The Ring of truth
To risk a banal observation, the Ring is very long. It took Wagner 26 years to complete – and his detractors say it shows. When he went, Adrian Boult’s solution was always to skip an act, on the grounds that “two acts of Wagner is enough for any one evening”. But he missed the point that much of the pleasure is in the pain: resolution, musical and philosophical, only follows prolonged crisis.
In the current issue of Opera magazine, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, without much evidence, announces “the death of Wagnerism”. By this he means there is no longer a cult of Wagner. The same issue contains a small advertisement for the Wagner Society, based in Haywards Heath. It is offering half-price subscriptions, which might seem to bear out Wheatcroft’s point, but I think the existence of the society, those crowds at 4.50pm in Floral Street and the near-capacity audiences for Richard Jones’s much-reviled production tell a different story. Wagnerism is alive and well and flourishing in a faithless world.
“Is this your first Ring?” says one elderly gent, evidently a veteran of many a Bayreuth, to a middle-aged Japanese man. “I’m afraid it is,” says the latter sheepishly, embarrassed to have found religion so late. The Ring is a great musical experience, but the true Wagnerian wants more – enlightenment, spiritual nourishment, truth. You “do the Ring” because you believe that by the end you will understand – everything.
I was fascinated by the audience: I started seeing familiar faces on the evenings I attended; we were becoming a family, a community, united in our love of the music and our search for the message. Men seem particularly susceptible – much of male life is about repression, and Wagner ‘s soaring injunctions have a visceral appeal. Tear off those suits, throw away those mobile phones, forget tomorrow’s board meeting, be true to yourself, your instincts, your demons.
Would-be cultists want big, simple solutions, all-encompassing emotional answers. Music seems to provide them; opera especially; and Wagner most of all. Love, sex, heroic death – who needs mundane reality? It is nonsense to paint Wagner as a proto-Nazi, but he did provide a blueprint for glorious self-destruction. Hitler, a Wagner obsessive, could no more have surrendered than Brünnhilde could have forgotten Siegfried and married an insurance broker.
The critic Barry Millington, in his book on Wagner, claims to have identified more than 100 interpretations of the Ring – socialist, fascist, Freudian, Jungian, Schopenhauerian. Jones says his production has no such agenda – “I think the Ring is profoundly ambiguous; don’t explain it in a psychoanalytic or a Marxist sense’, he says – but he is either protecting his back or being naive. His staging fits squarely into a “modern” aesthetic that seeks to express the human significance of the Ring.
The interpretation I was left with at the end of this compelling production – the obloquy to which it was subjected when it premiered in 1994 seems for the most part to have subsided – was part-Christian, part-humanist. The power struggle, the battle for control of the Ring and with it the world, is largely meaningless. Wotan is imposing but Lear-like in his irascibility and foolishness Alberich is an impotent tramp; the giants are a pantomime act. Jones’s comic-book style mocks the gods – they are inane, enervated, chasing useless dreams, building feeble fortresses.
The central character here is not Wotan, but Brünnhilde, a god who discovers freedom, an immortal who has to embrace death. She appears in Walküre as a jolly public schoolgirl who you wouldn’t want to meet on the hockey field. She learns the meaning of love from Siegmund’s glorious (albeit incestuous) passion for Sieglinde, and is physically and spiritually liberated by Siegfried. She ceases to be a god and becomes a woman. In Jones’s reading, the transition in the Ring is from a tedious god-driven world of petty jealousies and tiresome tyrannies to a human world where brutality and love exist side by side. Twilight of the gods (or, to extrapolate, of God); dawn of Godot.
One of the chief haters of Jones’s production is Michael Tanner, philosopher, Spectator music critic and author of a recent book on Wagner. Tanner dislikes productions that “domesticate” Wagner, by which he means fitting him into a schematic box. Tanner loves Wagner but I somehow doubt that he is a member of the Wagner Society. He is suspicious of easy solutions and thinks the Ring is at points incoherent, reflecting the way Wagner changed personally, musically and dramatically.
Tanner’s book is pleasingly short and stroppy; through its long years of composition, it developed a Harold Brodkey-like aura, only to disappoint when it arrived. Readers and listeners had looked to Tanner for answers; instead he posed only more questions – “What is the Ring About?” cries one of his chapter headings in exasperation. There is boundless food for thought here, but no solution: is Brünnhilde’s love ultimately healing or destructive; is Götterdämmerung a tragic end or a new beginning?
Perhaps it is unethical to reveal this but for three of the four parts I sat behind Bernard Levin. At one point just before the final act of Götterdämmerung, an American admirer came up to him. She said that many things were puzzling her but one thing most of all: why were Hagen, personification of evil, and Siegfried, our confused superhero, wearing almost identical green suits? Could this be the key? The sage looked perplexed; he shuffled, he mumbled; just one of those things, a quirk of the costume department, he seemed to be saying. Probably material left over from Traviata.
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