Wagner Blew It

Last Saturday, Ann and I entered the world of Wagner -- The Ring Cycle. A back-of-house tour; four operas (Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday) sixteen hours in all, plus a three hour lecture ahead of each; a five hour seminar covering parodies of Wagner (including Bugs Bunny, of course), Wagner's antisemitism, leit-motifs and musical invention, comparison of Wagner and Verdi; a Q&A luncheon with the director; an evening with Speight Jenkins recalling his thirty years of presenting The Ring; plus entering a contest to create, in treatment form, a "fifth opera" of the cycle. (My entry, Erda's Lament, one of eight from the couple of hundred attendees, did not win.)

We were immersed in a sea of RingChasers. Seattle's quadrennial Ring Cycle is world renowned. Some folks have seen 25 and more Rings on every continent (save Antarctica; a penguin cast Ring, now that would be a kick!)  This was Ann's and my second Ring -- mere pikers.  These professional and dilettante Wagnerites are expert on every arcane nugget --when he wrote what; which philosophers were at the moment affecting him over the course of the 28 years it took him to complete the work, why he chose to use oboes here and clarinets there and to invent his own Wagner Tuba along the way, how his critics carped and complained, and on and on and on.  So my thoughts herein should be regarded as the musings of the rankish of amateurs -- and I am sure they are not unique.  Nonetheless...

... I can't help thinking Wagner blew it.  His set out not only to create a revolutionary new form of musical drama, but also to give the Germanic peoples (they were not yet a country) their unifying myth, as the Norse had in the Edda, the Greeks in Oresteia, the Romans in the Aeneid. (Do we have a unifying myth?  But that is for another ruminations.) He sought to give Germans a hero, one whose values reflect love, freedom, naturalness, and purity, one who does not depend upon intercession of Gods for success and fulfillment. Siegfried was this new hero.  But as Wagner's ideals mutated and changed, as his personal screw-ups and values warped, he let his hero become less and less so.

Siegfried is no hero.  Fearless, yes, as is any teenager; self-centered, arrogant, daring, insensitive to others, dismissive of authority, a braggart.  He slew a dragon not for gain but because it was there.  He had been told no one else could do so.  He braved the fires and awakened Brunhilde not out of love but because it was said only the bravest could do so.  He impulsively was smitten by this first woman he had ever seen, this Valkyrie daughter of Earth and the Supreme God, but despite her renouncing her godliness and teaching him all she knew about the Gods, the world, courage and cowardice, off he stupidly went, this self-proclaimed dragon-slayer, to be flattered, conned, awed by power and pomp, to renounce love and be used as a pawn. No model hero he.

Yet Wagner had his hero in hand all along. Brunhilde is our hero. She is all the prejudiced, embittered, revolutionary nationalist might have wanted. Perhaps he chose not to proclaim her as such, leaving it for us to discover on our own.  Perhaps he was bound by that 19thC presumption of male superiority and precedent. But I think he just got tired and wouldn't think outside his box any longer.  Brunhilde embodies the nadirs of both love and power, one independent and self-determined but aware of her relationship with her world, one compassionate but in touch with her own rights and emotions.

Brunhilde is the hero Wagner sought -- and gave us in spite of himself.