and of which Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great
fourfold drama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a
reaction by personifying the reacting force only, any more than
Archimedes could lift the world without a fulcrum for his lever.
You must also personify the established power against which the
new force is reacting; and in the conflict between them you get
your drama, conflict being the essential ingredient in all drama.
Siegfried, as the hero of Die Gotterdammerung, is only the primo
tenore robusto of an opera book, deferring his death, after he
has been stabbed in the last act, to sing rapturous love strains
to the heroine exactly like Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia. In
order to make him intelligible in the wider significance which
his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soon assumed in
Wagner's imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a much
vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. Hence
Wagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried's hammer;
and since there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book,
Wagner had to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily
to the very beginnings of human society. And since, on this
world-embracing scale, it was clear that Siegfried must come into
conflict with many baser and stupider forces than those lofty
ones of supernatural religion and political constitutionalism
typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, these minor antagonists
had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic, Mime,
Fafnir, Loki, and the rest. None of these appear in Night Falls
On The Gods save Alberic, whose weird dream-colloquy with Hagen,
effective as it is, is as purely theatrical as the scene of the
Ghost in Hamlet, or the statue in Don Giovanni. Cut the
conference of the Norns and the visit of Valtrauta to Brynhild
out of Night Falls On The Gods, and the drama remains coherent