Director’s Notes

The Importance of Being Understood

Siegfried is to a great extent a story about knowledge and understanding. It is a coming-of-age tale motivated in the first place by Siegfried's attempts to learn about his origins and of his wish to know the meaning of the word fear, and by overcoming ignorance to escape the prison of his childhood. In the playing out of the drama, the importance of wisdom is repeatedly brought to the fore. Mime, stymied by his ignorance of how the sword Nothung may be recast and how Siegfried may be used to further his own ends, is berated and doomed for his preoccupation with idle knowledge and his inability to understand his real needs. Wotan as the Wanderer infuriates Alberich with his own superior wisdom. Dull Fafner fatally ignores their warnings and instructions for survival. In slaying Fafner and hearing the dragon's tale, Siegfried begins to realize that he sought the wrong enemy. More than that, in tasting of the dragon's blood, Siegfried now understands the language of the birds, something he had earlier wished for. He also learns how to understand the meaning behind Mime's words in a remarkable scene in which music directly contradicts text. Wotan as Wanderer seeks out Erda in order to learn whether and how his fate may be avoided; her deliberate evasions prompt him to understand and accept, renouncing unattainable eternal wisdom. Siegfried provokes the Wanderer by failing to grasp any of the latter's friendly overtures. Similarly, though physically entranced by Brünnhilde, Siegfried can make nothing of her proffered divine wisdom. Defeated, Brünnhilde comes to understand the meaning of her loss of godhead, bitterly at first. In the end she exultantly surrenders, together with Siegfried, to the rapture of love and the reality of death.

If understanding is so important to the characters, it is no less so to the audience. Here we come to a curious feature of the Ring. It may not be enough just to know what the singers say; how they say it is also important. At least Wagner thought so. The words of the Ring have a strange, and easily ridiculed, sound that has come to be identified with Wagner almost as much as images of winged and horned helmets, though neither is truly representative of most of his work.

It is often said of Wagner that he wrote his own libretti. It might be more accurate to say that he scored his own dramas. It cannot be denied that his contributions to the art of music tower over those to the art of poetry, to say nothing of prosody. Nonetheless, Wagner considered himself a poet, and drew his musical inspiration from the dramatic verse texts that he wrote. Wagner completed and even published the “libretti” to Siegfried and Götterdämmerung long before he began their serious musical composition. He did so in part because they represented a radical break with the verse forms in universal use for music drama at the time, including all of Wagner's six prior operas.

Though one might scarcely guess it from the translations, whether stuffily literal or breezily conversational, that flash across the title screens of opera houses like captions or tickers, opera libretti from the earliest days through well into the 20th century were almost always written in established verse forms with regular patterns of alternating strong and weak stresses, lines with consistent numbers of such feet, and ending in patterned rhyming schemes. Italian opera was based on a set of half a dozen verse structures formalized early in the 18th century by Pietro Metastasio and seldom varied. German opera used classic poetic forms akin to those of traditional English verse. Consider the following examples from the two operas of Wagner's that immediately preceded the Ring:

Both are composed of quatrains rhymed ABAB, with alternating strong and weak endings, the first with one of iambic tetrameter followed by one of iambic triameter, lending an air of urgency and contrasting mood. The second is in strict iambic pentameter, in keeping with the formalistic nature of the opera, which is also remarkable for being almost entirely in a single musical metre.

In studying the medieval Teutonic-language texts from which he began to elaborate his story of Siegfried, Wagner encountered a wholly different form of poetry, one in which syllabic line lengths counted for little and rhymes for naught, the words instead being linked by a form of alliteration of stressed syllables between half-lines. He chose to write his new poem in a form inspired by this type of structure. The poetry of the Ring (and of Tristan und Isolde alone among his other works) is built up of comparatively short lines, each containing either two or three stressed syllables, known as staves (or Staben, hence the term Stabreim). The number and placement of the unstressed syllables in a line is entirely flexible. Instead of end rhymes, pairs of short (2-stave) lines are linked by alliteration between at least one of the staves in each. Long (3-stave) lines are expected to have two internally alliterating staves. The alliteration can and often does extend over more than pairs of short lines, and frequently links long lines too. The distinction between alliteration on stressed syllables and on full words is particularly important for German, with its plethora of weak agglutinative prefixes, be-, ge-, auf-, etc.

Stabreim fulfills the essential organizational and mnemonic role normally assumed by meter and rhyme. The metrical flexibility of the Stabreim scheme allowed the composer to fully exploit the potential of Leitmotive in an extended musical context, and Wagner at least viewed it as a revolutionary breakthrough. The extent to which his Stabreim really generated the musical ideas, or was instead unconsciously motivated by their requirements, cannot really be known. It was an engagement within the mind of Wagner the poet and Wagner the musician. But if the nature of the words and their sounds is so important, what is the listener/viewer unconversant in German to make of it?

The word libretto is Italian for little book, and originally referred not to the text of the drama, but to the cheap little paperbound booklets distributed at opera houses to serve as programs. They would normally contain a cast list (spaces for the names of the singers would be left to be filled in as appropriate after the premiere run); the text in the language the opera was being sung in, usually with a parallel translation if that was not the language of the country, often with a synopsis; sometimes an antefatto (a description of events leading up to the situation in the opera in order to avoid a lot of background narrative that seldom lent itself to tuneful treatment); occasionally musical examples of the "principal airs"; and a certain amount of advertising as well. Patrons were expected to be able to follow along with the text as it was sung, and the text was usually typeset in the appropriate poetic form. This allowed composers the freedom to write ensemble music in which multiple texts were sung concurrently, impossible to decipher aurally, but readily scanned if they were laid out closely on a printed page. The inclusion of time and place settings and stage instructions helped overcome any shortcomings in the realization of the dramatic production.

The demise of the libretto was largely due to Wagner himself. He insisted on darkening the theater in order to achieve his dramatic effects, making it impossible for audience members to follow along in a booklet. For an audience capable of understanding the language, this was not a problem, for Wagner was almost always very careful to provide musical settings allowing the sung text to be heard clearly. For foreign audiences, titles have come to replace the translation function of the libretto. But titles are not usually designed to expose the poetic framework of the text.

Virtually all poetic translations of the Ring have been metrical, motivated by the absolute necessity of following the syllables and stresses if the translation is to be sung to Wagner's music. Constrained by metre (and long vowel equivalences desirable for singing translations), insistance on regular alliteration is nearly hopeless, though brave and frequently satisfactory attempts have been made. The fact that German and English share so many cognates is certainly helpful. Appealing to the essence of Stabreim, however, which is to free the metre while providing aural connections within the text, can be a boon to a translator not so constrained.

For the translated titles for this production, I sought to implement Wagner's Stabreim scheme, paying more attention to stress alliteration than to meter, while preserving the essential poetic line structure. I have not tried to provide exact translations (an impossible task in any case), but rather the general sense. (We did, libretto-like, provide titles in the original language along with the translation on separate screens each capable of displaying up to four poetic lines at a time.) There are many examples in the text and his writings to indicate that Wagner's main intent was, to turn Humpty Dumpty on his head, to take care of the sounds, and let the sense take care of itself!