bride and sister, be to your brother

sentimental incest in Die Walküre

hello new subscribers! sorry to blindside you with insane Ring cycle content but I started this project last year and I have to finish it because that’s the kind of person I am, which is to say, a dedicated, if not particularly mercurial one. Whether this is the last essay I’ll write about the Ring depends on how badly I want to rewatch Götterdämmerung. For now, however:

This is the last of the ‘Wälsung Essays,’ a series I have written about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. Notes on translations of the texts and other methodologies can be read, along with the introduction to this series, here. Enjambments in the text have been removed for email brevity.

This essay assumes reader familiarity with the subject matter.

Siegmund and Sieglinde by Hans Makart (1883)

So far in this series, our treatment of the love of the Wälsung twins has revolved primarily around the sentiment of solidarity. Above all else, Siegmund and Sieglinde share the experience of and desire for emancipation from violence and subjugation. It is this point of mutual recognition — evident in that very first moment, when Siegmund collapses on Sieglinde’s hearth — from which all other acts and emotions emerge. This framing was, in part, a political choice. After all, my broader critical project is to craft an interpretation of the Ring that moves away from the two poles of Wotan and Siegfried and with them the commonly accepted framework of fatalistic right-wing melancholy; and towards characters like the Wälsung twins, who, while also melancholic in nature, shift the political aperature away from the Right and to the Left.

More importantly, however, it is this sentiment of solidarity that saves the twins from merely being another (albeit scandalous) operatic story of adultery and forbidden romance. Solidarity is the basis from which the love — fraternal and romantic — between Siegmund and Sieglinde derives both its depth and its political and emotional meaning. In other words, it’s why we forgive them their trespasses. The music, some of the most beautiful ever put to paper, also helps.

We will return to solidarity a bit later on because it is related to the (rather utopian) mechanism of identification of the self in the Other, by which the love of the Wälsungs unfolds formally within the work, a mechanism that inadvertantly undermines its own sentiment by revealing structural biases lurking beneath the surface. But in order to get there, we must first (and finally) address the elephant that’s long been languishing in our room.

This is, of course, the fact that the first act of Die Walküre ends with the infamous lines (followed by a bit of musically unambiguous lovemaking on the bearskin rug):

Sieglinde: Are you Siegmund, standing before me? I am Sieglinde who longed for you, your own sister you won for yourself with your sword.

Siegmund: Bride and sister, be to your brother; blest be our Wälsung blood!*

That’s right: the incest. Where does one even start? The prevailing answer seems to be “avoiding the gaze of whoever is sitting beside you in the opera house, or, say, your junior year opera history class.” Ironically, the blantancy of the twins’ incestuousness makes it difficult to look at head on. This is especially true for contemporary viewers (with perhaps the exception of Jonathan Haidt), for whom the idea of a voluntary and “non-harmful” form of incest is ridiculous — if not insulting. However, as is perhaps expected, the incest plot didn’t fare much better with 19th century audiences. A British critic, writing in The Era in 1882 excoriated Die Walküre thusly: “The story is so revolting, indecent and impure that it ought never to have been tolerated on the English stage…A composer must have lost all sense of decency and all respect for the dignity of human nature who could thus employ his genius and skill.”¹

Perhaps this mix of disgust and discomfort is why, for almost 150 years, Ring defenders have treated the incest problem primarily by way of what I’ll call “thinly veiled Wagnerite cope.” This is comprised of three different explanations that either defer the matter at hand or ask the wrong questions entirely. It’s worth addressing each of these in turn because collectively they offer us a solid point for a more productive departure.

i. twincest theory, in brief

1. Gossip

The first and least satisfying of our hypotheses is the “Wesendonck Theory.” This posits that Siegmund is a kind of Richard Wagner Mary Sue and Sieglinde is a fantasy version of Mathilde Wesendonck, who was both a writer and poet in her own right and the wife of a wealthy businessman, with whom Wagner was having one of his many affairs. (She is also the dedicatee of Wagner’s excellent “Wesendonck Lieder,” whose musical echoes can also be heard in Die Walküre.) There is some factual substance to this theory, as Wagner littered key points in his score (such as the beginning of Siegmund’s testimony “Friedmund darf ich nich heissen”) with abbreviated and rather pathetic notes referring to Wesendonck, such as “W. d. n. w., G.” (‘Wenn du nicht wärst, Geliebte’ — were it not for you beloved.)²

However, while such gossip is all very entertaining, the unintended purpose of this theory is to deflect from the incest question altogether. Implicit here is the notion that the relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde is cannot be truly incestuous in sentiment because it is secretly based off of a non-incestuous affair. Much like with Wotan’s defense of the twin lovers to Fricka (who is disgusted by their relationship), here l’affair Wälsung is watered down into a generic 19th century paean to free love — i.e. the love in question should thus be recognized primarily for its emotional content which, when it comes down to it, isn’t all that different fron any other kind of love affair. Unfortunately, this is not even how Wagner himself viewed things. One need only look at his prose sketch from 1852 to see that the incestuousness of the twins’ bond was clearly a point of erotic fixation. There Wagner wrote: “Siegmund ([is] beside himself)…Sister and wife — as the twins had clung to each other in their mother’s womb, so the blissful couple are now conjoined.”³ Moving on!

2. The Mythology Scapegoat

Perhaps the most common way of dealing with the incest question is by simply claiming that everything in the Ring is mythical and mythology just so happens to be full of weird stuff like this. This is the angle Rudolph Sabor takes in his otherwise pretty good companion guide to the Ring. He writes:

“It should be remembered that Wagner’s drama is located in mythological times and that, as children of Wotan and a mortal woman, the two [twins] are demigods. Modern convention and modern morality does not necessarily apply to the age when the gods walked on earth. Osiris, the judge of the dead in Egyptian mythology, married his sister Isis. The later Pharoahs, rulers of Egypt, married their sisters in order to procreate sons of the noblest stock. Niörd, the Svandinavian spirit of water and air, married his sister Nerthus. Kronos, father of Zeus, had his sister for wife. Zeus himself married his own sister Hera.”⁴

This “many such cases” explanation is unsatisfying for a number of reasons. First of all, that the twins are demigods is not very important within the work itself. In fact, the opposite is true: the most important trait of Siegmund and Sieglinde is their humanity, and with it, their subjugation at the hands of both other people and the gods. Neither twin has any particular special or supernatural powers similar to those of Wotan, Fricka, or the Valkyries. (Siegmund, rather unfortunately, is the loser in every fight he’s in.) Second, within the work itself, the incest is acknowledged to be problematic rather than “natural” to the state of godhood. Invoking the twins’ “vile incest” is the trojan horse through which Fricka disguises (and achieves!) the double-goal of reigning in her dissolute husband and putting all of humanity, represented by Siegmund, back in its rightful place.

the exception of siegmund

It’s not uncommon for commentators on Wagner to make reference to Greek mythology as a way from shifting the temporal gaze away from the parts of the Ring that pretty obviously invoke 19th century ideas and questions, even such troll-like ones as “is incest included in the definition of free love?” I once listened to a podcast by the Metropolitan Opera about Die Walküre which cited Oedipus Rex as partial inspiration for many of the plot elements therein. No offense to the Met — and from a dramaturgy perspective I can certainly see where they’re coming from — but, to paraphrase an old Žižek bit, Oedipus Rex famously doesn’t end with Oedipus saying, “To hell with it, I love fucking my mother!”

3. The Volsunga Saga

Mythology does bring us to the most compelling of the traditional incest theories, which is that the love between brother and sister is, like other elements in the Ring, based off of the content of the Old Norse Volsunga saga. However, anyone who’s read the saga (or, if you don’t have time, its Wikipedia page) can tell you that its version of Wälsungenliebe is very different from that of the Ring. I won’t go into all the ways these two stories diverge — there are many. But of these differences, two are the most important. In the saga, Signy has not been separated from her brother. Instead, she is raised with him by their father, which makes her later acts even more explicitly incestuous. Second, she does not sleep with Sigmund as herself, but shapeshifts into a sorceress in order to do so. Her brother is none the wiser. Problematic!

However, two very important related plot elements are borrowed from the saga. The first is that the result of the twins’ affair is a supernaturally gifted son (Sinfjotli) capable of overthrowing Signy’s brutal and murderous husband, King Siggier. (In the Ring, Sinfjotli is merged syncretically with Sigurd, the dragonslayer, to form Siegfried.) Siggier has killed all of Signy and Sigmund’s other siblings, and her desperation to sire a son capable of deposing him is why Signy seduces her brother to begin with. Wagner, somewhat awkwardly, transforms this mythological source material into mere foreshadowing for Siegfried. Displaced onto Siegmund (it’s his seed after all), it is condensed and expressed via that line (which comes off rather badly to contemporary ears): “Blest be our Wälsung blood!”

Second, like in the Volsunga saga, the choice to commit incest first rests with Sieglinde. After all, she’s revealed very little about herself to Siegmund, and what she has revealed probably isn’t enough for Siegmund to recognize her by.⁵ When exactly Sieglinde realizes Siegmund is her brother is a point of massive ambiguity in the opera, one that’s often left to the director’s discretion. In Chéreau’s production, for example, he has Sieglinde (Jeannine Altmeyer) do a little double take when Siegmund (Peter Hoffman) recounts the story of being violently separated from his twin sister in childhood, which, to be fair, is a pretty unique situation. However, Wagner, despite having written so many elaborate notes, does not address this as a particular moment of clarity. His excessive use of irony as a dramaturgical tool doesn’t help matters either.

The earliest point by which Sieglinde could possibly recognize her brother is in the recounting of the story of the old man (Wotan/Wälse) who attended her sham wedding and plunged the sword into the ash tree: (“Then I knew who had greeted me, / me, this woman laden with sorrow; [with intensifying certainty and passionately growing warmth] I also know / to whom alone / he destined the sword in the tree.”) This, coincidentally, is also the point of no return, after which the relationship will become flagrantly erotic. Whether Sieglinde is truly certain Siegmund is her brother (she sure gives him lots of opportunities to prove otherwise!) also remains a point of ambiguity. An alternative subtext is that by the time she recognizes him as such, it’s too late — she’s already in love with him and is now afraid that the revelation will shatter the bond. Hence, her ecstasy when he embraces her anyway.

Siegmund and Sieglinde. Illustration by Ignace Henri Jean Fantin Latour (1887)

ii. sentimental incest

I bother to list these theories because a) Wagner commentary is exceedingly pedantic and it’s worth covering all the bases, and b) as I said before, I think they either ignore the issue (such as with the gossip bit) or answer the wrong — albeit important — question, which is: “Why do the Wälsung twins commit incest?” An even simpler answer here would be: because they love each other! This brings us to what I believe is the more interesting question at hand, which is not why the twins are incestuous but why, unlike in the original source material, the incest is sentimental in nature.

To begin to answer this, a bit of sociology is in order. Sentimental incest is a primarily 19th century phenomenon, one that originates in the solidification of the bourgeois family as the primary social institution of its time. While seen as inherently natural even in Wagner’s day, such a social formation wasn’t always the norm. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, the closer families grew, which is to say, the further they drifted away from simple patriarchal structures of ownership coupled with base economic necessity, the more they moved towards a sentimentality rooted in concepts such as “mutual love” and “childhood innocence.”

As a different Sigmund (Freud) would later systematically lay out, the bourgeois family was and remains an eroticized social formation. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this eroticism manifests in a number of ways — for example, the Oedipus complex — that the vast majority of us are able to sublimate even if that process makes us neurotic perverts in the end. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that a shared cultural anxiety developed around the idea that such erotic impulses wouldn’t be diverted to their appropriate channels — i.e. that they would remain incestuous.

The historian Brian Connolly in his fascinating book Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth Century America links all of these elements together with (as it says in the title) the cultural and political formation of the liberal subject: “that autonomous, rational individual who acted on his own desires, was endowed with the capacity for consent, was not dependent on others, and had his choices and desires ratified in contracts.”⁶ Because consenting (if easily beguiled) individuals were involved, incest itself was also perceived as being a choice, one that, like the family itself, was sentimental rather than abusive or coercive in nature.

Wagner, however, seems to have seen Freud & co. coming. Hence, he gets rid of the icky problem of familial closeness by simply separating his twins in childhood and making them strangers to one another. But this, too, reflects a 19th century anxiety. Capitalism’s complete restructuring of society, coupled with massive wars and the technological developments of the industrial revolution unmade whole families, scattering them into the cities via new forms of transit, namely the railroad, to participate in wage work. People became alienated, estranged, and separated from one another. Additionally, as soon as middle-class familial ideals became the norm, they became sites of contention in other ways. The more women were forced out of the home and into the factories where they became not just wives, mothers, and sisters but workers, the more their liberation became entwined with that of men in a new, more equal and solidaristic social relation that threatened the status quo.

These shifts, on the one hand, only resulted in a further middle class doubling down on the sanctity of the family as both a natural state of affairs and a refuge from capitalism. On the other, they, too, caused new incestuous fixations to emerge. Connolly’s eye was turned to America, but he documents an emerging literary preoccupation with what was called “accidental incest” in which family members separated by larger social forces — especially the slave trade in the United States — became reunited in love by accident, thus prompting many crises and moralistic paeans⁷ — paeans of the kind Wagner chose to pretty much entirely eschew.

Hence, materialism also does not save us (though it does contextualize things!) and we once more arrive back to the problem at hand.

iii. you are the likeness that i hid within me

To make the love of the Wälsungs so deeply genuine, to choose to elimate the disgust from incest, these were choices so unmoored from both the incest narratives of Wagner’s own time as well as his source material, the big man must have made them for a reason — beyond the fact that he was cheating on his wife. There must, then, be an analytical link between incest itself and the content and sincerity of the love expressed therein — a love which, to our great emotional confusion, is the truest in the whole cycle and one of the most meaningful in all of Wagner’s work.

We can begin to glimpse what this may be by way of the cycle’s other pair of lovers, Siegfried and Brünnhilde. These two are also incestuous —Brünnhilde is Siegfried’s aunt. Yet curiously this is never acknowledged, perhaps because incest no longer serves a philosophical function for this particular kind of love, which is very different — and much more fraught — than that of the twins. It is not a love of reciprocity, but of taking and being taken from. Brünnhilde gives herself to Siegfried, who, despite his virginal apprehension, is only all to happy to take her. And from that point on, she is his, so much so that her very disposition changes. She is made “human” which, in this case means she becomes a man’s portrait of a weak and jealous woman led around by the yoke of her own passions. The curse of the ring helps disguise this transition, but it does not explain the gendered way in which it manifests.

It’s at this point where we return to solidarity. Both Siegmund and Sieglinde are objectified and made other by the world they live in. Sieglinde is trafficked, forced into marriage, and lives a life of fear and sexual subjugation. Siegmund is born an outcast and outsider, a recepticle for violence and ridicule. Both are stripped entirely of their selfhood. Sieglinde reduces herself to her husband’s property. Siegmund, famously, can’t even use — and perhaps doesn’t even know — his own true name. What would it mean, then, for these two people, who have suffered so much, to love one another as man and woman? The answer is simple: love promises a restoration of that same selfhood. To see and be seen, to recognize the self in the Other, and to eradicate otherness altogether by way of this recognition.

The process by which this recognition unfolds in the opera begins (as mentioned before) with that same solidarity: acknowledgement of the other’s suffering. This is well-trodden ground in this series of essays. Siegmund tells Sieglinde his sad story at the dinner table; later Sieglinde comes to Siegmund in the night and reveals her own sorrows, which Siegmund then aligns with his own. However, this mode of recognition ends midway through the third scene, when Siegmund begins to move beyond the past, away from pain and towards potential happiness, by professing to his sister the poetic contents of his heart. Beginning with the Winterstürme — five of the most gorgeous minutes of the whole cycle, a song in which metaphorical spring-brother and love-sister are reunited at last — the process of recognition now becomes eroticized. This is done through music (the “bliss” motif, the long, cadenceless swirl of withdrawing and returning), through metaphor (warmth, blossoming, the vigor of life), and through physicality, more specifically, the act of looking.

Of all of these, the act of looking — and being looked at — is of the most importance to us.

Sieglinde sings (emphases mine):

My heart greeted you with canny forboding, as your gaze on me first blossomed. Everything I ever saw was strange, my surroundings were friendless; whatever came my way seemed like something I’d never known. But you I knew plainly and clearly; when I laid eyes on you, you were mine; what I hid in my heart, what I am, bright as day, came to me…

A few lines later:

With your brow as open as this, how like a maze the veins throng your temples! I’m fearful of the joy that transports me. A miracle stirs in my mind: the one I saw to day for the first time is you, someone I’ve seen before.

Siegmund responds:

A dream of love also stirs my mind: in ardent longing I’ve seen you before.

Sieglinde:

I once caught sight of my likeness in a brook, and now I see it again; then it rose up from the water, now my likeness comes from you!

Siegmund:

You are the likeness that I hid within me.

It is this act of looking that merges the desire to see the true self of the beloved with the recognition of one’s own true self. In this moment, all dissolves. There is no man and no woman, only you as you are and me as I am. In theory, such mutual transcendence is a utopian idea. Part of what makes the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde so moving is that the dream of the twin-lovers is one that persists also in the dreams of feminists: a love between man and woman that does not rest upon a bedrock of domination and submission, a love that transcends difference and is thus bereft of objectification. This emotional content remains very real.

However, it is precisely in these later fragments of eroticized identification that we can uncover a gnawing truth at the center of the whole work: incest, far from being an impediment, is a precondition for such utopian thinking.

To make this final, concluding connection, we need a feminist lens. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir had this to say about the primordial origins of incest prohibition:

“[Man] aspires to escape [his mother’s] circle and assert transcendence against immanence, to open up a future different from the past where he is rooted; depending on the types of relations recognized in different societies, the banning of incest takes on different forms, but from primitive times to our days it has remained the same: man wishes to possess that which he is not; he unites himself to what appears to him to be Other than himself. The wife must not be part of the husband’s mana, she must be foreign to him: thus foreign to his clan. Primitive marriage is sometimes founded on abduction, real or symbolic: because violence done to another is the clearest affirmation of another’s alterity.”⁸

This latter point is made very clear in, you know, Götterdämmerung — not to mention all of the other gendered relations within the Ring, a work, as I said before, in which rape is the arch-crime. However, in Walküre, Wagner attempts to create a love that expressly wants to resolve the problem of alterity, an impulse which is, albeit more covertly, also caught in the wicked problem of misogyny. After all, it is by way of a misogynistic logic that, in order for there to exist a love between man and woman that isn’t rooted in domination — in order for there to be true identification of the self in the Other — man and woman must be the same. In other words, a love without alterity must, by corollary, be incestuous.

Siegmund can only love Sieglinde this way because he is her, and she is him. Hence, the act can only end when this mutual identification is finally made — when each is able to not only bestow true selfhood on the other but consummate that selfhood through being made, finally, physically, one. But to me, the sentiment — problematic in its incestuousness, unproblematic in its desire for another way of being — is best expressed earlier, in a line I’ve carried with me for as long as I’ve known the opera:

“Name me as you love me," Siegmund begs his sister. “I take my name from you.”

1. Sabor, Rudolph. 1997. Richard Wagner: Der Ring Des Nibelungen, a Companion. Phaidon.

2. Wagner, Richard. 1997. Die Walkure. Ediz. Illustrata. Phaidon.

3. Sabor 1997, 96.

4. Ibid.

5. Even more ambiguous than this is whether Siegmund can see that his lover is his sister before the final revelation of her name. His certainty in his love indicates that this might be the case, but Wagner offers us absolutely no help here. Any and all conspiracy theories are welcome in the comments.

6. Connolly, Brian. 2014. Domestic Intimacies. University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812209853, p. 2. Also: liberal individual subject? That’s our Siegmund!

7. Ibid., 40-49. Connolly cites, for example, a story about a man who lives a life of crime up until he sleeps with his sister — when he realizes she is his sister he decides to reform his entire life in response to the disgust.

8. De Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex. Vintage., page 83.