PERFORMANCE HISTORY AND ESSENTIAL LORE OF THE RING
Artistic temperaments (1876) Of all the roles in the Ring, few were as hard to cast in the first production as Grane, Brünnhilde’s trusty steed. Legend has it that all necessary arrangements to rent a performing horse had been made with a dealer of circus animals; then Wagner was informed, at the eleventh hour, that the dear creature had a nasty habit of breaking into dance steps whenever he heard music! Ludwig, as usual, saved the day, loaning the valuable black stallion Cocotte from the royal stables, who behaved in a more seemly fashion. In fact, Cocotte was so impressive that Wagner changed his stage directions for the Annunciation of Death scene in Walküre, instructing Brünnhilde to “park” him in the cave beforehand lest he steal the show.
More critter crises (1876) Grane, it turned out, was less of a problem than Fafner, whose dragon outfit had to be made in London. The middle part never showed up, and some pretty quick patchwork had to be done between the head and tail sections. Supposedly, the shipper on the London side misread the order, and had sent it to Beirut rather than Bayreuth. It is impossible to verify this story, but it is entirely believable, since people constantly confuse these two very different places. Tell your friends you are going to the Bayreuth festival, and see how many are disappointed not to receive postcards from Lebanon.
Inhospitable Bayreuth (1876) The pretty town of Bayreuth can assault visitors with an array of tortures, many of which are still part and parcel of attending the festival today. Heat and dust one day, rivers of mud the next, and, most of all, accommodations that can never meet the demands of the admittedly strange horde that descends on the small town every summer. Apparently, this was so from the first festival. Tchaikovsky, who always had problems with the whole affair anyway, wrote that the main topic of conversation that first year was not music or theater, but where one might find a restaurant that hadn’t run out of food.
“And what do you do for a living?” (1876) One person who managed to get a hotel room that year was Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil and longtime admirer of Wagner. When instructed to sign the hotel’s guest register, he wrote his name; when asked to fill in his occupation, he calmly wrote “Emperor.”
Great ways to say “Hello” (1876) If Ludwig ducked out of town before anyone could see him, Kaiser Wilhelm I had other ideas. Wagner met the imperial train at the platform with marching bands, fluttering banners, and cheering throngs. The gruff old kaiser, once merely king of Prussia, stepped off the train and approached Wagner, saying, “I never thought you’d pull it off!”
Sound advice (1876) August 13 was the first day of the actual festival. Excitement was running high, with half the crowned heads and most of the musical notables of the world in attendance. Wagner wrote out a final urging to the cast and posted it backstage. It read: “Clarity! The big notes will take care of themselves; the small notes and the text are what matter. Never address the audience but only one another; in monologues always look up or down, never straight ahead. Last request! Be faithful to me, dear friends!” These words should be written in bronze and placed in the wings of every opera house in the world.
Beyond Bayreuth (1881) Angelo Neumann, a singer who became a sort of manager-agent, got Wagner’s permission to produce the Ring at Leipzig in 1878. He faithfully followed details of the Bayreuth production, and had the good sense to have his sets and costumes photographed, so we have some idea what the first Ring looked like. The Leipzig production was successful, and Neumann hired the Viktoria Theater in Berlin for another Ring production, which was given in May 1881. Neumann persuaded Wagner to come and supervise rehearsals. It was a triumph. The most singular aspect of this Ring production was that Das Rheingold was given with an intermission, since the urban audiences were perceived as requiring one. (Perhaps they needed to visit each other at intermission, since they managed to survive Act I of Götterdämmerung with no recorded fatalities.) What is even more surprising about this is the fact that Wagner appeared not to mind at all. There were times, after all, when he could be accommodating.
Rams versus Vikings (1896) Animal issues continued to dog Bayreuth after Wagner’s death. For Cosima’s new production of the Ring at the 1896 festival, her extremely literal commitment to her late husband’s stage directions led her to find two live rams to draw Fricka’s chariot in Die Walküre. They worked better than the children on hobby-horses behind a scrim she tried for “The Ride of the Valkyries,” which fooled no one. Both experiments were subsequently abandoned.
The Ring as politics (1918–45) The Ring, or at least snippets of it, is too powerful not to be used for propaganda purposes. “Siegfried’s Funeral” was played at Lenin’s state funeral in 1924. This has some logic to it, since Siegfried was the new creature who smashed the old to bits, but the juxtaposition of Lenin and Wagner is a strange one. On the other hand, is there any better funeral music?
The heroic imagery of the Ring always had a special appeal to military propagandists. In the First World War, the German generals had their Operation Walküre, and the great defensive line against the 1918 Allied offensive was named the Hunding Line. Why? What is so heroic about Valkyries, who never really fight but just pick up dead bodies from the battlefield like loud vultures? And Hunding? He’s killed off without even a hero’s death! It doesn’t matter. People rarely think through their pet images, least of all in wartime.
After the swift German surrender of 1918, General Ludendorff circulated the “stabbed in the back” theory, which said that the German armies were invincible at the front and must have been sold out back home. Hitler picked up this image from the Ring in Mein Kampf when he wrote the warlike German Siegfried (meaning the army) had been stabbed in the back by the Reichstag. Years later, Francisco Franco asked Hitler to send air support to the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. Hitler complied, and, having just attended a performance of Walküre at Bayreuth, named the operation Feuerzauber (“Magic Fire”). Again, what does Wotan’s Farewell have to do with an air raid?
Either the German generals of 1944 hadn’t learned their lessons from 1918 or they hadn’t read their librettos, but they couldn’t resist naming their Western front defensive system the Siegfried Line. This line held longer than the Hunding Line had in 1918, and seriously impeded the American forces during the last winter of the war, but it eventually failed. Life imitates art yet again.
Several accounts of Berlin in the last days of the war record that the state radio was given to endless repetitions of music from, of all things, Götterdämmerung. God knows how this was supposed to inspire the people to a final resistance, but there’s no point questioning Nazi logic. Throughout the Third Reich, propagandists had used the immolation imagery of Götterdammerung for their purposes, portraying a great conflagration that would bring about a new world order. So it did, of course, but those making the speeches were, in fact, what had to be swept away first!
Clash of the titans (1968) Conductor/director/dictator Herbert von Karajan was, by 1968, accustomed to doing what he wanted when he wanted, and merely handing his bills over to the local government. When he was invited to New York to produce a Ring at the Met, everybody rightly predicted doom. Besides everything else, he would have to work with the legendary Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Met and no less an autocrat than Karajan. Heedless of union overtime, Karajan scheduled scores of rehearsals for every detail of the production, including several dozen for the lighting alone. When Bing saw the results, he sniffed that he could have made the stage pitch-black in just one rehearsal!
Karajan’s Ring at the Met got as far as Walküre. The rest of the production was worked out and performed at Salzburg, where Karajan answered to nobody except, perhaps, God. It was later sent to the Met as a fait accompli, where it was successfully given in the 1974–75 season and then promptly packed away.
ORIGINS OF THE RING
The conventional understanding of the writing of the Ring goes as follows. First Wagner wrote the libretto for a grand opera to
be called Siegfrieds Tod, or “Siegfried’s Death,” the germ of what we now know as Götterdämmerung, the final opera of the series. It began with the Norns telling the story of all that had previously happened. Later, Wagner realized he would need a whole separate opera to serve as an introduction, and wrote Der junge Siegfried, or “The Young Siegfried,” which corresponds to the opera we know simply as Siegfried. In that work, the character of the Wanderer explained all that had happened previously in his scenes with the dwarf (who wasn’t yet named Mime) and Erda. Unable to contain himself, Wagner then wrote Die Walküre, where Wotan must explain what had happened previously in his long Act II monologue. Eventually the composer was so unsatisfied with stopping there that he penned Das Rheingold. The Ring, then, was effectively written backward, which explains why there is so much repetition in “flashback” of what we have already seen.
Like much of the conventional wisdom on Wagner, there is just enough truth in this summary to make it truly misleading. There are two major errors. First, it could only be plausible at face value if Wagner had completed (including the music) Siegfrieds Tod, or Götterdämmerung, before deciding it needed a “prequel,” and then had done the same each time until he had the entire Ring as we know it. Only then could we believe that this is why he had “repeated” himself so often in the saga. Yet the same people who propound this tale know perfectly well that the entire poem was completed and published before he wrote one note of music (well, he had written down a couple of measures here and there as they popped into his head, but the basic point stands). Are we to believe that he merely composed the music and never noticed such recapitulations as the Norns’ scene and Wotan’s monologue? Hardly.
The second problem with this interpretation of events is that it ignores the fact that Wagner had written a prose outline called The Nibelung Myth as Scheme for a Drama in 1848, that is, before he had written Siegfrieds Tod. This outline covers the same ground as the Ring, from the beginning of time to Brünnhilde’s immolation, albeit with many differences from the work we know. However, it is important to understand that Wagner had conceived the work as a vast tetralogy (four-parter) from the start, and then produced the librettos incrementally. And, yes, those librettos were written in reverse order.
Still, we may put to rest the notion that the Ring’s repetitions, if that’s what they are, result from sloppy planning or egomania on Wagner’s part. He basically knew what he was doing from the start, even if he only admitted it to himself and the world one libretto at a time. Indeed, Father Lee, in his book Turning the Sky Around: An Introduction to the Ring of the Nibelung, points out that Wagner had no need to stop at Das Rheingold. He might just as well have added a fifth opera to precede the four we know, showing actions referred to in the subsequent operas. This, he suggests, would have been called The World-Ash Tree, and would have traced Wotan’s rise to power. As excellent an idea as this may be, we must admit we have quite enough to deal with in the Ring as we know it.
Oddly, however, for all Wagner’s rewrites and revisions, a surprising amount of the original outline for the drama creeps up in various places in the Ring. He had originally conceived this drama in terms of groups rather than individuals. There were many giants. All the gods contracted them to build Valhalla. There were many Volsungs, which was the name of one of the races of humans. And so on. The Volsungs were the most heroic of the human races, but they were in danger of corruption through breeding with inferior races. (You can surely see where this is heading.) Siegmund and Sieglinde were each married to another, but those unions were sterile, and the twins paired off to produce a real Volsung. Wotan was not, originally, their father. Much of this carries over to the Ring in strange ways. The giants are constantly referred to as a “race,” with a homeland of their own, and yet there are only two of them for all we know. The same is true of the Volsungs. “Race” seems like a big word to refer to a single set of twins, but it’s used time and again, and their child Siegfried is once referred to as “the strongest Volsung of them all!” All three of them? While Wagner was careful, in most cases, to revise facts and details as his story evolved, much of the spirit overlapped between versions.
The main difference between Wagner’s drama outline of 1848 and the Ring as he wrote it is the ending. Originally, Brünnhilde’s sacrifice purified the Ring, as it does in Götterdämmerung, but this had the effect of ensuring the rule of the gods rather than ending it. Siegfried’s spirit soared to a rejuvenated Valhalla. Wagnerites have made much of this about-face, seeing a change in Wagner from an optimistic to a pessimistic world view between the years 1848 and 1854, when the completed poem as we know it was published. At this point in the commentaries, we are usually reminded of Wagner’s discovery of the philosopher Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic writings had such an effect on him, but this is not an explanation. Wagner picked up Schopenhauer in 1854, by which point he had already found the original ending of the Ring unsatisfactory. Most scholars now agree that the philosopher Schopenhauer did not so much affect Wagner’s thinking as provide him with a vocabulary to express what he already believed.
The standard explanation for Wagner’s change of heart relies on political history. Certainly the Europe of 1854 was a very different place from what it had been in 1848, when idealistic aspirations exploded in a series of revolutions across the continent. Wagner, as we have seen, was an active participant in this movement in 1849, and the failure of the revolutions affected him not only in practical matters (he was exiled from Germany), but intellectually. In fact, he took it all rather personally, and tended to see the revolutions’ failure as a failure of will on the part of the people to support the revolutionary art he was creating. This is evident in several of the pamphlets he produced around 1850. The revolutionary movement was killed off where it had started, in Paris. When the elected president Louis Napoleon declared himself dictator and subsequently Emperor Napoleon III in a December 1851 coup, everything was over. Wagner said he was stunned by that development.
Newman has demonstrated that Louis Napoleon’s December coup cannot be held responsible for Wagner’s move toward a cataclysmic ending to his saga, since he had already written of the self-annihilation of the gods in his sketchbook in May of that same year. Newman deduces that the cumulative sense of doom pervading the onetime revolutionaries after 1849 had more to do with the changed ending of the saga than any single event.
Fine, but are we any closer to an answer? Why would a hotheaded radical like Wagner wish to portray the preservation of the old order in his first rush of revolutionary fervor, only to will its destruction later in his bitterness? The problem is that the scholars have looked at the time line of history and the time line of Wagner’s creative life and assumed too great a correlation between the two. Nobody seems to have suggested the obvious: that having Valhalla and the world burn up at the end of the Ring is better theater than having it purified in some vague manner, and Wagner’s theatrical instincts told him so. One might even say it’s better opera, but you’d really be playing with fire, excuse the expression, with that one. It is more agreeable for idolators to believe that historical events and Wagner’s great artistic achievements naturally sprang from the same source.
Clearly, there was great upheaval in Wagner and in Europe within these years. But how, exactly, did the Ring get written? While still modifying the texts of Der junge Siegfried and Siegfrieds Tod, Wagner began working on the texts of Rheingold and Walküre—simultaneously! By the end of 1852, he had the entire poem pretty much together, although many alterations were yet to come. The following year, he began to compose the music, starting at the beginning of Rheingold. By August 1857, he had written up to the end of Act II of Siegfried, and then he abruptly stopped. (Finding the exact spot where he left off kept scholars busy for years.) He then turned his attentions to Tristan and Meistersinger. He orchestrated Act II of Siegfried in 1865, and then put it aside again. He resumed the work in March 1869 and finally finished it in November 1874.
/> LOGICAL INCONSISTENCIES IN THE RING
Even though Wagner worked on the Ring for about twenty-eight years, there are still plenty of confusing details in the story. You may as well know this right from the start. Well, what of it? Hamlet doesn’t exactly “make sense,” but it’s no less great for all that. In fact, that’s an important part of why it still is compelling.
Here is a list of ten logical inconsistencies in the story of the Ring, some with possible (if far-fetched) explanations, others without. This is by no means a complete list, they’re just the first ten that came to mind. They are here not only so you won’t spend too much time pondering the impossible or wondering if you read the summaries wrong, but also to accustom you to the idea that music drama is not an exact science. Perhaps you’ll want to add your own favorites to the list—such a sport is considered popular parlor entertainment in some circles.
1. Das Rheingold, Scene 1 What is a dwarf doing at the bottom of a river? Possible explanation: Wagner had originally conceived the river as having a sort of air tunnel underneath it. This is why Alberich sneezes and complains of the “damp,” something of an understatement for a river bottom. Later, Wagner seems to have forgotten this detail, as he has the dwarf chase and almost catch the Rhinemaidens. By the way, do the Rhinemaidens have a mother? It’s not Erda. She says she was only overpowered “once,” although that was an exceedingly fertile encounter (Siegfried, Act III, Scene 1).
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