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The Ring and I
00:58:58
On this Radiolab/WNYC Special, we explore the impact and influence of Wagner's Ring Cycle on the Metropolitan Opera's 2004 Presentation.
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- [00:00]
A
This is a special presentation of wnyc, New York Public Radio.
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Opera people are all nuts. The Ride of the Valkyrie is my theme song. I'm trying to work it into my memorial service. I figured, what?
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Well, if opera people are all nuts, then what makes Wagnerites special?
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B
They're more nuts and more intense. Probably because Wagner was more nuts and more intense. His desire to change his audience, not just to entertain them, but to change them, to get inside of them and stir them up.
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I just was so moved by that thing.
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This is what he was doing, this is what he did. And he succeeded.
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I could still. Just thinking about it still makes me.
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B
Kind of tear up. But, you know, the man was an absolute whore when it came to stealing money, stealing women, but he never once compromised his artistic vision. What I always tell people when they recoil at the idea of watching the Ring or other operas is these are mirrors of.
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A
When you see a lot of people making a huge fuss over a work of art or an event or a happening, you get curious. The Ring Cycle is one of the biggest works of art ever created by one of the most controversial artists to ever live. Over the next hour, we'll explore the question, just what is this thing and why does it continue to inspire people? I'm Jad Abumrad. This is the Ringinat. The passion, the myth, the mania. Stay with us. So what is the Ring? If I had to describe it in one sentence, it would go something like. The Ring is a German romantic view of Norse and Teutonic myth influenced by a Greek tragedy and a Buddhist sense of destiny, told with a socio political deconstruction of contemporary society, a psychological study of motivation and action, and a blueprint for a new approach to music and theater. But we'll get to all that. The first thing to know about Wagner's Ring is that it is an event. Productions of the Ring Cycle happen all over the world at different times. But here in New York seems to roll through about once every four years, like the Olympics. And when it does, the air changes, people's eyes dilate and Ring classes like this one at Juilliard are practically standing room only.
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Okay, so let's begin the serious part of the class.
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This is Professor John Muller. He stands by a piano and surveys the 40 or so mostly older Wagner lovers who were lucky enough to make it into his seminar.
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And I'm going to start with a quote. And it may seem like an odd way to begin this class, but when the third installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, they were Doing a showing of all three of them. They refer to this as the trilogy. Tuesday and author of the article in the Times made the comment about the need to see all three of them together. He says, shouldn't all three movies be watched together? Our forebears had Wagner's Ring cycle. We have Peter Jackson's Tolkien trilogy. I took offense to this statement.
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With a theatrical flourish, Professor Muller flings the newspaper article away from him in disgust, almost hitting a student.
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Sorry about that. The Ring is still very much with us, and I don't think it's something just for our forebears. And that statement really bothered me.
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A
Nonetheless, one of the reasons I, and I would guess many people are curious about Wagner's Ring now was because of the Lord of the Rings connection. The Lord of the Rings really could not have existed in the form that we know it now without Wagner as an example, according to New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. There are the superficial connections, like the way the characters dress, and also a lot of the language, particular Wagnerian phrases.
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A lot like a ride to ruin.
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And the world's ending. And those similarities, he says, can be chalked up to ancient Norse mythology, where both Tolkien and Wagner got their stories. But Wagner threw something new into the mix, which Tolkien borrowed outright. A ring.
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This is the main connection, this notion of this object which gives you power.
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And yet ultimately makes you powerless. Ultimately, you are enslaved to it.
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B
Yes, the Ring is very much with us. And, you know, there are people who travel all over the world going to Ring cycles, and I don't know, maybe some of you are those people. It's like the people who travel all over the world going to solar eclipses wherever they may happen.
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We're talking about four operas here or one opera in four parts, and it's 20 hours in all. But it's more than that, too, which was clear from John Muller's class. Like a hobbit convention or a Grateful Dead tour, a Ring cycle is an event. It's a happening. It takes planning. So you'll need provisions. That's why we head to Fairway. Fairway is Manhattan's biggest grocery store. And when there's a ring in town, it's where you'll find Manhattan's biggest ring fan. Fred.
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Yes.
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Hey.
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B
Hi.
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Chad. Nice to meet you.
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B
Pleasure to meet you.
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Fred Plotkin. He writes about food and opera. And get this is on his 38th ring cycle.
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B
This year, I'll be seeing three ring cycles in different places. I'm going to two at the Met with different casts, and then I'm going to one in Finland. My idea in creating a menu to dine while watching all four Ring operas is to be thematic with the Ring and inspired by the Ring. And I decided to look at the cycle and look for gastronomic cues of which there are so many throughout the Ring cycle of foods, of food products.
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He calls this the Wagner meal cycle. He's able to tell the entire story of the Ring through food. And that's why we're here, for sustenance.
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A, I take doggy bags when I attend performances and eat them at the intermissions.
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And B, because the plot of the Ring cycle can get complicated fast. And this is an easy way to remember what's happening on stage. So Fred begins how the Ring cycle begins with gold, which we find at fairway in the chocolate aisle.
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John de Yorti are essential to the Ring cycle because these are little gold wrapped nuggets of chocolate. They're like curr, but shaped like bricks of gold.
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The first opera, the Rhine Gold, begins underwater at the bottom of the Rhine River. We see three Rhine maidens swimming around. They guard the gold and all is fine with the world, says Fred, while the gold stays there.
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That's the fundamental thing of the Ring Cycle. When it's stolen, theft, and it's given away like taxes to the rich. What happens is everything goes askew. And therefore we try to put the gold back in the rhine. It takes 20 hours to do it.
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But for the moment, what we see on stage are Rhine maidens swimming, shimmering gold. And what we hear is the orchestra building around one E flat chord. And this is where things get interesting. As John Muller tells his class, this may be more than just pretty water music.
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In one sense. The opening of the prelude is showing you the Rhine river from the very depths of the Rhine. When you get the opening E flat in the double basses, then to higher levels and more activity with arpeggio figures in the strings. But on a much deeper level, Wagner's giving you creation itself. And he represents this by using the overtone series. In other words, we have, in a sense, the creation of tone from one.
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Pitch, the birth of an entire universe as told in music, note by note, atom by atom. Which is why Professor Muller tells his students when they're in the audience during this scene, they may want to close their eyes.
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It's going to burst out after more than three minutes. And you get the first Rhine maiden entering Voglinde. And initially she sings a couple of nonsense syllables until she actually starts to speak the words of the opera.
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So it's as if Wagner is also.
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Trying to convey the creation of speech.
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This is just one indication that Wagner's approach to drama is pretty wild. On stage, the eyes in our head are seeing Rhine maidens swimming, while the eyes in our ears are getting another image, the cosmos being born. Perhaps Wagner meant for our mind to somehow blend the two. The question remains, though, how do you even get the first part right? The visuals. This is opera, remember? So along with music, we've got the problem of staging.
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The Ring is the biggest project, I think, that any opera house faces always.
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This is Joe Clark, the Metropolitan Opera's technical director. And we're on stage during a changeover.
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There's a challenge there that I don't think is like anything else.
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To our right, 4,000 empty seats. To our left, 60 some odd workers swing hammers and push props. And to my dismay, for the swimming Rhine maiden scene, he says they don't use an aquarium.
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It's certainly not realistic water by any means. In fact, it's very stylized. But the whole proscenium is filled with a number of moving gauzes that are painted to look like water. They're constantly in motion, and there are smoke and dry ice effects operating at the same time with fans. So again, it sort of seems like currents underwater.
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And the three Rhine maidens, meanwhile, Joe has them stand on three separate stage lifts, which move up and down, but.
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Very slowly, so you get that sense of water flowing.
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We'd heard that the Seattle Opera takes it a bit further, so we called director Speight Jenkins. His company has taken the Rhine maidens to new heights. Literally. They suspend the singers 25ft off the ground.
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B
Well, it looks like Cirque du Soleil is what it does. The first time I saw it, I almost dropped. Because, you see, first of all, we dress them in kind of mermaidish type things and wonderful wigs. It looks as though it's a very fluid and easy movement. They can go down, in other words, they can go down and they can spin. Now, what makes it unusual is that they do, in fact, flip as they sing. The three young women at first were, you know, a little bit nervous about it, but as the. As we moved on into rehearsals and got to the performances, they flipped all the time as they sang, they would flip on, singing high note.
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A
This voice right here is where the trouble starts. This is Alberic, the evil dwarf. He shows up at the bottom of the Rhine, starts to chase the Rhine maidens round and round. They laugh at him. But then he steals their gold and forges a ring that will make him master of the universe. Eventually, the gods steal it from him and the world begins to go sour. But Wagner's musical universe really starts to take off. For more on that, we visit pianist Jeffrey Swan.
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B
Thank you, thank you. Appreciate that.
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A
Jeffrey Swan lectures all over the country about the Ring, and in particular on a system Wagner developed called leitmotif. It's as if he gave each character a theme and then changed those themes as the characters change. He demonstrates as we sit at a grand piano that takes up almost his entire midtown apartment.
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B
The ideal listener to the Ring early on needs to become aware, I suppose, of leitmotifs, a real obvious one. When we hear the Rhine maidens in the very first scene when they're singing their song of joy and they say, rheingold. Rheingold. They sing it over and over again. At the end of the work, we hear the Rhine maidens sort of off stage, and now they're bewailing their fate.
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As it were, because they've lost the gold.
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They've lost their gold and the gods aren't giving it back to them. Here it's something concrete, a change of harmony. The fact that the orchestration is completely different. There's just a harp on stage, the difference between and. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
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It gets much, much, much more complicated, says Jeffrey, because often Wagner will use leitmotifs to comment on the action or to foreshadow. And this is something film composers have eagerly embraced. Just imagine if the Rhine maidens are swimming and you hear this in the orchestra, you know immediately what's about to happen to them. Seems obvious, right? But think about how powerful this is. Just two notes create the image of a big fish in your mind. Which brings us back to Lord of the Rings. And Oscar winning composer Howard Shore. Howard, if I were to call your scores for the Lord of the Rings movies Wagnerian. Not saying I would, but if I were to call it that, you would think what I would think.
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Leitmotif, music expressing emotional ideas. And the use of leitmotifs.
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Is that something you made use of in your score?
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Oh, I think tremendously.
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How so?
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Well, there's over 50 leitmotifs. Oh, really? Used in the piece.
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Do you have. Reflect each individual character.
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They reflect characters and places and objects. The ring itself has four motifs for its different moods.
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And here's one you may recognize if you've seen the movies. This seems like a good time to ask the question why a ring? This was something Tolkien borrowed from Wagner, but where did Wagner get it from? And what does it mean? Hi, it's Jad from wnyc.
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You right there.
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So we visited Lori Shapiro at her small office in Brooklyn.
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Come on in.
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Laurie Shapira is a Jungian analyst and also teaches a class about Norse mythology and symbolism in the Ring cycle.
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B
Okay, well, first of all, the ring is made of gold. It's made of the Rhine gold, so it's manufactured. And I think that's an important piece of this. Gold is a treasure, right? But in its raw state, it's perhaps worthless in a way, only valuable if it's made into something else. That's a very Western concept. A person who is willing to renounce.
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Love and who has the skill to.
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Forge the gold into a ring will be able to have measureless might. Is the way it reads. The libretto reads.
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It's a very modern idea. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. It's not something that the old storytellers seem to think about. Any random person being able to pick up an object and automatically have power over everything. It just. It wasn't part of their way of looking at the world. Power wasn't infinitely transferable. Those who had power were born with power, and those who didn't, you know, would never be able to touch it.
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You know, he wrote this around the middle of the 19th century. Wagner wrote the Ring in the same year that Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. And there was a revolution going on. There was something in the air. We could view that as perhaps the real dawn of the Age of Aquarius.
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Now, what that means is open to interpretation, but Laurie Shapiro defines it as the beginning of the end. Destructive technology was on the horizon. Kings and queens were being replaced by new belief systems. Wagner was creating a mythology for these uncertain times with the ring of power at the center, a symbol of both what's possible and what might be missing.
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It's a myth that appears apparently around the same time that coins were invented.
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Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner.
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And it has always stood on some level for the invention of money. The transfiguring power of gold, in that it's an invisible force. I mean, the ring is always the thing that makes you invisible and unseen so that you can be there and not be there. What's the thing in our lives that's there and not there at the same time, that has immense power but is essentially invisible? It's the power of money.
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Speaking of money, our first opera ends with the gods Marching triumphantly into their new castle, Valhalla, built by giants and paid for with stolen gold. Fred Plotkin explains.
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It's a real estate deal and the gold is stolen by Alberich the dwarf, and then is taken by Wotan, the chief God, who gives it to the giants Fafnir and Fassold for their labors to build Valhalla. Now, how do you get to this great big castle? You have to build a rainbow bridge. It takes energy to do that. So what do you eat? Rainbow trout. And that's what we're gonna do. Let's see if they have rainbow trout.
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Coming up, incest, Apocalypse now, and a Ring of Fire. You are listening to a special presentation from WNYC New York Public Radio. The Ring and I, the Passion, the myth, the Mania. Amjad Abumrad. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is a special presentation from WNYC New York Public Radio. The Ring and I, the Passion, the myth, the Mania. It's amateur night at Cafe Tatci uptown. This place, we've been told, is where professional opera singers hang out after performances and also where three times a week up and comers strut their stuff. This is one of those nights when we're hoping to see something from the Ring cycle to use in this documentary. But this guy, I'm Brian Griffin, flat out refuses.
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B
I could never sing the Ring in my life.
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No matter what I do.
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B
I just don't have that kind of voice. I mean, it's the epitome of singerdom, if that's a word.
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A
Another aspiring singer takes the stage and let's rip some Italian opera. Well, I head to the back to join a table of Germanophiles, which includes rock guitar's Gary Lucas, formerly of the band Captain Beefheart.
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B
Let's just say that some of the.
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A
Classic LED Zepp riffs could be considered Wagnerian. Can you give specific examples, I wonder? Okay, let's go to the very first LED Zepp hit, Whole Lot of Love. You know, it's got this motif, okay?
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B
And that motif is really hammered home.
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To death throughout the song.
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B
If you could go to, you know, for instance, the primary motif that really.
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Rings throughout the Ring.
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And.
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That to me is like a very. And okay, maybe not exactly the same intervals.
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Yeah, know what I mean? It's like he was into by the creation of leitmotifs. This is almost analogous to riffs in rock music.
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Whether or not you hear the similarity. Gary Lucas is talking about, Wagner and rock are at least spiritual cousins, particularly when you throw this into the mix. I did a version of Ride of the Valkyries, kind of in a surf guitar style.
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I don't know how else to describe it.
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For me, the Ride of the Valkyrie.
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Is my theme song.
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That's Dorothy Pepke from the American Wagner association to Gary's right.
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I'm trying to work it into my memorial service. I figured, well, when they rush, take the casket. So that would be the time for the right of the robbery. But I have it on my answering machine.
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We checked.
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B
We are unable to answer your call at present. Please leave your name and phone number and we will return your call as soon as possible.
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A
Thank you. If ever there were a soundtrack to an outgoing message or the apocalypse, the Ride of the Valkyries is it. Just ask Francis Ford Coppola. His movie Apocalypse now forever associated this Wagner anthem with war. In fact, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American soldiers reportedly played this in their vehicles before raids. Really what Wagner meant it to evoke were warrior goddesses riding on flying horses over the battlefield, retrieving fallen heroes. In Norse myth, these corpse goddesses are called Valkyries. And that is the name of the second opera in the Ring cycle, the Valkyrie. And as you can hear, this opera is bigger and bolder. Earlier fairway, while shopping for Ring themed menu items, opera and food writer Fred Plotkin put it this way.
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With Das Rheingold, we laid down all the elements, but that opera's only 2 hours and 40 minutes long. Now we're going to the big stuff. Di Valkyura, the story of the Valkyrie. Brunhilde is five hours plus. It has great sex, fantastic music, a great storm, a big eruptive fire at the end. It has everything. It's life. Who needs soap operas, who needs reality TV when you have this, which is with much better music?
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The Valkyrie is the story of Brunhilde, possibly the most well known figure in all of opera. She is opera, in fact, in the minds of many who know nothing about it. The hefty, wailing Viking soprano with blond braids and horned helmet, that stereotype comes from her, says Will Berger.
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You know, I mean, not without reason. She does walk on stage like no one ever walks on stage. She makes her entrance into this world of the ring screaming her head off. It's meant to make an impression.
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Soprano Jane Eagle, I think the stereotype.
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Of, you know, the woman with long blonde plaits and sort of horns on her head. I just think it's kind of sad, really, that that is what people think it's about, because it's so clearly not.
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A
What it is about is choice and love and power and incest. Well, all those four things wrapped up together in one big family drama. You might think of this as All My Children meets Norse Myth meets Freud. Brunhilde is the favorite daughter. Wotan, the head God, is the dad. Turns out he has kids all over the place. We meet two of them at the start of the story. Sigmund and Siglinda, twins, Except they don't know they're twins. Author Will Barger explains, We have two.
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B
Lonely people who are these twin brother and sister parted at birth. And there's always been a sense of something missing in their lives. They've had rotten, miserable lives, both of them. And then they meet and he says something that I think is so powerful. He says, you are the image that I've kept hidden in myself. And that's why he loves her. And I think that's a very beautiful moment for anybody who's ever had any kind of a coming out process coming out as anything coming out as a full human being.
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Incest as self discovery. Sound crazy?
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Hello?
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Metaphor.
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B
If we're not capable of metaphor, you're probably gonna have a lot of trouble at the opera anyway or the movies.
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A
Will says, just think of all the cinematic incest out there. Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Back to the Future, Cruel Intentions. House of. Yes, Oedipus Rex, Dangerous liaison. This is a myth that speaks to our primitive brains, says writer and commentator John Rockwell.
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B
The deepest archetypal needs and longings of a given culture, and these are common across cultures. And so almost every culture has an incest love story or a heroic hero who defeats a fearsome enemy and so forth.
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A
The heroic hero and fearsome enemy come in our next opera. For now, back to the family drama. Votan, the head God and dad of this dysfunctional family has to figure out what to do about the incestuous twins. He does love the twins. They are his kids, after all. But what they are doing is illegal and immoral. He tells his daughter Brunhilde to go get Sigmund and bring him to Valhalla. In other words, kill him. She agrees and shows up at Sigmund's house, but finds that he doesn't want to come. As far as she's concerned, it's like, hi, come on, let's go to Valhalla.
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It's really great. She can't understand why he wouldn't want to go, but when he explains it to her, she then starts to understand.
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What he explains to her, says Jane, is that he's in love. He'd rather stay here on earth with his sweetheart than go up to Valhalla, no matter how glorious it is up there. And that totally flips her. She's never seen true love before and it makes her question everything. Should she even kill this guy? Or, God forbid, disobey her dad? Author Will Berger.
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B
So on the one hand we have these fairy tale, let's say fairytale characters. But I think what is really superb about the Ring, they're real people too, real characters going through real emotions. And the fact that they happen to be gods is kind of immaterial in.
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A sense, because what you've got here, says Jane, is a story anyone can relate to, a story about growing up and becoming independent. That's why she loves this role, because.
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B
Of the development that you get and that comes through the music as well.
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A
As through the character and the drama. Speaking of the music in Wagner, the music knows everything. Even when the characters don't know what's going to happen, the music does. This we found out from Jeffrey Swan. We're back in his small apartment with a giant piano for another demonstration. He explains that Wotan carries a giant spear wherever he goes.
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B
The spear stands for Wotan's power. His legal power is his power to rule the world.
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And the spear, he says, has a musical motif.
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B
The whole opera Volcura is sort of, could be, could be experienced strictly as, or at least as a exercise in what happens to the spear motive.
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In other words, what happens to Wotan's authority over his daughter. He demonstrates, starting with the original motif, the spear.
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B
From that spear motive, you get something like.
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A
See, now I can't hear the difference.
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B
If I deconstruct it for you. You can.
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A
Can you give me like a 30 second deconstruction? Sure.
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B
The spirit motive. Let's put it in the convenient key. The scale, rhythmic, going down. Okay, first thing, let's put it in the major. Then instead of continuing down, let's jump back on ourselves. Then let's slow it down. I see.
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This was an epiphany. The one thing anyone can hear in Wagner's Ring is flux. It's unstable music. He huge masses of sounds swirling endlessly like waves. And yet inside that flux there is a center. You feel it. Millions of musical cells, multiplying, mutating, make up the 18 hour organism that is the ring cycle. Each cell attached to a character or idea. All these characters and ideas in constant states of change, like what we're for looking, listening to now, just one of those cells, A spear. Motive. A symbol of Votann's power and authority, transformed into.
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Sam.
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Analyst Lori Shapiro.
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B
The main conflict in the in the ring is love versus power. Now it would be easy to say, well, the power guys are the bad guys and the love guys are the good guys in the world, but we all have inside of us a power drive and arrows. Really, the most important way of interpreting is to look at it psychologically that all of these characters are part of.
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The individual, are parts of the personality.
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That are in conflict. So the deepest way to interpret this conflict between love and power is to find it in oneself.
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A
Brunhilde is often referred to as Wotan's will, as if they are two parts of the same person. Wotan had ordered her to kill the boy twin because he felt bound to by law. She disobeyed his orders, but fulfilled his true wishes. They meet on a mountaintop, and he decides for punishment. Which brings us back to Fred at Fairway.
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B
Brunhilde is Wotan's favorite daughter, and she shows up, does battle, disagrees with her father, whom she loves. And these are intolerant times. And though he says, I love you, he says, I have to put you to sleep. And so he kisses your eyes shut in a very tender scene. Suddenly, he creates a.
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Us all.
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B
It's really. It's kind of like the fires of the Southwest. I know the President talks about his Clean Forest initiative, but he should see this. And then what you have is this incredible fire that protects Brune Hill. It never burns her, so that only a great hero can penetrate the fire to wake her up. And she's leaves for 18 years, so when she wakes up, boy, is she hungry. So I created Rock Shrimp Flambade.
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A
Many later scenes in the Ring can seem hokey, but this moment at the end of the Valkyrie, where Wotan gently kisses Brunhilde's eyes to sleep, is one of the most famous and most widely loved in the entire cycle. Soprano Jane Eagle. My father died when I was very.
- [34:38]
B
Young, so the whole sort of father daughter relationship is something which is very much in my mind. The idea of never seeing your father again is something that I can certainly relate to occasionally. There have been times in a Valkyrie performance when I have actually felt, you know, tears welling up just because you get so into the moment. I mean, I do think that the voting Brunhilde scene at the end of Valkyrie is like the greatest father daughter scene ever written.
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Playwright Tony Kushner.
- [35:07]
B
It's so mo I mean, it's so moving. The music is so heartbreaking. And the things that they say to each other, I mean, this deep, stubborn love that they have for each other, it's in dialectical tension to the way that everything else breaks under the spell of the gold, that this is this kind of connection that simply cannot be severed.
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You are listening to a special presentation from wnyc, New York Public Radio. The Ring and I, the Passion, the myth, the Mania.
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Sam.
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A
I'm Jad Abumrab. This is a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio. The Ring and I the Passion, the myth, the mania. There are certain facts about Wagner that get repeated over and over, however unbelievable. Here's one.
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There are more books on Wagner than anyone except Christ.
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That was Dorothy Pepke of the American Wagner Association. We called the Library of Congress. They couldn't verify it. That is true.
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B
And every week there's another book on Wagner.
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A
One thing is for sure, though, if Wagner is second to God, he wouldn't be pleased. He thought he was God and like it or not, he created a work in the Ring cycle that is like the Bible. It's open to an infinity of interpretations, not all good.
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B
It would be very easy to interpret the Ring in terms of politics, let's.
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Say analyst and historian Laurie Shapiro, looking.
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B
At different groups of people, the Nibelungs or the gods, to sort of assign them to different ethnic groups. Perhaps Hitler loved doing that.
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A
For instance, imagine how the third opera of the Ring cycle might look through the eyes of the Third Reich. It's called Siegfried and it begins with an argument. On one side, Siegfried, the muscular, blue eyed child of glory. On the other, Mima, a sniveling, crafty dwarf. The dwarf is the boy's guardian. Mima found him abandoned in the forest, raised him. But now Siegfried is dying to get away. Playwright Tony Kushner, I mean Mimi, his.
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B
Sort of, you know, this repulsive, whining kvetch, is on one level you're supposed to sort of sneer at him as this person who's like, imprisoned Siegfried in this, like, false domesticity, and that he has to be that. You have to throw off the chains of this terrible Jew who's like, or Nibelunger, whatever you want to call him, this Untermensch, who's like, clinging to you so that you can go off and be, you know, the hero. But of course, that isn't really the experience. I mean, what's really great about Siegfried is that it's like a fantastic portrait of this Abs and you know, Wagner intended it. It's like one of the most marvelous portraits of a teenage jerk. You know, those scenes between him and Mimi are just fantastic.
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And it's not to say that Wagner didn't hate. He did. In an early essay, he called Jews worms and freaks of nature.
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B
It's not that you're unaware of the fact that this is a great racial nationalist epic written by an anti Semitic egomaniacal monster, but it's just too great to leave alone.
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A
Really, what we've got here is the most universal story known to man. A hero's journey like Star Wars. You've got a sword much like a lightsaber, a boy looking for his parents. Interesting creatures, some incest thrown in for good measure. Siegfried, it turns out, is the child of the twins from our last opera. And as writer Fred Plotkin explains back at Fairway, our hero has got a lot of growing up to do.
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B
And really, Siegfried, the opera is the Education of Siegfried.
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A
Sort of a coming of age story, right?
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B
It's a coming of age story. Ashton Kutcher would do it nowadays.
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A
It's probably option in writing, I think. So Fred parallels Siegfried's ring journey with his own gastronomic one. By ordering up a filet of swordfish.
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He goes from being a callow youth to getting an education. Literally sort of trials by fire. And the first fire is actually the forging of the sword, which is wonderful music. Once he's created the sword, he learns how to use it. And he discovers that Fafner. Remember Fafner the giant?
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Fafner the giant we met in the first opera, he built the gods a castle in exchange for the Rhine gold.
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He's been holding on to the gold for all these hours. Now, the gold includes the ring. Whoever has the ring is master of the universe. But the ring has a curse on it. So he who takes something that's not rightfully his, like taking the White House when you didn't win, pays the consequences.
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A
As you can see, this story is so archetypal that anyone can see what they want in it. While Fred imagines the giants as, well, Republicans, Tony Kushner prefers the Marxist reading.
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B
I mean, it's essentially a socialist parable.
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A
Which equates the giants with the working class.
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B
This gigantic inchoate force that, you know, that's been promised a share in divinity.
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A
In any case, Fafnir the giant is no longer a giant. When he got his hands on the ring, he turned himself into a dragon, a singing dragon. Not your typical Lord of the Rings dragon. He's sometimes depicted as a sad creature, woozy with the power of the ring. But here again, interpretations vary.
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B
Dragons are always in the ring. Cute.
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Spade Jenkins of the Seattle Opera.
- [42:16]
B
So I said, I want to have a dragon that is truly scary. Okay, fine. We thought, well, let's have a dragon bigger than the opera house. And so we only see his claws. Well, A, it was a bad idea, and B, it was an idea that I didn't think through. And nobody else did either, because Siegfried's supposed to stab him in the heart. So how on earth do you stab him in the heart if you don't see a heart?
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A
We didn't. How did you not think of that?
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B
I don't know, but we didn't. So then we moved on to dragon number two. Dragon number two was a dragon seven feet tall, and this was a beautifully conceived dragon. I thought it was an old locomotive with a steam shovel for a face, really. It came on stage, led by stagehands all dressed in black, and it puffed steam, and out of the steam shovel blew huge amounts of fire.
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Wow.
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B
And the audience went totally crazy over it. When he was stabbed, all of the smoke died, all of the fire died, and all of the stagehands who had a chance to be real hams all fell to the stage dead at that moment.
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A
After the dragon, Siegfried has an even bigger challenge. Brunhilde. Remember her? She's been asleep for 18 years on a mountain surrounded by a ring of fire. Siegfried comes along to wake her up. Sort of a Snow White, Sleeping Beauty situation. Here's Fred.
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B
We could also say that the whole progression of the cycle is not just the consequences of the ring, but the growth of Brunhilde from a sassy young woman, a goddess full of piss and vinegar, to use a food term, or ginger, let's say. When she's been put to sleep for 18 years, she is awakened as a mortal. Right.
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Soprano Jane Eagle.
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B
The music becomes more dramatic, I think, as the cycle goes on. Really, she's discovering her womanly qualities and falling in love. She's no longer a goddess and doesn't have the power she had and therefore develops as a human. And this is what is so fundamental to understanding the Ring cycle, that gods are not infallible. Mortals have great power and glory if they know how to use them, they become the best that they can as human beings.
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As Wagner approached the end of the Ring cycle, which took him 25 years to write, a few things began to dawn on him. First, the theater. No theater in the world would Be able to stage this. A dragon, a ring of fire. It was getting too big. What to do?
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Well, first he tried to redesign the city of Munich around the ideal opera house that he would need in order to present this the right way. Okay, do you know any artists like this?
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It wasn't simple vanity driving him, says Will Berger. Wagner wanted the opera house to redeem the world. And like Siegfried, he thought it was up to him.
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B
Yes, it was very like the. The artist as savior of humanity.
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A
What he wanted to save humanity from was fragmentation. In today's world, you've got art over here and politics over here and philosophy and religion over there. Wagner wanted them all together in one glorious, mind altering fusion. A festival which would last for four days.
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B
And then in this wonderful idea he had, at the end of these four days, you just burn the structure to.
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A
The ground because like a Burning man kind of situation.
- [46:06]
B
Very Burning Man. Totally Burning Man.
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A
Burning man, incidentally, is an annual art gathering in the Nevada desert that ends with the burning of a giant wooden statue.
- [46:15]
B
The entire community dancing around it in some way praising all the art that had gone into it.
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A symbolic renewal like Burning Man. It would have to be outside the bounds of civilization. You'd have to travel long distances to get there, leave your life behind. The place he chose was a small town in Germany called Bayreuth. A king built him a theater specifically to stage the Ring cycle. And that theater and the town remain, to Wagner devotees, the promised land, the Haj.
- [46:42]
B
The most intense experience I've ever seen of real desperation was going to Bayreuth and seeing people trying to get in.
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Writer and commentator John Rockwell.
- [46:53]
B
I mean, it is so, so, so hopelessly sold out. There's this desperate cadre of people holding up signs saying Zuche S U C H E, which means looking for tickets. And I was one of those people in the summer of 1959 or 60.
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I really feel like it's just stepping into an alternate universe. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. You're living in Wagner's world. It's like a vacation inside a work of art. I don't know how to describe it. It was only about these operas and.
- [47:26]
B
Nothing else was going on. And you sit around talking with these fanatics, of which you are one, about Wagner and about the experience and about the performance and whether it was any good and who was good and who wasn't good.
- [47:37]
A
I've just never experienced anything like that. When you go to the opera at the Met or any other urban opera house, you go, you're in its world for a few hours. And then when you leave, you get into the subway, you go home. You know, the bills are there.
- [47:51]
B
Now, this is perhaps obsessive, but it is devotion. I mean, you know, people make fun of the romantic image of the artist as kind of madmen who are above the normal range of human experience and have some direct connection with the divine and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's very easy in our modern, politically correct age to mock that. That all said, Wagner wrote the book on being a romantic artist. I mean, he was more brilliant and more talented and more close to divine inspiration than most other people. And when you hear his music, you hear that.
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A
We pick up the action with Siegfried and Brunhilde on the mount right where we left him. Siegfried puts the ring of power on her finger. They embrace. If we were to stop the story right here, we'd have a happy ending. The ring of power becomes a wedding ring. Love conquers all. And Wagner considered going this route, but then scrapped it because somewhere along the way, his outlook on life changed from utopian to dystopian. And that's exactly what we get in this final opera. Very large doses of things falling apart. And that's why it's called the Twilight of the Gods. Brunhilde sends Siegfried off on an adventure, while back at Fairway, Fred Plotkin grabs a package of ringdings off the shelf and explains the trouble that lies ahead.
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B
The one major character that we've not really spoken about yet is Hagen. He's the son of Alberich who put the curse on the ring a long time ago. And Hagen is the bad guy. He is the one who plots to dupe Siegfried by taking him away from Brunhilde and introducing him to a woman named Gutruna Gabich. I'm not kidding. Siegfried is duped. He's given drugs, the classic love potion.
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He forgets about his wife and falls in love with another woman. He has betrayed Brunhilde, and she will betray him right back.
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B
He's just not swift and ultimately will be duped by lots of people. And that's his great tragedy.
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A
Maybe being a heroic hero is as much about being stupid as being courageous. In any case, Siegfried is clueless. The only character or thing that has any clue in this world is the music. Remember how Wagner created little musical themes for his characters and objects? Well, listen to how he uses them.
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B
Just looking at this page, I see so many things, so many references.
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A
We're back at pianist Jeffrey Swan's Manhattan apartment, and we Turn to a random page from the final opera.
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B
So we have that interval. Has to do with Hagen. There's the spear. Here's a new motive. The blood brotherhood. That's related to the Nibelungs, actually, the dwarfs and forging. With that. I have to stop a second. That was Gutruna and friendship and the fire they're going to go through. This is back to the blood brotherhood again. It's going to get complicated in a second. That's friendship. That's Hagen. There's the spear again. This is complicated.
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Don't feel you have to follow any of this. People like Jeffrey Swan have spent their lives trying to decode it all and still can't. Because maybe Wagner didn't intend it to make literal sense. You might imagine it like when you're walking down the street just living your life. Your brain is firing off all of these thoughts. Half thoughts, really.
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B
Wow.
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A
Cute dog. Am I fat? Hmm. Relativity. What am I gonna wear tonight? I'd like that song. Who Am I? All of these things you're thinking, but not conscious of thinking. If everyone else on the street is doing that too, and you could somehow collect it all, you'd have a gurgling, churning pool of longings and yearnings. Jung would later give this a name, the collective unconscious. And that, says Jeffrey Swan, is what Wagner was doing with the instruments of his orchestra. Trying to reflect the subconscious emotional life of his characters.
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B
Now, how much does a casual listener pick up of this? I think he picks up some of it, actually.
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A
Back at Fairway, as Fred explains, things with Siegfried are about to take a turn for the worse.
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B
He's taken on a hunting trip. All the guys are going out, you know, and there are swords, and Siegfried has his sword, but he's briefly distracted. And Hagens stabs him in the back. This goes back to ancient Rome, if not before that. But Siegfried is tapped.
- [52:38]
A
Siegfried is superhuman, but he has one weak spot on his back. And the real tragedy here is that it was Brunhilde who told Hagen about it. She was blinded with rage over Siegfried's betrayal.
- [52:49]
B
And they carry him back to the castle. And there's this gorgeous music. Gorgeous. It's the funeral music. The Ryan Kernan funeral music music. As they take him back. It's some of the most glorious music ever written.
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Brunhilde, now in the land of humans, sees the body, and her anger turns to sadness. She realizes what brought about this treachery. It's Brano Jane Eaglen.
- [53:49]
B
At one point, she said another wonderful line from the ring. She Says now I know every everything. I understand everything. I know everything. She has to give the ring back to the Rhine die, but everything will be fine. Wow.
- [54:12]
A
It's almost like she becomes the hero then.
- [54:14]
B
Oh, totally.
- [54:24]
A
Siegfried, our tragic, not so bright hero, turned out to be a decoy all along. A woman comes through in the end. Carl Jung saw this as Wagner critiquing patriarchal rule. What the audience sees are supposed to see is something that has tortured technical directors like Joe Clark for a hundred years.
- [54:44]
B
A lot happens in a very short time. The list is long.
- [54:48]
A
We're at the Metropolitan Opera again, this time underneath the stage. Joe explains his technique for destroying the world, which involves setting the entire stage above us on elevators, and then at.
- [54:59]
B
The point of collapse, the elevators themselves are moving down. At the same time, elements of that scenery are coming apart.
- [55:07]
A
No one would have ever thought to try this before Wagner, which is why the Ring is sometimes called proto cinema in movies, however, the music supports the visual. Here, says Joe, the music is out front with the visuals, hanging on for dear life. The way I often measure it, or.
- [55:23]
B
At least I say I do, is, does it look like it sounds? And if you can get something in the Ring to look like the Ring sounds, it's sounding like one of the most remarkable things in the history of Western art. And you can get something to look like that sounds, it's quite wonderful.
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A
In the theater, in Wagner's head, it all happens in one astonishing moment. Brunhilde lights Siegfried's funeral pyre, throws herself in it, flames seize the stage, and Valhalla, the home of the gods, collapses. Then the Rhine river overflows its banks, and the Rhine maidens come swimming by to reclaim the Ring. For the first time since the beginning of the cycle, the balance of the universe is restored. The Ring cycle was Wagner trying to put his arms around the world, encompass everything. Thousands of years of mythology set to extraordinary music. And yet, at the center of all that hugeness, it's just us up there, people trying to be noble, showing possibility, failing. That's the surprising thing from a guy who thought he was God. We get a story about how the gods must die. And maybe this is what it means to say something is Wagnerian. Not just that you try to say everything, but that you try even though you know you ultimately can't. Wagner's music can express more than any of us can. So perhaps the most important thing I can say to you now is, listen.
- [57:22]
B
Ram. Sam.
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A
The Ring and I was produced by me and Aaron Cohen, with production assistance from Michael Rayfield, Jenny Schneier and Max Leffer. Our executive producer is Elena Park. Special thanks to Dean Capella, George Preston, Margaret Jumpwaite, Michael L. Sessor, Sarah Billinghurst, Ellen Godfrey, and the staff of the Metropolitan Opera, King FM studios in Seattle, and engineer Bill Sigmund. This program was made possible by the listeners of wnyc, New York Public Radio. I'm Jad Abumra.