What is the meaning of Siegfried’s death? It is, after all, the reason Wagner authored and composed the Ring in the first place. The whole purpose of the tetralogy was to explain why Siegfried had to die, why it was inevitable. And in order to do that Wagner had to trace the multiple causes of his death back to their roots in nature, in evolution itself, and the origins of human consciousness and human thought, which is the subject of The Rhinegold. Siegfried had to die because it was inevitable in human cultural evolution that the mytho-poetic self-delusions, the religious beliefs, which sustained man and gave his life meaning in the early phases of cultural history, would eventually give way to objective knowledge of man and nature. That the last representative of man’s religious impulse, the music-dramatist Siegfried (Wagner), would actually take a hand – however unwittingly and involuntarily - in bringing about the demise of that very tradition of which he was the exemplar and apex, was the ultimate irony.
Curiously, Wagner’s erstwhile friend and advocate, and latterly most vehement nemesis, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his life-long critique of Wagner, played a role in relation to Wagner very like that which Hagen plays in relation to Siegfried. After Nietzsche broke off his formerly friendly relations with Wagner Nietzsche dedicated his life, as an Atheist, to bringing about the twilight of the gods, that is, the death of religion, the death of God, and the death of all those values and ideals which are predicated on illusory belief in man’s transcendent value. And as a key component of his campaign he set out to expose and destroy Wagner’s romantic nihilism, Wagner’s dedication in his art to the redemption of religious feeling from scientific inquiry’s assaults on religion as a set of beliefs in the supernatural. Nietzsche, like Hagen (and to a certain extent Feuerbach), was a proponent of egoism (which, however, he only valued if it was the self-expression of the higher man of creative genius and independence of spirit) at the expense of the romanticism which seemed to be behind humanism, compassion, and the high value set on romantic love. Nietzsche was prepared to live in a loveless world, even if happiness was forever banned from it, so long as it was true. And to this end, according to Wagner, Nietzsche set out to discredit and eliminate both religion and (in a certain sense) art, as Hagen has done in stabbing Siegfried in the back:
“N.’s [Nietzsche’s] book provokes R. into saying playfully, ‘Oh, art and religion are just what is left in human beings of the monkey’s tail, the remains of an ancient culture!’ (…) ‘Actually,’ R. adds with a laugh, ‘genius is simply envy.’ “ [921W-{6/27/78}CD Vol. II, p. 103]
Here, in an extract cited previously but well worth considering in brief again, is Wagner’s description of the loveless world which Nietzsche’s victory over religion and art and humanist values would leave in its wake, which provides a very concrete illustration of the world Hagen would leave in the wake of Siegfried’s death, the world Hagen and his ilk would inherit after the twilight of the gods which they have wrought:
[P. 74] “… the dauntless judge of all things human and divine, the latest product of the Historical school of applied philosophy, will never touch an archive not first subjected to the tests of Chemistry or [P. 75] Physics in general. (…) The gravest defects I deem the banishment from the new world-system of the term spontaneous, of spontaneity itself … . For we now are told that, as no change has ever taken place without sufficient ground, so the most astonishing phenomena – of which the work of ‘genius’ forms the most important instance – result from various causes … which we shall find it uncommonly easy to get at when Chemistry has once laid hold on Logic. (…)
