Fern von hier Folgers mir nun

The Wagnerian subtext of the Folgers Christmas incest ad

For the last few years, I’ve spent my holidays in Denmark, avoiding Berlin’s bacchanal of fireworks and spending about ten days in a series of cabins about an hour west of Copenhagen. Starting last year, we’ve made the trip easier by staying in Copenhagen for the first night to catch our breath after the train and to avoid needing to navigate country roads in the dark. I’ve come to enjoy this for the hotel we stay at which is across from the train station, allows dogs, and has a rooftop swimming pool. I take a swim both that night and the next morning, with my ancient waterproof iPod playing Lorin Maazel’s The Ring without Words as I do laps, the warmth of the pool contrasting with the chill in the air each time I lift my head.

This year, on Monday evening, I made it to the end of the Die Walküre section, weaving between couples hopped up on glühwein and pheromones, the lower halves of their bodies making sculptural tangles under the water. It was like something out of the Venusberg. At certain points, the lights in the pool turn yellow. I feel like this would normally read as piss in everyday circumstances, but with Wagner the Rheingold allusion is unmistakeable.

In The Ring without Words, Maazel devotes a decent chunk of the symphonic suite to these first two chapters of the Ring Cycle, and the combination of Walküre’s opening scenes, the phonetic clarity of the pheromones in the water, and the holiday cheer all reminded me of that 2009 Folgers commercial, the official title for which is “Coming Home.” Of course, collective society has chosen to remember it as the incest commercial: a brother coming home from “Africa,” and finding only his sister awake on an early Christmas morning. Because there is no coffee in Africa, he is almost orgasmically delighted to find a drip pot of Folgers that has been brewing for God-knows-how-long. He turns that sexual energy towards his younger sister, whom he hands a present wrapped in a black-and-white mudcloth print paper (“do they know it’s Christmas,” indeed) topped with a red bow. She slaps the bow on his chest, informing him that he’s her present this year. They look like they’re about to tear each other’s clothes off before his parents come downstairs, woken up either by the scent of cheap filtered coffee or by the seismic disturbance of impending incest.

In this light, it’s hard to write “Coming Home” off as misfired capitalistic sentimentality, because Wagner was cooking with a similar recipe in the first act of Die Walküre. After Siegmund draws Sieglinde close to him, declaring that “the bride and sister is freed by the brother, against the ruins of what held them apart,” Sieglinde delivers her own version of “You’re my present this year” when she sings: “Du bist der Lenz nach dem ich verlangte in frostigen Winters Frist.” You are the spring that I have so longed for throughout this frosty grip of winter.” You could, especially through the Above Average Productions parody, then read the parents as Fricka and Wotan, left to clean up their kids’ mess.

While I had originally intended to write more about this for the end of the year, time caught up with me. Morning took over and I watched the sun rise over Copenhagen, through the mists of the water, as the Rhine rose up to swallow the burning ruins of Valhalla. So my gift to you, dear reader, is a short bit of comparative literature in video format. How apt that it features Jonas Kaufmann’s Siegmund both given Jonas’s contributions to the legitimate Christmas canon and his recent interview in which, as my colleague Hugh Morris wrote, he discovered the world’s tiniest violin.

It’s a season primed for miracles.

Rejoice.