ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the conflict between devastating force and love, its apparent antithesis. The will-to-power colours the actions of every character in the Ring, to devastating effect. Divested of any last vestige of humanity, utterly uncomprehending of the claims of love or Romantic imagination, Alberich has become 'a mere tool of repression' – and has bequeathed that deadly inheritance to his son, whose motto is to 'hate the happy'. However, Wagner proposes a countervailing force, that of love. As Walter Benjamin once remarked, in every great artist there lies a dialectician, to which one should add that, as an artist's greatness develops, so do his dialectical skills. The Romantic idea of immortality through love had been present in Wagner's work from his very first opera, Die Feen, onwards. The Volsungs' love is also doomed by other manifestations of the love-denying will-to-power: Wotan's legal power-games, Fricka's custom-bound domination, and Hunding's property-based brutalism.
