Wagner's 'Ring' cycle (Part 1)

First of a series of articles about Wagner's Ring cycle.

I'm attending a Ring cycle of historic significance. It may be the last ever in the traditional style envisioned by Wagner. This is the Metropolitan Opera's Otto Schenk production from 1987, which is being retired in favor of a new, multi-media Ring from the director of Cirque du Soleil, which will debut in the 2010 season.

I've attended Wagner's operas for decades, but this time I'm accompanied by my wife, who is just now seeing her first Ring cycle. Over the next few weeks I hope to share our experiences with you.

The cycle of four music dramas is intimidating for neophytes because of its vastness. On the other hand, the huge scale of the Ring is one of its attractions. A performance takes four nights, with a playing time of 15 hours. Wagner's orchestra is larger than previous operas, and it includes exotic instruments like the Wagner tuba, which he invented to fill a gap he sensed between the tone qualities of the French horn and the trombone.

Wagner advocated a close relationship between words and music. He wasn't the first to advance this notion— Gluck had argued that cause a century earlier"“ but Wagner was the strongest proponent of it in the later 19th Century. In his 1852 essay, Opera and Drama, Wagner described poetry, music and the visual arts combining to form what he called "the artwork of the future." Wagner linked the growth of the German Empire to a massive artistic monument of the German intellect: his music dramas.

Shades of Vince Fumo

Plainly, Wagner was an egotist of grandiose dimensions; his obnoxious personality is difficult to ignore. In a manifesto that referred to himself in the third person, he declared, "Richard Wagner, the bard of German greatness, will dedicate his lifework to the German Fatherland. It is up to the People to ensure its worthy reception."

He suffered other faults as well. Wagner wasn't the only anti-Semitic musician of his time, but he went to greater depths than others, publishing essays of his diatribes. He seduced other men's wives. He raised funds for German music theater but used some of the donations for his own pleasures. Like Vincent Fumo, he assumed that anything that benefited him must naturally benefit society.

But for our purposes here, let's overlook his character (or lack of it) for the moment and look at Wagner's musical and theatrical creation.

The Ring is normally thought of as a saga about gods fighting over gold, but its appeal really derives from something else. The Ring essentially is about a dysfunctional family with problems involving love, jealousy, envy and resentment. The operas pose an eternal question: Can love endure when people devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and dominance? Wagner's answer is that lust for power and wealth destroys love.

Wotan as control freak

The quintessential control freak, Wotan, king of all the gods, is filled with anguish and self-hate and comes to a bad end. Here is a drama that illustrates how control is the antithesis of love— which, of course, is based on sharing. The Ring is, at its core, a household drama. Think of it as "Desperate Housewives" in a ritzier neighborhood.

Or think of it as an Edward Albee play. When Wotan and his wife Fricka start tearing each other apart, or Wotan and his daughter Brunhilde, we can't help thinking of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And speaking of wolves, when we hear that Wotan has had sex with a she-wolf and fathered twins (Siegmund and Sieglinde) we remember The Goat, Albee's play about a man who has sex with an animal.

A socialist critique?

In addition to its conflict between love and power, The Ring is a quest story about gods and mortals, filled with lust and political maneuvering. The saga also can be seen as the struggle between industrialization and individualism. George Bernard Shaw described The Ring as a socialist critique of industrial society. He pointed out that Alberich, who steals the gold from the Rhine Maidens, is a Nibelung, one of an exploited people who work hard in mines and factories; he represents the working class, which is tricked and humiliated by Wotan and his corporate board of directors. The 1976 Bayreuth production of The Ring directed by Patrice Chéreau was based on that premise.

You also could plausibly turn The Ring into an environmental parable, showing how the plunder of natural resources leads to disaster. Wagner's music suggests this. The opening notes of Das Rheingold start low and rise slowly from the depths, connoting more than just the Rhine River but, in addition, the wellspring of nature far below the surface of the planet.

The music, not the words

Rhonda and I have come to believe that Wagner's popularity stems more from his music than his words. His passionate melodies and his lush orchestrations stick in our memories more than any lines uttered by the characters. Wagner used what he called Grundthemen, or "base themes," often referred to as leitmotifs— recurring melodies or harmonic progressions denoting an action, emotion or character. Wagner referred to them as guides-to-feeling, and he repeats them throughout the four operas of The Ring. They are more than calling cards to identify who's speaking. Sometimes the music reveals a character's subconscious feeling— a Freudian suggestion of an un-stated thought.

Some critics are unimpressed. George Bernard Shaw dismissed the final bars of The Ring, the so-called "Redemption through love" motif, saying, "The gushing effect which is its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that it is hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the entire tetralogy." Novice listeners like Rhonda, however, find comfort when they recognize a Grundthemen and connect it to what's happening.

A new way to pull the listener forward

Wagner altered traditional tonality so that the Ring's late sections expand on the old concept of key as an organizing principle. Instead of relying on traditional triad chords— with the fingers of your hand on the first, third and fifth white piano keys"“ Wagner used chromaticism, in which the scale proceeds by semitones, using all the black keys, so to speak. These extra notes pull the listener forward, yearning for a resolution. Thus Wagner provides musical tension, which heightens the drama.

He had finished the first two operas of the Ring— Das Rheingold and Die Walkure— and was working on Siegfried in 1857, when he set that aside to compose Tristan und Isolde— the first opera to make extensive use of chromaticism. Here it becomes more difficult for a listener to perceive the tonal center of the music, the home base. When Wagner returned to composing the latter parts of the Ring, he used chromaticism to dramatize how gods and mortals lose their way.

In our next installment we'll look at what makes this production memorable. Then we'll examine each of the four parts of The Ring. â—†



To read the second installment, click here.