{"id":15078,"date":"2011-04-28T11:55:57","date_gmt":"2011-04-28T15:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=15078"},"modified":"2011-04-28T14:58:30","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T18:58:30","slug":"one-new-wagnerite-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/28\/one-new-wagnerite-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"One New Wagnerite at a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

The Ride of the Valkyries in Robert Lepage\u2019s new production of Die Walk\u00fcre. Photograph by Ken Howard, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera. <\/p><\/div>\n

When Mark Twain spent a week attending performances of Richard Wagner\u2019s operas in Bavaria, he complained that \u201cseven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.\u201d But by the end of his ordeal, he conceded it to be \u201cone of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.\u201d That was in 1891. This year, the Metropolitan Opera is rolling out a new production<\/a> of Wagner\u2019s famed four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung<\/em>, and I\u2019m here to tell you that whether or not you like opera, this is an experience that is not to be missed. On Friday, I saw Die Walk<\/em>\u00fcre<\/em>, the second of the four operas, and was reminded that the Ring<\/em> is not only one of the most magnificent achievements of human creativity but also, contrary to reputation, one of the most accessible.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t fully understand why the Ring<\/em> came to be considered impenetrable. It is long, I\u2019ll grant that. In 1853, having completed the libretto for the Ring<\/em>, Wagner wrote to his friend, Franz Liszt, \u201cMark my poem well, it holds the world\u2019s beginning and its destruction.\u201d This isn\u2019t just Wagner\u2019s notorious megalomania speaking. The cycle does tell the story of the origin of human conflict, the destruction of the human world, and everything else in between. Perhaps it\u2019s these enormous themes that are responsible for the Ring<\/em>\u2019s reputation. But still, they\u2019re nothing you don\u2019t find in your standard myth. Perhaps it\u2019s the dead seriousness with which Wagner approaches his ambitious enterprise that makes him a little perplexing, even suspicious, in these times\u2014he hasn\u2019t a trace of cool irony to protect him against mockery. Thank God.<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, the Ring <\/em>appears on the horizon like a monumental citadel, but venture just a little closer and you\u2019ll see that the points of entry are as plentiful as the structure is immense. Indeed, because the Ring contains multitudes, you can use it to think through whatever\u2019s on your mind: the environmental consequences of greed, your ugly competitive streak, why Gadhafi won\u2019t just throw in the towel, your latest breakup\u2014it\u2019s all there.<\/p>\n

Herewith the half-dozen reasons I\u2019ve been using on my friends to lure them to the Ring<\/em> \u2026<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

THE MUSIC, OH, THE MUSIC<\/h3>\n

The Ring<\/em> teems with some of the most beautiful music ever written. Wagner has a reputation for bombast\u2014shrieking sopranos, blaring horns\u2014and there\u2019s just enough of that sort of thing in the Ring<\/em> to keep you on your toes. But on the whole, the music is lush and sensual. In his rousingly vitriolic essay, The Case of Wagner<\/em> (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Wagner\u2019s most impassioned champions turned detractors, proclaimed Wagner the great mouthpiece of modernity\u2019s prevailing illness: decadence. He had a point. The Ring<\/em> is an extravagant indulgence that leaves you weak in the knees. It\u2019s a consciousness-obliterating night out dancing on ecstasy, a body-melting vinyasa yoga class, a sequence of crescendos, climaxes, and decrescendos that outlasts even the most epic sexual encounters. Below, a video of the new production.<\/p>\n

Even at his most disillusioned, Nietzsche admitted that Wagner was \u201ca master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist<\/em> in music who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness.\u201d In their abundance of precise detail, Wagner\u2019s operas are like Tolstoy\u2019s novels rendered in music. You\u2019ll find no interpretation more finely tuned than that of the Met\u2019s own James Levine, universally recognized as one of the foremost living conductors of Wagner. His slow, voluptuous rendition is sublime.\u00a0 He also has great hair. When he stands at the podium, the outer rim of his puffy curls catches the light off his score and becomes the halo that his conducting merits. Here are some snippets from the 1989 production (including a shot of Levine\u2019s great hair). Listen to minutes 3:40-5:40 for one of the opera\u2019s sexiest climaxes.<\/p>\n

YOU DON\u2019T NEED TO BE INTO MUSIC TO BE INTO THE RING<\/h3>\n

If you\u2019re more inclined toward the literary and philosophical than you are toward the musical, the Ring<\/em> will keep your brain abuzz for the seventeen-plus hours it takes to make your way through the full cycle. Unlike most nineteenth-century opera composers, Wagner was as attentive to his text as he was to his music. Not only did he write his own librettos, which was highly unusual, but in the case of the Ring<\/em>, he wrote the libretto before the music. The care Wagner took with his libretto shows. If you only read a condensed plot summary or the abbreviated translations provided on the seat back in front of you during performance, the Ring<\/em> might well appear over-stuffed and chaotic. But if you sit down and read the libretto first, I think you\u2019ll find it compelling and not at all ridiculous. I wouldn\u2019t call it perfectly coherent\u2014Wagner\u2019s thinking shifted during the twenty-eight years he spent writing and revising the Ring<\/em>\u2014but it\u2019s all the more exciting and provocative for its wild breadth. I liked the translation I read by Andrew Porter; it didn\u2019t retain too many traces of what an opera-director friend of mine tells me is a pseudo-archaic German that Wagner invented for his \u201cpoem.\u201d<\/p>\n

WAGNER THE RED<\/h3>\n
\"\"

A young Richard, out to change the world.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Ring<\/em> is Wagner\u2019s protest against organized society. He began working on it in the aftermath of the 1848 European revolutions. Wagner participated in the republican uprising of that year in Dresden and, when it was crushed, fled to Zurich where he remained in exile for eleven years. When he conceived of his four-part opera, he was a young revolutionary, deeply immersed in his moment\u2019s ideological protests against the direction in which an industrializing Europe was headed. Heavily influenced by the writings of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and by his friendship with anarchist and socialist Mikhail Bakunin, himself a friend of Karl Marx, Wagner considered economic, legal, and political power\u2014in other words the very foundations of organized society\u2014to be the primary causes of social ills. Wagner\u2019s conviction that power is an evil bound to self-destruct in the end, is fundamental to everything that occurs in the Ring<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That most entertaining of socialists, George Bernard Shaw, made the convincing case, in his 1898 commentary on the cycle, The Perfect Wagnerite<\/em>, that the social system described in Das Rheingold<\/em> that meets its inevitable downfall in G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung<\/em> is none other than good old Capitalism. Alberich, who sets the cycle cycling by sacrificing love in exchange for the gold that, when forged into a ring, confers absolute power, is, in Shaw\u2019s reading, a captain of industry who exploits the earth\u2019s resources and his fellow men all for the sake of profit. Wotan, head god, who dreams of \u201cmanhood\u2019s honor, unending power,\u201d and \u201cendless renown,\u201d is for Shaw an exemplar of the educated ruling classes, one who naively believes he can wield power benignly. That Shaw hailed Wagner, who would later be embraced by the Nazis, as a prophet of the Left, is testament to the malleability of Wagner\u2019s work. Nietzsche thought this openness to interpretation morally perilous. I find it invigorating.<\/p>\n

WAGNER AND PSYCHOANALYSIS<\/h3>\n
\"\"

Wotan and his sidekick, Loge, descend into Alberich\u2019s underworld to steal themselves some gold. Ken Howard\/Metropolitan Opera.<\/p><\/div>\n

When writing the Ring<\/em>, Wagner was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer\u2019s account of the \u201cinward-facing side of consciousness\u201d and his conviction that the unconscious will to life\u2014akin to what Freud would later call the sex-drive\u2014underlies all human behavior.\u00a0 In The Artwork of the Future<\/em> (1849), Wagner argued that Schopenhauer\u2019s \u201csecond world,\u201d that which can only be \u201cbrought to our cognizance by an inward<\/em> function of the brain\u201d such as the dream, can also be accessed by music. That\u2019s precisely what <\/em>Wagner set out to do\u2014to speak to the unconscious through music.<\/p>\n

Robert Donington was the first to put forth a comprehensive psychoanalytic reading of the Ring<\/em>, in his 1963 book, Wagner\u2019s \u2018Ring\u2019 and Its Symbols<\/em>. For Donington the Ring<\/em> tells the drama of an individual\u2019s psychic development; where Shaw sees the inevitable fall of capitalism, Donington sees the integration of consciousness. In Donington\u2019s reading, each of the Ring<\/em>\u2019s characters symbolizes some aspect of the psyche. Alberich is Wotan\u2019s shadow self, and so when Alberich seizes the gold, which is pure libido, he brings that power into consciousness; when Wotan, the ego, steals the gold from Alberich, he does so in order to put the libido to active use. In Rheingold<\/em>, both the shadow self and the ego give up love for power. But the love they renounce is seductive beauty, in other words, superficial love, making way for the kind of intersubjective love based on compassion that Siegmund and Sieglinde introduce into the psychic landscape in Walk<\/em>\u00fcre<\/em>. The appearance of this powerful outlaw, love, kick starts the superego, Fricka, who appears to stop the madness \u2026 You get the gist.<\/p>\n

THERE\u2019S INCEST!<\/h3>\n
\"\"

Siegmund and Sieglinde have the same hair and a big sword. Ken Howard\/Metropolitan Opera.<\/p><\/div>\n

Walk<\/em>\u00fcre<\/em> makes a seriously convincing case for incest. In the first act, Siegmund and Sieglinde sing one of the most beautiful love duets in all of opera. \u201cThe stream has shown my reflected face\u2014and now I find it before me,\u201d Sieglinde sings. \u201cYours is the face I knew in my heart,\u201d Siegmund answers. They recognize in one another all that they have lost\u2014their father, their mother, their childhood, themselves. Literally. They are twins who were separated in their youth by a forest tribe that murdered their mother and kidnapped the young Sieglinde. \u201cBride and sister,\u201d Siegmund sings of Sieglinde. Isn\u2019t that what we are wishing for\u2014a spouse and a sibling in one\u2014when we say we want someone we are both drawn to sexually and feel utterly at ease with? Wagner shows incest to be the most pure expression of what we are all looking for in love, and the incest taboo doesn\u2019t have a fighting chance against his persuasive music.<\/p>\n

BR\u00dcNNHILDE<\/h3>\n
\"\"

Brunnhilde learns about love. Ken Howard\/Metropolitan Opera.<\/p><\/div>\n

A majority of operatic heroines fall in love, suffer, and then die of consumption, madness, or a broken heart. Br\u00fcnnhilde is different. At least the Br\u00fcnnhilde of Walk<\/em>\u00fcre<\/em> is. It\u2019s not that she\u2019s a warrior goddess who flies through the clouds on her horse to collect dead heroes for her father\u2019s army\u2014although in that respect as well she\u2019s pretty special. Br\u00fcnnhilde is by far the most interesting character in the Ring <\/em>because she is the only character in all four operas to transform herself. She begins as an exuberant but obedient daughter who thoughtlessly carries out her father\u2019s will. But, through her encounter with the unassailable love of the twins, she learns to make her own moral determinations, and in so doing she ceases to be a goddess and makes herself a person instead. Simone de Beauvoir would approve.<\/p>\n

Sadly, after Br\u00fcnnhilde is stripped of her godhead and becomes a woman at the end of Walk<\/em>\u00fcre<\/em>, her story comes to resemble that of the typical operatic heroine. Except that when she commits suicide, she takes the entire world with her. As the opera\u2019s only wise, strong, and<\/em> free character, Br\u00fcnnhilde could, I think, have been put to better use. If one doesn\u2019t agree with Wagner that total destruction by flood and fire is an ideal solution to humanity\u2019s problems, then Br\u00fcnnhilde proves, at least as well as Nick Kristof, that letting the world\u2019s women go to waste does nobody any good.<\/p>\n

Catherine Steindler is a writer living in New York. <\/em><\/p>\n

Die Walk\u00fcre is on now and runs in repertory<\/a> until May 14, 2011. The new<\/em> Siegfried begins on October 27, 2011; the new<\/em> G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung on January 27, 2012. Performances of the cycle\u2014all four operas in one week\u2014start on April 7, 2012. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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