‘Wagner and the Creation of the Ring' Review: Back to Valhalla

Wall Street Journal

12 hours ago

The world had plenty of reasons to forget Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle, 'Der Ring des Nibelungen.' None of the four makes sense without the others—they premiered together in 1876—but the prospect of sitting through 15 or 16 hours of musical theater in the course of a week, as the composer intended, is not one a normal person would seek out. The cost and complexity of mounting four operas in a few days has proved, over the decades, similarly overwhelming. It is easy to imagine other works by Wagner remaining in the repertoire—'Tannhäuser' (1845), 'Lohengrin' (1850), 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg' (1868) and especially 'Tristan und Isolde' (1865)—with the 'Ring' remembered much as Samuel Barber's 'Antony and Cleopatra' (1966): an overambitious flop.
The 'Ring' cycle's plot, which is based on Wagner's idiosyncratic interpretation of Norse myths, is convoluted and at times almost nonsensical. And then, of course, there are the unhappy facts that (a) the composer derived his saga from some of the sources later used by German academic theorists to postulate a superior Nordic race and (b) Wagner was a virulent antisemite. Worse: Adolf Hitler adored Wagner's music. Some important 'Ring' manuscripts no longer exist because they were destroyed when Hitler's bunker went up in flames in 1945. So entangled with each other were Hitler's and Wagner's legacies that the Nazi dictator and Winifred Wagner, the widow of the composer's son, Siegfried, were once rumored to be lovers. The German novelist Thomas Mann, at once a fanatical admirer of Wagner's music and a loather of Nazism, wrote in 1940 that, with its 'mixture of roots-in-the-soil and eyes-toward-the-future, its appeal for a classless society, its mythical-reactionary revolutionism—with all these, it is the exact spiritual forerunner of the 'metapolitical' movement today terrorizing the world.'
The 'Ring' operas' association with the Nazis led stage directors after 1945, chiefly the composer's grandson Wieland Wagner, to strip the operas of their Germanic elements. The urge was defensible in the immediate postwar years, but over the decades it has led to aesthetic perversity—Valkyries wearing pantsuits; the palace of the gods, Valhalla, looking like a discothèque. A few years ago the Lyric Opera of Chicago staged 'Siegfried,' the third 'Ring' opera, in which the sword-wielding eponymous hero appeared as an overgrown child playing with dolls, his baggy polo stained with fingerpaint.
Such 'transgressive' interpretations, aside from their bad taste, appear calculated to prevent the audience from enjoying Wagner's music. I well recall the Edinburgh Festival's production of 'Die Walküre,' the cycle's second opera, and wondering why there was a bathroom on stage and why the eyepatch-wearing Wotan, king of the gods, felt the need at a critical moment to wash his face in its sink. The quality of the singing or orchestral playing I don't recall, so perplexed was I by the toiletry and other distractions.