Ring 2018 articles V2.qxp_RING 2018 5/19/18 4:20 PM Page 1 B Y P E T E R B A S S E T T WHAT ichard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is rarely described as an extended love story, but that is what it is. The changing relationships throughout the four oRperas tend to obscure this central idea but, when you think about PRICE it, love is the thread that binds the whole story together—not love confined to a single pair of individuals but love as the alternative to hatred and revenge, power and property, greed and envy. The story begins with love’s renunciation and ends with its triumph as LOVE? the one irreplaceable, transforming ingredient in a new world order. That surely is the significance of the soaring orchestral melody that concludes Götterdämmerung. It is difficult to separate the allegory of the Ring from events in A century before post-Napoleonic europe when rival forces were attempting, on the one hand, to restore reactionary systems of government (think George Orwell’s 1984, of them as the gods) and, on the other hand, to establish new sys- tems of capital ushered in by the Industrial Revolution (think of alberich and his ilk). The result was a chain of political uprisings the Ring warned of throughout europe in the 1830s and ’40s—and incredible intellec- tual and creative ferment. Goethe and Beethoven were alive when the rise of totalitarianism Wagner was a teenager, Charles Darwin was four years his senior, and Karl Marx was five years his junior. The philosophers Hegel, and the pursuit of power Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were his contemporaries, and Sig- mund Freud was born when Wagner was in his 40s. We are still, in many ways, heirs to that seminal period in european thought. at the expense of love. In that context, Wagner’s eagerness to throw his own, often provocative ideas into the arena reflected his need to join the debate, and the Ring is, first and foremost, a drama of ideas. as a young radical, Wagner argued that the basic goodness of human beings had been subverted by the property-owning classes and the selfish interests of the state. In this he was echoing the ideas of the French philosopher and socialist Pierre-Joseph Proud- hon (1809–65) who famously asserted that property is theft. and “what a thief steals, you steal from the thief,” advises Loge in the second scene of Das Rheingold. But whereas Marx and engels saw the future of human society in terms of the emancipation of the proletariat, Wagner saw it in terms of the redeeming power of love. This was a worldview that owed much to the writings of German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), to whom Wagner dedi- cated his important essay of 1849, “The artwork of the Future.” People who knew the young Wagner in his Dresden years were impressed by his passion and high-mindedness. In March 1849, for instance, the actor edward Devrient made the following entry in his diary: “Met Kapellmeister Wagner on the Terrace; another discussion about his theories for changing the world. He still thinks that only by destroying property is it possible to civilize mankind…. He thinks of putting an end to all deficiencies, believes in the absolute and original perfection of the human race—a perfection lost only as a result of the state…. Finally, he had to agree with me that only moral amelioration can put an end to our misery and that this would produce the right types of state, R based on the law of love.” e v a e The link to Rheingold is remarkably clear. The absolute original W y perfection of the human race? Well, that is the opening prelude and R o C the naiveté of the Rhinemaidens. A perfection lost only as a result of 20 SAN FRANCISCO OPERA Ring 2018 articles V2.qxp_RING 2018 5/19/18 4:20 PM Page 2 the state? That is the coming of feudal rulers like Wotan, and pow- erful plutocrats like alberich. and the solution? The right types of state, based on the law of love. It is all there in a single diary entry by someone who knew Wagner intimately. Three months earlier, in December 1848, Devrient had written: “Kapellmeister Wagner read me his completed opera poem Siegfried’s Death. The fellow’s a poet through and through. a beauti- ful piece of work. alliteration, as used by him, is a real find for opera poems; it ought to be raised to the level of general principle. I con- sider this poem to be his best and most dramatic. afterwards we spoke at length about language, instruction of the people, Christian development, and, of course, we got on to the state, at which point he again mounted his favorite hobby-horse, the destruction of capi- tal. But there’s no doubt his is the most original mind of all the peo- ple I know in Dresden.” The Industrial Revolution had, after all, been a golden opportunity for some and a hell on earth for others, just as Wagner depicted it in the third scene of Rheingold with the hellish hammerings of anvils and the screams of the tormented Nibelungs. The victorians themselves recognized that this unprecedented social transformation had a dark R side: the mind-numbing toiling of men and the servitude of women e v a and children in the workhouses, factories, and mines. and behind e W y everything stood, as it were, alberich, who was prepared to renounce R o love in order to acquire power and wealth. C The Ring is, first and foremost, a drama of ideas. Wagner had no doubt at all who alberich symbolized: the tyrant, the overlord, the power-hungry invader. Six years after the failure of the Dresden revolution of 1849, Wagner’s despair at the apparent triumph of the forces of greed, materialism, and artistic shallowness caused him to write to Liszt: “Let us treat the world only with contempt, for it deserves no better; but let no hope be placed in it, so that our hearts be not deluded! It is evil, evil, fundamentally evil… it belongs to alberich: no one else!! away with it!” a century before George orwell wrote his novel 1984, Wagner was warning of the rise of totalitarianism and the pursuit of power at the expense of love. We know this from several sources, and especially from his essay “The artwork of the Future” in which he expressed the view that the earliest societies arose nat- R urally out of humanity’s instinctive need for mutual love and fel- e v a lowship. But later, he said, authoritarian states arose unnaturally, e W y out of none of humanity’s instinctive needs, being imposed by R o the few on the many. The authoritarian state was, he said, a C crime against human nature, and therefore against nature itself. Opposite: The twin lovers Siegfried (Christopher Ventris) and Sieglinde “a crime against nature,” which is the starting point for Rhein- (Eva-Maria Westbroek) sing the Act I love duet from Die Walküre, as seen gold. These ideas weren’t expressed in an essay called “The Poli- in the Company’s 2010 staging. tics of the Future” or “The Society of the Future” but “The Above: Hagen (Andrea Silvestrelli), the son of Alberich, rallies his men in artwork of the Future.” Wagner wanted to go to the very heart of Act II of Götterdämmerung; the eponymous hero Siegfried (Jay Hunter what made humans “human.” Morris) wakes Brünnhilde (Nina Stemme) from her magic sleep. Both We find similar ideas contained in his sketches and commen- photos date from the Company’s 2011 Ring production. encoremediagroup.com/programs 21 Ring 2018 articles V2.qxp_RING 2018 5/19/18 4:20 PM Page 3 S e G a M I N a M e G D I R B / R o e T v o a H e P W Z y S R o © C “I immediately recognized Wagner as an impractical dreamer,” wrote Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76). Bakunin (left) was one of the composer’s closest associates in Dresden and during the city’s 1849 uprising; (center) from 2011’s Rheingold, the quintessential plutocrat and renouncer of love, Alberich (Gordon Hawkins), torments his fellow Nibelungs with his all-powerful ring; (right) Wagner at his home in Bayreuth, Germany with his second wife, Cosima, and the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Wagner married Cosima, Liszt’s daughter, in 1870, six years before the premiere of the Ring. taries for two unfinished operas planned in early 1849: Jesus of will force himself on their women who shun his attentions and Nazareth, whose central theme is that one does not overcome love- reject his love. They should beware of the nocturnal army when lessness by being loveless, or overcome violence by using violence; the Nibelung hoard rises from silent depths! We can almost see and Achilles, in which the “hero” is identified as a fully developed the torchlit processions and hear the tread of marching feet. human being, free from obligations to so-called gods. “Man is god Into a world of bountiful nature has come the lust for power, perfected,” wrote Wagner, and we see in the Ring a progression from with which love can never coexist, and we are plunged into moral human beings constrained by their belief in gods, to those who are darkness. But the supreme irony is that alberich, who renounces free to build a new order based on love.