Brünnhilde, Brought to You by Beef
Wagner wanted myth to transform modern culture. Within a generation, modern consumer culture returned the favor. It put Wagner on trading cards and used him to sell concentrated beef extract. It’s a thick, concentrated meaty pasty glop you could dissolve in hot water to make broth. Think beef bouillon. That’s close enough.
Meet Liebig Company’s Fleisch-Extract, or Liebig’s Extract of Meat. It was manufactured in Fray Bentos in Uruguay. The picture is not a poster, but a Liebig advertising/collecting card from 1893, one of a six-card Die Walküre series. This is Series 254, No. 3, "Fricka’s Nahen" ("Fricka’s Approach"). The tiny "Siehe Rückseite" at the bottom simply means "See reverse side."
Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate a picture of the reverse side of this particular card. Liebig cards typically carried advertising copy or recipes on the reverse.
Wagner's gods and Valkyries were being used to sell beef bouillon. You bought Liebig meat extract, received these elaborate chromolithographed collectible cards, and the reverse sent you back to the kitchen with an advertisement and a recipe.
There is something wonderfully strange about this. Wagner was deliberately trying to create modern myth, something larger than ordinary entertainment. Yet by 1893, only seventeen years after the first complete Ring cycle at Bayreuth, Die Walküre was recognizable enough to become advertising. Fricka, Wotan, Brünnhilde, and the Valkyries had escaped the opera house and entered popular consumer culture. Wagner wanted to make myth. Liebig discovered that myth could also sell beef.
There’s also a lovely underlying irony. This supposedly quintessentially German cultural object was advertising a product made in South America. This celebration of German mythology was selling a product bearing the name of a German chemist, manufactured from South American cattle in Uruguay and marketed to consumers thousands of miles away.
You can see this card as the third in the series here:
You can see other examples of the series here:
Works Cited:
"Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape." UNESCO World Heritage Centre, UNESCO, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1464. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.
"Liebig Company Trade Cards." Smithsonian Institution, https://www.si.edu/object/archives/sova-eepa-2008-005. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.
"Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company and Other Trade Cards Depicting the Americas." HOLLIS for Archival Discovery, Harvard Library, https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/catalog/hou03153. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.
"Liebigbilder 1893, Serie 254 - Richard Wagner’s Walküre." Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Liebigbilder_1893,_Serie_254_-_Richard_Wagner%27s_Walk%C3%BCre. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.
"Liebigbilder from Germany." Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Liebigbilder_from_Germany. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.
"Musically-Themed Liebig Cards: Part I." Museum of Music History, https://momh.org.uk/exhibitions/musically-themed-liebig-cards-part-i/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.
