All very interesting, of course, but how are we to understand “redemption” in the supposedly non-Christian world of the Ring? It’s not Brünnhilde who is redeemed, but the world in general and the Ring in particular. But is it really? Does the ending of the Ring really deliver the same sort of fulfillment message as, say, Parsifal? No, it doesn’t, and even if it did that would not explain Brünnhilde as the basis of all this redemption.
Shaw, predictably, had no use for this theme at all, whatever one calls it. He saw the music itself as “of no great merit: it might easily be the pet climax of some popular sentimental ballad,” and adds that Wagner only used it because it “gushed” and “for convenience’ sake.” He then devotes two chapters to explaining this as a political choice on Wagner’s part. Poor George! He always got loopy when things didn’t agree perfectly with his ideals.
Had Shaw lived until 1976, he would no doubt have jumped all over Cosima’s just-published Diaries and found more to write about, particularly concerning this one, climactic theme. In the Diaries, Cosima notes that Wagner referred to this theme as the Apotheosis of Brünnhilde rather than the Redemption through Love. This is a different matter altogether.
The dictionary defines “apotheosis” as “the act of raising a person to the status of a god,” or, in a word, “deification.” This has given a new spin to our understanding of the Ring’s conclusion, and commentators since 1976 have twisted themselves into pretzels attempting to deconstruct it anew. In fact, so intensely do they emphasize that this theme is not to be called what it used to be that we might as well now call it the Not-Redemption through Love motif. In any case, it opens new interpretations that are beginning to be seen on stage. The Metropolitan’s 1989 production of the Ring concluded with an image of a star rising to the heavens, looking also like an ascending drop of water or perhaps even a single sperm, and signifying the continuance of life after the cataclysm. But why Brünnhilde?
Unlike Fricka, Brünnhilde has comprehended the universal import of the situation beyond her own personal needs, and, unlike Wotan, was able to take the necessary action to effect what had to be. In this way, she earns, or proves, or demonstrates, or manifests her own latent divinity. That is, she is “bigger” than herself. The alignment of personal will with the universal destiny (Wotan’s elusive goal) is, in itself, a marker of divinity.
In the Hindu conception, one great cycle of time follows another as one lifetime follows another. Brünnhilde’s literal action causes the end of one cycle and, presumably, the dawn of the next one, even if it means sacrificing her own life. Her ability to relinquish her “will to life” (in Schopenhauer’s phrase) breaks her out of the Karmic cycle that has trapped everyone else (including Wotan, who talks a great deal about “the end,” but cannot make it happen himself). Brünnhilde’s action moves her up a notch in creation to the sphere of those not bound to time and its cycles. She is divine.
Facets of the Ring
PRODUCTIONS OF THE RING:
WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO SEE
When Wagner first produced the complete Ring in 1876, his goal was to present a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. His genius as a composer of music was well known, but he wished the Ring to represent the acme of all the arts, including acting and poetry. The physical dimensions of the production were to herald a new era as well, and clearly the Bayreuth Festival House represented achievements in theatrical architecture and acoustics. The one aspect where Wagner’s genius seemed to have let him down was in the areas of scenic and costume design.
The Ring called for advances in the field of production that were unheard of in 1876 and still make producers gasp. For starters, the drama is meant to begin underwater. Then there are vast and rapid scene changes, characters changing into dragons and toads and God knows what else, rings of fire, flying horses, and so on. A very capable crew of mechanics and engineers was assembled for the first production, and no doubt they worked wonders. The Rhinemaidens, for example, were placed atop bobbing contraptions that were wheeled around by stage hands. With a bit of waving silk to hide the mechanisms, the illusion actually came off rather well. All were pleased with this, including the Rhinemaidens themselves, who were originally quite dubious, and had to be coaxed, cajoled, and threatened into the infernal vehicles.
Other effects were less well received. The character transformations were achieved by means of “curtains of steam.” Shaw said it made the theater smell like a laundry. There was no way to get the Valkyries, let alone their horses, to fly, and a pantomime dragon is a pantomime dragon, no matter what great music accompanies him. The glitzy audience at the premiere had been told to expect a revolution in stage production, and there was a vague sense of disappointment in this regard.
Nobody is a genius in all fields. The fact is that Wagner, for all his revolutionary aesthetic innovations, had a rather conventional design sense. His dream house, Villa Wahnfried, is pleasant but utterly bourgeois. While he was busy telling his singers to look at each other rather than at the audience, like conventional opera singers of his (and, alas, our) time, he was quite content to see them “act realistically” in front of a painted backdrop, whose natural representations and time-honored illusory perspectives would undulate with every passing breeze.
The artist in him must have sensed this dichotomy. “Next year, we will do it all differently,” he said after the premiere, but he died before he could restage the Ring. He also made a remark that has puzzled and titillated subsequent generations. Having invented the invisible orchestra (a reference to the famous covered pit at the Bayreuth Festival House), he said he wished he could invent the invisible stage. “And,” he added with a smile, “the invisible audience.”
Many have taken this comment to justify sitting home and listening to compact discs on the latest stereo systems as the “best” way to hear the Ring, but nothing replaces live theater, as Wagner well knew. Remember that he didn’t put a lot of effort into writing oratorios or presenting “concert versions” of his works. Cosima noted in her Diaries that they couldn’t see how Edison’s new phonograph invention could be of any use to them. Wagner clearly wanted all the magic of opera, even if he didn’t always know how to make it happen visually. Also, it is odd that movies, which have tackled so many grand operas so successfully, have thus far steered clear of the Ring, even in installments or, God forbid, highlights. (Fritz Lang made two movies based on the original Niebelungenlied, but avoided the Ring.) The Ring is obviously meant for the stage, even if it can then be enjoyed on a video or a telecast. The question is, How do you present it on stage? Do you try to make it as “realistic” as possible, knowing that it will always be slightly disappointing visually but at least possible to understand? Or do you reject any attempt at realism and jump headlong into symbolism or abstraction? And, if you make the second choice, what sort of symbolism or abstraction will best unfold the Ring for the audience?
This is the basic issue at stake in Ring productions today. To see where we are, it is necessary to take a quick look at what has happened between 1876 and now.
The question remained moot for a long time. Even though theatrical innovators like Adolphe Appia dreamed of bringing their new ideas to the Ring, no house would invest in them. Opera houses throughout the world, when they staged the Ring at all, were slavishly faithful to the original production. One saw blond women in braids and breastplates, horned helmets, faux-Teutonic costuming and decoration, and so forth. Occasionally, there were attempts to “improve” certain aspects, but always along the lines of what Wagner had conceived. The Valkyries, for example, were sometimes hurled around the stage on winged carousel horses, daring the audience, one imagines, to explode with laughter. True innovations were slight for many years. In 1924, Siegfried Wagner replaced the traditional “flats” with three-dimensional sets at Bayreuth and actually got flack for it in certain quarters.
This was nothing compared to the uproar that greeted the Bayreuth production of 1933. Heinz Tietjen, the man
ager of the Prussian State Theaters, and his favorite designer Emil Preetorius staged a new production with new sets and costumes. The Valkyries’ rock, most notably, looked somewhat cubistic. This was a very tame development compared to some of the truly ravishing design innovations Germany had seen in the 1920s, but the battle lines were drawn by 1933. Change was Jewish or Bolshevik, while tradition was pure and Aryan. Bayreuth was intended by the Nazis to be a bastion of ideals amidst a corrupted world. How could such aesthetic decadence permeate the fortress? Preetorius modified his designs and costumes in subsequent years.
The political implications of tradition versus innovation plague the theater today. In Germany, it is quite possible to divine people’s political orientation by whether they applaud or boo any given production.
This explains the reopening of the Bayreuth festival after the war in 1951 as a political and historical, as well as theatrical, event. Never in history has the relatively discrete art of stage design borne such significance.
Wieland’s famous postwar production had to strip the Ring of all associations with the Third Reich. Since the Nazis had insisted on realistic representation of details and faithfulness to original stage directions, all as part of their broader cultural ideology, the new production opted for basically no representation of details and hardly any stage direction at all. The main feature of the stage was a sort of disk, a metaphor of both the Ring and the world, on which the action unfolded. Imaginative lighting set the emotional tone for each scene. The characters, who could hardly be presented in the tainted trappings of Norse mythology, were dressed in rather neutral outfits that suggested, if anything, Greek mythology. All the traditional props, from Donner’s hammer to those blasted drinking horns, were gone. Even stage directions were ignored. For example, Wotan and Fricka were standing rather than lying down at the beginning of the second scene of Rheingold. Wieland justified this by referring to his grandfather’s “invisible stage” comment.
Traditionalists howled, signed petitions, and threatened. Wieland persevered. Fortunately, he was a genius, and his productions held up to critical analysis. When lesser minds attempted to copy his style in other theaters, they tended to fail. Without Wieland’s gift for lighting and other details, all they were left with was a blank stage.
There was little need to worry about cheap Wieland imitations, since not too many Ring productions even tried to copy Wieland’s 1951 masterpiece. As astounding and radical as the New Bayreuth production of 1951 was, it was not the most influential. After all, where does one go from virtual nothingness? Wieland’s second Ring production of 1965 was far more influential. After Henry Moore declined to design the sets, Wieland designed them himself with more than a nod toward Moore. Totemistic and ritualistic shapes abounded, speaking of an inner-psychological world. (Donington’s groundbreaking Jungian analysis of the Ring was published in 1963.)
This set the tone for several years after, and the world was treated to an abundance of productions that looked as if they were taking place either at a papier-mâché Stonehenge or in your local modern art museum’s sculpture garden. Look at any album cover of the Ring from this period, and you’ll feel as though you are being subjected to a Rorschach test. But, hey, at least you couldn’t mistake the people on stage for Nazis.
In the 1970s, directors and designers finally started having a spot of fun with the Ring. The then-extravagantly funded midsized theaters of West Germany took the lead in this regard. A well-received production in Cassel in 1974 came to be called the Space-Age Ring from its use of those motifs. British companies were taking chances at the same time. The Sadler’s Wells company produced a Ring in English that was part outer-space, part everything else. This toured the country for a few years and surprised audiences pleasantly. London’s Covent Garden hired Götz Friedrich to direct and Josef Svoboda to design a major Ring production in 1974. Friedrich had astronauts where he wanted them, but also other touches: tribal ritual motifs, cadaverous beings—you name it. The era of postmodernism had arrived. In other words, a little of this, a little of that … Images from the world of comic books and science fiction and fantasy, which owed a great deal to Wagner in the first place, also began, in turn, to influence Ring productions in this period.
The next important step would be a very concrete presentation of the Ring. The year 1976 marked the centenary of the Ring’s premiere, and all Wagnerian eyes were on Bayreuth. Wieland was dead, and few expected true innovation from his brother Wolfgang. Bucking expectations, Wolfgang commissioned Pierre Boulez to conduct and Patrice Chéreau to produce the new Ring. Two Frenchmen, of all things, were shocking enough to the old guard, but traditionalists were further disturbed by Boulez’s musical iconoclasm and Chéreau’s unfamiliarity with opera. What they presented is still hotly debated, but no one would deny that it was one of the important moments in Wagnerian production.
Chéreau looked to George Bernard Shaw’s book The Perfect Wagnerite, and basically staged the Ring as face-value Marxist analysis. Wotan was the Capitalist, complete with top hat; Hunding’s hut was a row of Victorian houses; and so on. This was the Ring as thematic statement. The effect was enhanced by the excellent, unconventional (for opera) direction of the performers, who set a new acting standard for the operatic stage. In this regard, Chéreau’s unfamiliarity with opera served him well. Many were shocked at the time, but have since come to remember this as one of the definitive productions of the Ring. It was televised in the United States in the early 1980s with surprising success.
Meanwhile, Rings were popping up everywhere. San Francisco looked back to Wieland’s 1951 production, where the gods were draped in vaguely Greco-Roman costumes, and produced a neoclassical Ring in the 1980s. But a “themed” Ring is a relative rarity in the United States. Most productions of the Ring in the last generation have been a synthesis (some would say hodge-podge) of the styles outlined above. There is realism when the production staff can manage it, historical reference when convenient, and abstraction of one sort or another the rest of the time. Inherently surreal moments, like “The Ride of the Valkyries,” are done however they can be to create an impression, and contemporary audiences are especially fond of groovy dragon machines. The Seattle Opera has made quite a name for itself with good syncretic productions along these lines. American opera companies tend to rely on team effort more than the authoritarian, hierarchical European systems do, and productions reflect this. It is therefore harder for American companies to present productions that clearly represent the visions of a single creator. One needs an absolute dictator in the manner of Wieland Wagner to bring such efforts off.
In 1989, the Metropolitan Opera presented its own first new production of the complete Ring since 1948. (The Ring presented in the 1974–75 season was patched and borrowed. Also, the whole Ring hadn’t been presented at the Met within a single week since 1938!) The 1989 production was of the “realistic” type of Rings—modified, of course. The Valkyries did not wear horned helmets or ride flying horses, but there was the rainbow bridge, the tree in Hunding’s hut, drinking horns, and so forth. Europeans and American hipsters clucked their tongues in disapproval: here was a perfect example of American operatic traditionalism and political-aesthetic naiveté, they said. But the Met knew what it was doing. There having been no complete Ring production in over a generation, there was no point in presenting a radical reassessment of the work. Furthermore, the Met must have had an eye to the televised performances. The millions of people who watched (or claimed to watch) it were best served by this sort of a production.
There was more. The Mighty Met, with its legendary production capabilities, knew it was probably the only house in the world that could hope to approach anything like Wagner’s stage directions and not look ridiculous. The opening Rhinemaidens’ scene alone, always a nightmare for directors and designers, utilized the moving stages (“wagons,” as they’re called), to create the illusion that the audience was bobbing in the water. The descent into Nibelheim, the mag
ic fire, and, especially, the Götterdämmerung finale also blew everyone away. “Let’s see Bayreuth top that!” was the basic message. There were some silly painted backdrops of the old tradition to contend with as part of the price for all this, but the lighting and staging were fine-tuned in subsequent years. Audiences, live and over the television, were quite pleased. The Met can take much credit for its role in making the Ring the popular entertainment it is today.
The Met production, however, may have put the lid on any other “realistic” presentations of the Ring, at least for a while. There isn’t much any other American company could do to top the Met in the realm of spectacular realism, short of setting the theater on fire and diverting the local river, so the other companies have been pushed further into experimentation and innovation. This has been another salubrious effect of the Met production. The Chicago Lyric Opera produced its long-overdue first complete Ring in 1995, and scored successes with its most imaginative details. The bungee-jumping Rhinemaidens were a particular hit.
The future of Ring productions seems to belong to the designer. In the earlier years of the century, the conductor reigned. One speaks of Mahler’s Ring or Furtwängler’s. The next phase was the ear of Regietheater, when the director was supreme, as witnessed by references to the Wieland Wagner, Friedrich, or Chéreau Rings. Now we hear more and more of the Ring by Rosalie or Eiko Ishioka.
This, of course, is to be expected in our fashion-obsessed era of visual superficiality, but there is an exciting and promising aspect to this development. Design, by definition, is concerned with appearances even at the expense of substance. Whereas directors are trying to tell people how to interpret a piece (Götz Friedrich, for one, is very clear that contemporary audiences need to be told what to think), design-driven productions tend to suggest more than define. As exciting as the director-versus-Wagner clash of egos can be, Regietheater must of necessity limit the scope of interpretation. Even Wagner sensed this when he was his own régisseur. The new trend promises to open a wide world of possibilities to the next batch of Ring devotees, and Wagner would have approved of that. After all, the goal has always been the same: Finding a way to unpack the limitless delights of what remains, in the final analysis, Wagner’s Ring.
Wagner Without Fear Page 33