From the Publication of the Libretto to Bayreuth

Public responses to the Ring started considerably before its first complete performance in Bayreuth in 1876, at a time when only the music of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and half of Siegfried had been completed. Heinrich Porges, coeditor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZfM) and later the chronicler of the 1876 rehearsals in Bayreuth, was among the first to promise a full-scale interpretation of the Ring based on the libretto published in 1863. Although his series of articles did not venture further than Rheingold, it introduced several themes that remained staples of the discourse for decades to come: the claim that the Ring attempted to “recreate the totality of the hustle and bustle of the world in a unified artwork”;Footnote ¹ its relevance particularly for the Germans by reviving their “ancient history”; its combination of Greek clarity with Germanic infiniteness;Footnote ² its perfect embodiment of nature in the figure of Siegfried, the “ur-image of the human being”;Footnote ³ the expressivity and realism of its music and its developmental-symphonic character reminiscent of Beethoven.Footnote ⁴ Much of Porges’ introduction, however, is a plot summary, and this focus continues in the critical responses to the first cyclic performances in Bayreuth in 1876. Apparently, the mythological storyline, which departed significantly from the well-known Nibelungenlied, needed substantial explanation. By contrast, few writers saw the Ring’s potential significance beyond immediate artistic or musical concerns. The Protestant Church in Germany strongly voiced its discomfort with the all-encompassing pretensions of the artwork of the future, the preachings of the “new musical Messiah” and the Schwärmerei (swooning enthusiasm) among his followers.Footnote ⁵ A journalist for the Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung also rejected the claim that the music dramas or their Bayreuth realization constituted a national treasure, an idea that already had become standard among Wagnerians. However, even those who emphasized Bayreuth’s significance for a new national – German – art usually stopped short of drawing explicit political parallels. One exception is an anonymous article in the Deutsche Presse of Vienna, which traces the inspiration for the festival to the upsurge of national confidence in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, claiming that the German people themselves had now become the patron of art.Footnote ⁶ The author’s stance must be seen against his Austrian background: After the hopes for a Greater German Empire had been laid to rest for the present, many Austro-Germans upheld all the more forcefully the inseparable bond of Germany and Austria in the sphere of arts and ideas.

Friedrich Nietzsche likewise saw the Franco-Prussian War as a decisive step towards the realization of the Bayreuth project. He published “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” as the fourth of his Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations) in 1876 and sent the essay to Wagner in July 1876 as “a kind of Bayreuth festival sermon.”Footnote ⁷ In many ways, it serves as an echo chamber of Wagner’s own writings about the destiny of the music drama, namely to bring about profound change in all areas of society. In line with the title of the essay collection, Nietzsche stresses that the Wagner phenomenon is not yet “timely” (zeitgemäß); the realization of the Bayreuth Festival anticipates a future world which truly needs art and derives authentic satisfaction from it.Footnote ⁸ Among the present generation, Wagner’s works will steel the tragic spirit for future fights against the traditional order of power and law, customs and contracts.Footnote ⁹ Exasperatedly, he exclaims in the final section, “And now ask yourselves, you generations of human beings living today! Was this written for you? Do you have the courage to point your hand at the stars of this entire firmament of beauty and goodness and say: it is our life that Wagner placed under these stars?”Footnote ¹⁰

It is ironic that the writer of the impassioned “festival sermon” had to leave Bayreuth during the rehearsals, as he could not bear the heat or the admiring crowds. Twelve years later, he had shaken himself free from his Wagner infatuation and attacked him in Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1889). In his acerbic parody of “redemption,” he declares that the composer – in the guise of the “typical revolutionary” Siegfried – sought his own redemption in the Ring through the destruction of the old gods and the emancipation of woman.Footnote ¹¹ Wagner foundered on the reef of Schopenhauerian philosophy, turning the Ring from a socialist utopia into a dramatization of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and Wagner into the artist of decadence. While “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” stressed the noncontemporaneity of his works, Der Fall Wagner declared the opposite: Wagner’s oeuvre encapsulates everything that is wrong with modern art and society; it is artificial, brutal, mock-innocent, lying; a pick-me-up for enfeebled youths and a dangerous stimulant for hysterical women.

Degeneration and Regeneration

Nietzsche’s voice was by no means alone in a swelling chorus decrying contemporary culture. “Conservative revolutionaries” like Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck vociferously attacked liberalism, capitalism, materialism, parliamentarianism, and urban lifestyles and “propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian,”Footnote ¹² holding out the promise of a redemption or rebirth in the völkisch spirit. The success of these “politics of cultural despair,” using Fritz Stern’s memorable term, built on a long-standing tradition of German idealistic yearning, an emphasis on culture and the cultivation of Innerlichkeit (inwardness), and a deeply-ingrained habit to regard culture as equal with religion, which brought a prophesying and proselytizing tone into the debate.Footnote ¹³ The place of art in society was important in these writings, not least because Wagner himself had made far-reaching claims about the redemptive mission of his music dramas and joined the antimodern discourse in his late “regeneration writings.” However, opinions were divided whether he was the illness of or the cure for modern life. While Paul de Lagarde, for example, was courted by Bayreuth after Wagner’s death, the bestselling writer of Deutsche Schriften (German Writings, 1878) was “bored to extinction” by a performance of Siegfried and told Wagnerians so with great relish.Footnote ¹⁴ Leo Tolstoy was similarly traumatized by attending the same opera in Moscow. In his essay What Is Art? (1897) he pillories plot and performance in excruciating detail and reiterates, by then, well-worn criticisms of the music. Since his essay deals with the question of art’s role in society, his main concern is the impact of Wagner’s works on an already degenerate urban audience. They will

Julius Langbehn, another cultural pessimist, took particular offense at the “erotic madness” in Tristan und Isolde, which he characterized as non-German, and saw a similarly exaggerated “sensual character” in the Nordic mythology, in contrast to the “silent passion” of the ur-German Nibelungenlied.Footnote ¹⁶ Even Wagner’s anti-Semitism was no recommendation to Langbehn, one of the figureheads of this movement, since Wagner had applied Meyerbeer’s technique to national stories and thus “out-meyerbeered Meyerbeer.”

The medicalization of Wagner’s operas reached its high point in Max Nordau’s widely read pathology of fin de siècle cultural Entartung (Degeneration, 1892).Footnote ¹⁷ Building on the work of Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, who had linked genius and mental disorder, Nordau offered a complementary study of arts and letters,Footnote ¹⁸ encompassing phenomena as diverse as the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism, and the “cult of Richard Wagner” under the heading “mysticism.” He sees Wagner as the victim of two pathological urges: an anarchist bitterness, which manifests itself mainly in the writings (not in the Ring), and an exuberant sexual drive: “All his life, Wagner has been an amorist [Erotiker] (in the pathological sense of the word) and his imagination entirely circles on woman.”Footnote ¹⁹ The Ring provides a rich hunting ground for corroborating evidence. After citing Hanslick’s verdict of the “animal sensuality” in Rheingold and the repugnant lustful groaning in Siegfried, Nordau offers a close reading of the stage directions in Die Walküre and concludes that Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, and Tristan und Isolde faithfully replay the main content of Die Walküre: “It is the ever same dramatic embodiment of the same obsessive idea, the terror of love.”Footnote ²⁰ At the same time, Wagner’s bodily urges struggle with the self-denying ideals of Schopenhauerian philosophy, necessitating the death of the sinful character. This eroticism was not even original since Nordau brands Wagner “the last fungus on the dung-heap of romanticism.”Footnote ²¹ He sees Wagner’s intermingling of the arts not as a step towards the future but as an atavistic regression towards an earlier, less developed stage. Nordau’s criticism of the music, however, remains conventional; he rejects the “endless melody” as a string of recitatives, and the use of leitmotifs as a violation of the nonrepresentational nature of music. From these criticisms, Nordau moves back to the intellectual and cultural climate which made degenerate art possible: The eager reception of Wagner’s works can only be explained with the rise of hysteria in Germany since the 1870s. Especially those already affected – notably women – were an easy prey for the voluptuous eroticism, dazzling imagery, and hypnotic quality of the music. Furthermore, Wagner’s success relies on pandering to contemporary obsessions of the Germans, such as anti-Semitism, chauvinism, and vegetarianism. Nordau thus classifies these regeneration movements, which were endorsed by many of the “conservative revolutionaries,” as dangerous aberrations that found their artistic complement in Wagner.

It may seem ironic that Wagner’s attempts to revive folklore and national mythology could be interpreted as a sign of decay and degeneration, for instance in Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West, 1918–22), which outlines a historiographical panorama of rising and falling cultures, with Western civilization the latest to enter a downward trajectory. Spengler draws parallels between Wagner and Baudelaire, who both appeal to the “cosmopolitan man of the brain, not the rural or generally natural man,”Footnote ²² aligns their art with contemporary concepts such as Darwinism and Socialism and declares: “Everything Nietzsche has said about Wagner equally applies to Manet. Seemingly a return to the elemental …, their art in fact yields to the barbarism of the big cities … . An artificial art is unable to develop organically; it marks the end.”Footnote ²³ Although Spengler lacks the moral panic that characterizes much of fin de siècle cultural criticism, he clearly sees Wagner’s art as the writing on the wall.

The opposite camp considered Wagner one of its figureheads in the fight for regeneration and national renewal but was likewise steeped in conservative cultural pessimism, possibly with even more pronounced racist and supremacist overtones. The journal Bayreuther Blätter, founded by Wagner’s acolyte Hans von Wolzogen in 1878 to give Wagner’s late writings a forum and to act as the “official” Bayreuth mouthpiece, sought, in particular, to integrate the dramas into a völkisch worldview.Footnote ²⁴ At first the Bayreuther Blätter focused on Parsifal and published only literary-historical explorations of the Ring mythology, with the exception of an early contribution by Nietzsche’s physician Otto Eiser, who suggested that the Nordic-Germanic Ring mythology was injected with a contemporary spirit and thus evolved towards the basic idea of Christianity.Footnote ²⁵ The most comprehensive exegesis of the Ring appeared in several installments between 1907 and 1915: The Austrian independent scholar Felix Gross interpreted the tetralogy as a pagan cosmology in preparation for the Christian world in Parsifal, where gods and humans progress through ever-renewing cycles of innocence, fall-from-grace, curse, and revenge.Footnote ²⁶ Rheingold in particular is seen through the racist lens as a fight between Aryan and non-Aryan races, which the former are doomed to lose precisely because of their exalted ideals. Gross was not the only one to employ the modish term “Aryan,” which so conveniently conflated mythology and up-to-date science. In 1911 the esteemed Viennese Indologist Leopold von Schroeder published a treatise where he explains Wagnerian drama as the final destination of several thousand years of Aryan culture, from Indian cult and Greek theater onwards.Footnote ²⁷ Schroeder reads the Siegfried story as a modern variant of an archaic solar myth, a theory that by 1911 had a venerable ancestry, not least in Wagner’s own treatise Die Wibelungen. In contrast to many others dabbling in Aryan ideas, however, Schroeder had a solid academic background in Indian literature and Baltic folklore, and while the introduction in particular celebrates Wagner’s creation of the German music drama as rebirth of ur-Aryan myths, his arguments steer clear of the derogatory racism so common in the early twentieth century.

Whether these writers saw in the Ring drama the crowning achievement of German – or even human – culture or just the most deplorable aberration of modern civilization, they usually agreed that their praise or criticism was not political but metapolitical. The Ring’s potential for critiquing contemporary political and social conditions was suppressed through a strict separation of the lowly realm of pragmatic, materialistic politics and an idealistic sphere of timeless, transcendent values and artistic endeavor.Footnote ²⁸ Even Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who exerted a decisive influence on twentieth-century politics, kept Wagner out of his ideological texts. The composer is not even mentioned in the seminal Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 1899), while Das Drama Richard Wagners (1892) proposes a purely interiorized reading of the music dramas including the Ring, which he characterizes as the “tragedy of Wotan.”Footnote ²⁹

This apolitical posturing of intellectual opinion leaders, which dogged German intellectual life well into the twentieth century, found its best-known expression in Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Non-Political Man, 1918), where he argues that his rejection of democracy and cosmopolitanism – all alien to the German spirit – does not constitute a political but a metapolitical statement.Footnote ³⁰ His early experiences of Wagner’s music played an important role in the self-fashioning of the German bourgeois thinker par excellence, including a story of how alienated – and German – he felt while listening to an open-air performance of Siegfried’s Funeral March in Rome, surrounded by a crowd of unruly Italians. The lecture “Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners” (Richard Wagner’s Suffering and Greatness), which he gave at an event of the Munich Goethe Society on February 10, 1933, responded to the changed political climate with careful analysis and guarded observations. Mann’s main concerns are Wagner’s character and personality as an artist, and at first he contains Wagner’s political activism within the nineteenth-century bourgeois mindset: “I won’t insist that he was a revolutionary of 1848, a middle-class fighter and thus a political citizen; because he was it in his particular way, as an artist and in the interest of his revolutionary art, for which he expected non-material advantages, improved reception conditions from an overturning of the existing order.”Footnote ³¹ However, when Mann moves on to nationalism and Wagner’s Germanness, it becomes apparent that his insistence on the unpolitical nature of the composer – whose nationalism was either alien to official state politics in the 1840s, or merely pragmatic in Bismarck’s new Empire – is a warning against the simplistic appropriation of the artist by the National Socialist regime. In Mann’s view, Wagner’s Germanness is “modern, fragmented and deconstructed, decorative, analytic, intellectual,” at the same time offering “the most sensational self-expression and self-criticism of the German character” – in short, cosmopolitan.Footnote ³² The effect of the lecture was immediate: Forty-eight mainly Munich-based artists and intellectuals (most of whom had not heard the lecture or read the article in Die Neue Rundschau) accused Mann in an open letter of character assassination, which the writer took as a signal not to return from a holiday in Switzerland.

While “Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners” has little to say specifically about the Ring, in 1937 Mann returned to the tetralogy in a public lecture delivered on occasion of a performance in Zurich. Here the metapolitical reading of Wagner’s music dramas reasserts itself. In the first half, Mann outlines in some detail Wagner’s revolutionary involvement and even calls him a “Kultur-Bolshevist,” who wrote the Ring “essentially as an attack on the bourgeois civilization and culture that had reigned supreme since the Renaissance – [with] its blend of primitivism and futurity … aimed at a non-existent world of classless populism.”Footnote ³³ His initial comparison of the Ring with the second part of Goethe’s Faust, however, signals that Wagner’s work was no mere political parable but true art and therefore “concerned solely with the primeval poetry of the psyche, with the simplest of beginnings, the pre-conventional and the pre-social: and these things alone seem to him to be fit material for art.”Footnote ³⁴ While non-German artists, such as Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, or Zola focused their efforts at monumentality on the social novel, “the form that this greatness took in Germany, knows nothing of the social dimension and desires to know nothing of it: for society is not musical, or indeed accessible to art at all.”Footnote ³⁵ Contemporary events notwithstanding, Mann placidly concludes that the “German spirit is essentially uninterested in the social and the political”Footnote ³⁶ and that the Ring’s ending projects “the same message that speaks to us in the words at the end of Germany’s other universal poem of life [i.e. Faust II] … The Eternal-Feminine / Draws us ever on.”Footnote ³⁷ Wagner’s art is divorced from the political realities of the day not because it is “just art” but because it is “true art.”

Form Follows Function: Alfred Lorenz and Theodor W. Adorno

If thus far the music has played a subordinate role, this faithfully mirrors the early stages of the engagement with the Ring. Those commentators who were at all willing to consider the musical language often stopped at the most prominent aspect, the leitmotif, highlighting how it added meaning and articulation to the situations and concepts expressed in the poetry. By the turn of the century, this limited approach became problematic, not least because the emerging academic discipline of Musikwissenschaft increasingly demanded technical tools to describe its subject matter in a “scientific” way. Guido Adler, chair of music at Vienna University, poured scorn on the “exegetes who stopped, in childish contentment, at finding this or that motive in such and such a place, and labelling individual motifs. … What really matters, the relationship of thematic work to poetic content, the orchestral to the vocal parts, to the scenes, sub-scenes and … acts could not be covered by these attempts.”Footnote ⁵⁸ One of the first coherent, all-encompassing explanations of Wagner’s musical form was written by an accidental musicologist, Alfred Lorenz, who submitted his dissertation on the Ring at Frankfurt University in 1922, having been dismissed as music director at Coburg and Gotha three years earlier.Footnote ⁵⁹ The study was published in 1924 as Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (Richard Wagner’s Mystery of Form), by which time Lorenz had taken up a lectureship at Munich University. Lorenz rejects the charge of formlessness, the attempts to salvage remnants of traditional “numbers,” and the division of recitatives and arias in the Ring. Instead he proposes that each act is divided into ten to twenty “periods” – a term inspired by Wagner’s own dichterisch-musikalische Periode (poetic-musical periods).Footnote ⁶⁰ These periods are internally unified through tonality, melodic punctuation (cadences), the use of identical or related motivic-thematic material, and less tangible elements like orchestral timbre or dynamics. The distribution and repetition of the themes determines the overall shape or form of each period; Lorenz suggests nine different types such as simple repetition, strophic form, arch forms, rondo and refrain forms, and bar form.Footnote ⁶¹ These orderly periods, Lorenz is at pains to point out, are not simplistic labels or concessions to tradition but subconscious reflections of Wagner’s “dark creative urge, becoming the representation of a distinctive Will that could not be otherwise, the exterior visualisation of unlimited logical thought processes.”Footnote ⁶² Lorenz’s notion of Wagnerian form is thus grounded in a particular understanding of creativity which also informed his view of music historiography. While organicist theories were by no means unique in the 1920s – Heinrich Schenker’s approach to musical form is based on a similar understanding of artFootnote ⁶³ – Lorenz took them further by putting his ideas to the service of the emerging National Socialist movement. He was the only professor of Munich University who joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) before 1933; he took a leading role in several Nazi organizations, and frequently invoked Wagner as Hitler’s spiritual precursor.Footnote ⁶⁴ While his cultural conservatism – a movement that gained momentum in the Weimar Republic and for many transformed effortlessly into National Socialism – is beyond doubt, it is, however, perhaps too simplistic to label his analytical method “an embodiment of National Socialist ideology.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Although Wagner’s life and works were certainly put to use by the Third Reich, it is noteworthy that the Bayreuther Blätter, which had contributed significantly to the formulation and dissemination of Nazi cultural and racial agendas, did not publish any extensive Ring critiques in the 1920s and 1930s, whether musical or ideological. While they rejected any left-wing readings such as Shaw’s, it seems that the Ring had mainly lost its usefulness for scoring points in contemporary debates.Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus it might have been the general complacency with Wagner’s popularity with the regime, rather than any coherent National Socialist appropriation of the Ring, that spurred Theodor W. Adorno into writing Versuch über Wagner (Essay on Wagner) in 1937–8 (revised and published as a book in 1952). While remaining an inspiring and provocative read, its lasting legacy has been to suggest how Wagner’s anti-Semitism permeates his creative imagination: “The gold-grabbing, invisible, anonymous, exploitative Alberich, the shoulder-shrugging, loquacious Mime, overflowing with self-praise and spite, the impotent intellectual critic Hanslick-Beckmesser – all the rejects of Wagner’s works are caricatures of Jews.”Footnote ⁶⁷ If this thought was not exactly new – readers of Wagner’s late essay “Erkenne dich selbst” (1881) found the equalization of Alberich and Jewish finance fairly transparentFootnote ⁶⁸ – it certainly became more prominent in late twentieth-century American scholarship (e.g., Paul Lawrence Rose and Marc Weiner),Footnote ⁶⁹ who found Wagner’s creative output to be saturated with anti-Semitic coding. Adorno, however, aims at a higher target altogether. Wagner’s personality and his creative persona are intimately intertwined with the crisis of bourgeois society where even a rebellious gesture is – in one of Adorno’s dialectic reversals that oscillate like the magic fire music he so abhors – a sign of acquiescence with the powers of state and capital. Wagner “is an early example of the changing function of the bourgeois category of the individual. In his hopeless struggle with the power of society, the individual seeks to avert his own destruction by identifying with that power and then rationalizing the change of direction as authentic individual fulfilment.”Footnote ⁷⁰

In contrast to many Wagner critics, Adorno does not stop at a damning dissection of Wagner’s character or his writings. A considerable part of his essay is devoted to a discussion of Wagner’s musical techniques, because he claims – half a century before the New Musicology – that “the key to any artistic content lies in its technique.”Footnote ⁷¹ For example, the use of a parlando style in opera buffa has potential for “bourgeois opposition” against the powers of the ancient regime whereas, in Wagner’s later works, recitative “deserts irony for pathos.” In the hands of Wagner the reactionary revolutionary, language is forced to “wrest a new form of magic from the disenchantment: bourgeois language should sound as if Being itself were being made to speak.”Footnote ⁷² Likewise Wagner’s reluctance – or inability – to create themes rather than motives and his rejection of conventional forms are explained as consequences of his ideological ambiguities. While Adorno draws on examples from the Ring throughout the essay, its final chapters, especially chapter 9 “God and Beggar,” are given over to a dissection of the tetralogy. He focuses on the encounter between Wotan, the representative of the old order, and Siegfried, seemingly the rebel and harbinger of a new time, in act three of Siegfried. However, Adorno subverts the familiar reading by arguing that the victor necessarily succumbs to the power of the Ring, because “betrayal is implicit in the rebellion.”Footnote ⁷³ “The conflict between rebellion and society is decided in advance in favor of society, because the latter recruits the opposition for the bourgeoisie, a process which Wagner then presents as entirely natural or even transcendental in his operas.”Footnote ⁷⁴

It is hardly surprising, then, that Adorno reads the finale of Götterdämmerung as a cinematic happy ending that thinly disguises its commodity character with the perfect, ultimate phantasmagoria.Footnote ⁷⁵ At the end of the essay, there is hardly any aspect of Wagner’s artistry left that could – or should – be experienced with anything approaching pleasure. Adorno allows Wagner some self-reflective clear-sightedness that in itself is part of everything that is wrong with late-bourgeois society: “Wagner is not only the willing prophet and diligent lackey of imperialism and late-bourgeois terrorism. He also possesses the neurotic’s ability to contemplate his own decadence and transcend it in an image that can withstand that all-consuming gaze.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Although Adorno resorts here to a visual metaphor, it is clear that Wagner’s music is the true culprit. There is a vague hope that in some instances, such as the dark passages of the third act of Tristan, music, “the most magical of all the arts, learns how to break the spell it casts over the characters. … It is the rebellion – futile though it may be – of the music against the iron laws that rule it, and only in its total determination by those laws can it regain the power of self-determination.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Adorno’s dialectic somersault catapults him into the company of desperate Wagnerians who want to salvage at least the beloved music from the rubble of the catastrophe of the twentieth century. But even then, the myth and the music of the Ring seem beyond redemption.Footnote ⁷⁸

Early Essays

Given Wagner’s legacy as a reformer, we may wonder at its origins. The so-called Young German movement – an opposition group of left-leaning writers critical of autocratic rule and sympathetic to French socialist ideals and the idea of a unified German nation – offers one background for the impulse to enact change. In his sympathies for the movement, Wagner established an early bond with Heinrich Heine, a fellow expatriate in Paris whose name had been on the Bundestag resolution of December 10, 1835 against the group’s writings.Footnote ¹⁰ Even before the twenty-one-year-old composer joined Heine in the French capital, admittedly, he writes of the need for opera to exceed its national traditions, rousing readers to “take the era by the ears, and honestly try to cultivate its modern forms; and he will be master, who writes neither Italian, nor French – nor even German.”Footnote ¹¹ Wagner would reflect critically on the nature of an ideal German character for decades, of course. In like spirit, Heine ridiculed the political scene (Neue Gedichte, Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen) but took aim specifically at art music for being blithely disconnected from matters of social concern. While gorging on the “Marseillaise” booming beneath his window, Heine condemns art music as powerless in the face of such rabble-rousing anthems.Footnote ¹²

That Wagner’s setting of Heine’s “Les deux grenadiers” incorporates the Marseillaise (three months after his arrival in Paris) offers grounds to suspect the composer was both aware of and sympathetic to Heine’s complaint. By 1848, with the authority of public office, his attitude had hardened enough to warrant public criticism; he remodeled Heine’s concern as the subjugation of artists’ creativity in Art and Revolution (1848): “What [has aggrieved] the musician, when he must compose his music for the banquet-table? And what the poet, when he must write romances for the lending library? … That he must squander his creative powers for gain, and make his art a handicraft!”Footnote ¹³ Other Young Germans were still more assertive in their contempt for the disconnect between instrumental music and bracing social realities. A fuller case is articulated by literary critic Ludolf Wienbarg, for whom the escapism of “refined” art music created a moral solipsism that blots out suffering. Music truly expressive of “silent dissonances within our breast … would drown out the music of the angels and bring forth the shrillest discords from the throne of harmony itself” he explains.Footnote ¹⁴ Such sentiments may offer one reason why Wagner remained a self-styled dramatist reluctant to acknowledge his identity as composer, even during the composition of Götterdämmerung.Footnote ¹⁵

At the age of twenty-seven, the composer famously reflected on German musical character in a short essay rooted in Ludwig Tieck’s writings. On German Music (1840) placed this character starkly at odds with the spectacle and virtuosity of the Opéra and the cult of celebrity that characterized the principal singers of the Théâtre-Italien. “The German cannot impart his musical transports to the mass, but only to the most familiar circle of his friends,” Wagner tells his French readers. “Music in Germany has spread to the lowest and most unlikely social strata, nay, perhaps here has its root.”Footnote ¹⁶ (The attempt to define the terms of the question Was ist Deutsch? runs like a red thread through Wagner’s writings between at least the essays of 1834 and 1878, and both he and Heine would satirize the enterprise by 1840.Footnote ¹⁷) Patent exceptions to the low standing of German opera – Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791) and Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) – merely proved – he felt – that German opera is at home only within the sphere of fairy tale.Footnote ¹⁸

Beyond confirming domestic instrumental music as the German vernacular, this 1840 essay laid the ground for an identity problem that would occupy Wagner for decades: “[i]t is not to be denied that the grander genre of dramatic music does not flourish in Germany of itself; and apparently for the same reason that the higher type of German play has never reached its fullest bloom.”Footnote ¹⁹ How, a concerned reader might ask, should Germanic theater flourish and be true to itself? In a decade during which Shakespeare was claimed as a native German and Meyerbeer a naturalized Parisian, national identity and affiliation were both flexible and chosen. Whether motivated in the context of aesthetic or nationalist discourses, the German question acknowledges a positional weakness vis-à-vis French and Italian traditions and, guarding against frail teleologies, it is in this context that we may start to investigate Wagner’s identity as a reformer.

Aborted Reforms at Dresden

At the age of thirty-four, Wagner’s impulse to reform German theater first found its public voice. The year was 1847. Twelve months earlier, Wagner had submitted a formal entreaty to reform and reorganize the Dresden Court Theater; he waited over a year for a response. The document, Regarding the Royal Chapel (Die Königliche Kapelle betreffend) sets out a practical case for pensioning off old or inadequate players, appointing new players in key roles, apportioning players between heavier and lighter operas (to avoid fatigue), updating old instruments (timpani, double-pedal harps), redressing discrepancies between the salaries of certain orchestral players, and rearranging the layout of the orchestra the better to enable lines of sight.Footnote ²⁰

During July 1847, August von Lüttichau, Intendant at the Dresden Theater, informed Wagner his proposals had been rejected without further explanation: “I broke definitively with Lüttichau,” Wagner confessed privately.Footnote ²¹ The moment was pivotal; it was the last time Wagner had the opportunity for advancement within a municipal institution, and, in effect, before embracing the identity of an outsider. After his proposal was dismissed, Wagner went from febrile frustration (in August):

to outright revolt (in November): “There is a dam that must be broken down here, and the means we must use is Revolution … A single sensible decision from the King of Prussia with regard to the opera house, and all would be well again!”Footnote ²³

Of course, the fractious character of social reform was long familiar to early nineteenth-century Europeans, and Wagner’s efforts in 1846–7 are far from singular for the period. Wagner came of age during the post-Napoleonic retrenchment of rights, and his radical conclusion – in a string of essays from 1848–9 – linked urges towards artistic reform with those governing the reshaping of social institutions and prevailing middle-class values.

We find this to varying degrees in publications of 1849:

• Plan for the Organization of a German National Theater in the Kingdom of Saxony

• On Edward Devrient’s History of Acting (not accepted by the AAZ)

• Theater Reform

• Theater Reform Once Again

• Revolution (authorship unproven)

• Art and Revolution

The synonymy of political and artistic reforms in Wagner’s mind emerges explicitly in 1849 when he asks his close acquaintance, the Berlin music critic Karl Gaillard, to place “Theater Reform” in a Berlin newspaper, adding: “perhaps [the title] ‘German Reform’ will suffice for present purposes.”Footnote ²⁴ In rhetoric, he effortlessly blended artistic matters with social reformist principles – and their implied violence. The essay Revolution (attributed to Wagner in the Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen but published anonymously in the Volkszeitung without surviving holographs, and whose authorship therefore remains unproven) left little doubt as to the radical nature of urges towards artistic reform and their translation into civic engagement: “If we look out across nations and people, we recognize everywhere throughout the whole of Europe the fermenting of a violent movement, whose first vibrations have already seized us, whose full fury already threatens to close in on us.”Footnote ²⁵ The notion that “true Art is revolutionary, because its very existence is opposed to the ruling spirit of the community,” sets Wagner’s brand of mid-century reformism apart from other figures in the history of opera.Footnote ²⁶

Operatic Reform: A Brief History

Histories of opera are of course studded with debate concerning local conventions. And textbooks record several calls – Wagner’s included – to reform the genre by reviving ancient Greek tragedy. Since its inception in the late sixteenth century, the raising of speech-like utterance and dialogue to monody reflects a humanist impulse predicated on the prestige of Greek practice. In 1634, Pietro de’ Bardi (fils) wrote of Vincenzo Galilei “restoring ancient music … to improve modern music,”Footnote ²⁷ while Marco da Gagliano praises Ottavo Rinnucini and Jacopo Corsi for “having repeatedly discoursed on the manner in which the ancients used to represent their tragedies, how they introduced their choruses, whether they employed song, and of what kind, and similar matters.”Footnote ²⁸ For humanists like Galileo, opera itself was less an invention than a revival.

Wagner disagreed. As early as 1851, he complained of “an entirely misconstrued Greek mythology” in which “the whole apparatus of musical drama [aria, dance music, recitative] – unchanged in essence down to our very latest opera – was settled once and for all.”Footnote ²⁹ By 1872, writing with the confidence of Germany’s unification behind him, he reflected on what he saw as the specious reasoning that had concealed a flaw in the genre from the outset:

That Wagner was consistent in this view indicates a hard kernel, a leftover that cannot easily be ascribed to an ideology of 1848–9, neither literary fantasy nor anti-Italian prejudice alone.

To take a second example of operatic reform, in the middle of the eighteenth century attitudes towards antiquity were tempered by appeals to Enlightenment ideals of progress, with Vincenzo Manfredini advocating that “to convince oneself that modern music … is absolutely better than ancient music, it is enough to compare good modern compositions with ancient ones.”Footnote ³¹ Manfredini’s caution against venerating tradition was aimed at conventions of opera seria. He was writing in the wake of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), whose reforms the composer and his librettist – Ranieri de’ Calzabigi – would summarize in the preface to Alceste (1769):

Historically speaking, Wagner’s writings on singers largely amplify rather than add to these principles, though the conventions against which each composer worked were different (and Wagner supplied an entirely new linguistic apparatus). According to Manfredini, Gluck inveighed against such practices as: (i) repeating the words of the first part of an aria four times, and the words of the second only once; (ii) stipulating between two and four cadenzas; (iii) adhering first to formal convention, and only then to dramatic situation; (iv) vocalizing on syllables favorable to the voice before the end of the word in question; (v) making conspicuous display of vocal agility in long drawn-out passages. Wagner, for his part, became irritated by conventions of end-rhyme, iambic meter, melodically unsuitable libretto translations, ad libitum cadenzas, and unmetrical recitative divorced from the natural rhythms of prosody. But such fixations served only to bolster his terminal verdict against the genre of opera, which he felt derived from principles of absolute music (rather than poetry) and hence was “dead at core … no longer an art, but a mere article of fashion.”Footnote ³³ Of Gluck’s reforms, he acknowledges only that “the so famous revolution of Gluck, which has come to the ears of many ignoramuses as a complete reversal of the views previously current as to opera’s essence, in truth consisted merely in this: that the musical composer revolted against the willfulness of the singer.”Footnote ³⁴ Despite elevating poetry above music, in other words, Gluck was no dramatist. In a court of law, it would be improper for the prosecution to present the case for the defendant (or vice versa) but, in the absence of standardized narratives for music history, this is effectively what happened during the mid-century. Wagner’s self-serving, potted histories of opera and stage drama – principally parts 1–2 of Opera and Drama – are often dazzling to modern readers in placing him at the apex of historical necessity. No fewer than twenty-seven German-language music periodicals were established between 1848 and 1860, and controversy only increased dissemination as Wagner’s views were widely discussed and propagated – however inaccurately – in the professional press.Footnote ³⁵

However partial Wagner’s summaries may seem to us today, his insistence on the historically unprecedented nature of his music, beginning – he specified – with Tannhäuser (1845), found sympathy among writers of the next generation. Wagner wrote in 1864 to his Swiss confidante, Eliza Wille, of having embarked “upon a course that was as novel as it was fraught with difficulty,” and of how his “unspeakable suffering” from the birth pangs of such artworks bestowed on him “a superior right, an entitlement which … would have raised me far, far above the world and thus … would have made me inwardly a hallowed and blessed human being.”Footnote ³⁶ This kind of attitude repulsed Nietzsche, who deftly inverted it: “one is an actor by virtue of being ahead of the rest of mankind in one insight: what is meant to have the effect of truth must not be true.”Footnote ³⁷ Wagner’s claims for a “human gospel of the art of the future” would be so much self-aggrandizement but for the fact that they entered the water stream of European aesthetics, and – for a time – were readily imbibed. As ever, the discourse is enmeshed within Wagner’s own words and endeavors: the very existence of Bayreuth solidified his aura of uniqueness along with that of the Ring in 1876; it was a singular theater for a singular art – from architecture to atmosphere to acoustics – and hence epitomizes his claims for the historical uniqueness of his “stage festival play.”Footnote ³⁸ Writing with all the wisdom of hindsight, Martin Geck still diagnoses Wagner as the prophet of art sought by his century: “he may not have been uncontroversial, but there is no doubt that he was unrivalled.”Footnote ³⁹ It was a Kantian justification – identifying the natural genius principally by a criterion of originality – but also a powerful historical claim; it made Wagner central and yet radically extraneous to the institution of opera.

In the first part of his poetic obituary, Richard Wagner: Rêvue d’un poëte français (1885), Mallarmé echoes the composer’s sense of his own particularism: “The certainty that neither he himself nor anyone of this time will be involved in any similar enterprise liberates him from any restriction that might be placed on his dream by a sense of incompetence and by the gap between dream and fact.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Wagner’s peculiarly singular artistic vision shields him from normative judgment, in other words, allowing him at least to lock eyes with the greater heuristic phantasms of art, if not quite slay them. (The Ring, for Mallarmé, remained unresolved and incomplete, its violated law of exchange is unrectified and its incest taboo unrecanted: “Le dieu Richard Wagner”Footnote ⁴¹ had scaled but “halfway up the holy mountain” [à mi-côte de la montagne sainte].)Footnote ⁴²

Against such qualified praise, the question arises as to why, historiographically speaking, Wagner’s case, and that of the Ring in particular, has been treated as sui generis, as Wagner asserted it to be. What is it about the Ring – fruit of contested reforms – that led a generation of writers and philosophers to interpret the world through its expressive devices, its symbols, and its narratives? If the practical principles of Wagner’s reforms – from disciplining singers to seeking radically flexible forms and the primacy of drama – largely build on Gluck’s precedent, why did they encounter such a different reception?

The Ring in Literature

There are several routes a response to these questions could take. One would be that Wagner embarked on Der Ring des Nibelungen explicitly as a political revolutionary, that the work resonates long into the night of German modernism because it was conceived from the outset as “an onslaught on the bourgeois-capitalist order,” as John Deathridge put it. George Bernard Shaw had declared the Ring “a first essay in political philosophy” as early as 1901, a view that underscored his allegorical reading of it – in 1898 – as a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism, where the much delayed composition of Götterdämmering almost becomes anachronistic: “an attempt to revive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the Grail.”Footnote ⁴³ But there is little reason to attribute Wagner’s literary influence to this political identity, which – for those historical witnesses aware of it – appears incidental to the design of his musico-theatrical program (it goes unmentioned in most literary responses to the Ring: the Wagnerism of Wilde’s Algernon Moncrieff and Huysmans’ Jean des Esseintes has nothing to do with revolutionary politics and everything to do with psychological captivity and sartorial extravagance). Another answer would be that the Ring imputes a certain mythic symbolism to its musical devices, a symbolism that resonated profoundly with turn-of-the-century aesthetics where music is elevated above representational forms of art. Hence, the psychological function of leitmotifs, the musical sound of poetry, and the impulse to draw different artistic media together under the auspices of revivifying Greek theater. Still a third answer might point to Wagner’s reception as a literary persona, whose bold statements, strewn throughout his lengthy published essays, became attractive for a generation of artists regardless of medium. To take one example: “The artist addresses himself to feeling and not to understanding,” Wagner explains near the beginning of A Communication to My Friends (1851) in a statement that would become a mantra. “If he is answered in terms of the understanding, it is as good as saying he has not been understood.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Walter Pater would influence a generation of writers and painters (“decadents”) by extending much the same argument in 1873, that aesthetic criticism depends on the cultivation of one’s receptivity to beauty as a function of pure sensory pleasure.Footnote ⁴⁵ “What is important,” he explains, “is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, it seems, composer and critic interlock cleanly in their aspirations for aesthetic communication.

For Wagner the reformer, silent literature almost always carried negative connotations, as noted above. Drama, he felt, should not be treated as a branch of literature, a defective “literary drama” wherein any musical accompaniment was incidental, akin to the unintegrated media of melodrama.Footnote ⁴⁷ But if Wagner is to be taken at his word, the narrative and symbols of the Ring cycle came from literature: the Old Norse Sagas and instantiations of the Nibelungenlied. It seems fitting, then, to investigate in turn the Ring’s impact on literature, however diffuse this may be. It is certainly not my intention to provide a synthesis of all that has been written and all that could be written on Wagner’s literary dimensions.Footnote ⁴⁸ But rather to ask: What about Wagner’s public image and the Ring cycle in particular appealed so potently to turn-of-the-century writers? Previous commentators addressing the topic acknowledge it as theoretically infinite – a vast network of influence, whose tremors are often subtle, occasionally antithetical – and break it down according to discrete national literary traditions.Footnote ⁴⁹ Here we might note that separate literary journals were founded in France (Revue wagnérienne, 1885–7), England (The Meister, 1888–95), and Italy (Cronaca Wagneriana, 1893–5), in order of consequence. One problem for this approach to literary influence is that where the tremors stop depends on the apparatus of measurement, regardless of intention. Such artificiality becomes particularly evident when such questions are subsumed within the broader remit of Wagner’s role in European modernism (for Mann he was nothing less than “the problem of modernism itself”).Footnote ⁵⁰ Hence the task becomes to bring the intentionless into the realm of concepts.

Such an ambition is necessarily tapered by the remaining space of this chapter, so I adopt a series of representative case studies rather than attempt a comprehensive overview. To structure this closing discussion, I focus on three categories vis-à-vis the Ring: (i) mythic themes, (ii) leitmotifs, (iii) the sounding surface of musical words, to probe the role Wagner’s harmony, Versmelodie, and alliterative poetry had for European writers.

Mythic Reference, Mythic Parody

Alongside coded allusions to Wagner’s works (Adrian Leverkühn’s letter to Kretschmar gives a verbal description of the Prelude to act 3 of Die Meistersinger in Doctor Faustus, without naming it)Footnote ⁵¹ are explicitly intertextual references to the Ring pitched ambiguously between parody and homage. D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Trespasser (1912) was originally entitled The Saga of Siegmund. Some parallels are glaring: a sheepdog bays, like Wagner’s giants; the sound of the train mimics the “Ride of the Valkyries” (Raymond Furness found these “forced and unsubtle”).Footnote ⁵² More intriguing is the mythic realism that sees Wagnerian characters citing Wagner’s actual works, as though in an alternative reality: at Tintagel, Helena

In the same vein, Mann’s insight for his early novella, The Blood of the Walsungs (1906), was to transplant the social shock and latent tension of Wagner’s (positive) depiction of incest vis-à-vis Hunding to that between assimilated Jews (the Aarenhold family) and a German outsider (Herr von Beckerath). Sieglinde and Siegmund are turn-of-the-century Jewish “twins, graceful as young fawns,” practicing incest, while Sieglinde is engaged to a German government official, sixteen years her senior. His visit to the Aarenhold house, and the psychological development of the opera they witness together, constitute the action of the novella. Along with allusion to the plot of Die Walküre, its musical barbs shred the otherwise seamless poetic realism: Siegmund asks von Beckerath if he and Sieglinde may hear Die Walküre “once more together – may we? We are of course aware that everything depends upon your gracious favour,” and this question is followed by Sieglinde’s other brother, Kunz, tapping Hunding’s motif on the tablecloth – mocking both the leitmotif technique and the pretense that von Beckerath (or any reader) is ignorant of what is going on.

Parody without homage formed a prominent literary strand in its own right, of course. We are perhaps most familiar with pictorial caricatures of Wagner. Less immediately graspable, but no less lancing, were the numerous literary riffs on Wagner’s narratives.Footnote ⁵⁴ Aubrey Beardsley, for one, planned to write a “Comedy of the Rheingold” in the same spirit as his illustrated novel Venus and Tannhäuser – variously called “a romantic novel” and “a fairy tale” – but aside from its cover illustration, this never materialized (see Figure 12.2). In other writing, Beardsley’s nested criticism of the Ring is plain. Take the example of Under the Hill (1907), where Tannhäuser lies in bed reading a score of Das Rheingold:

Here the insights of criticism (not unlike those of G. B. Shaw) merge with ironic inversions (a reposing knight reading the “least reposeful” opera; the knees not as vehicle of deference but as “pulpit” from which to attack Wagner’s score) and parodic readings of Rheingold in terms of alien genres (a “brilliant comedy” or “melodrama” replete with flamboyance, extravagance, wit), all under the protective guise of fiction. The author’s voice functions at multiple levels: The parody is stylistically true, while the moments of genuine music criticism – where accurate – can only be read as equally sincere.

Figure 12.2 Aubrey Beardsley frontispiece to his projected “Comedy of the Rhinegold,” The Savoy 8 (December 1896), 43–4

The lofty claims of myth frequently lend themselves to satire, and, perhaps for this reason, more traditional parody of the Ring cycle has had a long shelf life. As early as 1877, Pniower Gisbert’s The Ring that Never Worked sent up much of the action from the previous year, from alliterative “female Rhein guards” (Wir Wiener Wäscherinnen waschen weiße Wäsche / Die Katze tritt die Treppe krumm.) to the god “Wodann?” (literally: “Where then?”) whose very name asks how he is supposed to attain Götterdämmerung.Footnote ⁵⁶ A century on, Anthony Burgess’ novel Worm and the Ring (1961) resituates the cast in an English grammar school: Wooltan (the school principal), his wife Frederica, Lodge (cf. Loge), Linda (cf. Woglinde), and one Albert Rich who is in pursuit of three giggling schoolgirls, make up the cast: “Albert Rich and his rain reflection sloshed through the puddles after the three giggling fourth-form girls. By God, he would have one of them, which one didn’t matter … The three maidens laughed in peal after peal, a shrill song of provocative triads as they bounded with girlish grace through the water.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Beyond the fading satisfaction of intertextual recognition, Burgess’ comic allusion carries comparators, e.g., casting Rich’s pedophilic desire as a Wagnerian malady akin to incest, as provocative in 1961 as it was in 1870/76.

After parody lies the soberness of veiled critique. The protagonist in Émile Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre (1886), Claude Lantier, is a misunderstood, revolutionary artist (painter) who fruitlessly adores Wagner and fails to live up to his potential, descending into madness while attempting a huge landscape painting before finally hanging himself. Beyond camouflaging his own friendship with Paul Cézanne and his imbrication with the Wagnerism of the 1880s, Zola obliquely highlights the loss of landscape painting from Wagner’s touted society of artists in The Artwork of the Future (1849). Neither the richness of the Vienna Secessionist’s response to Wagner nor the flourishing industry of Ring-inspired imagery could reinstate the rejected role of landscape painter.

Leitmotif

Historically speaking, literary responses to Wagner’s music begin with the man he once saluted as “my second self.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Liszt’s extended, propagandistic essays on Tannhäuser and Lohengrin (1850–2) were the longest written responses to Wagner’s music to date, dwarfing French reviews of Wagner productions in Germany (by Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval among others).Footnote ⁵⁹ One need but hear the overture to Tannhäuser in order to discern in its principal motifs the opera’s medieval agon between faith and flesh, Liszt asserted: “not once is it necessary to know the words which are adapted to [the motifs] afterwards.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This claim to eschew text and context in favor of pure sound effectively threw down a gauntlet for later writers. To be sure, French literary Wagnerism officially begins around 1860–1 with Baudelaire’s essay Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris (1861), modeled in part on Liszt’s reading of synesthetic imagery into Wagner’s sonorities. That this was coeval with the symbolist movement is no coincidence. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) inaugurated a movement conceived in opposition to realism (cf. Balzac, Flaubert, Zola), whose central purpose was to unleash the far-flung intuitions of the imagination; describing this “delicate delirium” which writers wished to present often required the language of synesthesia, becoming a task for which music – the least referential art – was best suited.Footnote ⁶¹ Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” speaks of “perplexing messages; / forests of symbols between us and the shrine.”Footnote ⁶² In charting correspondences between sounds, scents, and colors, it could be taken as a manifesto for symbolism as offspring of leitmotifs:

Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere else

into one deep and shadowy unison

as limitless as darkness and as day,

the sounds, the scents, the colors correspond.Footnote ⁶³

The Ring is the earliest work Wagner composed explicitly as a fabric of corresponding mnemonic-thematic associations that carry listeners’ feeling and mold perspective. In his oft-cited 1844 letter to Gaillard, moreover, he explained his own working practice of being “immersed in the musical aura of my new creation,” even before drafting a word of a prose scenario, continuing, “I have the whole sound and all the characteristic motifs in my head so that when the poem is finished … the actual opera, for me, is finished.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Whether or not we accept this, it rings true for the aspirations of later poets.

Scathing reactions to Wagner’s practice are less familiar than the proliferation of his thematic Leitfaden (Wolzogen’s term) or “melodic moments” (Wagner’s term) as signposts to direct listeners’ feeling through the labyrinthine corridors of a drama. On different occasions Hanslick dubbed leitmotifs tourist guides, quipping that the operas’ heroes are all furnished (via the orchestra) with a “rich musical wardrobe”;Footnote ⁶⁵ for Nietzsche, they held the ironic status of the ideal toothpick,Footnote ⁶⁶ while Stravinsky spoke of “cloakroom numbers,”Footnote ⁶⁷ George Bernard Shaw of “calling cards,” and Debussy of an absurd “address book.” It has been easy to impugn the principle of musical signs (such mockery only attests the pervasive presence of Wagner), yet the technique is central to Wagner’s notion of an unfolding drama that can be understood intuitively, without verbal commentary (Wagner’s terms for this are Gefühlsverstehen / gefühlsverständlich). His cultural ownership of the leitmotif is a mixed blessing, though, and in some cases contributes to dubious generalizations: It encourages simplistic assessment of what is a protean, inconstant technique of audio-visual signs, and it ascribes a semiotic process wholly to Wagner that other composers and genres already employed in part if not systematically. Witness melodrama’s unsubtle use of musical signs to mark a particular character’s entrance, to underscore heightened tensions, or to signal a change in situation.Footnote ⁶⁸

An instance where nothing more than a key delivers a leitmotivic function can be instructive, given the unchanging nature of its pitch and hence its proximity to the use of fixed images or a recurring phrase. The trumpet’s C major dotted arpeggio is one example of a sound assigned an associative value mnemonically. When it recurs later in the narrative, it has with the effect of adding interpretive layers to our reading, both of the past and present. As Example 12.1a shows, this is initially linked to Wotan’s mission in Das Rheingold (just before he ascends the rainbow bridge to Valhalla, bb. 3780–7, 3876–80) and to Wälse’s sword, Notung, in Die Walküre (when Siegmund draws the sword from the World Ash Tree, act 1 scene 3, bb. 848–50). It transfers to Siegfried – as Wotan’s now unsanctioned agent – where the key, first played by the trumpet, and later heard in radiant brass and harps for the sunrise on his awakening of Brünnhilde, carries his strength, all the while conceived as part of his (unsanctioned) mission. This association of strength, coupled to his relation to Brünnhilde, is fatally undermined for listeners in Götterdämmerung when Siegfried, unaware of the threat from Hagen, is undone (Examples 12.1b–c), perhaps by naïveté now seen as the flipside to his strength-giving fearlessness: Following the curse motif heard pianissimo on a single trombone, two C major snippets from his triadic horn call – ordinarily in F – are undercut by a tritone pedal (F♯; act 3 scene 2, bb. 494–501) and, in premonition of Hagen’s call “Hoi-ho” after Siegfried’s murder, the jarring semitone (D♭–C, cf. act 3 scene 3, bb. 1033–42) is overlaid in octaves, all against the lower tritone pedal. The C major pitches are identical but clouded in dissonance: What sounded so vibrant and powerful now signals vulnerability, weakness, and death – not just of Siegfried, also of his ostensive mission.

Example 12.1a Premonition of the sword motif, emblematic of Wotan’s mission, Das Rheingold

Example 12.1b Premonition of Siegfried’s downfall, Götterdämmerung, act 3 scene 2

Example 12.1c The underlying harmonic corruption of Siegfried’s C major

It is worth clarifying, then, what it means when authors like Furness say, that the harmonic and timbral transformations of these carriers of feelings “exerted such an overwhelming influence on literature because psychological cross-references and associations, and interrelationships between clusters of images and symbols, could be established, the impact being enormously increased thereby.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This reminds us that motifs – sensory carriers of associative meaning – are as protean and potentially combinatorial as the expansive harmonic and contrapuntal vocabulary of the period allows, i.e. considerably freer than grammatical syntax. Critically useful for literature was the fact that, like spoken intonation, at least two layers of meaning are collapsed into one sound signal: sound conveying an activity, person, event, object, etc.; sound commenting on or expressing the emotional value of that activity etc. In such elisions, the difference between word and music, sign and sensation recede into an infinite regress between memory and meaning.

Sound of Language

While Pater’s adage that all arts aspire to the condition of music is usually taken to refer to music’s freedom from referentially and the fetters of meaning, Paul Valéry valued Wagner’s music for its “pure sound,” viewing the entire symbolist movement as an attempt to reclaim from music what originally belonged to poetry itself.Footnote ⁷⁰ Mallarmé sharpened Valéry’s position, seeking to recuperate specifically from Wagner’s music what he felt had once belonged to poetry alone. He sought, in other words, to roll back Wagner’s increase of “music’s language-capacity into the immeasurable,” in Nietzsche’s words, while retaining the potential for multimodal communication through verbal sounds.Footnote ⁷¹

Contemporary commentators such as Joachim Raff were skeptical of Wagner’s alliterative poetry in the Ring, but Gottfried Keller recommended the 1853 printing of Wagner’s poem, explaining to Hermann Hettner, “you will find a powerful, typically Germanic poetry here, but one which is ennobled by a sense of antique tragedy.”Footnote ⁷² And while many subsequent musicologists have scoffed at Wagner’s claims for language’s ancient communicative potency, the twentieth century has been particularly receptive to composers seeking to “increase music’s capacity for language.” Influential commentaries by Ferdinand de Saussure (linguistics) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophy of language) tended to sever the word from any reference it had in an external, physical world. Just as language thereby became a system of signs, entirely derefentialized and self-enclosed, where signs point to other signs rather than to real, tangible objects, so speech becomes ever more like music.

Ironically, Wagner was moving in the opposite direction with the Ring poem, seeking a language whose phonemes were ever more firmly referentialized, resulting in an ever-greater hedging-in of meaning through sound, even as symbolists cultivated sound as a means of loosening syntactical fixity. If the direction of travel is different, the road is the same. “Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think,” Wittgenstein mused in 1953.Footnote ⁷³ He explains this elsewhere by noting how the progression from dereferentialized verbal sounds to music is really only possible upon realizing that “reality” depends on conventions of verbal signs:

Wagner’s Ring is not responsible for this move in structural linguistics, but his sonically captivating treatment of language as a totality of phonetic elements and his practice of motivic signification arguably opened the door.

In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), we find alliterative references to Das Rheingold, whose musical effect ripples on the brink of syntactical sense, relishing the patterns of pure vocal sound:

Alongside the steady evolution of phonemic patterns – not unlike the children’s game of “telephone” – the unmistakable cadence evokes Woglinde’s opening phonemes, which constitute equally referential sounds on the brink of nonsense, particularly when unsung.

The Swedish playwright August Strindberg alludes to the German verbs in this passage rather more literally in A Dream Play (1907), a work – he explains – modeled on associative patterns formed during dreaming. Here is the waves’ gentle singing interlude, in conspicuously alliterative translation: “We, we are the waves – which rock the winds in their cradle to rest – we, we are the winds – which wail and moan – woe – woe – woe … ”Footnote ⁷⁵ In his richly allusive poem The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot too points to traditions of Wagnerian alliteration (“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee” [where King Ludwig II drowned]) and audio-aquatic imagery from the Prelude to Das Rheingold (“If there were the sound of water only”). Beyond the oft-cited Tristan quotations (“Frisch weht der Wind … ” / “Oed’ und leer das Meer”), Eliot’s chain of Wagnerian references testifies to the prevalence of Wagnerism as obsession and malady in British literary discourse. Amid densely nested intertextuality, we find Erda by another name (“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante / … Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, / With a wicked pack of cards”), along with the Rhinemaidens – Flosshilde, Woglinde, Wellgunde – transmogrified in rhyme and cleanliness as the three “Thames” daughters – Richmond, Moorgate, Margate – where they quote their cousins in Götterdämmerung, as though dispelling all doubt of kinship: “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.” Indeed, the whole profile of apocalypse, fire, water, and redemptive love resonates with Götterdämmerung, and the temptation of mining Eliot’s text for Ring references has led some to regard Wagner as the preeminent influence on The Waste Land.Footnote ⁷⁶ But Eliot’s allusions borrow to reflect the age. Stoddard Martin is persuasive in suggesting that such allusion reflects less Eliot’s own mixed affiliation to Wagner, more “the Wagnerism of those artists who people his mind as he wrote.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This is not to deny Eliot’s early infatuation. His unpublished poem “Opera” (1909) revels in Tristan’s paroxysms, a music “Flinging itself at the last / Limits of self-expression.”Footnote ⁷⁸ But by the end this leaves him feeling strangely disconnected: “like the ghost of youth / At the undertakers’ ball.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Whether because of enervation or alienation, Eliot’s motivic allusions critique the cumbersomeness of Gesamtkunstwerk, while capturing the interior soundscape of European cultural thought, suffused as it was with Wagnerian reference.

But motifs are also carriers of memory and hence of time. Marcel Proust’s extended novel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is a touchstone for a literary technique of leitmotif that conveys how involuntary memory functions by subconscious association, the belief that we only recall the past when we stumble across a sensation: a taste of madeleine cake and lime-blossom tea (recalling Sunday mornings in Combray with Aunt Léonie), the scent and texture of an old glove (recalling the love for us by those who are gone), a sound of an old piano (recalling your grandfather).Footnote ⁸⁰ Boulez would make an explicit connection to Wagner’s temporality here, and it is surely no coincidence that later French authors such as Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Jean-Paul Sartre all likened the consciousness of one’s temporal existence to “melody.”Footnote ⁸¹ The association between musical flow and interior perception has a complex history, to be sure. For present purposes, though originally a simile introduced by Schopenhauer, melody’s link to the perception of consciousness arguably finds its characteristic formulation in Wagner’s description of infinite melody (unendliche Melodie), given in his preface to a French translation of the librettos of his romantic operas.Footnote ⁸² Ventriloquizing a dialogue between a (male) poet and (female) musician, Wagner imagines the former imploring the latter:

In the Ring cycle this double narrative – poetic word and instrumental music – is spun into a polyphonic web that includes characters’ words, their singing voices, orchestral sonorities, and their thematic signs, though the potential narrative multiplications go much further.

The French poet Édouard Dujardin, founder and editor of Revue wagnerienne, came close to this poetic-musical compound for a purely verbal sort of drama in his description of monologue intérieur, a literary technique first used in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887). Like an “uninterrupted [musical] stream” giving voice to what syntactical words cannot, an interior monologue offers: “the most intimate thought, closest to the unconscious,” Dujardin explains. “[I]n concept, it is speech before any logical organization, reproducing this thought as it comes into being and in its apparently raw state; in its form, it is realized through sentences in direct speech reduced to a syntactic minimum.”Footnote ⁸⁴ As is well known, this literary technique is the model Joyce acknowledged for his steam of consciousness in Ulysses (1922). Not enough has been made of the links between Joyce’s technique and Wagner’s concept of an “uninterrupted stream” of melody that ensounds unvoiced thoughts. Dujardin appears not to have understood Wagner’s leitmotifs comprehensively (he suggested they never develop),Footnote ⁸⁵ but as Stephen Huebner has argued, the language of Les Lauriers reveals a twofold trend: “an ambition to create a seamless … open-ended unfolding of new impressions and an inclination to lyrical repetition and order.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In the shadow of Wagner, both relate to literary investigations of interiority and putatively subliminal processing, both entrain aesthetic techniques to mimic lived experience and vice versa.

Motifs as Psychological Reference

Proust himself invokes Wagner for the cognitive realism he sees embedded in recurring musical reference:

Here musical allusion becomes the guarantor of individuality, no less, evoking interior responses to exterior objects. Proust’s are needle-point specific: “Even that which, in this music, is most independent of the emotion that it arouses in us preserves its outward and absolutely precise reality; the song of a bird, the ring of a hunter’s horn, the air that a shepherd plays upon his pipe, each carves its silhouette of a sound against the horizon.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This roll call of Wagner’s motifs – the Woodbird in Siegfried, Siegfried’s horn call, the Shepherd’s lament in Tristan – contrasts with the nondiegetic thematic references of, say, an instrumental sonata, though the psychological effort each solicits from listeners are akin as signs within what Proust calls music’s “liquidity.” Witness his description of Swann listening to fleeting thematic references in the absence of verbal language. Here, in a final quote from Proust, the concept of understanding is moot as memory intervenes in the cognitive wash of a sonata:

This kind of emerging cartography of our emotions was attractive for writers probing the psychological interiority of subjects. It established a mnemonic framework as central to organizing aesthetic experience. And the cognitive task of relating one’s experience of Wagner to meaningful interpretation of his operas is laid bare at once as literary technique, fictional description, and music criticism.

Perhaps this helps explain why Mann’s novels glisten with leitmotifs. “I have imitated Wagner a great deal,” Mann confessed to Adorno in 1952.Footnote ⁹⁰ Beyond Proust’s involuntariness, leitmotifs can point to unconscious thoughts or processes as a narrative technique, where the absence of narrative comment on their recurrence leaves the reader to assign significance. Witness the song Hans Carstorp sings on the battlefield (“Der Lindenbaum”), which recuperates the experience he had when listening to same song on the gramophone at the Berghof, as well as the tree’s broader cultural resonance within German mythology; or the recurring x-rays; or Asiatic eyes (The Magic Mountain); or the varying state (and colors) of characters’ teeth that signals their mental as well as physical health; or the prominent blue veins on Thomas Buddenbrook’s “narrow temple”; or the “finely articulated” Buddenbrook hands (Buddenbrooks). Such tiny signs draw on a symbolist tendency towards gestures of meaning, while simultaneously serving the purpose of realist description. Mann wrote openly about his musical understanding of the technique:

This is why readers gain a “heightened and deepened pleasure” from a second and third reading, of course, “just as one must be acquainted with a piece of music to enjoy it properly.” Such a bold confession of intent leaves no room for doubt about the extent of Wagner’s role in shaping Mann’s literary aspirations. Regardless of certain irreducible differences between musical and verbal signs, it provides a new context for substantiating Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s belief that music provides a “redemptive model” for literature.Footnote ⁹²

At a certain level of theoretical abstraction, this notion has been applied even to figures as ostensibly hostile to the Gesamtkunstwerk as Bertholt Brecht. Hilda Brown reads the use of “imagery or image-networks” that have a strategic function in his plays as a principle of recurrence that constitutes kinship with Wagner’s leitmotifs. Both men sought a deliberately radical break with the past, yet their dialectical relation has arguably been distorted by an overemphasis on Brecht’s rejection of Wagnerian phantasmagoria as a narcotic of yesteryear.Footnote ⁹³ Unlike Proust, who saw sensory motifs as routes to unconscious associationism, Brown sees Brecht’s image networks, and their shifting contexts, as a means of creating reflective distance: Witness the telescope, the apple, the milk in Leben des Galileo (1943).Footnote ⁹⁴ The ostensive dialectic between Wagner and Brecht weakens further upon consideration of certain famous passages of epic narrative and monologue within the Ring, moments of reflective distance from the drama, leading other commentators to go further in venturing that modern theater itself, whose standard-bearer is epic theater—“may be the illegitimate child of opera.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Closing Thoughts

The second half of this discussion indicates that literary responses to the Ring cycle have almost nothing to do with Wagner’s self-image as a reformer of art institutions. While it is clear Wagner’s sense of his own destiny is a prerequisite for the shaping of the Ring as compositional praxis, it is the tetralogy’s characters, narrative techniques, and structuring principles that provided literary hooks for later writers in the first instance. The impulse to respond goes to the heart of Wagner’s modernist outlook, for along with the cultural phenomenon of Wagnerism that engulfed Eliot, Joyce, Fontane, Mann, Proust, et al., the musicking of poetic language helped destabilize the image of language as a referential link to reality. Auditory signs functioned as such not only by referring to other signs in an infinite chain but by conveying a quality of sensory experience in their very signing. Adapting Nietzsche, we might say Wagner heightened the sensory potential of language immeasurably. It is perhaps for this reason that Ernst Krenek reclassified Wagner’s operatic reforms in 1936 simply in terms of extending sensory pleasure:

For his part, Wagner complained to Cosima in 1880 that the achievements of the first scene of Das Rheingold “were not properly appreciated” in 1876.Footnote ⁹⁷ This scene epitomizes the sensuous sonification of language predicated on the coupled sounds of alliteration and proved one of the passages most immediately amenable to subsequent writers and poets. While we cannot know what Wagner had in mind, it is tempting to interpret Krenek’s insight about pleasure potentiality as inflating to daunting dimensions opera’s sensory means of communication. With the first words of Rheingold, in such a reading, Wagner effectively recast what it meant for a word to mean. It was a flash of experience undreamt of by those ordinarily occupied with the estranging enigmas of thought alone. Two years after his complaint, Cosima – again thinking of Rheingold – recalls that Wagner: “agrees with me when I say that music can make an impression in the memory as great as when one is actually hearing it.”Footnote ⁹⁸ By inwardly mediating sense and sign, the literary technique of motivic recall in Proust and Mann (to name but two) would substantiate that passing thought for literary endeavor for decades to come.

The Woodbird: Anti-Adaptation

The One Ring is mute. Bilbo Baggins remarks on how it “felt cold when it quietly slipped on to his groping forefinger.”Footnote ³ And while in The Lord of the Rings it is weighed, scrutinized, read, and allows visions into the nature of things, it does not make a sound.Footnote ⁴ Peter Jackson’s ring whispers and hisses, beckons and calls; Tolkien’s ring requires Gandalf to give it voice. Is this muteness intentional? Is the sound Tolkien banishes a distant echo of another ring of great power that moved from person to person sowing strife and death?

Tolkien’s reaction to this association is famous: “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases.” Various scholars and enthusiasts, including Christopher MacLachlan and Renée Vink, have made a convincing case that Tolkien’s dissimulation is not to be taken at face value.Footnote ⁵ More remarkable than Tolkien’s dissimulation in our present context is that he felt it necessary to dissimulate at all: As in many kinds of twentieth-century classical music, asserting not to have been inspired by Der Ring des Nibelungen is a particular, and indeed a popular, mode of Wagner citation. And it is one that seems to be largely limited to the Ring. In this section, I will explore different modes of denying one is citing the Ring and examine some of the reasons behind it.

The Woodbird may not be Wagner’s invention, but it is the Völsunga Saga at its most Wagnerian. The episode seems to put forth its own philosophy of music, a little bit of Schopenhauer in the Nordic forest; it distills Wagner’s strange distinction between natural laws and brute fate; the way nature both conspires to make Siegfried/Sigurd invincible and conspires to leave him with a fatal weakness provides precisely the kind of bridge between the divine drama and the mortal drama that organizes the Ring cycle, but is largely absent in the Nibelungenlied, which has the bath in the dragon’s blood but no bird.

And it is a noteworthy episode because it has infiltrated without exception the various attempts to make a film of the Nibelungenlied, a text in which it does not appear. The Woodbird’s call is the bit of Wagner none of the Nibelungen-films seem to be able to resist – but watching them try gives a good sense of what it meant to take Wagner out of the Nibelungen saga in twentieth-century popular culture. The various German productions to make a film epic out of the Nibelungenlied usually sought to displace Wagner’s stranglehold on the material. They are prime examples for what Thomas Leitch has called “anti-adaptations” of Wagner: attempts to return to the Meister’s material only to wrestle it free from his viselike grasp.Footnote ⁶

It is likely no accident that it was in film that anything resembling a straightforward adaptation of the Woodbird is so overtly, even stridently, refused. Film as art form grew up in the shadow of older theatrical and operatic tradition. The medium’s turns to Wagner were thus always shot through with a healthy dose of competitive spirit. To see what a medium far less encumbered by such anxieties (or a different set of anxieties) does with the scene, one need only turn to P. Craig Russell’s graphic novel adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen (2000). Russell is an enthusiastic adapter of classic plays (Pelléas & Melisande) and opera (The Magic Flute), and, in adapting Wagner’s tetralogy into a series of eight comic books, he seems most intent on showing how the graphic medium can do justice to Wagner, rather than show how it can do Wagner better.

Russell’s Woodbird shows off the specific capabilities of the graphic medium by bringing to the fore the questions of comprehensibility that in opera are always difficult to decipher (the audience hears the bird and understands it – What does spying Mime know?). He does this by having speech bubbles that approximate musical notation but which gradually, as Siegfried begins to understand them, turn into written language. By having Siegfried’s head and the bird occupy very small, very contained panels, Russell can suggest a privacy of their conversation that opera’s stage-bound rendering of the same scene naturally struggles to emphasize. Russell’s Ring regards itself as a staging, one that addresses the problems brought on by Wagner’s demands for special effects and epic scale. It does not regard itself as a reworking of the work itself. Film proved far more competitive in this regard.

In 1924, Fritz Lang undertook to turn the Nibelungenlied into a two-part motion picture, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge. Lang was insistent that he was not undertaking “any old filmic adaptation of a work that already exists in some other form.”Footnote ⁷ He meant that he aimed to outdo both the Edda and Wagner’s Ring, both of which he regarded as elitist; film, meanwhile, could lay claim to a far more universal vocabulary, and Lang’s film could, as David Levin puts it, occupy a “middle ground”Footnote ⁸ somewhere between the banal universalism of Hollywood and the rarefied niche pursuits of Wagner. As Levin argues, the resulting film powerfully reflects “contemporary anxieties about film culture.”Footnote ⁹

Lang’s treatment of the Woodbird-scene follows the sequence of the Völsunga Saga and the Ring, but it is worth pointing out where Lang places intertitles in the sequence, that is to say how he positions his own medium in the act of understanding dramatized in the scene. After killing the dragon, Siegfried tastes the dragon’s blood, and Lang cuts away immediately to the bird. Then he gives us a long medium shot of Paul Richter as he puzzles over what he has just heard, followed by a second shot of the bird. Only now do we get an intertitle explaining (in the past tense) that “Young Siegfried understood what the bird’s song told him.”

The intertitle comments on the moment of understanding only after it has occurred, the auditory act of understanding itself happens visually. And it does so with help from filmic conventions: Lang stages a series of reaction shots of bird and man which, even in 1924, would have signaled to audiences that a conversation was taking place. Die Nibelungen is insistent on recreating the sonic revelation through images alone – the intertitle is ultimately superfluous. Even though Gottfried Huppertz’s original score neither cites the Woodbird motif, nor attempts to avoid associations with it, the film as image makes a powerful case that it can tell the most musical episode in the myth without taking recourse to its most famous musical rendition.

In the 1960s, producer Artur Brauner revisited the German national epic under entirely different premises. Wagner’s shadow now loomed not so much as an aesthetic problem, an impediment to a genuinely cinematic form of myth-making, but above all as a political problem. To make a Nibelungen film after the Second World War was a fraught proposition. Brauner clearly felt that any and all associations with Wagner, whose reputation Wolfgang and Wieland were still busy excavating from under the rubble of the Reichskanzlei, had to be banished from the production. After Fritz Lang declined to direct the remake, Harald Reinl (then famous for a spate of recent Karl May adaptations) took the reins, with Uwe Beyer as Siegfried and Karin Dor as Brünnhilde.

Retelling the German national epic post-1945 meant reducing the national elements in the material, and for Reinl that seems to have meant reducing the fingerprints of Hitler’s favorite composer. The film follows the blueprint of Lang’s and retains his borrowings from Wagner, but uses the realm of sound to definitively distinguish itself from the Ring. On the one hand, the film relies heavily on recitations of (paraphrases from) the Nibelungenlied in voiceover, but it pointedly places its voiceover speaker on the scene in several scenes. He is a specific singer, Volker von Alzey, guiding us through the story as it is happening – a mythic simulcast. The story issues not from some suprasubjective ether, instead an embodied, interested and actively involved human being relates it.

If the magic of voiceover allowed for a ready divestment from the story’s Wagnerian baggage, sound also raised a problem for any anti-adaptation of the Nibelungen material. After all, in the 1960s most Germans, watching Siegfried and Alberich interact and squabble over a dragon’s hoard, would likely have expected Wagner’s music on the soundtrack, something Die Nibelungen is at pains to avoid. Rolf Wilhelm, known for the scores of Heimat films and Reinl’s Mabuse remakes, delivers a soundtrack that sounds like 1930s Erich Wolfgang Korngold far more than Wagner. It was a return of sorts to the Ring cycle for the composer, for only two years earlier Wilhelm had written the score for Rolf Thiele’s loose adaptation of Mann’s Wälsungenblut (to which Erika Mann had helped write the screenplay).

Reinl’s film walks a different kind of tightrope from Lang’s, and it too leads him to downplay Wagner’s hold on the material. This becomes clear in the dragon-slaying scene: composer Rolf Wilhelm serves up a Forest Murmurs pastiche but throughout insists on lute arpeggios that remind us that we’re listening to a frame narration (by Volker von Alzey, i.e. the “narrator” the film invents for the Nibelungenlied). It is the narrator’s voice that pronounces the bird’s advice that “hart wie Horn wird deine Haut … steigst du zum Bade in des Drachen Blut” (Your skin will become hard as horn … if you bathe in the dragon’s blood). No special effects, no whispers, no music – simply a man with a lute instructing his own hero. The text does not come directly from the Nibelungenlied, but the two passages it most resembles there are narrated by Hagen, whom Reinl (like Wagner) casts as his main villain – in fact, Reinl turns Hagen into something of a Hitler figure whom the others trust and follow to their doom.Footnote ¹⁰

Where Lang’s version of the myth uses the filmic medium to replicate the mythic gesture of a story that simply exists, as though no one had to invent it, Reinl’s version is deeply interested in who is telling us the Nibelungenlied and why. While it would be going too far to say that Reinl here gently imports techniques of Brechtian epic theater, he does seem at pains to prevent a kind of uncritical acceptance of a story independent of its teller. His teller is frequently on-screen, which creates a dissonance of its own. But Reinl also had that quintessential audio technique of mid-century German cinema: dubbed dialogue. When we see Alzey on-screen he is played by Hans von Borsody, but his voice is dubbed by Christian Rode, a famous voiceover and Hörspiel artist. Viewers hear a voice tell them a story; the film suggests that this voice belongs to the man they see on-screen, but a good many of them would have been aware that the voice was not properly his. Displaced vocality offers Die Nibelungen a path past Hitler and past Wagner.

Uli Edel’s two-part Die Nibelungen, made in 2004 for German television, chafes against a different overwhelming historical force. Although the film also avoids Wagner, it does so because it wants to look, and above all sound, like a big, international fantasy blockbuster, specifically The Lord of the Rings. Director Edel is a longtime journeyman of German film, notable not so much for his unique visual idiom but the ease with which his images feed into a perceived international style. The music, by Klaus Badelt (a frequent collaborator of Hans Zimmer who scored Disney’s Pirates of the Carribean), studiously avoids any musical quotations from Wagner – but in order to sound more blandly Hollywood. The association of Wagner and the Nazis seems to matter little.

The specter haunting Die Nibelungen is Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings film, which had premiered about two years before, as the bath in the dragon’s blood makes clear: The forest murmurs here sound like druggy whispers, the music like a Philip Glass redux – and when Siegfried picks up the Ring, he encounters the Nibelungs as spectral wraiths. Edel and Badelt are struggling mightily to replicate the myth in an internationally palatable and emphatically nonspecific aesthetic idiom. Wagner is not too German; he is rather too particular to be referred to directly.

Wagalaweia: Parodies

Any attempt to parody the Ring des Nibelungen has to grapple with a simple fact: It is very long. Referring to it and eliciting laughter means assuming that one’s audience has sat through seventeen hours of opera, not perhaps the most natural of prerequisites. While citation may pick up on specific details from the opera, parody has to take the context of that detail seriously. To what extent, for instance, can What’s Opera, Doc?, the 1957 Chuck Jones animated send-up, count as a parody of the Ring? It contains the iconic Elmer Fudd number “Kill the Wabbit” (sung to the “Ride of the Valkyries”), but other than a certain martial association, what connects wabbit-killing to the Ring specifically? Featuring tunes pilfered from Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, and Tannhäuser, What’s Opera, Doc? is perhaps better thought of as a parody of the opera form as such than of Wagner, let alone the Ring, in particular.Footnote ¹¹

Parodies that single out the Ring have tended towards practices other than citation, and they have tended to come from high culture rather than popular culture. Thomas Mann’s Wälsungenblut, Anthony Burgess’s The Worm and the Ring (1961), but also Elfriede Jelinek’s 2013 novel Rein Gold take in the whole of the Ring, but parody by condensation. Such texts refuse Wagner’s archetypal dramaturgy and instead return his story to the bourgeois, domestic realm, where they secretly suspect they originated in the first place. The Ahrenhold twins in Mann’s story think they are reenacting the myth but are rather engaging in tawdry, soulless mimicry. Brünnhilde’s philippics against her father Wotan, which make up the monologic Rein Gold, lovingly detail his failed business ventures, his affairs, his wandering eye, and his inability to make good on his promises. In other words, Jelinek returns the myth from its perch to the far more primal Oedipal scene of family members yelling at each other around a Thanksgiving table – what Roger Scruton and Michael Tanner assail as the tendency of “domesticating” Wagner in recent stagings of his operas has a long prehistory in literary parody.Footnote ¹²

Even beyond high literary parodies, spoofing the Ring usually presupposes an unusual amount of foreknowledge on the part of the audience. Parodists often found no more powerful tool to skewer the Ring than simply to summarize it. The joke relies on the fact that the massive cycle is brought down to size; however, the cycle itself looms in each case in the background. Unless we remember the outsize hugeness of the thing parodied, the parody will not be funny; unless we can sense the mythagogic ambition behind a motif like Valhalla, the comedian Anna Russell (1911–2006) describing the same as a “celestial White House” isn’t nearly as amusing. Pop-culture parodies walk a fine line between deflating Wagner’s ambitions and presupposing them.

Anna Russell’s act combined music and comedy and often lampooned the stalwarts of the opera stage. Among her most famous bits is “The Ring of the Nibelungs (An Analysis),” which gleefully laid into Wagner’s mythagogic grandeur and his portentous names.Footnote ¹³ Russell’s “Analysis” at its core consisted of the heresy of paraphrase, usually accompanied by bemused reflections on how ludicrous the mythic plot sounds once translated into plain English: “I’m not making this up, you know.” The performance depended on the audience knowing that Russell was indeed “not making this up”; from the knowing laughter at particular jokes in different recordings, one gets a good sense that her audiences knew their Ring well. At the same time, Russell’s English-speaking audiences knew their Ring in translation, and Russell’s “Analysis” aims to reassure them that they’re not missing too much. Throughout the performance, Russell recounts the Ring but always with added provisos like “supposing you can make any sense of it.” The performance accomplishes two contradictory objectives: It reassures the audience that whatever sense they’re unable to make is to some extent simply nonsense, but it also lives off the fact that Russell’s narration constantly wards off the vexing possibility that perhaps understanding the nonsense as nonsense may not make one a good listener to Wagner’s cycle.

When she discusses the opening of Das Rheingold, Russell describes the Rhinemaidens as “aquatic Andrew sisters,” that is to say she updates them to resemble a famous group of boogie-woogie singers. The act of translation takes Wagner out of the opera house and into the world of popular culture, out of German culture and into English-language pop culture as the global lingua franca. At the same time, we may wonder just who the joke is on: What should we say of an audience that cannot be trusted to grasp the concept of a Rhinemaiden unless it is rendered in terms of mid-century popular music? The update serves to make Wagner ridiculous, but it also puts a question mark over an audience that would require such updates – the same way that Mann’s Wälsungenblut at some point stops parodying Wagner and rather lampoons those that would seek to import him into the modern world.

Russell is on firmer parodic footing when she intones the Rhinemaidens’ Stabreim-riddled song. “I won’t translate it,” she remarks, “because it doesn’t mean a thing.” Here the message is clearer and less troubling to the English-speaking audience: What they may have thought were their own shortcomings in grasping Wagner’s meaning, she reassures them are actually lacunae in Wagner’s meaning. In moments like this one, Russell mobilizes English skepticism against Teutonic credulity, English “test by ridicule” against German seriousness. In her autobiography, she points to opera critics who told her that “even though he wouldn’t have expressed it in exactly the same manner I had, my facts were completely correct.”Footnote ¹⁴

By juxtaposing British facts and German nebulousness, Russell activates an old topos of Wagner reception: that whatever in the Ring opposes itself to commonsense scrutiny is somehow linked to the tetralogy’s Germanness. That opera characters on the whole do not tend to be the most commonsense bunch does not seem to rob that topos of any of its allure. And it has made modernizing Wagner a far more enduring sport than, say, updating Verdi. Mann and Jelinek read back into Wagner’s neo-pagan myths the constrained bourgeois imagination they suspected in it all along: Behind Wotan’s debt for cloud-capped Valhalla lurks nothing other than a bad mortgage. Anna Russell proceeds instead by pushing Wagner into unfamiliar modern territory – by making him pop music.

Charles Ludlam’s Der Ring Gott Farblonjet (1977) abducts Wagner into a far more pointed new context: His burlesques were put on, often by drag performers, at Off-Broadway theaters.Footnote ¹⁵ Ludlam (1943–78) also updates Wagner, yet he updates not just the myth but also the operatic medium: “My Valkyries are lesbian motorcyclists, Valhalla is Lincoln Center, which we’ll burn down in the last act.”Footnote ¹⁶ His script embeds the whole story in a variety of discourses, which he claims work as linguistic leitmotifs: gay and Yiddish, what Ludlam calls “potato-German,” “elevated Elizabethan,” and clipped modernist diction. Rather than having the leitmotif allow the audience to enter the theatrical world directly while forgetting that it is “just” theater, Ludlam’s pastiche presents Wagner’s world as a mash-up of different performing traditions. Ludlam himself noted that he wanted the parts to be sung “in the manner of Florence Foster Jenkins,” herself a creature of the theatrical stage and an early figure of camp reverence.

Whether or not he seeks to make a specific point about Wagner and Jewishness (it should be noted that he doesn’t dial the Yiddish either up or down when similarly spoofing Marlowe, Joyce, or Wilde), he takes particular delight in the fact that, once he has dragged Wagner from Valhalla to the Great White Way, the composer is rather comfortably at home there. Rather than What’s Opera Doc? and the less well-known Herr Meets Hare (1945), which put Bugs Bunny in drag as a Valkyrie to lampoon Wagner’s Teutonic masculinism, Ludlam’s celebration of a queerness in the Wagnerian corpus is a sign of affection. He seeks to out Wagner not to denounce him but to rescue him. When his Rhinemaidens sing of “Waves of wasser”Footnote ¹⁷ their alliterative play really isn’t that far removed from Wagner’s own Stabreim. And the sexual puns about guarding gold being a “schmerz in kooz,” or the appellation of Alberich as a “sexy little toad,”Footnote ¹⁸ are in the end just intensifications of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian erotics. Wagner belongs in a queer and Yiddish context, Ludlam’s text suggests: He has simply repressed that fact and needs Ludlam to loosen him up.

Others are far more reverent of the mythic dimension of Wagner’s chef d’oeuvre. It is a reverence that has to remain at least to some extent ironic and self-aware, as Thomas Mann’s Wagner pastiches make clear. But the case of the novelist Anthony Burgess (1917–93), who was himself a composer and avid Wagnerian, shows that Ring-parody can work both ways: By returning the work from its exalted perch to terra firma, one can also elevate that terra firma beyond the quotidian. In The Worm and the Ring (1961), Burgess combined Wagner’s epic frame with the decidedly less epic goings-on in a grammar school, based none-too-freely on Burgess’s own experiences as a teacher in Oxfordshire. Burgess creates a self-portrait as a Siegfried stand-in, in the less-than-dashing guise of German teacher Christopher Howarth. As Burgess explains in his autobiography, “the hierarchy of gods, heroes and dwarfs found a parallel in a grammar school.”Footnote ¹⁹

The Worm and the Ring opens on a soaked southern English February day, as the schoolboy Albert Rich, short, ugly, and winded, chases after “three giggling fourth-form girls.” They reject him, run away from him, taunt his short legs, and call him a pig. Then one of them carelessly drops her school bag, and Albert finds in it a secret diary, full of dirty fantasies about assorted teachers and students. Albert has found an artifact of tremendous power, and all the forces vying in the extremely confined universe of the school will be set in motion by his seizure of this treasure.

What type of relationship to source material is this? Geoffrey Aggeler calls it “a mock-opera” and “a burlesque.”Footnote ²⁰ But the text is not intended to mock by diminution alone. Instead of the downfall of the gods of Valhalla, Burgess’s topic is the decline of the English gentry, itself not a minor topic. As John J. Stinson puts it, the novel is a “mock-epic,” “but not entirely.”Footnote ²¹ Burgess himself once noted with respect to James Joyce’s Ulysses that “the invocation of the Odyssey may reduce Ulysses to Bloom, but it also exalts Bloom to Ulysses.”Footnote ²² The shuddering foreboding at Albert’s theft of the diary depends on a sense for the source material – that this world, however diminutive, will be shaken to its foundations and that the stakes are, to the people who inhabit this world, cosmic.

“Romeo Foxtrot, Shall We Dance?”: Walkürenritt

Another mode of citing the Ring takes far less interest in the operatic nature of the tetralogy. It refers to Wagner rather as a cultural cipher, a sign of excessive Teutonism. In its extreme form, this manner of citation treats Wagner as essentially Nazi kitsch. In the 1991 German-language comedy Schtonk!, which deals with the scandal over the phony Hitler diaries published by Stern in 1983, the forger Fritz Knobel presents a nude painting supposedly of Eva Braun by the Führer himself. As collectors and Nazi nostalgists gaze upon the picture, a distinctly Wagnerian pastiche wells up in the soundtrack, only to end its transfiguration in a thoroughly Germanic, but rather un-Wagnerian, yodel. Wagner, yodeling, Eva Braun – they all belong to the same universe, banal ruins of the “thousand-year Reich.”

In the film, the episode gives Knobel the idea for what he refers to as his Gesamtkunstwerk, namely sixty-two volumes of a fake Hitler diary, full of bizarre minutiae and screaming historical inaccuracies – to say nothing of semiconscious borrowings from Wagner. Apropos of the real fake diaries, Rudolf Augstein noted even back in 1983 that the relationship Hitler–Hess seems like a dilletantish Wotan–Brünnhilde redux, with the eventual flight to England as a demented kind of Walkürenritt.Footnote ²³ The filmic story of the forgery picks up on this idea: When a journalist (played by Götz George) decides to track down the “diaries” in a town near the Czech border, he commandeers a bus to a rather unsubtle pastiche of the “Ride of the Valkyries” – which briefly transforms into a quotation of the “Internationale,” when George bribes his way across the East–West German border. Wagner here functions as a signifier for a bizarre and uniquely German fixation, a quixotic quest for an ultimately bogus object. The implacable churning of the “Ride” becomes a cipher for his monomania.

In Bryan Singer’s 2008 film Valkyrie, a bomb strikes near Claus von Stauffenberg’s house and rocks his gramophone back into motion – the record on the turntable is the “Ride.” Wagner’s piece about the dead of battle, activated by the bombers, gives Strauffenberg (Tom Cruise) an idea of how to end the war: by activating Operation Walküre.Footnote ²⁴ Wagner’s piece becomes both a symptom of a German mania and the means of its overcoming. Although Schtonk! and Valkyrie present this malaise as a specifically German condition, the same idea stands behind the “Kill the Wabbit” song in What’s Opera, Doc?: There, the repetitiousness of the tune stands in for the fact that Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny have been locked in a horrible version of the eternal return for over twenty years, where Elmer is fated to chase his “Wabbit” without success in perpetuity. Schtonk! portrays this German obsession as ultimately comical, one reason why it prefers to allude to, rather than actually include, the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Perhaps producers worried that the mock-heroism of the scene would be taken for an endorsement.

Films like Schtonk! are careful then to increase Wagner’s kitsch-factor, to make sure the Nazi resonances are safely rendered ridiculous. The Slovenian heavy metal band Laibach seems to harbor no such compunction. While writers, artistic directors, and scholars have sought for decades to free Wagner from his Nazi baggage, Laibach (the German name for Ljubljana) turned to Wagner’s music as essentially a Nazi signifier. The resulting concert, a heavy metal–orchestral hybrid entitled VolksWagner, first premiered in 2009, is exactly as alarming as its authors likely intended it to be. Where other heavy metal bands have expressed a sense of kinship with Wagner’s music, with his Nordic myth-mongering, Laibach are clear that their kinship is ideological: The word Volk is there for a reason, the orchestra is on stage for a reason.

While VolksWagner’s pastiche of the Siegfried Idyll is perched between parody and serious homage, Laibach’s Ring-quoting soundtrack for the 2012 film Iron Sky is more obviously tongue in cheek. Given the film the soundtrack accompanies, it would have to be so: The movie features Nazi UFOs that have stayed hidden on the dark side of the moon for sixty years and now seek revenge on the United States (led by President Sarah Palin). Their mothership is called Götterdämmerung. Iron Sky is pure Nazi kitsch amped up well beyond the point of self-parody. And yet, the film’s cheerful citation of what Susan Sontag so memorably called “the fascist aesthetic” elicited some consternation when the film came out – part of that was Laibach’s participation and part of it was the use of Ring-signifiers.Footnote ²⁵

This is the association that seems to have guided perhaps the most iconic deployment of the Ring’s music in popular culture. On a superficial level, Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to have Captain Kilgore’s men pulverize a Vietnamese village to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” may seem to make a point about American genocide in Vietnam resembling Nazi atrocities. But, as Jean Baudrillard, pointed out in a devastating two-page essay on the film, the scene is too ravishing, too brilliant, too thrilling for that.Footnote ²⁶ The scene restages the Vietnam war in a Philippine jungle, but this time the Americans control everything; this time they win. In a moment of national trauma, of wounded pride, the “Ride of the Valkyries” invites the viewer to take pleasure in the destruction of the colonial Other. Coppola uses the “Ride of the Valkyries” to ape the look and feel of footage from a Nazi Wochenschau of May 1941 depicting an air raid in Crete: The intent of that citation, much like the use of Wagner, should be perfectly obvious, but the sheer technical brilliance on display undercuts it.

Under the thundering brass and roaring sopranos, American victors and the anonymous, scattering Other that they disperse, finally take on the roles that seemed, in the defeat and humiliating peace before 1975, troublingly reversed: “if the Americans … lost the other [war],” Baudrillard writes, “they certainly won this one.” For Baudrillard, the “Ride of the Valkyries” is what allows Coppola’s anti-war film to turn into imperial pornography. The GIs and the film-audience are both equally spectators to the carnage, and Wagner’s music as deployed by Coppola invites them to take equal pleasure in it. But he and editor Walter Murch succeed perhaps too well: The scene knows it is supposed to be disturbing, but its gorgeous compositions, the bravura timing of its cuts, and the hooting of its Wagnerian Valkyries risk making it straightforwardly ravishing.

The “Ride” as a cipher for fascism has entered the cinematic vocabulary of even the most casual filmgoer, although it has likely done so as a consequence of Coppola’s and Murch’s use of it in Apocalypse Now. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009), for instance, simply uses it to refer back to the US involvement in Vietnam, but with a superhero Übermensch thrown in for good measure. The classic John Belushi comedy Blues Brothers uses it for a chase involving neo-Nazi bikers. Jackass 3D uses it when one of Johnny Knoxville’s merry band of pranksters tries to withstand the jetstream of a military plane. And when in The Simpsons villainous Mr. Burns rides a tank into battle, he does it of course to the “Ride” – after an unfortunate mix-up that has ABBA’s “Waterloo” blaring from the speakers instead.

But some references in Hollywood films seem owed to some reflection on the piece itself, not simply a nod to Coppola’s use of it. Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 revisionist Western Django Unchained references the “Ride” by not referencing it. Early in the film, Christoph Waltz’s King Schultz tells our hero, a runaway slave named Django, the “oldest of the Germanic legends” of Siegfried and Brünnhilde – but the version that he tells is the Ring (no mean feat of telepathy in pre-Civil War Texas). We are thus primed for a Wagnerian subtext. When the Ku Klux Klan rides after Django and Schultz, Tarantino restages D. W. Griffith’s infamous “ride of the Klansmen” from Birth of a Nation, but where Joseph Carl Breil’s score for Birth of a Nation used the “Ride of the Valkyries” to score the scene, Tarantino turns to Verdi’s Requiem instead. Where Coppola’s citation is supposed to call to mind the eternal repetition of violence, death, and war, Tarantino’s invocation of a “dies irae, dies illa” suggests that not all violence is created equally. There is good, redemptive violence, and it consists in blowing slave owners’ heads off.Footnote ²⁷

In the process, Tarantino transforms Wagner: By repressing the Ring during the “Ride of the Klansmen” sequence but at the same time citing the Ring explicitly earlier in the film, he seeks to release Wagner from the spell that the worst among his admirers cast on him. Just as Django Unchained seeks to redeem the western from its racial politics, so it seeks redemption for Wagner. During the filming of Django Unchained, Christoph Waltz took Tarantino to see the Ring – it is likely that Tarantino knew that his gesture of redeeming Wagner was at its heart a profoundly Wagnerian one.

Rheingold: The Ring as Film

Wagner is everywhere in Hollywood: As soon as films started to have fixed soundtracks, directors turned to Wagner’s music to lend easily recognizable gravitas to their projects: from Joseph Carl Breil’s score for Birth of a Nation, to Hi-Diddle-Diddle’s use of Tannhäuser, via Bernard Herrmann’s references to Tristan und Isolde in Vertigo, to Terrance Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), which refers repeatedly to Parsifal.Footnote ²⁸ Hardly anyone could walk down the aisle without the bridal chorus from Lohengrin; sometimes it was a perfunctory musical icon, but at others (for instance George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story), it produced uncanny resonances.Footnote ²⁹ Wagner was just as ubiquitous in non-American productions, from the avant-garde to the commercial. Luis Buñuel used a gramophone recording of the Liebestod in his own screenings of Un Chien Andalou (1929) and would use Wagner’s music again in his final film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). The shallow bachelor in Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959) regales his party guests with Wagner, and Lars von Trier, who was himself once slated to direct the Ring at Bayreuth, has made Wagner’s music a staple of his filmic vocabulary.Footnote ³⁰

Going through all these quotations exhaustively would probably yield much indifferent cribbing of famous melodies. But a few generalizations may nevertheless be instructive: For one, the Ring cycle is notably underrepresented – early Hollywood turns to identifiable, quotable, and excerptable snippets of Wagner, and that largely meant Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and above all Tristan und Isolde. Of the usual suspects of excerptible Ring material – the Fire Music, Siegfried’s Funeral March, the Forest Murmurs – only one has resounded through filmic production with any degree of continuity, namely the “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Some filmic citations function in a frankly parodic mode: Like Anna Russell’s guided tours through the Ring, they invoke the mythic resonances of Wagner’s motifs to unmask them by combining them with a screen action that shrinks them down to size. This is how Chaplin uses the Lohengrin Prelude in The Great Dictator’s famous globe-scene: There, Chaplin, in full regalia as Hitler parody Adenoid Hynkel, engages in sometimes rapt, sometimes childish, and at other moments quite bawdy play with a giant inflated globe. Chaplin will revisit the Lohengrin Prelude at the climax of the film, but that time as a soundtrack, background music over which Chaplin’s other role in the film, the Jewish barber who gets mistaken for the great dictator, gives a lengthy speech spelling out the moral of the story.Footnote ³¹ Die Walküre enters A Night to Remember (1942), a mystery comedy directed by Richard Wallace, in the former mode of citation. Brian Aherne plays a hapless mystery writer and accidental amateur sleuth who accidentally burns a roast. As an ominous sizzle rises from the new oven, Wagner’s joyous Feuerzauber dances through the soundtrack, more and more off-key and jazzy as dinner unravels.

At the same time, the Ring gets cited to give a kind of mythic profundity to the proceedings. Hollywood likes Wagner whenever it is most explicit in myth-making, in synthesizing vagrant motifs into new pop-mythologies. Highlander II (1991), the monumentally unsuccessful follow-up to an itself entirely forgotten fantasy film, opens on the main character, an immortal alien played by Christopher Lambert, at the opera. On stage (of the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires), Brünnhilde bids Siegfried farewell, and, in his box, Connor MacLeod is having an elaborate flashback to his existence on a faraway planet, none-too-subtly lifted from the Krypton-flashbacks of the first seventies Superman movie.

The opera setting is intended to lend ersatz gravitas to the manifestly ridiculous proceedings on-screen, but it functions in another way yet: In the utterly misbegotten flashbacks, Russell Mulcahy’s film attempts to introduce an entirely new mythic substrate to the first Highlander-film, which had no mention of extraterrestrials. Wagner here becomes the patron saint of inventing extra layers of mythology to your idiotic fantasy movie. Mulcahy responds to the same instinct that guided Mann and Jelinek, that the Ring is simply gussied-up bourgeois realism – but he understands Wagner as a how-to guide for gussying up.

Wagner has often functioned as the patron saint for mythomaniacs, and the Ring, simply by virtue of its outsized scope and ambition, has been the prime source for references. While preparing to film an abortive version of The Lord of the Rings for United Artists, director John Boorman instead began to mine popular myth for fantasy spectacle. His first effort in this vein was Zardoz (1974), a postapocalyptic fable about a false god who uses The Wizard of Oz as his holy book – Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony provides much of the film’s soundtrack. Next, Boorman directed Exorcist II: The Heretic, which used characters based on Blatty’s novel to retell the Book of Job. His final fantasy effort, 1981’s Excalibur, relies on Siegfried’s funeral march as its main theme – the final sequence, in which Perceval returns Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake and dead Arthur is born to Avalon, is set entirely to the piece. But Boorman’s film relies on Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde as well, and perhaps more appropriately so. Even Orff’s “O Fortuna” makes an appearance.

The Rheingold Prelude has long attracted filmmakers, but where the associations carried by the “Ride of the Valkyries” are fairly straightforward – and have been rendered more so, the more films relied on the tune – the Rheingold Prelude has been put to different ends by different directors. It is not difficult to see why the prelude, with its slow drone of an E♭ major chord, might be attractive to film makers: It is a music that assembles itself before our very ears that, as Friedrich Kittler has put it, explores “not a melody, but performs (as though to test out the range of transmission) a Fourier analysis of the E♭ from the first to the eighth overtone.”Footnote ³² At the same time, the piece is used by filmmakers not as a technological showcase but as a way to return film to something more archaic.

Director Werner Herzog turned to the piece twice. In his 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre, he uses the piece as his main character, Jonathan Harker (Bruno Gans), journeys to Dracula’s castle. As Herzog’s camera, in shot after languid shot, captures the rough beauty of Dracula’s remote mountain hideout, the music keeps nature eerily neutral – neither the music nor the visuals are stereotypically foreboding, but neither is their majesty without a certain menace. Wagner’s prelude speaks for, and stands in for, nature itself. The same ambivalence of beauty and danger animates Herzog’s second use of the piece, in the 1992 documentary Lessons of Darkness. The film presents highly impressionistic views of the burning oil fields Saddam Hussein’s troops left in their wake after abandoning Kuwait.

Herzog opens Lessons of Darkness with Das Rheingold and a quote: “The collapse of the stellar universe will – like creation – occur in immense splendor.” The film attributes the quote to Blaise Pascal, but Herzog has admitted that it is in fact pure Herzog. It is also a hint as to how Herzog reads Wagner’s prelude: We are witnessing the creation of a universe, a whole world is willed into existence, but a world that is destined to collapse. The simplicity of Wagner’s piece allows Herzog to blur precisely which of the two, creation or collapse, we are witnessing on the screen: The burning oil fields really do look like a young planet vulcanizing into existence, or they might be the last fiery heaves of a dying world.

Terrence Malick’s 2005 epic The New World likewise uses the Rheingold Prelude to make a point about world-making, worlding, and world-pictures.Footnote ³³ Malick opens his film with the piece. At first, we witness natives darting about under water, but eventually the camera looks up towards the river surface. Malick cuts to the surface and the camera catches up with three English ships. Only now does this world get a name, as the words “Virginia, 1607” appear on-screen. Malick spends the rest of the sequence intercutting between the natives, the English, and Colin Farrell’s John Smith, each noticing the other. The way the sequence progresses makes it clear that the “New World” of the title does not refer Eurocentrically to North America. What rises from the mists for each group is the other group, and the “New World” is the one where their ways of looking at each other will have to coexist. As so often in Malick, the sequence also amounts to a celebration of the filmic medium, as the intercutting between the world of the natives and of the European arrivals allows the film to comprise the two perspectives that will define the rest of the story.

In moments like this, cinema understands Wagner primarily as a builder of fictional worlds. They sense fealty not with his use of myth or with his mode of epic storytelling: They understand him as a showman and the Ring as his most masterful piece of make-believe. That may well be the reason why, from Magic Fire to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, there runs a separate tradition of musical quotation from the Ring: Rather than big, culminating set-pieces (the “Ride” in Apocalypse Now, the Prelude toTristan und Isolde in Melancholia), these Wagner citations are scene-setting, and they often draw on the Verwandlungsmusik. In moments like these, cinema seems to turn to the house on the Green Hill as the first cinema and to the Ring as its earliest ancestor.

The history of productions of the Ring is also the history of dramaturgy as it developed from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Created and first performed in an era of naturalism, the Ring was exposed within a quarter of a century to the dramaturgical innovations of Alfred Roller and Adolphe Appia, then in turn to the austere iconoclasm of Wieland Wagner, the ideological revolutions of Bertolt Brecht and metatheater, and in more recent decades to the radical theories of deconstruction and post-dramatic theater, all of which have come to constitute what is known as Regietheater (or “director’s opera”). Within that chronological framework, a number of themes or red threads should be evident: in the discussion of political (often anti-capitalist), environmental, or feminist interpretations, Personenregie (character direction) and the theatrical dimension (including mime, dance, and the prevalence of design, video, and new technology), and location-specific stagings. Many productions, of course, weave together multiple threads; nevertheless, a general pattern, corresponding to the sociopolitical concerns and dramaturgical developments of each era in turn, may be discerned. The following conspectus of Ring stagings, which makes no claim to be comprehensive, aims to illuminate that process.Footnote ¹

Wagner’s own production of the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876 belongs to the tradition of naturalistic, illusionist theater, that is to say the events on stage were to reflect “real life,” albeit in a stylized way, while the audience was to be transported into the mythic realm created by the composer. The primary means of that transformative process was the “mystic abyss,” i.e. the sunken orchestral pit, which drew the spectator into a hallowed space continuous with the scenic picture, thus presented as a “dreamlike vision.” That process paradoxically separated the spectator from the scenic picture but at the same time encouraged total attention on it, since the elimination of side boxes and the darkening of the auditorium at the Festspielhaus denied the traditional opportunities of opera for social spectacle. The term “naturalistic” as applied to Wagner’s intentions for the staging should not be read as a desire for meticulous representation of reality: On the contrary, Wagner coveted neither what he described as “arbitrary details of landscape scenery” nor the kind of antiquarian historical realism and “authentic” period costumes that had characterized Parisian grand opera, and to a large extent productions of Wagner’s own works in Dresden.Footnote ² Wagner’s approach was naturalistic, however, in its attitude to the acting, which was in tune with the more radical praxis of the company run by Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen at his court theater.

After Wagner’s death, his widow Cosima, while saving the festival, was determined to replicate the naturalistic style of acting she had witnessed at the first festivals but thus succeeded in fossilizing what had been a progressive tendency. The so-called “Bayreuth style” (both of stagecraft and mise-en-scène) predominated at Bayreuth until the 1930s, and provided a model for other houses too, for example the Metropolitan, New York, where the pre-First World War sets of the Kautsky brothers continued to be used right up until 1939. The first challenge to the Bayreuth style came from Vienna, where Gustav Mahler, director of the State Opera, collaborated with the Secessionist painter Alfred Roller on radically experimental productions of Das Rheingold (1905) and Die Walküre in 1907 (as well as a notable Tristan und Isolde in 1903), which deployed (electric) colored lighting to create vibrant stage spaces, rather than tableaux, in which the imagination of the audience might be stimulated. The aim was intimation rather than literal representation, though some contemporary accounts criticized the restriction on singers’ movements caused by Roller’s somewhat solid sets.Footnote ³

Meanwhile, the Swiss designer Adolphe Appia was theorizing about how best to realize the scenic dimension of Wagner’s works, powered as they were by the inner, musical life of the characters. His solution involved the abandonment of pictorialism and illusion in favor of an interiorized approach: suggestive, psychologically determined, with color and light given a primary role. In accordance with Wagner’s own theories, if not with his compromised praxis, Appia determined that the entire scenic representation must be focused on the singing-actor – both his/her vocal expression and movements and gestures – and on the poetic-musical text. What the composer added to that text in the form of scenic instructions, argued Appia, was irrelevant. Thus was delivered the first blow to the assumption that fidelity to Wagner’s works necessitated a literal dedication to their stage directions – a confusion compounded by the principle of Werktreue (fidelity to the work) that also became prevalent in the early decades of the century (being pursued by, among others, Mahler and Roller).Footnote ⁴

Appia had all too few opportunities to realize his theories on the stage – a Ring in Basle was discontinued after Die Walküre in 1925 – but his influence was profound. In addition to Roller, who acknowledged the importance of his work, his ideas were reflected in productions of the Ring by Gustav Wunderwald in Berlin; Hans Wildermann in Cologne, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf; and Ludwig Sievert in several German cities. Above all, his principles were to be put into practice by Wieland Wagner at “New Bayreuth,” which began when the Festival reopened in 1951 after the Second World War. Prior to that, reform at Bayreuth had been more cautious. Siegfried Wagner’s most forward-looking production, that of Tannhäuser in 1930, shortly before his death, ushered in the reign of Heinz Tietjen as artistic director of the festival, with Emil Preetorius as his scenic designer. Given that the Nazis were bringing to a halt all progressive experimentation in dramaturgy in Germany, Preetorius was in an impossible position, caught as he was between the demands of the rigid Bayreuth orthodoxy and a desire for moderate reform. In his essay Wagner: Bild und Vision (Wagner: Stage Picture and Vision) Preetorius somewhat confusingly argues simultaneously for, on the one hand, a faithful, even reverential re-creation of the many natural effects in Wagner’s works, which, he said, “must be rendered clearly and with complete illusion,” and, on the other, for a recognition that the works were conceived essentially as allegories.Footnote ⁵ The latter insight justified his own use of symbolism, reflecting that of the composer himself, and, like Appia, he espoused the reduction of stage props and the imaginative use of lighting.

One further innovative production of this period deserves special mention: that of Die Walküre (1940) at the Bolshoi, Moscow, by the Russian film-maker Sergey Eisenstein. Believing that traditional productions disregarded the mythical and prehistorical dimensions of the Ring, Eisenstein set out to depict a prelapsarian world in which man and nature were indivisibly united. A huge ash tree, representing the tree of life, dominated the stage, and not only in act 1; had he been able, Eisenstein would have liked its branches to have reached right out to embrace the audience, thus conjoining performers and spectators in a kind of primitive ritual drama. Unsurprisingly, Eisenstein’s approach was cinematic, with vibrant lighting and graphically realized stage pictures. His intention of using film to depict the events of Siegmund’s narration was thwarted, but he did introduce a “mimic chorus,” a group of extras, to play out the narration of Sieglinde in pantomime and to shadow the singers in the “Ride of the Valkyries.” His enacting of the events of the Prelude has subsequently become something of a commonplace, as has his idea of having Hunding accompanied by a gang of henchmen.Footnote ⁶

With the 1951 reopening of the Bayreuth Festival, the stage was set for a clean break from the traditional style of productions at the Festspielhaus, consistent with the determination of the new regime to distance the festival from its dubious associations with Hitler. Thus in his first Ring (1951), Richard Wagner’s grandson, Wieland, intended to present the work as a timeless moral drama shorn of its trappings of German saga. The pictorial sets, foliage, rocks, and winged helmets were largely jettisoned and the mise-en-scène reduced to bare essentials. The few remaining elements of naturalistic scenery were quickly abandoned in future seasons. The entire action was set on a circular platform or disk which, symbolic of the Ring, acted as a satisfying unifying device for the cycle. Valhalla was projected cinematically as a dreamlike vision, and the disk became obscured as Wotan became increasingly enmeshed in his contracts. After the final conflagration, the disk returned to its original state. Wieland Wagner gave short shrift to excessive reliance on the stage directions, drawing a distinction between the stage directions, which remained bound to nineteenth-century theatrical modes, and the timeless ideas of the works themselves, which demand constantly new representations. The stage directions, in other words, were to be regarded as inner visions rather than practical demands.

Wieland Wagner’s second Ring (1965) went even further in banishing props and stage furniture as well as anything approaching traditional scenery. It also pursued at greater depth the psychological dimensions of the cycle, incorporating archetypal forms inspired by the sculpture of Henry Moore and elements of Greek drama that reflected one of the key inspirations of Wagner’s own dramaturgy.Footnote ⁷ The tabula rasa of New Bayreuth productions was perceived at the time as representing a clean break with the associations of the past, though in light of subsequent revelations about Wieland’s proximity to Hitler and the Nazi regime, it has come to be regarded as anything but a depoliticization.

Wieland Wagner’s conception proved highly influential throughout Europe in the 1950s and 60s. Ralph Koltai’s design for the Ring of John Blatchley and Glen Byam Shaw at Sadler’s Wells (later English National Opera) in the early 70s, for example, drew on abstract symbolism to evoke a world beyond ordinary human dimensions. Koltai’s designs, however, combined naturalistic tendencies with a futuristic element. Thus forests and rocks were present, but represented by shiny bluish-silver metallic planks and spheres.

By the 1970s, avant-garde directors were ready to move on beyond Wieland Wagner’s austere style. Götz Friedrich, who directed the Ring at Covent Garden (1976), with Peter Sykora as designer, had been an assistant to and later collaborator with the legendary Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper, Berlin, and he was one of the first wave of European directors to attempt to fuse the latter’s principles of psychological and social realism, and his emphasis on role identification, with the quite contrary ones of Brechtian theory. What Brecht in his dramas was determined to confront and overcome were the limitations of the theater of illusion. Rather than pretend that we were witnessing real events unfolding in real time, Brecht wished to emphasize that we were sitting in a theater, reflecting on and learning from them, like the audience of the bards in ancient times. This is what Brecht meant by “epic theater”: a quasi-historical mode in which, moreover, the audience was encouraged to remain critically detached from the characters and their emotions – hence the term Verfremdungseffekt, usually rendered, somewhat inadequately in English, as “alienation effect.” The most obviously Brechtian device used by Friedrich was his bringing of characters, notably Loge, Alberich, and Wotan, to the front of the stage to address the audience directly (This is a device that has been used increasingly frequently in recent years).Footnote ⁸ More broadly, Friedrich asserted that the action of the Ring takes place not in thirteenth-century Scandinavia, nor in nineteenth-century Germany, but here and now in whichever theater we are currently located. What he was producing, in other words, was not a myth, but Welttheater, a piece of theater which holds up a mirror to the world. “Every artistic realization,” wrote Friedrich in a program note, “must establish its ‘today’ and ‘here’ in order the better to understand the time span which Wagner projects from a mythical past through his own epoch and on into the distant future.”Footnote ⁹ The twin notions of timelessness and of the world as a stage were reflected in the large hydraulic platform – capable of twisting and tilting to reveal the heights of the gods and the bowels of the earth beneath – that formed the playing area. Friedrich also perceived differences of mode between the four dramas: Rheingold as a mystery play viewed ironically through modern eyes, Walküre as typical nineteenth-century psychological theater, Siegfried as black comedy, and Götterdämmerung as the last stage of a glittering civilization doomed to decline.

Another Felsenstein disciple, Joachim Herz, was contemporaneously building a Ring in Leipzig (1973–6) that more explicitly referenced the history of the Ring itself and events in Wagner’s own life. It was a socially critical production which foreshadowed a number of future trends; for all that, it went largely unremarked in the West at the time. Beginning the second act of Die Walküre inside Valhalla instead of on a rocky pass was to become a popular idea, for example, while the setting of the action in a bourgeois palatial home served to remind the audience that Wotan’s dilemma arises from the conflict between natural instincts and materialist society.Footnote ¹⁰

The landmark centenary staging at Bayreuth (1976) by Patrice Chéreau, designed by Richard Peduzzi, similarly invoked a modern setting for the action – roughly the century framed by the history of the work to date (1876–1976). In a daring interplay of the work’s mythological and contemporary planes, Chéreau captured the ideological thrust of Wagner’s tetralogy: the degradation of love and of humanity’s finer instincts in a modern age dominated by industrial innovation, materialism, and profit-making. Thus, the curtain went up in scene 1 of Das Rheingold not on the traditional flowing waters of the Rhine but on a hydro-electric dam (rusty and disused by the end of Götterdämmerung, as the Rhine, deprived of its gold, had dried up). Siegfried’s forging of the sword was later to be assisted by a steam hammer.

What was also revolutionary about Chéreau’s production was the degree of naturalism he brought to the acting style (as opposed to the nonnaturalistic modes of production evident elsewhere in the staging). With the stunningly attractive Peter Hofmann and Jeannine Altmeyer as the libidinous twins, the staging of the love scene of Die Walküre was more sexually charged than any seen before. Naturalistic acting of this kind is now commonplace, and audiences expect dramatic conviction as well as vocal expertise from the cast; in 1976 it was comparatively rare on the operatic stage. Memorable moments include the following: the ineffably tender scene of Brünnhilde (Gwyneth Jones) kneeling in front of Wotan (Donald McIntyre) before their contretemps in act 2; the unforgettable image of Wotan, as he looks into his own soul, whispering his innermost thoughts to his reflection in a full-length drawing-room mirror, and his deeply moving embrace of the son he has just caused to be killed; as well as Heinz Zednik’s virtuoso comic performance as Mime – neurotic, terrified, but pathetically ambitious, he resembled a Daumier caricature.Footnote ¹¹

Chéreau’s production is today held up by conservative critics (and audiences) as a paragon, while the latest horror is excoriated. What was described at the time as “directorial itchiness” is now praised as vibrant theatricality, though Chéreau’s understanding of “fidelity” to Wagner (and that of the conductor, Pierre Boulez, also) took longer to establish itself as a principle.Footnote ¹² While Chéreau was blazing a trail for radical Wagner production in the last quarter of the twentieth century, there were isolated manifestations of a more conservative tendency elsewhere. One example was at Bayreuth, where the fetishization to faithfully adhere to stage directions in the production of Peter Hall/William Dudley (1983) resulted, on the one hand, in an attempt to realize those directions literally and, on the other, in the rather comical vast tank of water for the Rhinemaidens to swim in.Footnote ¹³ Ultraconservatism also prevailed at the Metropolitan, New York, where the hyperrealistic production of Otto Schenk/Günther Schneider-Siemssen (1989) held sway until 2009. Notable for its monumental sets, with mountain heights and subterranean caverns, all evocative of German Romantic landscape paintings, the production was popular with audiences for whom cinematic escapism was more of a priority than ideological engagement.

The production of François Rochaix/Robert Israel for Seattle (1986) was a compromise between the representational and the symbolically abstract, motivated and unified by a theatrical metaphor. The artifice of the theater was constantly alluded to, and Wotan resembled Wagner himself stage-managing events behind the scenes. The Valkyries sailed through the air on fairground horses and the showstopping two-ton dragon Fafner was a fire-breathing, acid-drooling contraption with a nineteenth-century steam engine for a body and a crane for a neck. The production that succeeded this one in Seattle, by Stephen Wadsworth/Thomas Lynch (2001), was a conscious reversion to hypernaturalism: lush woodland scenes straight out of the anthology of German Romanticism with gnarled tree trunks and grassy knolls. Spectacular special effects included Rhinemaidens suspended on wires, whose “flying” presented the illusion of swimming; there was a real horse for Brünnhilde’s Grane. Inherent in this “green” conception of the Ring, however, was an ecological concern; the production also reflected the Pacific North-West location in its arboricultural detail.Footnote ¹⁴

Back in Europe, the design for the time tunnel set by Peter Sykora for the second Ring of Götz Friedrich (Berlin, 1985), seen also in Washington, Tokyo, and London, was based on the Washington DC subway and on Henry Moore’s drawings of the London Underground as a wartime refuge. The tunnel was to be understood as a shelter where survivors of a nuclear disaster were doomed to reenact the story of the Ring, which had brought about the catastrophe. Thus the dramaturgy was once again Brechtian, consciously distancing the audience from the stage events, which were merely being shown to us.Footnote ¹⁵ Few of the leading characters were viewed sympathetically: Wotan removed Alberich’s Ring by spearing his hand off; Siegmund was shaggily unkempt and distinctly unheroic; an empty-headed, amoral Siegfried made free with Gutrune, even before he’d been given the potion; Gunther, unduly intimate with his sister Gutrune, wore a moronic grin that occasionally froze to a terrified stare.

The next production of the Ring at Bayreuth, that of Harry Kupfer/Hans Schavernoch (1988), engaged forcefully with the work’s ecological aspect, the entire action taking place in a world already ravaged by a catastrophe, presumably nuclear. Their unit set for the cycle consisted of a Weltstrasse, or street of world history, connecting past, present, and future and extending back some fifty meters behind the proscenium. The abandonment of love and of humanity’s finer sensibilities in favor of territorial aggrandizement and enhanced material possessions led inevitably, Kupfer suggested, to the despoliation of nature and ultimately global extinction. Central to this reading was his characterization of Wotan (memorably incarnated by John Tomlinson), whose restless, vigorous stage persona unmistakably suggested an incipiently disreputable, morally compromised father of the gods. While Kupfer’s Wotan arguably still seeks a moral solution to his dilemma,Footnote ¹⁶ his representation as devious and unscrupulous, verging on the criminal, came to dominate productions for decades to come, not least in Kupfer’s own reworking for the Berlin Staatsoper (1996).

Another influential production of this era was that of Ruth Berghaus/Axel Manthey in Frankfurt (1987), which continued the process of demythologization of Wagner’s work, with reference to both Brechtian principles and the Theater of the Absurd (the Wanderer and Alberich, for example, sat comically side by side clasping their knees, like Beckett’s tramps in Waiting for Godot). Playing off the music against the words, in a dialectical manner, Berghaus, a disciple of Brecht and one-time intendant of the Berliner Ensemble (then in East Berlin), sought to distance the audience from the emotions invested in the characters. Sets and costumes provided an astonishing sequence of images, often shocking, as with the grotesque mask-like objects that appeared instead of Nibelungs, and calculated to debunk. A vocabulary of gestures, often bizarre – the placing of a hand over an eye, symbolic of the loving impulse with overtones of wisdom and insight – consistently hijacked naturalistic convention but functioned like a system of leitmotifs across the tetralogy. Novel use was made of stage props. Fricka was represented by a chair, neatly symbolizing both authority and domesticity but at the same time evoking the element of the absurd. Fricka carried a chair on her entry in Die Walküre; Wotan drove Brünnhilde back with it when asserting Fricka’s demand that Siegmund be killed; Brünnhilde entered bearing it for the Annunciation of Death; and it returned for the Wotan–Brünnhilde argument over obedience. There was an amusing piece of stage business as Wotan and Fricka both dived for the chair in order to present a “normal” front to Brünnhilde when she appeared at the end of their dispute.Footnote ¹⁷

The Ring directed and designed by Herbert Wernicke at La Monnaie in Brussels (1991) was equally provocative in the audacity of its visual imagery: a grand piano, representing the primacy of music, on stage throughout; Fricka’s rams and Brünnhilde’s horse, Grane, represented by besuited extras with animal heads; Wagner’s stage directions projected as flickering silent-film titles.

The influence of such imagery, especially Berghaus’, was evident in the production by Richard Jones/Nigel Lowery for Covent Garden (1994–5). Here the visual images referenced Picasso, Ernst, Klee, and pop art, while the action oscillated between slapstick comedy and macabre horror, often combining the two. In Rheingold, the fetishistic identification of the gold with women’s shoes critiqued the prizing of material objects in capitalist societies (such as that initiated by Alberich); Donner’s red boxing glove and a waltzing Erda are just two of countless arresting images. In Siegfried, wardrobes provided a resonant symbol, their Freudian connotation pointed up in the portrayal of Mime (the self-proclaimed father and mother in one), wearing Sieglinde’s frock and wielding a menacing knife that looked as if it belonged to Mrs. Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. The forest proved to be a site of further Freudian/Jungian horrors, with the dragon Fafner as the Terrible Mother in a wardrobe, wearing the same frock as Mime but also sporting a pumpkin head to be lopped off and sliced up. The Personenregie, by now the norm rather than the exception in the post-Chéreau era, was integral to the surreal theatrical ambience invoked in this production, though the conductor, Bernard Haitink, was notoriously unpersuaded by the virtues of the latter.Footnote ¹⁸

In their Ring for Amsterdam (1999), Pierre Audi and George Tsypin extended the already broad stage of the Muziektheater into the audience space, with some seats closely adjacent to the action, and the orchestra not only visible but becoming part of the set. Traditional props were frequently abandoned, replaced by symbolic elements, such as chains dangling from the ceiling in the first scene of Rheingold foreshadowing the slavery that capitalistic acquisition brings in its wake.

Many of the foregoing productions, from those of Herz, Chéreau, and Friedrich onwards, would be classed as examples of Regietheater. As such, they embody principles of post-structuralist theories that came to dominate literary studies from the 1960s, the chief of these being deconstruction, which essentially disassembles traditional hierarchies. Roland Barthes’ landmark essay The Death of the Author (1968) specifically challenged the traditional assumption that the author is the sole origin of the text and the only authority for its interpretation. Post-structuralism generally emphasizes the unstable nature of signification (signs and symbols, whether words or music); deconstruction, for which the primary source is Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie (1967), likewise legitimizes a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations, encouraging the active participation of the reader/audience in arriving at their own.

Two further, and not unrelated, dramaturgical theories should also be mentioned at this point: “metatheatre,” a term coined by Lionel Abel in 1963,Footnote ¹⁹ and “post-dramatic theatre,” more accurately described as a form of “post-Brechtian theatre,” was articulated most notably by Hans-Thies Lehmann.Footnote ²⁰ Metatheatrical elements (the Greek word “meta” means “beyond”) are those in which a play comments on itself or in which the theatrical constituents are highlighted. (The play within a play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a classic example.) Abel applied the principle to the self-reflective dramaturgies of Brecht, Pirandello, and Genet. Post-dramatic theater’s chief features are as follows: narrative dissolution, deconstruction of plotline, replacement of high culture by more demotic forms including debate and audience participation, an element of hostility towards a (bourgeois) audience, and a fragmenting of reality such that the totality is never grasped. The work of art itself is essentially less important for its intrinsic value than as a trigger for audience self-interrogation. Paradoxically, post-dramatic theater even returns to a form of modified naturalism, sometimes called “hypernaturalism,” involving a recharging of the banality and mediocrity of everyday life. Its practitioners include several directors who have at one time or another tackled Wagner: Heiner Müller, Robert Wilson, Christoph Marthaler, Christoph Schlingensief, La Fura dels Baus, Achim Freyer, Klaus Michael Grüber, Frank Castorf, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

By the turn of the century, all these avant-garde dramaturgical principles had become firmly established in the productions of opera directors and designers working in Europe. In the following decade and a half, during a period of unprecedented Ring activity worldwide (at least three dozen new productions of the complete cycle were staged worldwide between 2000 and 2015), they continued to develop in productions throughout Europe, gradually making headway in North America too.

Nowhere were these dramaturgical principles more in evidence than in the Stuttgart Ring of 2002, in which the denial of totality was betokened in the allocation of each of the four operas to a different director: Joachim Schlömer, Christoph Nel, Jossi Wieler, and Peter Konwitschny. Nature was either totally absent in these productions or ironically referenced, as in the idyllic nature scene projected by a video camera in Konwitschny’s Götterdämmerung. The linear narrative was disrupted throughout by metatheatrical means, the most egregious example being the portrayal of Brünnhilde’s progress from avenging virago in act 2 to all-wise, forgiving heroine in act 3. For the final scene, Konwitschny had his Brünnhilde appear at the rear, as an “ordinary” modern woman in a vermilion suit. She switched off the projector, gently ushered Hagen’s men off stage, and comforted Gutrune. She then woke up Gunther and Siegfried, similarly steering them into the wings before occupying center stage herself. Calmly addressing the audience – the auditorium lighting remaining up – she showed it the Ring. This, one was supposed to believe, was a human being like us, or perhaps a singer–actor playing a part, coming to terms with her betrayal. The curtain came down prematurely, and the final catastrophe was depicted by a projection of the stage directions as surtitles. We the audience were left to draw our own conclusions.Footnote ²¹ There was ironic humor aplenty too: a domestic setting with oven for Mime in Siegfried act 1, a simple wooden kitchen table and two chairs for Brünnhilde’s domicile on the rock (with Romantic cliff faces and lake projected behind), Siegfried as “emotionally retarded clown cum cave-boy”Footnote ²² – for his Rhine journey, he puts on a winged helmet and rides off on a kindergarten hobbyhorse.

A Konwitschny protégée, Vera Nemirova, deployed a similar metatheatrical technique in her Frankfurt production with Jens Kilian (2012). At the end of Rheingold, the gods descended into the audience where they nonchalantly sipped champagne, toasting the stage.Footnote ²³ Wotan, in Die Walküre, dressed in modern white shirt and gray trousers, was seen tottering like a businessman after a long night out, and these characters in general had contemporary features. Kilian’s austere, quasi-abstract sets, based on mobile concentric rings, allowed considerable flexibility of purpose.

A pair of productions from Scottish Opera and English National Opera (ENO) further explored the contemporary plane of the work, arguably at the expense of the mythological. Hildegard Bechtler’s sets for Tim Albery (Scottish Opera, 2003) created an urban setting. Hunding’s house sported a modern red couch, plus chairs and table with plastic tablecloth. On arrival home, he thrust his spear into something like an umbrella stand and later made threatening gestures with a bread knife. Wotan frequented a soulless, strip-lit hotel room, an apt location for the kind of assignations that had resulted in the Valkyries. Fricka tracked him down there and narrowly missed the sight of Brünnhilde spread-eagled on his double bed – the incestuous implications of this relationship were alluded to in a number of productions at this time. Act 2 of Siegfried was set in a suburban street, with streetlamp, tree, and bench; in act 3 the Wanderer summoned Erda by pressing the appropriate intercom button of her tenement apartment. Despite the technological/corporate/contemporary setting, it was difficult to identify a sociopolitical critique as such in the production.

Phyllida Lloyd’s cycle for ENO (2004–5), designed by Richard Hudson, brought the mythological and contemporary planes into collision right from the start by opening Rheingold in a domestic interior space; indeed, Wotan had to declaim his first lines from a bathtub. Mime’s forge in Siegfried was an even seedier domestic interior, with kitchen sink, bunk beds, and a workshop annex for the forging of the sword. The tawdry values of contemporary culture obtruded again in Twilight of the Gods, with a kitsch Wild West backdrop for the love duet, a health farm at Gibichung Hall, and a Jerry Springer-style wedding. Here the critique of capitalist materialism was sharper, and there was a powerful sense too of the iniquities of that society from a female perspective. If the potential of women was repeatedly highlighted, so too was their oppression, both historical and contemporary. Unforgettable was the piercing shriek heard at the beginning of Die Walküre, before a note was sounded – a primal scream of violated women through the ages. The pink floral-print frock and pinafore worn by Brünnhilde as she sent Siegfried, in Stetson and cowboy boots, off on his Rhine journey was an ironic comment on the objectification of women (as was the Hollywood production number of a wedding). Little wonder, perhaps, that this Brünnhilde, tested beyond endurance, turned into a cat-suited suicide bomber to bring about the end of the world.

The Canadian Opera Company, like Stuttgart Opera, turned to a quartet of directors for its Ring in Toronto (2006), though in this case the conception was unified to some extent by the work of a single designer, Michael Levine. Levine himself directed Das Rheingold, making virtuoso use of traditional theatrical techniques, including groups of extras, mime, and cloths in place of props. The transformation to Nibelheim was a stunning coup de théâtre realized with simple cloths and whirling, balletic figures. The giants were represented by an army of workers, with Fasolt and Fafner on their shoulders. Male and female extras engaged in a tug-of-war when Freia was abducted for a second time, and the death of Fasolt was enacted in a stylized, balletic mime, with the Ring being passed up through the army of men to Fafner. Such a mimetic play reaches back through the classic Leipzig Ring of Herz and the 1940 Bolshoi Walküre by Eisenstein to the preoccupations of Wagner himself, expressed notably in the 1871 essay Über die Bestimmung der Oper (On the Destiny of Opera). Mime and gesture, as well as dance, were from the start essential ingredients of the Gesamtkunstwerk which have arguably only come into their own in Wagner productions in the age of Regietheater. François Girard’s Siegfried, presented as a dreamlike fantasy in which the psychological preoccupations of the adolescent hero are revealed also had an anthropomorphizing tendency. Bear, dragon, and woodbird were all represented by humans, as was the ring of fire – white figures, lit in fiery orange, lying in a circle on the ground.Footnote ²⁴

For the Kirov Opera cycle (2003), the designer George Tsypin, prompted by conductor Valery Gergiev, came up with a visual concept that replaced the Nordic associations of the myth with something that looked towards Asia and the Russian steppes. Dominating the stage were huge giant-like figures, sometimes topped by death skulls or humanoid heads. A second element consisted of manikin figures, in turn taking on the aspect of Russian dolls, burial urns, a miniature terracotta army, and embryos. Extras were used imaginatively to mime action (the abduction of Brünnhilde by Gunther/Siegfried) or emotion (grief at the death of Siegfried) or objects (fire).Footnote ²⁵ The imagery was primitivist, anthropological, and multicultural. Various other productions at this period were location-specific too.

Mike Ashman’s production for Den Norske Opera, Oslo (1996), designed by Kathrine Hysing, opened with a striking image: the three Norns, locked in embrace, against a bare, brooding Nordic landscape. Valdemar Holm and Bente Lykke Møller produced a Nordic Ring for the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm (2008): the Norns and Erda in traditional Swedish dress, the Rhinemaidens in Hans Christian Andersen-style costumes. (This production also drew on metatheatrical elements: notably a play within a play and cinematic projections.)Footnote ²⁶ Francesca Zambello’s production, designed by Michael Yeargan (San Francisco, 2011), dubbed the “American Ring,” drew on distinctively American imagery: Alberich as a forty-niner in baggy overalls panning for gold, an ocean-liner gangplank to Valhalla for the gods, motorway arches out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Zambello’s conception was also a feminist one, with women as active rather than passive agents (Sieglinde helping to pull the sword out of the tree, Brünnhilde laying herself down for her long sleep). In the Immolation Scene, Brünnhilde, aided by Gutrune, the Rhinemaidens, and the Gibichung women, were represented as more caring, nurturing forces for good than the men who had caused the catastrophe.Footnote ²⁷ Neil Armfield’s Ring for Melbourne (2013), designed by Robert Cousins, combined Australian references (for example the members of the Victorian community, clad in modern bathing suits, whose sinuous movements represented the flow of the Rhine) with theatricalism (Alberich’s self-transformations in Rheingold were overseen by a top-hatted magician and his glamorous assistant) and an environmental theme.Footnote ²⁸ Anthony Pilavachi’s cycle for Lübeck (2010, designed by Momme Röhrbein) related each constituent part to a different book by Thomas Mann, a native of the city, beginning with the parallel tales of house-building and dynastic collapse in Rheingold and Buddenbrooks. The production also offered an approbatory catalogue of hommages to past productions (including Chéreau’s dam and Friedrich’s time tunnel) and other Wagner-related cultural references, such as Apocalypse Now for a “Ride of the Valkyries” spoof.Footnote ²⁹ Allusions of this kind were another postmodern trait common at this time.Footnote ³⁰

Back at Bayreuth, none of the three productions that followed Kupfer’s managed to attain the legendary status of his. Alfred Kirchner’s production (1994) was dominated by the arresting, often bizarre designs of Rosalie. Her sets, stylishly austere, could be described as “minimalist chic,” while her costumes, which referenced both ancient and contemporary myths, were emblematic creations denoting exaggerated personal characteristics (of both the singers and their roles). The production itself offered few psychological or philosophical insights.Footnote ³¹ In Jürgen Flimm’s production (2000, designed by Erich Wonder), the gods appeared in modern-day dress. Thus Wotan was seen in Die Walküre in his office, surrounded by telephones, computer terminals, and paper shredder (which he used to cover his tracks). Not simply corruptible, he was positively thuggish, continuing the trend manifested in many productions of the time. Another common trait was Flimm’s unity of locations. His Sieglinde implausibly returned after the murder of Siegmund to the wooden-slatted house where she was regularly raped by Hunding. More convincingly, Brünnhilde, fleeing her wrathful father Wotan, took herself to his house, Valhalla, presumably hoping to confront her father and seek to bring him round.Footnote ³² Like its predecessors, the production of Tankred Dorst/Frank Philipp Schlößmann (2006) attempted a convergence of mythological and contemporary spheres, but utilizing more fluid chronological planes, with modern sightseers and workmen weaving in and out among antique ruins, the gods appearing ubiquitously in some kind of parallel universe. The conception remained disappointingly undeveloped.Footnote ³³

A feminist orientation in Ring productions was by no means extraordinary in the first decade of the present century (see particularly those of Phyllida Lloyd and Francesco Zambello above), but the production of Kasper Holten, with designs by Marie í Dali and Steffen Aarfing for the Royal Danish Opera (Copenhagen, 2006), went further by framing the entire action as though filtered through Brünnhilde, looking back through her life to try to understand how and why she betrayed the man she loved. In the process, she was presented as a figure of even greater significance in the outcome of the drama than Wotan or Siegfried. Comic touches and brutal violence were juxtaposed in this production. There were also frequent “quotations” from other productions.Footnote ³⁴

Keith Warner, in his Covent Garden production with Stefan Lazaridis (2007), also offered occasional homages both to other Ring directors (for example Götz Friedrich and his platform) and to filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman. Warner’s chief concern was to present the shift from a god-centered universe to one controlled by human beings: the replacement of one world order by the rule of humanism in which men and women take responsibility for their actions. His production drew heavily on the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, to which Wagner owed so much, emphasizing that the god, Wotan, himself comes to realize the need for his supersession. Man is to be the measure of all things; reality is to be confronted without any supernatural aids. Scientific progress was seen in both positive and negative lights. A telescope, prominently situated in the gods’ drawing room in Rheingold, stood as a metaphor for such progress: By observing the heavens, man has come to understand the universe better. In the Nibelheim Scene, however, science and technology were abused. Alberich’s underground lair was transformed into a chamber of horrors, where unspeakable experiments in genetics were taking place. Severed limbs, warm corpses, and electric shocks recalled Frankenstein’s laboratory, with overtones of Dr. Mengele’s experiments.Footnote ³⁵

Another production incorporating deconstructive principles was that of David Alden/Gideon Davey (Munich, 2002–3), which disrupted unities and continuities of narrative and structure, interpolated a depiction of Alberich’s rape of Grimhilde, and generally reinterpreted the myth with broad, sometimes scabrous humor and postmodern latitude.Footnote ³⁶

The incorporation of mime and other choreographed movement, generally involving extras, as in the productions for the Canadian and Kirov Operas (see above), became commonplace. Achim Freyer (Los Angeles Opera, 2010, designed by Achim and Amanda Freyer) subscribed neither to Romanticism nor to the mode of his teacher Brecht, but to traditions both primitive and modernistic. Puppets and masks loomed large. The doll, according to Freyer, “is the first figure through which in childhood we depict ourselves. The child in us needs awakening.”Footnote ³⁷ The action was played out on a medieval-style stage, with a steeply raked disk surrounded by “stations”; characters represented as bulbous puppets, effigies, or carnival monsters, recalling the Mystery Cycles and folk theater of the Middle Ages. But Freyer’s production also referenced Dada and surrealism, as well as a theater of images initially associated with Antonin Artaud and more recently developed by Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor among others.

The Valencia Ring of La Fura dels Baus and Carlus Pedrissa (2009, designed by Roland Olbeter) deployed an army of extras and onstage assistants, exploiting La Fura’s origins in street theater, where the primary resource is the bodies of the actors. The latter were used to create such props as the Valkyries’ rock and Valhalla (a huge humanoid web consisting of bodies and extended arms and legs). Drawing on cutting-edge computer-generated video projection and 3D animation (video director: Franc Aleu), as well as circus acrobatics, mime, and complex stage machinery, La Fura created a stunningly original repertoire of theatrical images. Ironically, technical innovation was at the same time harnessed to comment on the degradation of nature by modern man.Footnote ³⁸

New media technology – multiple screens, surveillance, and so forth –predominated too in Ivo van Hove’s Antwerp Ring (2008). Siegfried and Gutrune interacted with each other via their avatars: sexier versions of their “real” onstage selves. Closer to La Fura’s dramaturgy was that of Andreas Kriegenburg in Munich (2012, designed by Harald B. Thor, with choreography by Zenta Haerter), who utilized human bodies to represent not only the elements and objects but also ideas and emotions. Thus the dragon in Siegfried was a swarming mass of blood-red human figures against a blue background, with two athletic extras swinging to and fro to represent a flicking, forked tongue. Theatrical trickery was here used also to comic effect, often drawing attention to itself in anti-illusionist mode.Footnote ³⁹

With multiple references to “local” Bauhaus design, the Dessau cycle of André Brücker/Jan Steigert (2015) also made use of new technology in multiscreen images that risked visual overload but repeatedly paid dividends. Siegfried’s inability to distinguish between adversaries on video and in real life threw new light on the character’s fearless confrontation with the dragon.Footnote ⁴⁰

Though promising to harness cutting-edge video and digital technology to twenty-first-century theatrical techniques, the Robert Lepage/Carl Fillion production for the Metropolitan, New York (2012), proved only a limited success. The 45-ton, 24-plank set, known as the Machine, was indeed capable, with skillful lighting and computer projections, of rendering cosmological phenomena such as fire-encircled rocks, dappled woodland, and much more; however, a price was paid in the lack of engagement on either an ideological or a purely theatrical level. Moreover, whereas in Das Rheingold the Machine was deployed in a variety of different configurations, as the cycle went on, it was used increasingly as a mere backdrop for projections. Many found the experience more successful in cinematic transmission than live in the theater.Footnote ⁴¹ The damning indictment of Alex Ross in The New Yorker was “the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.”Footnote ⁴²

For the Vienna State Opera (2009, designed by Rolf Glittenberg), Sven-Eric Bechtolf used the human figure in sculpted formations: the Rhinemaidens as the Three Graces, the gods adopting a defiant pose as the giants entered. Alberich in Nibelheim appeared to be creating gold humanoids out of body parts. And when the gold was later piled up in front of Freia, it took the form of a female figure made of gold. This was the future conceived by Alberich, in which women are objectified and sexualized for the gratification of male desire.

The production by Guy Cassiers/Enrico Bagnoli (Milan/Berlin, 2013) played out against an ever-changing video projection based on a frieze by the Antwerp-born sculptor Jef Lambeaux, Les Passions humaines (1889), featuring human bodies writhing in both ecstasy and agony. Choreographed movement, occasionally expressive, frequently distracting, was also recurrent. The permanent visual flux, however, was scarcely able to conceal the lack of ideological engagement with the work.Footnote ⁴³ The Paris production of Günter Krämer and Jürgen Backmann (2013), on the other hand, projected – especially in the Walküre – an explicitly political interpretation, confronting also the tenets of orthodox religion. The gods’ power, symbolized by Valhalla, was represented by a Speer-like graphic construction, in capital letters, reading “GERMANIA”; as that power waned, so the structure was reduced to the shell of a Nuremberg-style stadium.Footnote ⁴⁴

In the Ring at Weimar (Michael Schulz/Dirk Becker, 2008) the extras included a gang of unidentified henchmen for the Wanderer’s inquisition of Mime, a number of teenagers described by the director as “ravens,” and no fewer than three doubles for Grane, one an elderly woman who rearranged furniture and prepared for dinner. Contemporary costumes and props (e.g., baseball bats for Hunding’s men) here had a domesticating tendency, veering dangerously close to television soaps.Footnote ⁴⁵

While many of the foregoing productions demonstrated deconstructive or metatheatrical principles of one kind or another, the bicentenary staging by Frank Castorf and Aleksandar Denić at Bayreuth (2013) would seem to represent the ne plus ultra of post-dramatic theater as applied to Wagner. Video projections (generated in real time by visible operators) offered revealing close-ups or caustic commentary on the characters’ (not least Wotan’s and Siegfried’s) less heroic aspects. A multifaceted mime character was introduced, as were visual leitmotifs such as a doll and bridal veil (symbolizing Brünnhilde’s thwarted desire for commitment by Siegfried), food and bling (greed and materialistic acquisition). At its best, notably in Siegfried, Castorf’s staging offered both sociopsychological insight and theatrical bravura. But in deploying irony mercilessly and consistently to undermine the echt-Wagnerian categories of idealism, heroism, nobility, and sublimity, the production posed the question of whether there was not actually a fundamental disjunction between the Wagnerian music drama and post-dramatic theater.Footnote ⁴⁶ The latter, at least in this form, represents of course only one dramaturgical approach and, doubtless, theories drawing on deconstruction and metatheater – not to mention others yet to be formulated – will continue to enrich productions of the Ring as the century proceeds.