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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Popular Fiction Studies
- Sprache: Englisch
Germanic mythology is currently experiencing a significant boom in audiovisual media, especially among younger audiences. Heroes such as Thor, Odin and Siegfried populate television and comic series, films, and video games. When and why did this interest in Germanic mythology emerge in the media? Starting from the interpretation of the myths used by Richard Wagner in 'The Ring of the Nibelung' at the end of the 19th century, the contributions in this volume examine the reception of Germanic myths in audiovisual media in the course of the 20th and 21st century.
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Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina
Germanic Myths in the Audiovisual Culture
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Tübingen
ISSN 2197-6392
© 2020 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de • [email protected]
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ISBN 978-3-8233-8300-0 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0212-4 (ePub)
Inhalt
Aknowledgements
I would first like to thank Prof. José Manuel Losada (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), coordinator of the Research Project “Acis & Galatea: Research Activities on Cultural Myth-Criticism” (S2015/ HUM-3362) and initiator of the idea of the present volume. The current edition has been made possible thanks to the aforementioned project, funded by the Comunidad de Madrid and the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Research Group from the University of Alcalá, RECEPTION (Reception Studies, REF CCHH2010/R24), which I am honoured to coordinate.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the Scientific Committee that helped me with their recommendations regarding the selection and improvement of articles: Andreas Grünewald (Universität Bremen), Berta Raposo (Universidad de Valencia), Carlos Duque (Centro Superior de Música Katarina Gurska), Carmen Flys Junquera (Universidad de Alcalá), Claudia Francisca Cabezón Doty (IÜD, Universidad Heidelberg), Ingrid Cáceres Würsig (Universidad de Alcalá), Lorena Silos (Universidad de Alcalá), Magda Polo (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), Marisol Morales (Universidad de Alcalá), Miguel Salmerón (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Susanne Cadera (Universidad Pontificia de Comillas).
Finally, I would like to thank Laura Arenas García (Universidad de Alcalá) for her invaluable collaboration in the revision and layout of the texts in this volume.
Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina
Introduction
The past decade has witnessed a striking renaissance of Nordic mythology in popular culture, mainly in the realm of audiovisual media. Be it the reinterpretation of Thor and his clan in the Marvel cinematic universe, or the success of series such as Vikings or American Gods, the truth is that the mythical tales of the ancient Germanic peoples of pre-Christian northern Europe have become increasingly popular and today exert a curious power of attraction, especially among younger audiences. Heroes like Thor, Siegfried, Ragnar, the Valkyries and Odin populate television series, films and video games, together with mythological creatures, such as the dragons Nidhogg or Fafnir, the wolves Fenrir or Sköll, and Odin’s crows. Moreover, Asgard, Heimdall, Muspelheim or Midgard, the settings for the mythical Nordic heritage, have become household names since they became ubiquitous in mainstream television and comic series.
Why this growing interest in Germanic mythology in audiovisual culture? Why are so many traces of Norse myths observed specifically in popular art that fuses sound and image? When did this interest in Germanic mythology in audiovisual media arise? The articles included in this volume aim to answer these and many other questions. To that end, the volume is structured in four thematic sections: “Richard Wagner and His Impact on Contemporary Audiovisual Culture”, “Germanic Myths in Cinema and Audiovisual Translation”, “Germanic Myths in Television, Videogames and Propaganda Posters” and “Ecocritical Use of Germanic Myths and Comparative Mythology”.
The first section, “Richard Wagner and His Impact on Contemporary Audiovisual Culture” analyses the legacy of the Wagnerian interpretation of the Germanic medieval sources in his tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung and shows the extent to which the German composer’s reading of the myths has influenced all subsequent representations thereof in the audiovisual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The section opens with a chapter entitled “The Siegfried Myth in Opera and on Film: From Richard Wagner to Fritz Lang”. This essay by Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina explores the Siegfried/Sigurd myth through opera and film, beginning with Wagner’s seminal interpretation in his opera Siegfried (1876), the third drama in his Ring of the Nibelung. In its combination of different medieval Germanic mythological sources (the medieval German Song of the Nibelungs and the Scandinavian Eddas) and its original aesthetic realization in the new Total Artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), Wagner’s original view of the hero marks a watershed in the way the fledgling cinema of the early twentieth century depicted the myth audio-visually. This is illustrated with reference to Fritz Lang’s silent picture, Siegfried (1924). The analysis shows that despite Lang’s wishes to retain a distance from Wagner’s reading of the Sigurd myth, his film contains evident parallels with the German master’s interpretation. The analysis also suggests that Wagner’s artwork was therefore truly visionary, not only in its recovery of the ancient Greek fusion of music, poetry and dance, but also in its addition to that amalgam of a new element which would be of vital importance to twentieth-century art and omnipresent in the present century’s audio-visual culture: the image.
In the next chapter, “The Ring of the Nibelung: Philosophy, Wagner and La Fura dels Baus”, Magda Polo examines the impact of Nordic mythology and the influence of the philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer in the composition of Wagner’s tetralogy. The analysis shows how this influence is to be found not only in parts of the libretto but also, and especially, in the new worldview that represents the Total Artwork in The Ring of the Nibelung. Polo explains how we can find the marks of the philosophers in a footnote that appears in the original version of the last opera of the tetralogy: The Twilight of the Gods. The so-called “Feuerbach ending” and the “Schopenhauer ending” express an optimistic and pessimistic view, respectively, of the end of the world that, ultimately, did not come to light in Wagner’s original libretto. However, in the late 2000s, an adaptation of Wagner’s tetralogy by the avant-garde Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus included an overwhelmingly positive and Mediterranean ending, which illustrated the role of man in re-establishing a new order and thus reinterpreted the main ideas of Feuerbach's philosophy for the stage.
Likewise in his article “Staging Wotan: Chereau, Schenk and La Fura dels Baus”, Miguel Salmerón reflects upon this recent version of La Fura dels Baus and compares it with the production of other stage designers: Patrice Chéreau’s proposal for the “Festspiele” centenary at Bayreuth (1976–79) and Otto Schenk’s work at the New York MetropolitanSchenk (1986–89). Salmerón focuses his analysis on the character of Wotan/Odin, who in The Ring of the Nibelung undergoes a profound metamorphosis. Majestic in The Rhinegold, he is torn between the law and his yearnings in The Valkyrie and becomes a wandering traveller in Siegfried and a barely perceptible, but present, shadow in Twilight of the Gods. In his chapter, Salmerón explains how stage designers have provided different solutions for the full enactment of Wotan and his transformations.
Finally, Jesús Pérez-García’s “Die Wandlung des Nibelungenmythos in der bande dessinée von Sébastien Ferran L’Anneau des Nibelungen” analyses the adaptation of the Nibelungen myth in the French comic adaptation of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, Taking as its point of departure the fact that the myths in the Romantic period emerged as constructs that modelled a stylized past and laboriously reclaimed cultural heritage, responding to the aspirations of nationalism and idealism in Europe at the time, Pérez-García examines how in the context of the globalized digital society, these semantic references are lost today, which leads to their radical transformation. The comic L'Anneau des Nibelungen reinterprets the myth for young audiences and analyses how the so-called heroic fantasy has a genre-defining effect in this renewal.
The second section, “Germanic Myths in Cinema and Audiovisual Adaptation and Translation”, studies the adaptation of Nordic mythology in films and analyses the translation strategies used in the subtitling and dubbing of television series that are inspired by Germanic myths.
Heidi Grünewald begins this section with an essay entitled “Mythos und Utopie in Fritz Langs Nibelungenfilm”, which examines the concept of myth and utopia in Lang’s film The Nibelungs (1924), thereby linking it to Ortiz-de-Urbina’s chapter. As Grünewald notes, Fritz Lang was of the opinion that a film can only be convincing if it also corresponds to the nature of its time. The director also lays claim to this for his two-part film, whose production and reception reflect the mental state of the Weimar Republic. Based on the reception of the film, the article deals with the cinematic transfer of the key ideas of the Nibelung myth onto a society characterized by disillusionment and rationalization and analyses Lang’s pictorial language with a view to the utopian or dystopian projections manifest in the film.
For her part, Laura Arenas adds another dimension to the study of Fritz Langs’ Nibelungs by comparing it with a contemporary film that also adapts the medieval epic poem Song of the Nibelungs: Uli Edels’ Dark Kingdom (2004). In her essay entitled “The Image of Germany in German Films. A Study of National Stereotypes in Two Film Adaptions of the Epic Poem Nibelungenlied”, Arenas analyses national stereotypes in both films. She starts from the fact that films, like other media, contribute to the transmission of the image of a country. This image, often riddled with stereotypes, not only provides information about a certain national group, but also about its producers. To analyse the image of Germany in those two film adaptations of the epic poem, she examines national stereotypes as mechanisms to represent mythological characters in movies and determines whether the image that is conveyed of Germany in both cinematographic productions has been modified or reshaped over time.
Finally, in “Artusmythos und Transtextualität in Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, Peio Gómez examines the characteristics of the relationship between Arthurian myth and the classic comedy movie from 1975. The transformation processes of elements traditionally associated with Arthur and Lancelot are analyzed using two fragments to finally determine the transtextual relationship between film and myth based on these transformations. Using theories of transtextuality, Gómez suggests that Monty Python and the Holy Grail can be regarded as an artificial myth that ultimately triggers the demythologization of the Arthurian myth.
The third section of this volume, entitled “Germanic Myths in Television, Videogames and Propaganda Posters”, explores the influence of Germanic mythology in videogames and television series and it surveys the intersemiotic translation processes through which the Nordic myths can be rewritten to serve political purposes.
To begin with, Ana Melendo proposes a first approach to the analysis of the television series Vikings that recreates numerous Germanic myths and has experienced a great success among the youngest generations. In her essay “Odin and Ragnar in the Television Series Vikings (2013): Between Myth and Legend”, Melendo bases her study on the perspective of mythology as a vehicle to facilitate our understanding of certain literary, historical, theoretical and visual aspects that converge in this audiovisual text and, consequently, of the artistic qualities that define it. By focusing on the mythological sub-plot, her study explores the stylistic features and modus operandi of the series, which manages to create a universe that fuses myth and reality and diverges from other more realistic portrayals of Viking history.
To continue the study of Vikings, Elena Castro’s chapter “The Duality of Translation in Historical Television Series: Vikings” focuses on the linguistic aspects of the show and how these are translated. In the series, the diastratic, diaphasic, diatopic and diachronic dimensions of language become essential tools in the process of bringing the source culture closer to the audience, despite the coexistence of up to five different languages and the audiovisual constraints that affect translation. Indeed, according to Castro, the linguistic complexity of the English-language series and the resulting complexity of translating it into Spanish highlights the limits of translation in the double contextualisation of this media product.
In her essay “Rebuilding Germanic Myths in Video Games: The Witcher, Hellblade and God of War IV”, Irene Sanz shows that not only have Germanic myths survived healthily in different forms, such as opera, comics, cinema and television series, but also that the Norse myths seem to be enjoying a moment of glory in one of the 21st century’s most ground-breaking audiovisual media, namely computer games. This chapter explores how three popular video games—The Witcher, Hellblade and God of War IV—acclaimed by both critics and players, resurrect Germanic myths in different ways, either as the background for the story or as essential elements in the plot of the game.
María Jesús Fernández-Gil, in her essay “Intersemiotic Analysis of Nazi Posters: Nordic Mythology at the Service of Arianism” completes this section by analysing the way in which the story of Sigfrid/Sigurd, the dragon slayer, was rewritten to draw the Nordic hero into the orbit of Hitler’s ideal Aryan master race. Myth was at the core of the National Socialist movement. Indeed, Nazis resorted to the appeal of Nordic mythology to shape an artificial united community driven by the idea of racial purity. Using a Nazi propaganda poster as a case study, this chapter seeks to highlight how Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine succeeded at conditioning the thoughts, feelings and actions of the German public, thereby ultimately gaining wide popular support for the Nazi agenda. Commenting on the increasing tendency to manufacture reality through digital image manipulation, this essay also attempts to show that lessons might be drawn from previous uses of propaganda and that acquiring visual literacy competencies is crucial in the post-truth world.
Finally, the last section of the volume, “Ecocritical Use of Germanic Myths and Comparative Mythology” opens the door to new research lines that have hardly been investigated and are of vital importance to understanding the process of the reception of myths in today’s world: ecocritical studies on Germanic myths and a comparison of Nordic and Chinese mythologies.
Lorena Silos opens this section with her essay entitled “How to Train Your Dragon: An Ecocritical Approach to Myth Criticism”. She argues that film and literary narratives aimed at children frequently feature a heroine or a hero who dares to question norms and traditions and thus unmasks the inconsistencies of the most deeply rooted discourses within their society. Silos explains how, in recent years, the most important animation studios have launched stories of rebellion and transgression in which the young protagonists resist perpetuating beliefs and attitudes that have, more often than not, legendary or mythological foundations. Such is the case of Hiccup, the main figure in the animated film How to Train Your Dragon (2010). He is a young Viking, destined to become a dragon slayer, who defies the traditions of his people and manages to rewrite a chapter of the legacy of Norse mythology. Silos explores the “ecological” reinterpretation of the Siegfried/Sigurd myth in this computer-animated action fantasy film.
In the next chapter, Lorraine Kerslake takes another ecocritical approach to the literary work Crow by Ted Hughes and relates Germanic myths to Biblical ones. According to Kerslake, Hughes reinvents myths by using his knowledge of primitive philosophies. The title of his work already alludes to an animal that is a spiritual guide in Nordic mythology, serving as a guide to Odin/Wotan. This chapter looks at the importance of myth and the uneasy relationship that Hughes maintained with Christianity as well as the way mythology influenced both his writing and his imaginative universe. Through an ecocritical analysis, Kerslake examines how Hughes subverts the creation myth by turning the Genesis account of creation upside down and she looks at the parallels between the poetic universe of Crow and that of Hughes’ creation tales in the sphere of his children’s writing.
Finally, Yue Wen enriches the present volume with a comparative analysis between Norse and Chinese mythology. Despite the fact that there is a huge distance between northern Europe and China and the culture and history of one has developed to a great degree without the influence of the other, there is still much in common that can be found in the early myths of both, especially in those reflecting the origin of the cosmos. Therefore, in her essay, within the frame of ethnology as put forward by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, Wen compares the Norse and Chinese myths in aspects such as cosmology and the concept of time and space. A foray is made into the similarities between Norse mythology and its Chinese counterpart, as well as into the anthropological origins underlying the Norse mythology classic The Poetic Edda, the Chinese Taoist doctrine classic work Dao De Jing and the mythical work Classic of Mountains and Seas.
Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina
(Universidad de Alcalá)
1Richard Wagner and His Impact on Contemporary Audiovisual Culture
The Siegfried myth in opera and on film: from Richard Wagner to Fritz Lang
The Siegfried myth
Main protagonist of the well-known epic poem, Das Nibelungenlied, written around 1200 in Middle High German, the Siegfried (also called Sigurd) figure had already appeared in earlier Nordic sources. The first iconographic treatment of this courageous hero, who slayed a dragon, obtained a prize and was finally murdered, is to be found in some eleventh-century Swedish and British runestones and stone crosses. Between 1050 and 1150 the Siegfried story merged with other heroic narratives to converge in the poems Reginsmál and Fáfnissmál, preserved in the Codex Regius manuscript (centre-piece of the PoeticEdda). These two poems would become the kernel and chief source for later sagas based on their mythical hero, namely, the Völsunga Saga (1217–1226), extant in a single thirteenth-century manuscript, the Pidriks Saga (1230–1250) and, less detailed than the others, the manuscripts of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (1220)1.
The Siegfried legend combines two narrative strands, the first of which tells of the hero’s youth, the second of his death. The first pivots around the slaying of the dragon, the achievement of a treasure and—in the Nordic version—the rescue of an enchanted Maiden2.
Of all the myths of Pan-Germanic origin, none have attained such popularity as those involving Siegfried and his victory over the dragon, Fafner. The adventures of Sigurd Fáfnisbani (or Fafner-slayer) are considered to be one of the first products of the Germanic imaginary of the Rhineland3.
While the different tales exhibit variations in plot, they all share the common thread of the curse pronounced by the dwarf, Andvani (or Alberich), according to which whoever possesses the treasure will come to a tragic end, as happens first to the dragon, Fafner, and then to Siegfried. This fatal destiny, foreshadowed in dreams, nightmares and auguries and transfigured in medieval literature, is a hallmark of the Pan-Germanic world-view4.
The presence of the Siegfried myth in western culture from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century is widespread5: literary milestones include Johann Heinrich Füssli’s Brynhild erblickt Sigurd in der Waberlohe (1800–1810), Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Der Held des Nordens (1808–1810), Ludwig Uhland’s Siegfrieds Schwerdt (1812) or Friedrich Hebbel’s Die Nibelungen (1861)6. But it is Richard Wagner’s re-interpretation of the hero which marks a turning-point in its cultural history, above all in regard of its adaptation to audio-visual culture. Almost five decades after the first performance of Wagner’s opera, Siegfried, in 1876, film-maker Fritz Lang would screen his film version of the same name in 1924. Lang, together with his wife, Thea von Harbou, who wrote the screenplay, claimed their version was based solely on the medieval Nibelungenlied and had nothing to do with Wagner’s own reading7. However, as we shall see, an audio-visual analysis of his film shows the extent of its impregnation by Wagner’s work and aesthetic, something this early silent film shares with later artistic reworkings, particularly audio-visual ones.
The Siegfried myth in Richard Wagner
Creative evolution of the opera Siegfried
The gravitational centre of Richard Wagner’s monumental opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung, composed between 1848 and 1876, is the myth of Siegfried. The Ring consists of four operas or “days”, The Rheingold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods. The full cycle received its première at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in August 1876. However, the first seeds of the tetralogy were sown in 1843 when Wagner began to show an interest in Germanic myth and Greek mythology. In the summer of 1848, he wrote an essay summarising his mythological studies under the title The Wibelungs, World History Derived from Legend (Die Wibelungen, Weltgeschichte aus der Sage1). From this emerged in October of the same year a first draft in prose called The Myth of the Nibelungen, Draft for a Drama (Der Nibelungen-Mythus, Entwurf zu einem Drama2). At the same time, Wagner was witness to the political revolution under way in Germany—the 1848 Revolution3– which prompted him to write the drama, Jesus of Nazareth, in which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is a social revolutionary who spreads the political message of love.
On top of that, Wagner continued to work on his recreation of the Siegfried myth, writing another prose work titled The Death of Siegfried. In November 1848 he rewrote it in verse. Five months later, on 30 April 1849, the Dresden Uprising took place, with Wagner among the rebels alongside his friends Mikhail Bakunin and August Röckel. Faced with persecution, he was forced to flee to Zurich, where he remained almost ten years in exile. There he wrote the continuation of The Death of Siegfried, which he called The Young Siegfried (Der junge Siegfried). The prose version was completed on 1 June 1851, its rewriting in verse on 24 June.
The symbology of the myth in Wagner’s Siegfried
While the ur-text for Wagner’s view of the Siegfried myth is the Song of the Nibelungs, which mixed medieval German legends and historical facts, the composer also drew on other Nordic sources. These were the Eddas and the Völsunga Saga, where he came upon the timeless mythical element which the epic medieval song, so firmly rooted in real time and history, was missing. The stage directions of Siegfried give no indication of the time of the events in the opera, and Wagner also avoided situating the characters temporally. As Christian Merlin1 notes, it was not by chance that Wagner abandoned his projects focused on historical personages like Jesús de Nazareth to concentrate on the subject of The Ring of the Nibelung, more specifically, on the character of Siegfried whose a-temporal purity the composer was at pains to exalt. In his 1851 essay, A Communication to My Friends (Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde), Wagner evoked Siegfried’s “purely human” element (“das Reinmenschliche”2), untied as it was by convention, and made a case for the hero’s fundamental and immutable human nature which found expression beyond the story and the circumstances of the time. Whereas Christ as a figure could be documented historically, Siegfried transcended any specific historical context. Moreover, Wagner felt it important to underline the universal nature of the myth, which ennobled man and set him over and above individual traits and vulgar or selfish interest.
That said, Wagner derived his idea for using the myth from Greek drama. As he put it in his 1852 essay, Opera and Drama, “[Greek] tragedy is no more nor less than the artistic culmination of myth itself”3. Following the Greek model, Wagner availed himself of the world of Germanic myth to criticize society. It was the free man, like Siegfried --and Prometheus— who had to fight against the established gods and, together with Brunhilde, achieve the foundation of a new world order through death and redemption. Power and capital, symbolized by gold and the ring, convention and defeat, are the archetypical themes worked out in Wagner’s musical drama.
From the point of view of myth, revolution, which, as Candoni and Pesnel note, could be understood etymologically as “re-evolution”, becomes a repetition of the original act of creation. Siegfried is a sort of “noble savage”, the harbinger of a new world in the future which is forever foreclosed to us by corrupt civilization4. Siegfried, who would free the world of politics, alienation and the craving to possess, embodies Wagner’s revolutionary aspirations. For Siegfried, Fafner’s treasure is nothing more than a natural metal, yellow and shining, not the abstract symbol of power longed for by the other characters. Siegfried is conceived of as the hero whose purity and innocence are free of the taint of social conventions or the intrigues of power. Brought up in virtual solitude, his only models have been the forest and its animal dwellers.
As we saw earlier, Wagner commenced work on the prose sketches for The Death of Siegfried in autumn and winter 1848 when he enjoyed the friendship and shared the revolutionary ideals of Bakunin and Röckel5. Thus, the Siegfried character is cast as the new man, the future of the world, the free man capable of carrying out Germany’s social revolution and building a new world on the ruins of the old. That is how a character chosen for its universal, timeless and mythical dimension was also the fulfilment of a very specific ideology belonging to the late 1840s.
The representation of the myth in Wagner’s Siegfried
The mythification of the Siegfried figure in Wagner’s opera can be observed not only on the plane of interpretation, but also in the stage directions and costume design, in the music and in the selected texts.
In the first place, the set designs by the Austrian painter Joseph Hoffman, which submerge Siegfried in the natural world, help lend the hero a timeless, mythical air. Scenes such as the dragon slaying (Fig. 3) were to have a decided influence on later film representations, such as the equivalent scene in Fritz Lang’s movie (Fig. 5).
Siegfried fighting against the dragon, according to set designer Joseph Hoffmann’s indications for Act 2 of Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried (1876).
Secondly, Wagner entrusted Carl Emil Doepler with the costumes and figurines for The Ring of the Nibelung. Despite being rather historically-minded, as Wagner would later confide to his wife Cosima1, Doepler achieved a purely human image of the hero (Fig. 1): ethereal (notice his cape flying in the air) and with an enlightened, messianic air, blond (like any typically German hero), young and innocent, but also strong and robust.
Carl Emil Doepler’s design for Siegfried’s costume, worn at the opera’s première in 1876.
This image would be an influence on later representations of Siegfried in the cinema, not only in Fritz Lang’s 1924 version (Figs. 3, 4, 5), but also those of Harald Reinl (1966) or Uli Edel (2004)2.
Thirdly, Wagner depicts Siegfried musically with the aid of the leitmotiv3, a sophisticated musical technique which would be imitated after his death not only in music but in art in general. Wagner’s interweaving of the leitmotif with the musical discourse of his work as a whole is complex and subtle. There are many leitmotifs related to the main hero of The Ring cycle and there is no space here to deal with them one by one. But among them me might pause a moment to consider the “Free Hero” motif, which defines Siegfried. It takes the form of a fanfare which the audience had already heard in the “day” preceding Siegfried in Act 3, Scene 1 of The Valkyrie.
The Free Hero motif represents Siegfried throughout Wagner’s
The Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy.
This motif is first heard when the Valkyrie Brunhilde tells Siglinde, on the death of her beloved, Sigmund, that her child by him will be the hero who will save the world, and that his name will be Siegfried. In German, the name Siegfried is composed of the term Sieg, meaning “victory” and Fried(en), meaning “peace”. In other words, it adumbrates a hero who will overcome adversities and bring peace to the world. The “Free Hero” motif recurs at the end of The Valkyrie when Wotan surrounds Brunhilde with a ring of fire and speaks as follows: : “Whoever fears the tips of my lance will never traverse the flames!”1. Hearing the motif at the same time as Wotan’s words, listeners or spectators intuit subliminally that the man who shows know fear of the lance-tip will be the hero Siegfried. Finally, the motif is heard once more within other ones, also related to Siegfried, namely Siegfried’s “Horn Call” and Siegfried’s “Funeral March”. Here the motif is in a higher tone than in the “Curse scene”, which implies that Siegfried is indeed the one who will free the world from that deadly curse and restore order to the planet.
Finally, it is worth highlighting how Wagner, who was his own librettist, presents Siegfried as an archetypal mythical hero surrounded by light, as if he were some god of light or the sun and the dragon he slays were the incarnation of the underworld and chaos, with all the symbolic power unleashed in a foundational act of that nature. Born in the East, as we learn in The Valkyrie, Siegfried also stands for the return of the sun. When Brunhilde awakens from her long, magical dream, she does not at first recognise in him the man, but the sun which has roused her and announces a new life. These are the words with which she greets him:
Hail, bright sunlight!
Hail, fair sky!
Hail, O radiant day!
Long was my sleep;
but now I wake:
Who is the man
wakes me to life?2
From myth to film through the Gesamtkunstwerk
In 1848, while writing his prose version of The Death of Siegfried, Wagner began to form the idea of what would become known as the Total Artwork or Gesamtkunstwerk, a new artistic concept which aimed to fuse music, poetry, dance and image. This new aesthetic amalgam would be the work of art of the future, as Wagner explained in several of his theoretical works, above all, Opera and Drama.
The concept of Gesamtkunstwerk had first seen the light at the end of the eighteenth century as a reaction against the enlightenment idea, advocated by Lessing in his Laokoon, oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Art and Painting, 1766), according to which music and poetry, as autonomous arts, should not be yoked together1. The German romantics were quick to conceive the idea of a universal poetic essence common to all arts, the substance of which lay beyond the sensible form of a given artwork and evoked the need to overcome the separation of the art. German philosopher Friedrich Schelling was the first romantic thinker to relate the notion of artistic fusion with opera, thereby sowing the seed that Wagner would cultivate in his Zurich essays.
Wagner’s notion of the Total Artwork rests on the global coming together not only of art but of reality as a whole; in so doing, it pulls the rug of legitimacy from beneath all scientific, analytical or mechanistic world-views. For Wagner as for the German romantics, it was a matter of re-encountering through the artwork a primal unity guaranteeing the coherence of the universe at all levels. In fact, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk is the recovery and restitution of Greek tragedy. What Wagner called the drama of the future presupposed both the reunification of the three major forms of artistic expression, namely, dance, poetry and music, as the Greeks had done, and the inclusion in this new amalgam of a new element, the visual. It is that which made Wagner’s formulation particularly innovative and visionary in its anticipation of the cinematic art and the visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Wagner did not stop at revolutionising the world of music by creating a new musical language but went further and reconceived drama as a mould-breaking, technological spectacle. In his new conception of the theatre, all spectators had to enjoy an equally good view of the stage. This was not the case in European theatres of the time where such a view was enjoyed by the privileged taking their seats in the royal box or the stalls but unavailable to those cooped up in the Gods. For that reason, he built a Greek-style theatre at Bayreuth which allowed every member of the audience, irrespective of class, to have an equally good view of the stage, much as would happen in the cinema four decades later. Wagner also put the orchestra out of sight in his newly-created pit; that way, the musicians were invisible to the audience who were free to hear the music as if it emanated directly from what they were seeing on stage. Once again, the cinema would shortly follow suit. In addition, Wagner’s electronic contraptions (lighting, elevators, and so forth) lent the scene a new visual dimension which anticipated the essence of the cinematic art that was to take wing four decades after his death.
In the French cradle of European Wagnerism, critics and theorists saw in turn-of-the-century cinema the same re-birth of Greek tragedy for the modern world that in his early stages Friedrich Nietzsche had seen in Wagnerian opera. Thus, the Italian film critic resident in Paris, Ricciotto Canudo, who coined the concept of cinema as the “seventh art”, proclaimed in 1911 that the birth of cinema —what he called “great synthetic theatre”— amounted to “tragedy’s renaissance” and inaugurated the great artistic renewal as presaged by Wagner2.
Emile Vuillermoz, the well-known Parisian music and cinema critic of the 1920s whose opinions reverberated Europe-wide, argued in 1927 that it had been impossible to achieve satisfactorily the Total Artwork Wagner had dreamed of due to the restrictions of stage space. Wagner and those who succeeded him had endured “the appalling reliance on cardboard and clumsy machinery”3. His conclusion could not have been more pointed: “If he had been born fifty years later, Wagner would not have written his tetralogy for a stage, but for a screen”4. Thus, the arrival of cinema meant the enhancement of the artistic synthesis the Wagnerians had yearned for.
The myth of Siegfried on film: Fritz Lang
Viennese director Fritz Lang’s output belongs to the early days of the new art of cinema. In 1924 he premièred his mammoth film, Siegfried, which took the German hero as its subject. Lasting 143 minutes, it was the first part of his monumental diptych, Die Nibelungen, the second being Krimhild’s Revenge. Produced by Erich Pommer, with a screenplay by Thea von Harbou, music by Gottfried Huppertz and photography by Carl Hoffmann and Günther Rittau, the film was shot in line with the UFA’s principles1, was a hit across Europe and even caused a stir in United States.
Although Fritz Lang wished to keep a distance from Wagner’s interpretation of the Siegfried myth in his Ring cycle, his cinematic diptych was associated from the start with Wagnerian aesthetics, as we shall see.
To begin with, links were forged directly during screenings which were accompanied by performances of Wagnerian pieces that had become indissociable from the characters of the Ring myths. Many of the major screenings in Paris and New York2 were actually accompanied by musical extracts from Wagner’s Ring. Secondly, the relationship between the two was palpable in the composition of original scores using various musical procedures inspired by Wagner’s own methods, such as the leitmotif or the use of rhythm to emphasise visual sequences. Moreover, Lang’s Die Nibelungen could not avoid receiving a Wagnerising gloss given that the first French film theorists had persistently framed their thoughts on film rhythm and the stylisation of the fundamental parameters of cinematic expression in terms of the Wagnerian Total Artwork3.
Much as Wagner had turned to medieval literary sources for his representation of Siegfried, so Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife from 1922 to 1933 and screenwriter of almost all his films between 1920 and 1933, showed a keen interest from the start in mythological matters. With respect to the Die Nibelungen diptych, Lang himself took almost no part in writing the script as he was much more interested in the artistic aspects of set-design4 than in the contents and the nationalist-political adaptation to which his wife wished to subject her medieval literary sources. As Michael Töteberg notes, while Lang refrained from airing his political opinions in the 1920s, his wife, Thea, was a woman of principles who made political comments in public, was fervent in voicing the ideas of the silent majority (“schweigende Mehrheit”) and showed clearly reactionary-nationalist tendencies5. Her nationalist ideology is plain to see in her screenplay for the film. Karin Bruns has explained how Thea, driven by the urge to produce something “genuinely German”, so shaped the literary sources to the screenplay that its legendary characters would take root in the public’s conscience. At the same time as injecting new life into the world of myth, her aim was to popularise national themes as a means of countering the cultural homogenisation threatened by the film industry6. The film was actually dedicated explicitly “to the German people” (“dem deutschen Volke”) for Thea’s purpose in using The Song of the Nibelungen was that the Germans should turn to the heroic adventures and identify with Siegfried and the unswerving loyalty of the protagonist of the old tale of national exploits7.
Not only that, but just as the first performance of Wagner’s Ring tetralogy had been a national event attended by the German Emperor, Wilhelm I, his Brazilian counterpart, Pedro II, as well as King Ludwig of Bavaria and political personages from the world over, so the première of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen diptych was a major social event in which the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gustav Stresemann, and top officials of the Weimer government took part.
Furthermore, it was Lang’s intention to give form to the Total Artwork through the new art of cinema. As Bertetto says, Lang’s films are particularly complex, capable of “bringing together all the technical, linguistic and pragmatic elements inherent to cinema in a new, strongly structured and artistically justified, synthetic version”8. No other director of the early 1920s showed so much artistic zeal in their work, “aiming at the creation of a Total Artwork on the basis of his synthetic and complex characters”9.
Just as Wagner was able to transmit through language (his libretto) the idea of Siegfried as a messianic figure surrounded by light, so too was Lang, bringing it to the screen with the aid of his innovative photography and its novel interplay of mist and light which made the hero of myth float timelessly on an aura of white light (Fig. 2).
Siegfried, surrounded by an aura of White light and mist, in Fritz Lang’s film Siegfried (1924).
Likewise, Lang’s scene of the dragon-slaying (Fig. 5), in which a dragon of the same shape and size as Wagner’s is discovered by the young, blond hero in a forest beside a river, is plainly indebted to the Wagnerian scenography devised by Joseph Hoffmann (Fig. 1).
Siegfried fighting the dragon as staged by Fritz Lang, Carl Hoffmann and Günther Rittau (1924).
Another feature of especial interest which has barely been researched to date is the importance of music as a narrative element within cinematic discourse. In the present case this is particularly significant since Lang commissioned the movie’s soundtrack from German composer Gottfried Huppertz, whose post-romanticism was a direct throwback to Wagner’s works. It is well-known that the technique of the leitmotif was a staple of movie soundtracks from the very earliest days of cinema10. While Huppertz went one step further in his use of Wagnerian guiding motifs and created his own language, the musical conception of the whole soundtrack is based on the Wagnerian principle of the leitmotif as a way of linking motifs or themes to different parts of the story which could be developed in different ways as and when the narrative required11.
As in Wagner’s majestic work, the immense cinematic architectonics of Lang’s Die Nibelungen provide the perfect frame for the epic stature of its mythical heroes. Lang dispensed with the aesthetics of Wagner’s late romanticism in favour of more contemporary modes. As Lotte Eisner explains, the balanced architecture of Die Nibelungen deployed some principles of German expressionism, chief among them the expressive stylisation of its large surfaces. Like the expressionists, Lang sought the essential, the mighty line and compression, all of which issued in an “absolute fusion of abstract forms”. To transmit his message Lang needed “monumental proportions”12. Not only that, but to achieve his celluloid Siegfried Lang abided by the principles of the UFA which, at that time, rejected the use of outdoor shots13. Thus, the director had no choice but to make use of new scenography tools to give the landscape its “soul”14, in this case by means of images soaked in atmosphere (Stimmungsbilder) which enveloped the characters and endowed them—as we saw with Siegfried—with a more profound symbolic force. Like Wagner, Lang aimed to contrive spectacular effects, which is why he illuminated the grandiosely rigid architecture with a novel and cunning combination of lighting (Fig. 3).
Also, like Wagner’s, whose epic tale unfolds slowly in the timelessness of myth, Lang’s cinematic narrative is majestically slow-moving. If it took Wagner a four-opera cycle lasting a total of over fifteen hours to tell his 1876 saga of the Nibelung, Lang was hardly more hurried, his 1924 film diptych running to a total length of over seven hours.
