What Power Cannot Keep, Alberich’s Curse and Wotan’s Contradiction

I am about halfway through Die Walküre. This was a very busy week, and I am only now coming up for air.

For me, the two most powerful scenes so far in the Ring cycle are when Wotan takes the ring from Alberich in Scene 4 of Das Rheingold, and the argument between Wotan and Fricka in Act II, Scene 1 of Die Walküre.

I should note a discovery I made while writing that sentence is that Das Rheingold is not divided into acts. I hadn't noticed that before. Wagner wrote it as a continuous Vorabend, the "preliminary evening" to the three-day Ring drama, and it is divided into four scenes rather than acts. The remaining three works are divided into acts and scenes, much more like the structure of a Shakespeare play. I have read that Götterdämmerung has a prologue followed by three acts, but I haven't watched or read it yet.

Those two scenes are powerful, to me, for almost opposite reasons. One is mythic, the other is intimate and personal.

The Alberich scene is mythic and absolute. But I understood Alberich's very human pain. He chose to renounce love, and turned to power, and now that power was forced from him, leaving him with neither the love he sacrificed nor the power he craved to master and dominate others.

I found his curse a strange kind of justice:

Alberich's curse turns the ring from an object of power into a machine for exposing desire. Whoever has it will fear losing it; whoever lacks it will covet it. The curse works because it multiplies what is already present in gods, giants, dwarfs, and men.

The Wotan-Fricka scene in Die Walküre is more intimate and, in some ways, more devastating. Fricka is not merely a prudish defender of marriage, and Wotan is not simply the champion of spontaneous romantic love. She catches him in the contradiction at the center of his whole project. He wants Siegmund to act freely, but Siegmund's freedom has been engineered by Wotan from the beginning.

Wotan wants to preserve the moral order while also creating an exception to it whenever the order obstructs what he desires.

That is an oddly relevant dilemma in conservative politics and culture, right now. It resonates in The Handmaid's Tale.

What makes the conversation so powerful is that Fricka is mostly right.

She argues from law, oath, marriage, kinship, and the legitimacy of the order Wotan himself represents. Wotan appeals to love, heroic spontaneity, and a future that cannot be generated by the old rules. But once Fricka forces him to admit that Siegmund is not genuinely independent of him, Wotan's defense collapses.

That is one of Wagner's great strengths in the Ring. The conflicts are rarely between intelligence and stupidity. They are clashes between goods that cannot all be preserved simultaneously.

Alberich gives up love for power.

Wotan wants power and love, law and freedom, authority and innocence.

Fricka insists that law has to mean something even when it becomes painful. She's right.

And that may be why her confrontation with Wotan feels so much more serious than a simple argument over adultery. She is forcing the ruler of the world to discover that he cannot escape the consequences of the order he himself has made.