B. Jurisprudence and Gesamtkunstwerke: Allegory, Symbolism, and Creative Interpretation

My aim, as noted above, is to locate within Rheingold the central tenets of “Wagnerian jurisprudence” and to illustrate in so doing that Wagner was a serious jurisprudential thinker, gifted at conveying legal-philosophical meaning through various means, including layered harmony. To do this, I undertake “creative interpretation”: The fundamentally constructive exercise of interrogating meaning within an object by taking it seriously as an example of the form or genre to which it belongs.Footnote ¹⁵ For instance, to interpret creatively The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dalí is to reason how it might be understood as both a great painting and a great example of surrealist art.Footnote ¹⁶ Creative interpreters must view the painting in its best evaluative light, relying on higher order evaluative positions concerning the purpose and value of both painting and surrealism.Footnote ¹⁷ This exercise is naturally constrained by the object itself: It would be nonsensical to argue that The Great Masturbator is truly a commentary upon the discovery of the Higgs boson, just as it would be implausible to contend that Rainy Taxi is really a portrait of Donald Trump.Footnote ¹⁸ Therefore, although creative interpretation should always seek to make of its object the best that possibly can be made, it must also maintain plausible fidelity. This follows because, in normative terms, the very act of seeking meaning within an object assumes both the value of truth-seeking as such and the possibility of locating value within the object itself.Footnote ¹⁹

Rheingold presents a particular challenge for creative interpretation because its form and genre are so complex. Wagner thought of his Musikdrama as Gesamtkunstwerke (total artworks), insofar as they combined several discrete art forms—music, poetry, and theater—within a unified performance.Footnote ²⁰ For this reason, it would demonstrate a problematic lack of fidelity to interpret the libretto of Rheingold in abstraction from its score or potential visual effect: It can only be interpreted as a musikdrama. This being so, any search for jurisprudential meaning within Rheingold cannot come at the expense of divorcing it from its essence as a performance to be seen, heard, and experienced emotionally. The hope instead must be that whatever legal meaning can be located within Wagner’s work will enhance these elements, rather than detract or distract from them. Moreover, insofar as Rheingold itself presents the opening of a modern myth, fidelity requires that its libretto, score, and potential for staging each be viewed as component mythological articulations, which means as primarily symbolic, rather than allegorical.Footnote ²¹ There are also important evaluative reasons for adopting this view, concerning the relationship between symbolism and drama. To quote from Scruton:

This additive nature of symbolism is crucial to the dramatic value of mythology because myths are necessarily informative and pedagogical. Their dramas tell us something about the concepts symbolized within them, as in the case of Heracles: an early Western exemplification of great power bringing with it great responsibility. Allegory, by contrast, necessarily involves the replacement of one story with another insofar as the explicit story is subverted, at the level of meaning, by its implicit counterpart. For this reason, symbolic works are always more than they appear, whereas allegorical works are very often less. This is the crux of Cooke’s powerful argument against Jungian interpretations of The Ring Cycle,Footnote ²³ which is worth reproducing at length:

The point here is not that wholly allegorical interpretations fail in terms of fidelity, although that may also be true. Rather, as Cooke’s comparison with Hamlet shows, allegory locates meaning externally, such that the artwork itself is only a receptacle of that supposed truth rather than a contribution towards it. Symbolic works, by contrast, always claim to tell us something new about the concepts with which they engage. It is the drama of Heracles’s labors that show us how it is through virtue and service, rather than physical might alone, that mortals obtain absolution. We learn about strength and its relationship with ethics by contemplating such tales. With allegory it is different: Once detected, allegory informs nothing more than the meaning of the particular work in question. Indeed, when faced with truly allegorical works, we cannot understand them without already comprehending the external matter to which their meaning is subservient. For this reason, to put matters crudely, works of symbolism are evaluatively superior, qua cultural contributions, to mere allegories.

When seeking to understand Rheingold as a work of legal philosophy, all of this means that we must be exacting in what we require from creative interpretation. Any plausible interpretation of this sort must engage with Rheingold as a work of symbolism that sits within a larger mythical tetralogy, which itself comprises a gesamtkunstwerk of unified music, poetry, and theater. Moreover, these sonic, literary, and dramatic components must be constructed in such a way that their contribution to our understanding of jurisprudential concepts is maximized, while at the same time not allowing this illuminating power to swallow whole the far broader symbolic and dramatic potential of the Musikdrama itself. In what follows, I attempt this by addressing my attention to four concepts—authority, legality, domination, and violence—as they arise within the libretto, score, and staging of Rheingold. In so doing, I focus on the representation of these four concepts through six symbols: the god Wotan, his spear, the fortress of Walhall, the dwarf Alberich, the giants Fasolt and Fafner, and the ring that Alberich creates from the stolen Rhinegold. At all points, I aim to show not only that Wagner creates significant jurisprudential content but also that, properly interpreted, Rheingold contains important insights of contemporary relevance to legal philosophy as a whole, delivering these insights harmonically, as well as semantically and visually. Wagnerian jurisprudence, or so I will suggest, is characterized by its pessimistic view of legality as an agent for social change and its commitment to law’s essential ambiguity. It sees legality as both a social fact and an ethical ideal, and as a space within which the better impulses of humanity clash with our darker natures. For these reasons, it cannot be neatly categorized as “positivist” or “non-positivist,” nor as “critical” or “constructive.” For Wagner, as I shall attempt to illustrate, law is fundamentally a deeply tragic thing, doomed to failure in its own lights by the tensions inherent within its own moral and conceptual structure.

C. Authority and Legality: Wotan, His Spear, and the Fortress of Walhall

In this section, I begin outlining the claims of Wagnerian jurisprudence by utilizing creative interpretation to locate discrete conceptions of authority and legality within three symbols that Wagner creates within the music, poetry, and drama of Rheingold. The first of these is the god Wotan, who along with the Valkyrie Brünnhilde and the chaotic hero Siegfried is as close to a protagonist as we come in The Ring Cycle as a whole. Wotan is only very loosely based upon his cognate deity in Germanic and Norse mythology, having far more in common dramatically speaking with the Ancient Greek Zeus.Footnote ²⁵ But in addition to being a truly horrendous husband and father,Footnote ²⁶ any plausible interpretation of his symbolic meaning ties Wotan closely to both authority and legality, the latter of which encompasses both the rule of law, understood as a normative ideal, and rule by law, in the sense of governance through norms. To quote Magee:

Magee is essentially correct here, although he must be amended on one point: Wotan’s spear is a symbol of manifested practical authority and not of either political power or instrumental violence,Footnote ²⁸ a fine yet important distinction.Footnote ²⁹ A similar conflation is made by Kitcher and Schacht, who conceptualize Wotan’s practical authority in their analysis as “the ability to make things happen—the power (of one sort or another) to impose his vision of things and his designs upon others.”Footnote ³⁰ The essential point, however, is that Wotan himself fulfils the role of “Mr. Law-and-Order” within Wagner’s myth,Footnote ³¹ symbolizing not only law itself but also elements of the modern state: a mode of political organization that developed, in Germany at least, during Wagner’s lifetime.Footnote ³² Indeed, many dark and sinister elements within The Ring Cycle can be read as reactions to contemporary statehood and economic-cum-social power that supports it. Interestingly, however, though Wotan is by his own admission deceitful and megalomaniacal,Footnote ³³ his motivations are noble. To quote Kitcher and Schacht:

He is akin, in this respect, to the sovereign “head” of the Hobbesian leviathan, pictured in Figure 1 below, which brings order from chaos through an authority granted by contract—the power to do so being concurrently created through the collective force that such authority marshals.Footnote ³⁶ Like Hobbes himself, Wotan recognizes that “the state of man can never be without some incommodity or other; and the greatest, that in any form of government can possibly happen to people in general, is scarce sensible, in respect of … that dissolute condition of masterless men, without subjection to laws.”Footnote ³⁷

Figure 1. The top half of the original frontispiece to: Abraham Bosse, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil.Footnote ³⁵

This drive towards order and authority is essential to Wotan, as he tells his daughter Brünnhilde in Act 2, Scene II of Die Walküre: “When youthful love began to grow old, I longed to be lord of life. By bold ambition, driven and drawn, I won myself the world.”Footnote ³⁸ Wotan’s longing, which he discloses in this scene, is reflected in his dream of Walhall, during Scene II of Rheingold, which sees him fantasize: “These halls of heavenly bliss are guarded by gates and bolts. Manhood’s honor, measureless might: promise of peerless renown.”Footnote ³⁹ The darkly carceral image of “gates and bolts” is powerfully ironic, given the eventual fate of the gods in Götterdämmerung,Footnote ⁴⁰ but it also evokes an aesthetic of artificial order that is central to the imposition of Wotan’s will upon the world. What precisely Wotan seeks within Walhall, over and above its physical security as a fortress, is a matter of great significance to Wagnerian jurisprudence as a whole. Indeed, to understand the conceptions of authority and legality that Wotan evokes within Rheingold, we must give attention to their manifestations: his spear and the fortress itself.

As Magee notes, the spear would be a visual symbol of violence were this not undermined by its use within the drama. The only time Wotan kills, he does so via a contemptuous wave of his hand, removing life from the murderer of his son Siegmund by way of restoring balance to the mortal world.Footnote ⁴¹ There is something vaguely pathetic in this—the spear, insofar as it also constitutes a phallic symbol, remains unused because Wotan, by his own admission, is impotent to attack his foes directly.Footnote ⁴² But this impotence, signified further when the spear is shattered in Siegfried Act 3, Scene 2 by the chaotic and virile titular hero of that piece,Footnote ⁴³ itself betrays the jurisprudential subtlety of Wotan’s characterization. Unlike the dwarf Alberich, or the giants Fafner and Fasolt, each of which is discussed below, Wotan’s potency exists at the normative level of practical authority rather than the physical level of dominance or violence. He requires, rather than enforces, and obligates, rather than enslaves. This can be heard, for example, in descending scale of the leitmotif associated with the spear itself (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Wotan’s Spear Leitmotif

Leitmotifs are short, recurring musical phrases through which Wagner communicates layers of meaning, including jurisprudential meaning, to his listeners.Footnote ⁴⁴ They are repeated and subtly augmented within the score to add non-linguistic context to the drama upon stage.Footnote ⁴⁵ Each leitmotif evokes a concept—sword,Footnote ⁴⁶ or arrogance,Footnote ⁴⁷ for example—and each contains symbolic meaning within its own unique musical structure. In the case of the spear, its falling progression evokes the spear itself pointing down: a sonic representation of the physical object but also a symbol of command.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the hands of Wotan, this symbol is one of rule by law—governance by means of norms—and evinces the practical authority of the god himself as a symbol for law and as an element of the state. In jurisprudential terms, Wagner communicates something discrete and important about the nature of legal authority through this component of his soundworld. The authority of law is normative, not physical: law itself merely instructs and requires, just as Wotan uses the spear to instruct and require. The actual enforcement of norms requires other techniques, symbolized musically by Wagner in quite different ways, as described below.

This interpretation of the score is corroborated by the dramatic use of the spear itself—Wotan brandishes it when he exerts authority in precisely this form—and by the poetry of the libretto on such occasions. For example, when in Rheingold Donner threatens to attack the giants with his hammer, Wotan holds forth the spear and proclaims: “Hold you hothead! Nothing by force! All bonds abide by my sacred spear. Strike not a single blow!”Footnote ⁴⁹ The spear leitmotif accompanies this act, cementing the authority of Wotan within the mythological soundworld. The god’s abhorrence of violence by others signifies not only the Weberian proposition that states must claim a monopoly upon legitimate force, a point to which I return below,Footnote ⁵⁰ but also that Wotan himself operates at the level of normativity alone. This is further reinforced by both his characterization of the spear as “sacred” and his reference to its physical form: upon the shaft of that weapon are carved the very treaties and contracts from which Wotan’s authority is derived. We first encounter this powerful imagery in the admonition of Fasolt that Wotan must honor “[w]hat [his] spear spells,” whereupon the giant warns: “Son of light, light of justice, listen and beware: to treaties be you true! What you are, you are only by treaties; and bound by rules, there are bounds to your reach.”Footnote ⁵¹ That Fasolt is correct about Wotan is confirmed by the god himself in his later admissions to Brünnhilde.Footnote ⁵² Yet perhaps more interestingly for present purposes, the giant’s remarks also track several important insights about the relationship between law, authority, and violence that can also be found in contemporary legal theory, developed long after Wagner’s own contribution.

Coercion, we now know, is only ever the law’s Plan B. Plan A is that its subjects should conform to it without further supervision.Footnote ⁵³ Confirmed by Raz’s famous “society of angels” thought experiment,Footnote ⁵⁴ this insight fits the mode of authority exercised by Wotan—the spear is brandished in expectation of compliance, not wielded to threaten with deadly force, and when finally met by a symbol of overwhelming force and total freedom in the form of Siegfried’s sword, it shatters. Moreover, the very idea of authority established, and so constrained, by treaty not only invokes the social contract tradition, which Wagner would have been familiar with through Kant,Footnote ⁵⁵ but also reflects broader sensibilities that the acquiescence or tolerance of the governed is at least characteristically a necessary condition for the stability of political rule.Footnote ⁵⁶ Furthermore, the notion of legal authority as necessarily self-limiting plays both upon Dworkin’s observation that “the most abstract and fundamental point of legal practice is to guide and constrain the power of government,”Footnote ⁵⁷ as well as upon claims that constituted legal authority is so tied up with the constituent potential of multitudes coming together to form polities that it is difficult to draw sharp lines between these two things.Footnote ⁵⁸

Wagner’s poetic, visual, and harmonic representation of these insights through Wotan’s use of the spear pulls them together into an accessible symbolism that is recognizable by his audience at the intuitive level. In these parts of the drama, legal philosophy is communicated viscerally, rather than conceptually, while losing none of its complexity. Indeed, the capacity of Gesamtkunstwerke to layer symbolic meaning within single scenes—or even within mere moments of musical expression—arguably makes it a more nuanced—if less explicit or precise—means for the communication of these ideas than philosophical prose. Given that Wagner is not burdened with the need to advance an argument, but only to suggest meaning through symbolism, he can move faster and maintain more concurrent conceptual tensions than those engaged in straightforwardly analytical work. As such, even audience members unfamiliar with academic jurisprudence will come to recognize Wotan as law and thereby understand law itself more clearly through an aesthetic and experiential process of symbolic recognition. Harmonies are, as the spear itself demonstrates, essential to this process.

Turning from the legality of the spear to the precise mode of practical authority it symbolizes, we learn in the Prelude of Götterdämmerung that it is fundamentally artificial. Wotan ripped the shaft from the World Ash, thereby killing that tree. As a Norn recounts:

Wotan’s contracts are marked by this artificial genesis. Unlike the oaths of lovers, which for Wagner always possess a kind of natural purity and bear the promise of redemption,Footnote ⁶⁰ there is no richness or substance to the morality of Wotan’s agreements: They bind purely as a matter of form. It is agreement as such, rather than the intrinsic value of what is agreed, that supplies his practical authority. So it is, according to Wagner, with both law and the state: Skepticism arising from the artificiality of both supplies the first major tenet of Wagnerian jurisprudence. To put this insight in contemporary philosophical terms, we might say that Wotan obligates, and is obligated, by content-independent reasons that operate in an exclusionary manner, for both himself and others.Footnote ⁶¹ Wagner’s god of law, it seems, is fundamentally positivist.Footnote ⁶² However, this apparent endorsement of positivism on Wagner’s part is political, not analytical. Wagner is communicating a claim about the nature of law that, if true, should be of considerable ethical importance to his audience: that law is not only artificial but, as a direct result, fundamentally shallow or “thin” in terms of the moral demands that it places upon us. This attitude of suspicion towards legal authority is both illustrated and compounded by the fundamental betrayal underlying the constitution of Wotan’s positivist authority, symbolized by the genesis of his spear, which itself foreshadows the themes addressed in the following section. Wotan’s legal order begins in much the same way as Alberich’s regime of domination: with the raping of nature by a violent removal of something precious from its original state.Footnote ⁶³ This perhaps not only explains Wotan’s willingness to wriggle out of his own contracts—he understands that their artificiality discloses their hollowness—but also the almost wretched naiveté with which he pursues Walhall, the symbol to which I now turn.

So far, I have concentrated largely upon rule by law and the practical authority that Wotan wields in order to affect its operation. But Wotan is clearly in search of something else—his quest for authority is incomplete when we first meet him—and before he learns of Alberich and the ring, this additional element is quite clearly the fortress constructed by Fasolt and Fafner. I consider the role of the giants in the creation of Walhall within the following section. For now, my focus is upon the fortress itself and what it means for Wotan, and therefore, to some extent, also to Wagner. At the physical level, Walhall provides security and a powerbase from which to rule.Footnote ⁶⁴ However there is more to it than that; when asked about its name, he explains: “Audacious and free, Conceived by my will, Victorious life, That is what Walhall means.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The fortress is clearly an apex achievement in Wotan’s eyes, but why? Understanding the answer to this question, and the tension it creates with the artificial, archetypically positivist characterization of law just canvassed, is essential to comprehending a crucial duality presented by Wagnerian jurisprudence.

For Kitcher and Schacht, Walhall is little more than one “instrument through which the rule of law can be universally accomplished and secured.”Footnote ⁶⁶ But to view it as an “instrument” underestimates its symbolic significance. Indeed, qua fortress, this comes close to denying that it has any further significance at all. Magee makes a similar error, viewing the fortress as nothing more than a place from which to “[rule] the world in splendor.”Footnote ⁶⁷ From a jurisprudential perspective, the difficulty with both views is their location of legality only in Wotan’s spear—only, that is, in rule by law, which they then conflate with the rule of law, thereby missing the discrete value of the latter. Wotan sees that value: a point that Scruton comes close to identifying when he speaks of “all the trappings of authority symbolized by the castle of Valhalla,” with its “hymn in D flat major,” pictured in Figure 3.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, this is still not quite right. True, contemporary law is often surrounded with pomp; however, Wotan is a political pragmatist.Footnote ⁶⁹ He would not risk so much for the appearance of splendor alone. When the god invites his wife—herself a symbol for both domestic harmony and conventional moralityFootnote ⁷⁰ —to dwell within the fortress with him, he declares: “Hail, fortress, to you! Nevermore dread and care. Follow me, wife! Let Walhall harbor us both!”Footnote ⁷¹ But what could Wotan dread, having himself previously proclaimed: “When strength is called for, I need no one’s assistance?”Footnote ⁷² He dreads both Alberich and the ring, certainly, for the reasons I canvass below, however his apparent need for “gates and bolts,” not to mention his desire for “honor,” predate his fear of both.Footnote ⁷³ Comprehending what motivates Wotan here is key to understanding both the depth of Wagner’s legal-philosophical insight and the extent of his hitherto unrecognized contribution to our understanding of law.

Figure 3. Walhall Leitmotif

I suggest that Walhall above all represents an ideal for Wotan, a completion of his original project of instantiating law and order within the world. This ideal is the true essence of legality—the rule of as opposed to by law—and is indispensable to Wotan because he believes that it will provide normative legitimacy to the hollowness of his treaty-based regime. Crucially for the Wagnerian conception of legality, this hope turns out to be illusionary. As Donington correctly observes, even in triumph Walhall seems somehow shabby, with the Rhinemaidens railing against injustice outside its walls;Footnote ⁷⁴ and Wotan ultimately burns alive, unmoving upon its throne, smiling grimly at an end brought about by mortal beings both lesser and greater than himself.Footnote ⁷⁵ But even in its shabbiness, Walhall tells us something indispensable about the relationship between law’s authority and its own normative ideal. This insight forms the second major tenet of Wagnerian jurisprudence. To understand it, we must turn from the libretto of Rheingold to its score, which conveys much of the meaning necessary to comprehend legality as an ideal within Wagner’s thought.

The Walhall leitmotif is a sweeping D flat major progression that falls and rises, ending tantalizingly close to where it began—pictured in Figure 3 below. Wagner’s use of the major key communicates stability and light, which stands in sharp contrast to the minor key setting of the ring leitmotif—pictured in Figure 5. There is a self-sustaining impression to the phrase, akin almost to sonic autopoiesis, even though, when heard in some dramatic contexts, it might be thought to end upon a question. The rhythm is steady and even, with ties in the first bar of the bass line that create an impression of solidity. It is, above all else, a fundamentally uplifting theme, which to my ears at least is less “hymnal”—contra Scruton—and more heady, almost ecstatic. If I were to put matters crudely, I would say that this is the sound that legality itself makes, at least when it is viewed as something to which we should aspire. Wagner attempts to give us something akin to a glimpse of law as a Platonic Form hereFootnote ⁷⁶ —a sonic impression of law’s most abstract noumenal reality.Footnote ⁷⁷

What should we draw from this fabulous piece of composition? In my view there are three connected things. First, its major key, bass line bridge, and steady rhythm, all suggest the form of law, in Fuller’s sense of “the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules.”Footnote ⁷⁸ These musical features give Walhall an impression of clarity and stability that go beyond the physical security offered by even the mightiest fortress,Footnote ⁷⁹ speaking instead to the formal virtues that Raz associates with the rule of law itself: the provision of greater certainty in human affairs and a guarantee against arbitrary power.Footnote ⁸⁰ These formal virtues are indispensable to Wotan, who in this dimension symbolizes law itself, because they comprise the “inner morality” that legitimizes the project of imposing order through the authoritative application of impersonal norms.Footnote ⁸¹ They redeem his honor by justifying his enterprise and assuage whatever dread he may feel from the knowledge that he once violated the natural order. From this perspective, Walhall, and the rule of law it symbolizes, both stands in tension with the artificial nature of Wotan’s positivism and operates as a salve for its moral and ethical weaknesses.

Second, the self-sustaining quality of this leitmotif perhaps recalls Luhmann’s analysis of law as a uniquely self-referential social system,Footnote ⁸² which speaks to the normative hegemony Wotan seeks in his attempt to wrest order from chaos. Law, to borrow once again from Raz, claims not only practical authority but ultimate practical authority—legal institutions claim the role of final social arbiter on the (often false) premise that they are morally justified in so doing.Footnote ⁸³ Wotan’s empty positivism of formal agreements needs something of this sort—some uniquely autonomous and apparently justified evaluative order—that is his and his alone, only then can he cement his position in the world as authority itself. Once again, Walhall as an ideal is both a point of tension with, and a cure for, law’s artificiality. Harmonically speaking, Walhall’s self-sustaining quality provides the necessary appearance of normative sufficiency and self-referentiality—an aptly haunting sonic promise that when perfect legality is achieved, no further justification for governance will be necessary. Law cohering with the spirit of legality will form an almost perfect circle, like the Walhall leitmotif itself, and need look nowhere else for normative, or harmonic, completion. Wagnerian jurisprudence is tempting us towards the idea that something like a natural law understanding of legality is politically essential both because of and in response to the positivist reality of law as a collection of social facts.

Third, the lightness and uplifting nature of the leitmotif, and in particular its sweep down and then up again in pitch, suggests that Walhall—and the rule of law it symbolizes—is not an empty ideal, even though it may seem shabby in the shadow of Wotan’s duplicities. As even Donington is prepared to admit, “we cannot give up all that Valhalla stands for and go back to the state of nature with which Rheingold began … we need its uncertain shelter and its overrated justice.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Walhall, much like Dworkin’s virtue of political integrity,Footnote ⁸⁵ may well be “Justice in Workclothes,”Footnote ⁸⁶ but it symbolizes a genuine kind of justice nonetheless. The sense of the sublime we experience when listening to the music of Walhall is genuine, to no lesser an extent than our sense of dread is real, when we hear the leitmotif of the ring—pictured in Figure 5. On the Wagnerian conception, legality as an ideal appears to be a genuine human good, at least when experienced in isolation from the other phenomena symbolized within Wagner’s score. In dramatic terms, it is only by realizing that this mirrors something true and important about the concept of law that we can make sense of Kitcher and Schacht’s intuitively appealing claim that Wotan is fundamentally a noble antihero.Footnote ⁸⁷ Underhanded and even abusive he might be, but his original ideal is one with which we can empathize, particularly in view of the many other, far darker beings with which the god shares his mythological corollary to our modern world.

Putting these three symbols—Wotan, the spear, and Walhall—together, and taking particular note of the complex thematic elements contained within Wager’s sonic representation of legality as an abstract ideal, we can begin to trace the outline of Wagnerian jurisprudence, which takes a very particular stance on the nature of law. Like more than one contemporary legal philosopher, Wagner conceived of law itself as more closely connected to normative authority than to either political power or violence. Moreover, his treatment of law in Rheingold creates a clear schism between the reality of rule by law, which is styled through Wotan and the spear to be both genealogically flawed and normatively insufficient, and an idealized rule of law, which through the music and poetic symbolism of Walhall is constructed to promise a self-referential and legitimate state of organized justice. Wagner’s insight here is that law, if understood in the first sense alone, will necessarily be incomplete: wherever the promise of Walhall is not fulfilled, legality as an ideal type is yet to be realized.Footnote ⁸⁸ That this echoes conclusions within the mature thought of scholars such as Alexy,Footnote ⁸⁹ Dworkin,Footnote ⁹⁰ Finnis,Footnote ⁹¹ and FullerFootnote ⁹² might be unremarkable, but for the fact that Wagner was writing and composing without the benefit of a legal education and at a substantially earlier point in history, when the contemporary nation state and its associated legal traditions were just emerging in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, although the rule of law, symbolized by Walhall, appears key to the Wagnerian conception of legality, it is telling that the fortress is never presented as somehow more essential or true than the artificial and flawed rule by law symbolized by Wotan’s spear. Rather, the two persist in uneasy coexistence with each other, in much the same manner that Wagner’s apparent positivism persists in tension with his awareness of the need for something like a natural law ideal. This is a jurisprudence of ambiguity, where law is neither neatly one thing, nor the other, but both at once. When combined with the complicating elements examined in the following section, it becomes clear that Wagnerian jurisprudence not only offers a unique object of study in both historical and methodological terms—presenting complex philosophical ideas viscerally in poetic, dramatic, and harmonic form—but also a serious contribution to the philosophy of law as such, with which contemporary scholarship would benefit from closer engagement.

D. Domination and Violence: Alberich, the Giants, and the Ring

As noted above, Wotan shares his mythological world with several far darker beings. It is to some of these that I now turn. By far the most significant is the dwarf Alberich, however given the emphasis placed upon Walhall in the previous section, I want to begin by considering the giants Fafner and Fasolt, who build the fortress under contract with Wotan. The leitmotif of these brothers is one of the most recognizable within Rheingold, with its steady plodding rhythm and limited written range perfectly encapsulating the physicality of the giants themselves—pictured in Figure 4 below.Footnote ⁹⁴

Figure 4. Giants Leitmotif

This physicality, I suggest, also captures their symbolic place within the drama. On one level, they symbolize raw strength, which, to borrow from Arendt, constitutes the singular potency of the individual human body.Footnote ⁹⁵ In jurisprudential terms, it is illuminating that Walhall—the ideal of legality necessary to legitimize the practical authority that Wotan wields—was constructed, not by the god himself, but by these two brothers. Wagner reminds us here of both the artificiality of law. in the sense of its social facticity, and the need that all normative orders have to be made real by the efforts of individuals working in concert.Footnote ⁹⁶ In this respect, the physicality of the giants mirrors the insistence of those such as Hart and Kelsen that legal orders must be made “effective” in some sense, if they are to exist at all.Footnote ⁹⁷

On a more basic level, we must surely agree with Kitcher and Schacht that, within the mythos itself, these giants are “outsized creatures of elemental appetite and desire, who live by impulse and brute strength and who regard themselves—rightly—as vulnerable to those who are cleverer.”Footnote ⁹⁸ They are, in this respect, not only representative of the teaming multitudes from which Hobbesian sovereigns like Wotan draw their authority and power, but also partly constitutive of the threats generated by the state of nature, upon which law must be imposed to avoid a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”Footnote ⁹⁹ This is confirmed when the ring passes from Wotan to the brothers: Fafner almost immediately turns upon Fasolt and murders him, in order to claim that prize for himself. Nonetheless, even this Hobbesian moment speaks to the human subtly of Wagner’s creation. Unlike Hobbes, who famously opines—contra ShakespeareFootnote ¹⁰⁰ —that “the difference between men is not so considerable,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Wagner’s giants symbolize quite different aspects of humanity. Fasolt, charmless though some find him,Footnote ¹⁰² labors hard in the hope of receiving happiness through love, in the shape of Freia. Indeed, his need for her seems almost childlike.Footnote ¹⁰³ Fafner, by contrast, desires the goddess only for the power she offers—her golden apples, which supply the immortality of the gods. These he is only too happy to trade for the greater power of the ring. He is violent and grasping where his brother is brute and naïve. His fratricide is evocatively captured by Sabor, who notes in the margins to his translation: “Thus dies an entirely blameless and honorable character, for love.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Whatever we may think of Fasolt,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ there is poignancy to Wagner’s warning about what happens when law—Wotan—relinquishes power—the ring—to our baser natures—the giants. What is violent and selfish within us, he communicates, is liable to murder what is childlike and naïve. In this dramatic episode, Rheingold once again illustrates the capacity of symbolism within a Gesamtkunstwerke to convey complex insights concurrently, rather than consecutively, as is necessarily the case with pure prose. Moreover, although Wagner’s point is essentially Hobbesian, the visceral manner of its delivery offers us a level of intuitive emotional understanding unavailable from even the most evocatively written academic text.

Turning from the psychological to the economic, Fafner and his brother might also be thought to symbolize the power relations that exist between the state and its proletariat.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Within the Shavian allegorical-Marxist interpretation, “Godhead and Kingship,” in the form of Wotan,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ are complicit with capitalism, in the form of Alberich,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ in using greed and the monetary economy, represented by the ring,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ to alienate the proletariat—here the Nibelungs as well as the giantsFootnote ¹¹⁰ —from the products of their labor: Walhall and the Nibelung gold.Footnote ¹¹¹ Despite his celebrated insight into symbols such as the Tarnhelm,Footnote ¹¹² Shaw’s overall view lacks interpretive fidelity: To make his allegory work, he is forced to dismiss the majority of Götterdämmerung as a poetic and compositional mistake.Footnote ¹¹³ There nonetheless remains an important sense in which he is correct. The material history of both positive law and Western statehood is one of class-based exploitation.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Precisely because Wagner’s work is symbolic, rather than allegorical, Wotan’s exploitation of the giants is capable of admitting this additional layer of meaning, notwithstanding its Hobbesian overtones and the positive connotations that seem inseparable from the appearance in the score of symbols like Walhall. Wagner’s social and political thought is, above all, complex.

Indeed, as noted above, it is the hallmark of legal symbolism within Rheingold that law has no singular essence but rather an overlapping set of different properties, many of which sit in fundamental tension with each other. This emphasis upon irreducible complexity and necessary conceptual conflict is the third distinguishing tenet of Wagnerian jurisprudence, sitting alongside the aforementioned opposition between law as social reality and justificatory ideal. In the face of such conceptual conflict, Wotan seeks coherence through global order, as all law must,Footnote ¹¹⁵ through his various schemes and political exchanges. However, he finally, and inevitably, fails. His dream of Walhall as an ideal is ultimately just that, which he comes to realize before the end.Footnote ¹¹⁶ With this in view, and before considering the dramatic role of Alberich, we must now consider the ring itself. Within the drama, the ring represents a potent threat to Wotan and the gods,Footnote ¹¹⁷ as well as the existential rejection of love by Alberich, who creates it in order to gain mastery over the world, in much the same way that Wotan crafted his spear. It symbolizes many things, including the Shavian monetary economy, but most importantly for present purposes, the power to dominate others—obliging, rather than obligating them to obey, to borrow a distinction from Hart.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Unlike the physical might of the giants, the power of the ring is an artificial one, emanating from the creation of something fundamentally wrong from the raw matter of the universe. This is symbolized by Wagner within the score, with the ring leitmotif sweeping down and then up again in the minor key, creating a sense of deep unease—pictured below in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The Ring (definitive) Leitmotif

It is no accident that the chord sequence of this phrase is the same as that of the Walhall leitmotif. The ring is Walhall’s sonic correlative: where the fortress inspires an ideal, the ring discloses a dark dystopian promise. It is the sound of law as it is used by the power-hungry and violent—an “anti-ideal,” or antithesis,Footnote ¹¹⁹ as it were. As put by Scruton, it signifies “the human disposition to see all things as means and nothing as an end in itself; it is a symbol of power and the lust for it, of exploitation, of the desire to possess.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The features I noted above in relation to Walhall all find themselves mirrored darkly within the sound of this ring. The minor key gives the tempo of this phrase a halting, almost revenant-like sickliness, which speaks to an irresistibility in place of Walhall’s solidity. Its descending ties and upwards sweep convey a yearning covetousness where the fortress invokes self-reflexivity, and while both Walhall and the ring might be perceived as ending on a question, in the case of the ring this question is corruptingly solicitous.

The ring, in these dimensions, symbolizes domination of the Other through coercion, understood as an exploitation of our capacity to reason through alteration of our available options,Footnote ¹²¹ which contemporary states typically accomplish through the threat of collective force.Footnote ¹²² This power for coercion is evinced by the words of Mime, Alberich’s terrified brother, when he cries “With that ring he can lord it over Nibelheim’s hidden host … now he compels us to creep into caverns, for him alone to sweat and to slave.”Footnote ¹²³ That Wagner makes the ring a sonic mirror of Walhall within the minor key displays not only dramatic and harmonic accomplishment but also jurisprudential insight; the symbolism of necessary connection that this creates communicates two claims central to the Wagnerian conception of legality. First, although it may be indispensable to us, the use or misuse of law can pose an almost overwhelming threat:Footnote ¹²⁴ In the hands of those like Alberich, law and the state are always weapons of tyranny and oppression. Second, this danger is no less inherent to the concept of law than is the ideal of legality itself and it cannot be plausibly claimed that the “light” of Walhall is more essential to legality than the “darkness” of the ring.Footnote ¹²⁵ Wagner is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an optimist when it comes law’s socially transformative potential. Indeed, he is deeply pessimistic.

It is precisely because it represents not just such a potent threat but also the dark side of legality itself that Wotan, the god of law, feels that he must possess the ring. “Mine the ring! Not yours but mine! Rant and rave as you will.” Wotan cries, as he rips it from Alberich’s finger.Footnote ¹²⁶ But there is no sense in which we believe that Wotan seeks this prize for his own aggrandizement. True, in triumph he claims, “I hold what makes me supreme: of lords the omnipotent lord.”Footnote ¹²⁷ However, from one perspective this invokes merely the Weberian notion that a state established by law necessarily claims a monopoly upon legitimate force: while the ring exists in the world, Wotan must seek to have it upon his finger.Footnote ¹²⁸ The ring, when viewed in this light, is something to be kept safe by the master of Walhall, for only in the hands of an authority that binds by virtue of legality can the dominating power of the ring be held as a justifiable deterrent.Footnote ¹²⁹ But this analysis, persuasive though it might be, comes close to committing the mistake of allegory. Wotan symbolizes both law and the state, however these concepts do not exhaust his meaning, nor does he exhaust theirs. To see the true nuance in Wagner’s myth, we must, finally, consider Alberich.

Alberich is the original lord of the ring, through which he masters the dwarven realm of Nibelheim, as Wotan is the master of Walhall and the wielder of the sacred spear. However, the parallels do not end there. Indeed, in Siegfried, Wotan goes so far as to call himself Licht-Alberich (Light-Alberich) and the dwarf Scwartz-Alberich (Dark-Alberich), acknowledging explicitly the extent of the connection between them. Magee is worth quoting from at length on this point:

Correcting again for Magee’s conflation of power and authority, and further conflation of coercion and force, this argument goes to the heart of both Alberich’s symbolic importance and his dramatic relation to Wotan. Alberich is distinct from Wotan insofar as, unlike the god—who grounds his authority in the formal but nonetheless egalitarian bonds created by treaties—the dwarf “does not put his will into the other, so as to see the other as a free being like himself: he exerts his will over the other, whom he treats merely as a tool.”Footnote ¹³¹ He symbolizes law and the state at its worst and most unfeeling.

However, his relationship with Wotan once more teaches us something important about law as such on the Wagnerian conception. Just as the harmonic parallel between Walhall and the ring communicate a necessary tension within legality at the abstract level of ideal and antithesis, the poetic and dramatic mirroring of Wotan and Alberich imply the same at the concrete level of social instantiation. This is the fourth tenet of Wagnerian jurisprudence: law as it exists within our world is always both the ideal and its own betrayal; it exists nowhere as either one or the other.Footnote ¹³² In Götterdämmerung, when Walhall burns, the Rhine also floods, claiming the ring into the depths from whence it came; as Wotan dies, the splinters of his spear clutched in his hands, so too is Alberich’s son Hagen pulled into the river by the avenging Rhinemaidens.Footnote ¹³³ Viewed in this codependent light, when Wotan proclaims of the stolen ring, “I hold what makes me supreme: of lords the omnipotent lord,” there is a sense in which he is literally correct—the ring always was what made him supreme, because it is the source of Alberich’s power, and the two cannot be neatly separated out.Footnote ¹³⁴ The war between Wotan and Alberich, fought through mortal proxies throughout the remainder of The Ring Cycle, is from this perspective an eternal war for the soul of legality itself, which can only end when both aspects of law vanish altogether. This being so, at least as far as Rheingold is concerned, the ultimate substantive contribution of Wagnerian jurisprudence to contemporary legal philosophy is to remind us that, at both the abstract and the concrete levels, law is a phenomenon in constant tension with itself and those who rely upon it to the exclusion of all else are, for better and for worse, balancing upon a tightrope between the fire and the flood.