Eva Rieger, Is Brünnhilde Raped? Searching for Clues in Music, Text and Productions

March 2026, Volume 20, Number 1, 41–54.

Did Richard Wagner have latently violent tendencies? To be sure, he was considered a happy family man in his later years, though he still possessed a conspicuous capacity for fantasising about acts of violence. Perhaps, like Goethe’s Faust, two souls dwelt in his breast. When he was a young man, he once threatened to plunge a sharp knife through the heart of his partner Minna Planer; his enthusiasm for the (violent) revolution of 1849 and his involvement in it are well known; and in his writings he took delight in conjuring up compulsive fantasies as part of his urge to shape a better world. It would nevertheless be methodologically unsound to use his life to draw direct conclusions about his work, even though ‘seasoned scientists sometimes think of a cauldron of seething emotions whenever the name Wagner is mentioned’. Wagner himself on several occasions admitted that he was quick to become agitated, and he also made a connection between his work and his own nature: ‘[My] art is very much connected with my life. My character will probably always be marked by extreme, highly conflicting moods’, he once said.