Siegmund refuses her offer if Sieglinde cannot join him in Walhalla, preferring the love of a miserable mortal woman to Walhall's sproeden Wonnen. The shattered Brunhilde comments on this refusal:. So wenig achtest du ewige Wonne? Alles waer'dir das arme Weib, das mued und harmwoll matt von dem Schosse dir haengt?
Nichts sonst hieltest du hehr? This is the core of Wagner's critique of religion: one has to get rid of the old Platonic topos of love as Eros which gradually elevates itself from the love for a particular individual through the love for the beauty of a human body in general and the love of the beautiful form as such to the love for the supreme Good beyond all forms: true love is precisely the opposite move of forsaking the promise of Eternity itself for an imperfect individual.
What if the gesture of choosing temporal existence, of giving up eternity for the sake of love, is the highest ethical act of them all? Ernst Bloch was right to remark that what is lacking in German history are more gestures like Siegmund's.
Jurgen Flimm's Ring , which will be repeated in Bayreuth till , is strong precisely at this level of intense intimate interplay; his staging is full of insightful ideas which, of course, sometimes work and sometimes not. Fricka is in Rheingold a careful saving Hausfrau , not the usual majestetic matron; Alberich is in the Act II of Siegfried accompanied by a boy, the young Hagen, whom he already trains for his future combat with Siegfrid Hagen-boy plays with the small model of a dragon ; etc.
And Hagen is, together with Wotan and Alberich, the key person of Flimm's staging which presents the Ring as a drama of corrupted state power Udo Bermbach was Flimm's official ideologue. The dark figure of Hagen is profoundly ambiguous: although initially depicted as a dark plotter, both in the Nibelungenlied and in Fritz Lang's film, he emerges as the ultimate hero of the entire work and is redeemed at the end as the supreme case of the Nibelungentreue , fidelity to death to one's cause or, rather, to the Master who stands for this cause , asserted in the final slaughter at the Attila's court.
