I hear you re: the women, though I have to say I like Siegmund a lot: at the start of The Valkyrie, he's on the run due to having defended a woman's right to choose not because he was in love with her or she with him, but because of a sense of fairness, and later he declines Valhalla and glory if it means leaving Sieglinde. By far the most sympathetic, non-egodriven in the Ring.
(George Bernard)Shaw had the theory that everyone's dislikability in Götterdämmerung is because Wagner wrote that first and then worked his way backwards as the backstory grew and grew, so his skills as a writer and composer and his understanding for and sympathy with the characters developed accordingly.
The problem with Siegfried in any case to me is that he's more a concept than a person - the free Nietzschean superman unbound by laws of gods and men who could have been this if raised by loving parents (either plural or singular). (As Frigga points out to Wotan in The Valkyrie, the fact that Wotan spent time with and caused both happiness and misery for Sigmund means Siegmund does not count as a free-of-the-gods person.) In a fictional universe where most of the characters really are characters, no matter which philosophical arguments they at times embody, that sticks out like a sore thumb.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2018-08-29 01:17 pm (UTC)(George Bernard)Shaw had the theory that everyone's dislikability in Götterdämmerung is because Wagner wrote that first and then worked his way backwards as the backstory grew and grew, so his skills as a writer and composer and his understanding for and sympathy with the characters developed accordingly.
The problem with Siegfried in any case to me is that he's more a concept than a person - the free Nietzschean superman unbound by laws of gods and men who could have been this if raised by loving parents (either plural or singular). (As Frigga points out to Wotan in The Valkyrie, the fact that Wotan spent time with and caused both happiness and misery for Sigmund means Siegmund does not count as a free-of-the-gods person.) In a fictional universe where most of the characters really are characters, no matter which philosophical arguments they at times embody, that sticks out like a sore thumb.