Rhine Maidens on a slippery slope
Only during the brief period of heedless youth, when most
people unconsciously assume an attitude of immortality, do we really think we
are likely to achieve all our “goals.”
As serious age advances the realization of life’s impossibilities
becomes articulate and acute. That
is one of the several not so nice things about aging. It is all the more wonderful to discover, therefore, that
among all the things you hoped to do but never will there turn out to be a fair
number of delightful experiences for which you never before had the time,
money, or opportunity to explore.
One such, which I will touch upon next week, will interrupt the thus-far
reasonably disciplined schedule of this blog. A second will provide this week’s subject: Richard Wagner's Ring of the Niebelung.
As
I write we are half way through it.
The Rheingold was
on Saturday. Last night’s
performance of The Valkyries (part
two of the four of the whole work) has three acts, each a mini-opera of its
own. The Metropolitan’s production
began at 6:30. We were still
applauding the singers at twenty minutes before midnight. If you can imagine an experience that
combines the leg pain of a tourist class flight to Heathrow and the tachycardia
of a long Alpine ski slope with the ethical exaltation of Paradise Lost—well, if you can do that, you can do more than I can
do. I have a day to recover before Siegfried (tonight) and then, on Saturday,
the marathon finale of The Twilight of
the Gods.
You
almost certainly know more about Wagner’s Ring
cycle than I do, and if you don’t, I could never offer even my infant
appreciation in a few hundred words.
It has to be among the most audacious artistic creations the human
spirit has yet attempted. The
excess is staggering. The length
is daunting. It calls for
dramaturgical resources unavailable in Wagner’s day. It requires a vocal range and stamina that surely only a few
singers in any generation can command.
Its narrative vehicle is an arcane phantasmagoria of early Germanic
mythology and heroic legend. Most
grand opera goes over the top at cardinal moments. The Ring begins
there and hardly descends, except when the Valkyries came galloping, as over
the crest of the globe, on their equine planks.
The Valkyries ride the rails
The
old theology, though prehistoric, is almost post-modern. The gods have created the human race;
but the destiny of divinity is to be supplanted by its creature. The ethic—far from being Hitlerian or
Nietzschean as I have been endlessly told by cultural historians—is classical,
humanistic, indeed Christian. It
is a plea for the superiority of the spiritual over the material.
Chaucer’s
Pardoner preached always on a single biblical text: Radix malorum est cupiditas.
That’s the one translated in the Authorized Version as “The love of
money is the root of all evil.” An
inordinate lust for the golden ring of the Niebelung, and by extension for the
power the possession of gold wields, animates the hugeness of the entire
tragedy. Whether beneath the
waters of the Rhine, as in Wagner, or beneath the earth’s surface, as in the
Boethian tradition, gold is naturally hellish.
“Let
none admire [writes Milton in Paradise
Lost]
That
riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve
the precious bane”
That is a great old English word, bane. It means a thing
or person that kills. Radix
malorum est cupiditas.
Naturally
I was generally familiar with the Ring
as an item of cultural literacy, but its concentrated viewing is something
else. The current Met production
is directed by Robert Lepage, the founder of Ex Machina, a production company
made up chiefly of Quebecois cybergeniuses who specialize in transforming the
proscenium arch into a computer game field. I thought it was fabulous, but it is evident that controversy swirls about Wagnerian opera when presented with the
production values of Star Wars. Traditionalists groan. Our own tickets became available for
purchase only because some friends of friends who had them by subscription were
preemptively disgusted by the very idea.
Yet however numerous, the naysayers, having voted with their feet, left
the field to the majoritarian enthusiasts. In the half hour before the curtain rises the large plaza in
front of the Met rather resembles the pit of the Stock Exchange, as musical
junkies, gesticulating like bond brokers, desperately search for a seller among
the surging throng. I saw no
takers and, within the hall, no empty seats.
But
I myself must eschew an excess of Arnoldian high seriousness of my own. The Ring
Cycle may be a masterpiece of musical high thinking, but it would appear no less to be the Rocky Horror Picture Show of the
aesthetic classes. This is an
opera with fans. Our own excellent friend Susan, through
whom we got our tickets, was seeing the cycle for the fifth time. Opera is exhibition, and over-the-top opera enthusiasts at times do not stop short of exhibitionism.There were
around us in the dress circle a few hard-core fans who had complemented their
glitzy attire of tuxedo or ball gown with those horned helmets that since the
nineteenth century have become the headgear de rigueur for most imaginary
medieval warriors north of the Olive Oil Line.* The idea that a man in his mid-seventies can come upon this
for the first time with the freshness of a child is rather thrilling.
A genius larger than life...
*On this topic I recommend the indispensable article of my learned friend Professor Roberta Frank, “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet”.
