Giants, valkyries and Nazi links – Wagner’s Ring remains both toxic and irresistible
Tickets for the -Bayreuth Festival of Wagner’s music, held every summer in the Bavarian town the composer made his home, used to be as hard to come by as Centre Court seats for a Wimbledon final. You had to add your name to a waiting list, pull strings, join a Wagner society, before you could take a seat among the 2,000 or so others who form the audience each August evening, and most afternoons, in the opera house Wagner built in Bayreuth in 1876.
It is unlike any other. In an amphitheatre with the most uncomfortable benches on which I have ever sat, you are literally locked in, in stifling heat, for the longest dramatic works in the repertoire. Wagner’s 1868 opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg lasts over five hours. The Ring cycle – comprising four operas written between 1848 and 1874, and which many regard as his masterpiece – takes more than 15 hours to -perform in its entirety. (Wagner’s -original plan was to -conclude the cycle with the audience -burning down the theatre.) The first of these, Das Rheingold, opens at -Covent -Garden this week, -marking the start of a new Ring cycle for the Royal Opera House, with Antonio Pappano -conducting and Barrie Kosky directing.
Over its two and a half uninterrupted hours, Das Rheingold brings you giants, a magic ring, a dwarf who turns into a toad, three watery nymphs, 18 tuned anvils, and -trouble in Valhalla. If this weren’t challenging enough, it was composed by the author of the most egregious anti-Semitic essay in music criticism, whose music was so loved by Hitler the original scores perished with him in the Bunker as Berlin burned. His works are never performed in Israel.
Why, then, do so many people flock to Wagner’s opera, at extra-ordinary expense, -inconvenience, and physical, intellectual and moral stress? Because, despite its -problematic aspects, the Ring cycle is one of the most profound and moving achievements of western civilisation.
It is a drama starring the gods of Norse myth – but it is not really about gods. It is a cosmological epic concerning bourgeois life, bourgeois fates. It sometimes feels like an ITV series about people with kitchen islands getting -messily divorced – but raised, amplified, expanded to the level of archetypes. Archetypes with Agas.
It sometimes looks like this, too. The difficulty of putting on Wagner’s music-dramas drives -producers to come up with ever more demanding concepts; -methods to frame the piece, to give a proper distance from -material that feels both irresistible and toxic. I have seen Rings with bus stops, Rings in neon, Rings with Kalashnikovs, Rings within Rings.
A bold new vision is promised by the upcoming production at the ROH. There is nothing wrong with a bold new vision. I adored Richard Jones’s Ring at Covent Garden in 1994, so bold and so new it caused a fight in the interval. For me, it worked. I was dazzled and deeply moved, and went three times.
This was partly because the peerless Bernard Haitink conducted it (he hated the production) and the cast was superb. But it was also because I found myself asking: “What do gods look like? What does Valhalla look like?”
I don’t know and, because of that, Jones’s Rhinemaidens in latex fat suits and the Valkyrie -Brünnhilde with a paper bag on her head drew me in. If you think -Brünnhilde should look as -Wagner envisaged – a -warrior woman in a winged helmet -wielding a spear – and -Rhinemaidens like -something from an Arthur -Rackham illustration, then you might be disappointed.
Wagner’s fans can be very -unforgiving. I once attended a Ring which was so disappointing the boos that greeted the producer and designer were louder and longer than Siegfried’s Funeral March.
For the first time in -decades there were unsold seats for the Ring at Bayreuth this year. -Perhaps -traditional fans have been -alienated by producers taking too many -liberties? Perhaps the taint of its association with Nazism has become ineradicable?
On the whole, though, -audiences still go to the Ring in droves, even if they know they will be let down or outraged. Some say this is because the music is so -sublime it can -survive whatever is thrown at it. I have enjoyed -concert -performances of the cycle all the more for not -having to jump a -conceptual hurdle, since these are music dramas first and foremost.
But the most exciting moments I have experienced at a Ring involve everything: orchestra, singers, sets, costume, lighting, my -fellow audience members, and -sometimes the subtlest of details. There is a long, long stretch at the end of Die Walküre, second of the four operas, in which Wotan, king of the gods, and his daughter Brünnhilde are caught in an -irreconcilable dilemma of love, anger, obligation, and -disobedience. I once saw this in a minor production at a -European opera house putting on its first Ring : the singer playing Wotan in this most static scene suddenly crumpled in a way that was so utterly affecting, the whole -audience gasped.
It is long, it is complicated, it makes you work, like five sets of tennis or Succession. Some things take time. The Ring is worth it.
Das Rheingold is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (roh.org.uk) from Sept 11-29