Die doppelte Triade: Wotan – Loge – Erda/Wagner – Freud – Butler

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of Richard Wagner’s Rhinegold as a work in which important tendencies of modernity are prefigured in the opera’s narratological and vocal dispositions. These tendencies are, first of all, the destabilization of an intact identity and, second, the Freudian-based concept of the three aspects of the psyche, the id, the ego, and the super-ego, which govern the individual self. A third focus is on Wagner’s ideas of an androgynous system beyond the dualism of maleness/femaleness, as described by Judith Butler. With these premises, an analysis of the opera’s dramatic function and vocal parts for the characters Wotan, Loge, and Erda shows whether Richard Wagner, as an author-composer of the late nineteenth century, can be regarded as a protomodernist and thus a pacesetter for modernity.