Does the finale to Götterdämmerung offer us an ending that is progressive or regressive? Does it emblazon a path forward or opt for apocalypse by, as Adorno would have it, nullifying both the progress its characters have made on stage and the time its audience has “wasted” off stage? With the apparent demise of its gods, heroes, and monsters is the stage finally cleared for the grand entrance of das Volk, as represented by the Gibichung vassals, seemingly the only survivors left at the end of the Ring? Or does the ending of Götterdämmerung point backward to a pre-cultural or even pre-chronological world – if one could imagine such a thing? And what are we to make of the apocalyptic forces of nature that Wagner uses here, those ur-elements of fire and water, which bring with them various connotations of birth and destruction from their pre-Platonic place in the history of philosophy? Seen from this angle, as a struggle between two opposing philosophies of history – Young Hegelian radicalism and Schopenhauerian quietism – the whole of the Ring can be reduced to an either/or proposition: either history revolts and progresses or it revolves and regresses.

But is it perhaps, as with so much else in Wagner, that here again we are left in limbo, between fire and water, death and transfiguration, forward and backward motion? Have we somehow both revolted away from and revolved back through to the beginning of the Ring?