Please update your browser
Your current browser version is outdated. We recommend updating to the latest version for an improved and secure browsing experience.

Götterdämmerung
Leitmotifs and the Ring Cycle
The Ring cycle exerted a tremendous influence on the development of modern music, on Symbolist poetry and art, and on modern mythopoeic epics ranging from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (which Boorman tried to adapt for many years in the 1970s).
It was also a great favorite of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis attempted a thorough and systematic appropriation of Wagner’s music and iconography. Albert Speer even organized a special performance of the final “Funeral March” from Götterdammerung by the Berlin Philharmonic on April 11, 1945, mere weeks before the end of the Second World War. This attempt at identification was so intense that Nazi associations continue to linger and shaped the work’s postwar performance history for decades.
The first performances of Götterdammerung at Bayreuth after 1945 were organized by Wagner’s grandson Wieland and took place against an almost entirely blank stage, as if he were attempting to purge and renew Wagner’s “absolute” music. In the 1976-1980 centenary productions at Bayreuth, however, director Patrice Chéreau and conductor Pierre Boulez pursued a very different approach and resituated the work in the 19th century in the context of the dramatic social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.



Boorman's Dark Ages
This was the production that inspired Boorman to make the bold choice to use Siegfried’s Funeral Music throughout Excalibur, where it is explicitly connected to the Dark Ages, a long transitional period between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the High Middle Ages. Boorman’s Dark Ages are marked by both brutal conflict and a kind of magical enchantment epitomized by the figure of Merlin, a relic of a half-understood, half-remembered mythic world that, as in Wagner’s Ring cycle, is gradually being supplanted by new forms of human civilization.
The music is used at the beginning, recurs again just after the consummation of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere (signaled appropriately by the appearance of the love theme from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, 1859), and then returns at the end to close out Boorman's mythic epic.



Wartime Memories
Boorman alludes to both the complicated and highly charged associations of Wagner’s music and to his own creative inspiration when a Luftwaffe plane is shot down in his cinematic memoir of London during the Blitz, Hope and Glory (1987). The use of the "Hero" leitmotif associated with Siegfried in this section is particularly ironic.