's quite something. Not to mention Mahler, and all the post-Wagnerians, Richard Strauss, Bruckner, etc. But not Brahms. Brahms always remained apart, it's an influence.
41:03 So let's not turn this into a history of music for now, I want to say that. In this loosening of the musical language, we can see it very well—I've already pointed out to you some almost Debussy-like resonances in the somewhat melancholy babbling of the Rhinemaidens, especially at the beginning before Siegfried appears, and I'm very glad one of you told me, in a passage—I'm not dreaming—the cello plays the blues scale. He listened well. I had pointed out to you that within this huge orchestral mass, plus the voices and choruses, there are sometimes passages of chamber music, of rarefied music with a presence, an intensity of presence of solo instruments.
41:56 There was in particular a short but extremely expressive phrase for solo cello when Hagen says "remember the helm that will make him invisible, I'll make him drink a potion, I'll make him forget everything." There, so from there, I think we can begin now—it's more interesting than my chatter after all—the curtain will rise on the banks of the Rhine, we'll see the dam again and the three maidens mourning the lost gold.
Screening: the Rhinemaidens mourn the lost gold 42:33 They're wearing the same somewhat saloon-girl outfits as in The Rhinegold, but they're no longer as playful, teasing, and flirtatious. I won't say more.
43:57 There we hear Siegfried's horn. It sets the mood.
44:35 Singing.
47:18 Watch out for that chord! A terrible chord. The tragic returns.
48:14 You see, she's teasing him anyway.
49:02 Since he's stung to the quick, there, he says "I'll give them the ring if they think I'm stingy." He doesn't want to give a bad impression. All this is very human. The music is strange.
The Rhinemaidens drop the mask 49:32 There, I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain to take a little pause. Thank you Pierre-Alain. Excuse me, there's a framing problem. Yes, why am I pausing here? Because you see, they've teased him so much, "you're stingy," etc. He doesn't want to play the bad role, he's ready to give it to them. And that's where, all of a sudden, they're going to, as I said earlier, drop the mask. You'll see how the stage action is completely different, they're going to go so far as to grovel at his feet as if seized by anguish at the same time.
50:09 It's not for us, so it's not to us that it should be given, it must be returned. First it will save the world, but it will start by saving you first, because you risk dying that very day. Well, you risk it—it's certain that if you keep it, you'll die before the day is over. And you'll see how everything changes, the themes of the ring's curse. I'll take the chance to tell you, look, the theme of the Rhinemaidens, Rheingold, the adoration of the gold, there. Excuse me.
50:53 There are multiple variations, let me repeat. Besides, Wagner, when he repeats it, it's only its first chords. That's the adoration of the gold by the Rhinemaidens. It's one of the many Rhinemaiden themes. But the theme of servitude, which is much more painful, that's this one, there. It too is made of two notes like this, isn't it? But first, it's not a whole tone, it's a half-tone, that's the most unsettling one.
51:28 You see all the combinations one can make with... each of the leitmotifs is composed in such a way that it can combine infinitely and transform into another. I spoke of transformation earlier in the strictest sense. Let's go.
52:03 The terrible chord again. He doesn't understand why she suddenly refuses.
52:46 The theme of the renunciation of love. The same theme, mixed in.
53:25 The Curse!
Reminder: Siegfried breaks Wotan's spear 54:45 The blending of the theme of servitude and the song of the Rhinemaidens. Let's take a break.
55:21 Thank you, Pierre-Alain. An interruption is needed here. He makes an allusion to a scene we haven't seen, so let me summarize it for you anyway, because it's worth its weight in gold too. Recall—it complements what I said earlier. When the bird—the second act of Siegfried, the finale of the second act of Siegfried—has just killed the dragon, he's delighted to see the bird, the only sympathetic character he's seen in his life since being raised in the forge by the treacherous dwarf Alberich, whom he has just killed.
55:52 So he has only corpses, that of the dragon, that of his adoptive father. And there's the bird that understands his language, which is going to guide him to Brünnhilde's rock. The continuation is the third act of Siegfried. When the curtain rises, Siegfried is heading toward Brünnhilde's rock, guided by the bird. But who's waiting for him at the foot of the rock? Wotan, the Valkyrie's father. I told you earlier that he's delighted that it's the best of heroes who will awaken his daughter, but at the last moment, he can't help opposing Siegfried coming to seize his most precious possession, his daughter.
56:33 But he doesn't say it like that. When Siegfried meets him, he says "Greetings, old man, you might know..." You see, already a bit insolent, Siegfried. "Greetings, old man, do you know where the Valkyrie's rock is, where she sleeps surrounded by flames? But who told you there's a maiden sleeping surrounded by flames?" "Well, a bird." "Oh, you know," he says, "birds gossip"—that annoys Siegfried. Well, tempers rise, and hot-headed Siegfried takes his sword and shatters into a thousand pieces—what? Wotan's spear.
57:06 The spear on which are inscribed, since the beginning of time and the world, the runes, the old magical Scandinavian writings, which maintain a semblance of balance in the universe, which mean that Wotan cannot break all those pacts among the giants, the gods, the dwarves, etc. So Siegfried's sword, which he forged himself from the pieces of his father's sword, shattered by Wotan's spear in Die Walküre—what a revenge, you see! Siegfried's sword has shattered into a thousand pieces the spear of the king of the gods.
57:46 So let's go back three seconds to pick up this phrase. Thank you, Pierre-Alain.
1:02:12 There it's explicit that he's interested in the figurines. I'm not putting words in his mouth.
1:03:00 Curse! Which comes to mingle with the fanfare of the hunting party we hear in the distance. Servitude, the voice of Hagen. The deliberately ridiculous theme, a bit silly and naive, of Siegfried's horn.
The hunting slaughter, Siegfried's account, and his death 1:03:52 Here are the men, the guns.
1:04:28 They're preparing the picnic. Look at this scene of carnage. There's blood in the air.
1:05:50 It's a stream of water, see?
1:06:35 Thirst calls for drinks. The violence becomes more and more melodic. Yes, Gunther's unease.
1:07:17 He would like his brother-in-law to celebrate. Servitude.
1:08:25 Listen to this crucial phrase for the woman-bird equivalence.
1:09:24 Siegfried's narrative. First the forge.
1:09:55 It's still the forge theme.
1:10:30 And here, back to the murmur of the forest, the magic of Ontario. The happiest moment of the Ring. The instruments rise upward.
1:11:24 The bird theme, he's singing on the bird theme there.
1:12:13 Second verse.
1:12:59 The men want the rest. And here's the drink that will restore memory. Watch out, the drink of anamnesis. The helmet.
1:13:58 I won't comment on this staging idea of Chéreau's, it speaks for itself, it's superb. And now we're going to talk about Brünnhilde. Memory returns.
1:14:55 The crossing of the flames. Watch how the music will fill everything entirely when he reaches the Valkyrie.
1:16:28 The curse.
1:17:27 I'm going to ask for a break now. Good, I'll ask Pierre-Alain to skip the episodes that follow, which are very marginal, and to go straight to Brünnhilde's final narrative, which closes the whole work. So obviously I'm skipping two magnificent passages, but less recapitulative than those of the final one, of Brünnhilde's final narrative, which is also a splendor.
Funeral march and versions of Siegfried's death 1:18:05 The famous funeral march follows on almost immediately, we just saw it, without a voice, only the instruments, but anyway it exists everywhere, on all the excerpts you stream. Siegfried's Funeral March, the Funeral March from Twilight of the Gods, you have all the versions in all the best performances, it's not complicated. And then the death of Siegfried itself. I would have liked, but for lack of time, to play you a sample. I'll go back here a bit to the answers to the questions we discussed last time. I'm answering our interlocutor who asked me which are the best audio versions of the Ring. I had answered that they can't be compared.
1:18:53 You'd almost have to make two rankings, a ranking of technically correct recordings, which has really only existed since the late 1950s, what's called high fidelity, practically, even a bit before the beginning of stereo. A good mono recording in high fidelity is better than a stereo one that reverbs. And then there are pre-war recordings, from the '50s, from the pre-war years, the further back you go, the more sound technique is so recent that the sound recordings are very poor.
1:19:30 It's a heroic sound for connoisseurs, if you like. But sometimes… But on the other hand, in terms of performers, there are versions that remain unequaled to this day. I'm not saying that out of nostalgia for old wax recordings. There are excellent versions, I mentioned them last time, I won't go back over them, with all the sonic splendor you could want, by Georg Solti, by Karajan, by Karl Böhm, with voices that perhaps don't reach that height.
1:20:00 But now, as for the moment of Siegfried's death, it's not long, that is, not even ten minutes, with his final ride. He relives the moment when he crossed the flames and discovered the Valkyrie. Everything comes back to him in memory, doesn't it? Forget Gutrune, the pretenses. And he dies while reliving his last ride to go awaken the Valkyrie. A virtual ride, then, this time. You have to hear it in Lauritz Melchior's version. Like the first name, remember it, Lauritz Melchior.
1:20:38 I'm telling you, this is often in English. Listen to this. And you'll see that voices like that, which combine phenomenal power and a sweetness that comes straight from the Italian schools of singing, have remained unequaled to this day. I speak of it with some emotion because it's in this piece, of everything he recorded, that the immense Melchior, the greatest Wagnerian tenor of all time — it's not just me who says so — Danish.
1:21:12 I discovered him precisely in this piece, in the death of Siegfried, on a magnificent France Musique broadcast in the 1960s, which still continues actually, but those were the heroic days of what was called the Record Critics' Tribunal, excellent for training the ear, where several versions of a given work are compared. And when they got to the Ring, the host of the program, Armand Panigel, had said, 'Well, let's listen outside the competition, because the sound recording is very poor. Outside the competition, the way Lauritz Melchior sang the death of Siegfried, but completely outside the competition, because it would almost be unfair to the others to compare them to him.' There you go.
Brünnhilde attains absolute knowledge 1:21:50 So remember that, Lauritz Melchior, the death of Siegfried, excerpt on YouTube. We can continue, so now we go straight on to the final scene. In the meantime, I'll tell you, Hagen has killed Gunther, who wanted his share of the treasure now, since the ring has been taken from Siegfried, from Siegfried's finger.
1:22:27 And as always, the good, the bad and the ugly, as always, when there's treasure, there's dispute, as we saw in The Rhinegold, the two brothers, one had killed the other. The moment it came to sharing the treasure, so Gunther was killed, Hagen is there, I tell you right away he won't say three words, just at the end, in the last seconds, when Brünnhilde throws the ring, he rushes forward saying 'The ring, the ring!' and the Rhinemaidens drag him down to the depths and the gold returns to its liquid element and everything goes back to how it was before the treasure.
1:23:05 ...the gold disappeared from the Rhine. So I move on to the moment when the Valkyrie takes on her full stature and orders everything that will follow. Look at the words, everything is well said.
1:24:25 Siegfried's theme, heroic, we'd been waiting for it a long time.
1:27:45 We're approaching the moment when she expresses absolute knowledge. She addresses the gods.
1:28:24 The eternal fault of the gods. She speaks to her father.
1:29:11 You see? So that a woman may attain knowledge. And now I know everything. On the harmonies of fate.
Interlude: the messenger bird 1:29:56 The dissonant chords of the ravens. We must stop for a moment.
1:30:26 I'm sorry to interrupt this ascending phrase which is about to reach a resolution, because she's going to finally say to Wotan, rest in peace, finally, despite all your faults. She's sending a message to Wotan: the gold will be returned to the Rhine, Wotan can breathe easy, he no longer has to fear the curse, the gold is going to be returned to the Rhine. But, as messengers, she sends the ravens, in the totemic archaeo-Germanic tradition.
1:31:00 And our Gauls are part of that too, the wings on the helmets of the Gauls, those were raven wings, for historians who know. The raven plays a very important role among Nordic peoples, including among the Inuit, where it is at the very origin of the creation of the world, it is at the origin of light, yes, this dark bird — well, let's not stray too far. But what interests me is the function of messenger, of the bird in general and the raven in particular.
1:31:35 I'm not only talking about carrier pigeons. I note that for example among the Senufo people, in the north of Côte d'Ivoire, on the border with Burkina — colonial borders divided up ethnic groups, so you find the same peoples in both countries — the Senufo always place a bird, generally the hornbill, on the head of the human figures. Just as with us, the wings on the helmet in our distant Middle Ages and well beyond, even in the barbarian period and in the dark and Merovingian times. Where am I going with this?
1:32:25 I once asked an African why they always put the bird on the head. And they all give me the same answer in different wordings, but the function is always the same. It's the one who takes your thoughts, that's why it's on the head, and who will transmit them to the other. It's the messenger hoopoe of the Queen of Sheba, if you want to take a more Eastern tradition, before she meets Solomon in the splendor of the Queen of the Morning.
1:32:55 She sends a series of birds toward Solomon, led by the messenger hoopoe. I wanted to make this ornithological digression to recall just how much the messenger function of the bird here... Here, of course, the message is to tell Wotan 'you can die in peace, the curse no longer gnaws, in a few moments the curse will have ceased to gnaw at the universe.'
1:33:33 I return the floor to the drama. Rest in peace, O god.
The burning of Valhalla and the return of the ring to the Rhine 1:34:30 Now events are going to rush forward. After this last farewell to Wotan. You'll notice that the audience increasingly resembles a crowd, a crowd of men, a civil society one might say today.
1:35:01 The waters of the Rhine. The ring. The song of the Rhinemaidens.
1:35:42 And the whole orchestra takes up the theme of the Rhine maidens.
1:36:43 The curse! Watch out there! The flames, the flames are starting. The flames.
1:38:02 Servitude! The flames accelerate, the fire gnaws away. The Valkyrie, the Ride of the Valkyries.
1:39:52 otototot The flames.
1:40:56 Eternal sleep. Eternal sleep falling into the waters of the rising Rhine. The Rhine maidens recovering the ring. Hagen, Hagen's last attempt to recover the ring, which will be fatal to him.
1:41:33 The last time we hear the curse. It calms down and only the peaceful song of the Rhine maidens remains. Valhalla falling into the flames, majestic yet glorious but in decline. And on the violin, a sublime melody, the theme of redemption through love, which soars above all the other themes.
1:42:10 Do you see the succession? Valhalla, the Song of the Rhine Maidens, redemption through love on the violin, Valhalla, we see the walls of Valhalla. The proud palace of the gods threatening to collapse.
1:43:18 One last time, Siegfried's theme. And now we hear nothing but redemption through love, which concludes the work.
1:44:31 Thank you. Thank you Pierre-Alain, that's quite a feat. So, it seems, I'm thinking about your questions, it seems that Chéreau's staging was inspired by our fellow member Daniel Arias, whom I'm always very happy to find again, good evening Daniel, who says this, doesn't he: "In the end, don't all these myths invite men to abandon God, idealism, in order to become masters of our future through knowledge and work?"
Answers to questions from the audience 1:45:14 That's exactly the conclusion when you see this crowd of men. You saw, we started having children, old people, it's the crowd of civil society. They're not warriors, gods, people who live only off the work of others. And this crowd turns its back, Valhalla, that's the last image, and looks at us. So yes, we pass from the Empire of necessity, the cable of the Norns, I'm paraphrasing Engels, aren't I, where he says that the goal is indeed to pass from the Empire of necessity to the Kingdom, notice the precision of the terms, Empire and Kingdom are different.
1:45:56 It's a matter of passing from the empire, imperium, imperialism, of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. There you go. And yes, I see Péricorès says "cult of Odin". So yes, Odin is the Scandinavian name for Wotan, or Wotan is the German name for Odin. They sound roughly the same. It comes from a root, as I told you last time, Wut, rage, anger, which recalls that Zeus too is the master of thunder. There you go. But anyway, here things are consummated. Daniel Arias, I quote him again to have him completed by an interesting remark from our friend Arnold Steiner.
1:46:54 "Don't all these myths invite men to abandon God? Idealism, in order to become master of our future, take up knowledge and work?" Arnold Steiner's answer, that's true by Toutatis, with much humor. Well, I also remind you, because I see our friend Péricorès, I'm only quoting the pseudonyms, mentions all these isms, ideologism, Islamism, humanism, etc.
1:47:26 I remind you that I recently committed to granting Daniel Arias's request to say that one day we should get back a bit to the good old vocabulary notebook. So, in my upcoming talks, the very next one actually, in the coming days, whether it's the longer-format sessions or the Wednesday format, I intend each time to say a little more, very briefly, about each of these terms, which are the basic terms, the names of the different philosophical currents since philosophy first appeared, so that we can all be fairly sure we're designating the same thing with the same words.
1:48:10 There you go. And otherwise, I mean, isn't there a question? An oral question, Pierre-Alain? A live question? If there's no live question, let me remind you that in two weeks, we'll do another conclusion, but this time concerning the other half of this long cycle, namely the one about "Is it possible to throw a bridge, however frail, over the impassable abyss which, according to Kant, separates the hard sciences from the sciences of history?"
1:48:56 So I see a question from Daniel Arias, there: "Knowledge is tragic when Psyche or the Oedipides access it against the order of the gods. Perhaps to be connected later with the mal du siècle, Baudelaire for example." Yes, especially since in Baudelaire, the mal du siècle, an expression that dates from the generation just before Baudelaire, that of the romantics properly speaking, to stay in France, from Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, etc. With Baudelaire, the mal du siècle worsens into spleen, with an almost physical and neurotic dimension, doesn't it? And which obviously comes closer to modern man.
1:49:33 You know, I refer you to a short work by Freud, one of his best works, the famous "Civilization and Its Discontents", or "Discontent in Culture", depending a bit on the translation. Where he returns a bit to... well, more than a bit, doesn't he? Where he takes into account the appearance, in modernity, of a new form of unhappiness, doesn't he, and which is not the tragic unhappiness of ancient times, but which is no less, is it?
1:50:08 I also greet Inès Oludé, whom I'm very glad to see again, who is very faithful to our broadcasts. And I take note of her suggestion to do something around poetry. Basically, we're doing it a bit already, if you look at our short formats. Well, we've just started, but I'm not going to stop there. There's going to be, I don't want to spoil it, but we had finished on Mignon last time and we're going to move on to a text, I'm telling you in advance, as a preview, we're not playing hide and seek, a text by Nerval, Nerval's last completed text, called "Promenades et Souvenirs", which I've never commented on in a broadcast, neither live nor in a lecture hall, Promenades et Souvenirs. And you'll see there's a surprise at the end that shows it's always the same subject we're developing, if you look closely.
1:51:13 There you go, but let me refer you, because all of Nerval's work is on Wikisource, isn't it? You type Gérard de Nerval, œuvre Wikisource, and you'll find Promenades et Souvenirs. It's very quick to read, it's a few pages, it's nothing at all. But it's his last work, one of the most accomplished in terms of his prose. I presume Inès knows poetry too well to reduce it solely to poems in verse. There are plenty of texts in verse that aren't really poetry, that are mere recitations, that only play with rhyme.
1:51:47 Which is what makes Verlaine say in his Art poétique: "Oh, who will tell the wrongs of rhyme? That cheap jewel that rings hollow and false under the file." Of course, great poetry, indeed Baudelaire's prose poems for example, great poetry was expressed in prose, and this prose poetry reaches one of its peaks in Promenades et Souvenirs. That's why I'm talking about it. And you'll see an allusion to the character of Mignon in the last lines, at the moment you least expect it.
1:52:20 It remains for me to wish you all a very good evening, and I thank all those who greet us and also wish us a good evening. Let me take a look for a second. What is, according to a question from Péricorès, which he himself says is too long? And he says, let's move on, no, we'll move on tonight, but we'll answer it, I promised we'd answer all the questions. What are, in your view, the differences between Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, please, apart from being masters and disciples of one another?
1:52:55 Well, I've sketched it out a bit, I'll give the references, the link, when I did the return to the logic of the subject, I recalled the difference between the subject-substance in Aristotle and the subject properly speaking in Descartes. For example, we're not going to quibble over that, indeed it's too long to develop here. So I promise, we'll answer it, and I reassure Péricorès that I won't answer the questions the way I'm doing now, rushing through a last quarter of an hour of a long broadcast of over two hours. But we'll devote entire two-hour sessions to answering questions, as we've already done three times, well, across three different videos. There you go. So, it remains for me to thank you all, to thank you especially for your presence and your loyalty, and to tell you, see you very soon. Stay tuned.
1:53:53 It will certainly be announced on Facebook that you'll soon have a continuation of your short, condensed formats, very soon. And thanks again to Pierre-Alain once more.
