The Deep of Night and the Sunrise

Greg Sandow, in his post on Art and Entertainment, threw in this little cookie:

In Götterdämmerung, the scene for Hagen and Alberich is a comparative low ebb, given Wagner’s standard, for both art and entertainment, but Hagen’s call to the vassals rates high on both counts.

I was really taken aback by that. My immediate reaction was that this scene has one of my favorite moments in the entire ring cycle, how can he dismiss it so? (In fact, the binding of my score of Götterdämmerung is cracked at that scene.) After all, this scene is the one moment of sympathy that Hagen gets. If Alberich were your father, and he pestered you for your entire life about the ring, you'd be evil too. (Alberich really pounds it away, using the phrase "mein Sohn" seven times in a relatively short scene.) Not only that, but Alberich insists to his son "Sei treu!" repeatedly as he fades away. (That isn't entertaining?)

The real high-point, though, for me is at the end of the scene -- the Morgendämmerung music in the transition to scene two. It opens with a bass clarinet solo (against a cello pedal), followed by a horn choir. When I first learned about imitative counterpoint in high school, I nominated this canon for closer study. What makes it so interesting is that Wagner is able to use some tricks to make it seem much longer than it really is. He uses fake entrances to create the illusion of a 7-part canon, even though the strictly canonic part had already ended by the final entrance. Even though the true canon is very brief, what follows is still a great example of tight-knight counterpoint.

Overall, the piece is very short -- just 50 measures -- and comes across as chamber music because of the severly reduced texture (at least until the end, when the low strings get into the game). This moment of stillness really is one of the hidden gems of the ring.








As a side note, I never noticed the (incidental) pun on the Well-Sung pair's name until I saw "Wälsung" in print in the score. I feel quite a bit behind the curve on that one, as everybody else has been talking about their name since before I even read their blog. (Evidently, they mentioned it as far back as November 5.)