Domesticating Wagner

The Royal Ballet and Opera’s new production of Die Walküre opens with the figure of an elderly woman standing naked against a black backdrop. She is rotating in place, her hands, at first, covering her eyes. She looks like Dürer’s The Witch, with sagging breasts and long grey hair. She is Erda, the Earth Mother. One of the few characters not taken from Old Norse myth, she is Wagner’s own invention, extrapolated from the Germanic Volva/Wala into a primordial mother-goddess figure. In Der Ring des Nibelungen as Wagner conceived it, she spends less time on stage than any other character, appearing in one scene in Das Rheingold and one in Siegfried. In both, she speaks only to Wotan; between the events of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, he has returned to her and conceived a daughter, Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie (she is likely the mother of the eight other Valkyries, though this is not made explicit.)