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Inching Toward Wagner 4/21/2016 4:14:17 PM
I once went to a movie theater in Toronto to watch a broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. Although I'm familiar with Wagner's four opera Ring Cycle, it's been about five years since I've heard one of them all the way through. The truth is I've never been much of a Wagnerite. The Ring seemed overly serious to me, without a sense of humor, and filled with characters who aren't very smart. The version of the final opera from New York helped me to see beyond the complaints I've had and Wagner's grandiose gestures and find the humanity in the work and even its greatness.
I enjoyed what I saw but felt some resistance to what was taking place on the screen almost till the end, when Siegfried and Brunnehilde sang their final arias. New ideas came to me at that point.
The world Wagner set his story in is similar to the pagan milieus of Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear. Wagner shows us a society where life is a constant battle for power and dominance. Greed and vanity rule, not justice, fairness, love, or even the law.
He draws human beings as creatures of appetite and passion. The hero Siegfried is not spared grievous error and excessive self-regard. Adultery, betrayal, and vengefulness are at the center of the story. The pagan gods are as flawed as the humans and at the end their magnificent off-stage castle is destroyed. The friend I saw the movie with, a student of Wagner's life and works, pointed out that though Wagner didn't live by the morality that was common in his day, he always showed that actions have consequences and that the gods knew that their fallible reign would end and that a new ethos would come in. Wagner upholds through Brunnehilde that love is the redeeming force that will heal human society.
I breathed more easily after I was able to reduce the work's over-sized dimensions and see its human core. My friend pointed out that Wagner used the Ring to wage an attack on the large factories that industrialists were building in his day that dehumanized their employees and encouraged the search for wealth and power. It's hard to estimate what influence this aspect of Wagner's thinking had on society as whole, because the industrial setup is still with us, though I've heard that conditions have improved greatly. Wagner didn't seem to have imagined the impact of labor unions.
Anyhow, my horizons widened a bit as a result of four and a half hours of Gotterdammerung and Das Rheingold, which I saw the week before. It didn't hurt that I could see and hear the work of fine singers and musicians doing their very best in an inventive stage setting. Though still not a Wagnerite, I can now allow his works into the same mental space I reserve for Mozart's operas and others that I've enjoyed.
