Elektra, Berlin Staatsoper, 29 October 2016

Schillertheater

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Orest's Tutor (Franz Mazura), Elektra (Evelyn Herlitzius) Aegisth (Stephan Rügamer) and Klytämnestra (Waltraud Meier)

 

Elektra – Evelyn Herlitzius

Chrysothemis – Adrianne Pieczonka
Klytämnestra – Waltraud Meier
Orest – Michael Volle
Aegisth – Stephan Rügamer
First Maid – Bonita Hyman
Second Maid, Train-bearer – Marina Prudenskaya
Third Maid – Katharina Kammerloher
Fourth Maid – Anna Samuil
Fifth Maid – Roberta Alexander
Overseer, Confidante – Cheryl Studer
Young Servant – Florian Hoffmann
Old Servant – Donald McIntyre
Orest’s Tutor – Franz Mazura

Patrice Chéreau (director)

Vincent Huguet, Peter McClintock (assistant directors)
Richard Peduzzi (set designs)
Caroline de Vivaise (costumes)
Dominique Bruguière (lighting)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Elektra

 

I was fortunate enough to see the Met broadcast of Patrice Chéreau’s Elektra in April. Conducted with white-heat intensity by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with the orchestra on exceptional form, a cast headed by Nina Stemme in the title role convinced this relative sceptic concerning cinema broadcasts that the experience might, in many ways, match that of being in the theatre. I shall spare you a half-baked discourse on liveness and mediation for now; there are others who might actually have interesting things to say on the subject. Comparison, however, is inevitable. What intrigued, if disappointed me, was that, on balance, and with certain exceptions, New York came off slightly better.

 

As I wrote last time, poor productions, performances being another matter, of Elektra are few and far between. Set designs tend to look very similar indeed, and the work itself seems to be one of those that is less amenable, or less welcoming, to radical reinterpretation. Perhaps that in part reflects Hofmannsthal’s own particular reworking of Sophocles. What would one do? Return to a putative original? Whatever for? Nevertheless, Chéreau’s humanism, and what I was – and still am – tempted to call feminism, does offer something new and convincing for a Konzept.

Klytämnestra and Elektra

 

It is hardly novel to consider Elektra as damaged, but here, one sees a woman – or is she a girl? – so damaged, so traumatised, that her illness almost is the story. What we see is surely real, whatever that might mean; but imagination can run alongside reality. Whether one experiences the close of the opera as catharsis is open to question, even to taste, perhaps even to one’s mood, but here there is absolutely, without question, none on stage. She participates more clearly, more directly, in Orest’s revenge than she normally would – so does his tutor, here played by Franz Mazura, well into his nineties! – and yet, in some sense, she appears almost to be a bystander. Her clumsy, shellshocked attempt to dance at the end, once again clashing with, undercutting, criticising our voyeuristic desires for enjoyment – do we shade into the realm of Lacanian jouissance? – remains a shocking thing indeed. And it focuses our attention somehow both on what she does and does not do, and upon the emptiness of Strauss’s C major conclusion.

 

Orest's Tutor

Has she emerged in a still worse position than she was before, or has what we have witnessed made no difference at all? Is the latter perhaps just as terrifying a prospect as the latter? A clash between generations, underlined by the presence onstage of veterans such as Mazura, Donald McIntyre, Cheryl Studer, and Roberta Alexander, has briefly offered a semblance of hope, the reunion of old retainers and abused children supremely touching here. Is not the real problem that of, as it were, the post-Atreus Baby Boomers? Yes, in a way, at least for now – although let us not forget how Klytämnestra herself has suffered – but that implies no hope for the future. People so damaged as Elektra and Orest: well, forget it...

 

Oddly, though, I think what I saw and understood – if indeed I understood it – may well have come across a little better on screen. Chéreau was a great film-maker, of course, but he was also a great man of the theatre. The unsparing nature of HD cinema had worked to the advantage of Stemme and also Waltraud Meier. I described their performances in New York as portrayals ‘that would have been astonishing had they been actresses in a spoken drama, a spoken filmed dramas’. Not being so close had its drawbacks in this case, especially when the Klytämnestra ‘was so much more rounded than the norm, indeed so much more rounded than I have ever heard’. One always needs to see Meier as well as hear her, and perhaps even more so at this stage of her career. But Evelyn Herlitzius’s Elektra, whilst an extraordinary achievement, by any standards, chilled me less than Stemme’s; Herlitzius, is I suppose, a less cool – to put it mildly – performer. She gave it her all, had us utterly enthralled, but for me, at least – and I realise this is an unfair criticism – she seemed perhaps less in tune with what I imagined to be Chéreau’s conception.

 

Adrianne Pieczonka once again gave as fine a performance as Chysothemis as one could hope to hear. The range of vocal colours alone was enough to satisfy the price of entry. Michael Volle was at least as impressive as Orest, finer still, I think, than New York’s excellent Eric Owens (although who cares?) Volle’s way with German words is second to none; their combination with as damaged, if differently so, a personality as Elektra’s made for powerful theatre indeed. There were no weak performances; the contributions from Mazura and Alexander in particular proved deeply moving.

 

Had I not heard Salonen, I might have had little quibble with Daniel Barenboim’s conducting. By most standards, it was excellent; the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin, the occasional rough edge apart, most certainly was throughout. However, I missed a little the icy control of Salonen, perfectly complementing Stemme. Barenboim, almost always at his best in Wagner, is perhaps less of a Straussian. His gift for hearing a work as if in a single breath seemed slightly to desert him here; phrases and paragraphs were all present, though, and that whole was not so very far off. There remained a great deal to admire and to experience, and one cannot always have everything.

 

Elektra, Met Opera Live, 30 April 2016

Metropolitan Opera House, New York

(viewed at Curzon Cinema, Mayfair)

Elektra – Nina Stemme

Chrysothemis – Adrianne Pieczonka
Klytämnestra – Waltraud Meier
Orest – Eric Owens
Aegisth – Burkhard Ulrich
First Maid – Bonita Hyman
Second Maid – Maya Lahyani
Third Maid – Andrea Hill
Fourth Maid – Claudia Waite
Fifth Maid – Roberta Alexander
Overseer – Susan Neves
Young Servant – Mark Schowalter
Old Servant – Tilmann Rönnebeck
Orest’s tutor – James Courtney 

Patrice Chéreau (director)

Vincent Huguet (stage director)
Richard Peduzzi (set designs)
Caroline de Vivaise (costumes)
Dominique Bruguière (lighting)

Metropolitan Opera Chorus (chorus master: Donald Palumbo)
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

Poor productions – performances are another matter – of Elektra are few and far between. The work itself does so much of the work, quite apart from the striking similarity of so many set designs. This production, Patrice Chéreau’s last, was, however, quite different, not so much in terms of set designs, nor even costumes, although difference – genuinely meaningful difference there certainly was there – as in the directorial Konzept, and the harrowing, once-in-a-lifetime brilliance with which it is brought to dramatic life.

I might be tempted to call it feminist, and in a way it is, but it is above all profoundly human, profoundly Elektra’s story. Her experience has trauamatised her, destroyed her, made her ill, above all mentally, to an extent I have never previously witnessed; it threatens to do likewise to us. Whilst Chéreau is far too subtle a director to suggest, let alone to state, that the drama is all in Elektra’s head, it clearly is in part. How could it not be? Such is the nature of trauma. This is a woman so damaged, a daughter so damaged, a sister so damaged that there is no catharsis. She participates more clearly, more directly, in Orest’s revenge than she normally would, and yet remains at a certain remove from it. She dances, or attempts to, yet cannot, at least she cannot in the way that we, uneasy, terrified voyeurs might like; we violate her by watching her tentative, clumsy steps. At the end, she is not dead, nor is she triumphant; she is even more damaged, looking outward, at or into nothing in particular.

Nina Stemme’s performance in the role was – and this is certainly not a claim to be made lightly – perhaps the single greatest performance I have seen from her, most likely heard from her too. In the case of her and Waltraud Meier as Klytämnestra, these were performances that would have been astonishing had they been actresses in a spoken drama, a spoken filmed dramas. The unsparing nature of HD cinema for once enhanced rather than detracted. Stemme’s performance had everything: precision, line, total command and portrayal of her role. Her facial expressions were just as much part of that as her unerring ability to pitch, to shade, to connect the many, many notes of her part. And, of course, she had to be on stage for all but the very first few minutes. Never did she tire; never was she anything other than outstanding.

Meier’s Klytämnestra – Chéreau’s too, I presume, and Vincent Huguet‘s – was so much more rounded than the norm, indeed so much more rounded than I have ever heard. She was no mere grotesque; no figure of high camp. (Herodes will always win hands down in those stakes.) This was a mother we saw and heard: a flawed mother, but one with a human relationship between her and her daughter. We were led to recall, even though it is never stated her, what loss and agony she too had endured. Agamemnon had been no victim. The tenderness and nobility of this queen were an important part of a far more complex character than reductionism would have us believe. Strauss’s score was both agent and beneficiary in that respect. And yet, we seemed, if anything, to go beyond Strauss and Hofmannsthal – both forward to the concerns of our own time and back to Sophocles, indeed to Æscyhlus. Perhaps more to the point, we were invited to sympathise, to empathise, above all to bring our own experiences, and to find meaning in them and in the work.

 

Adrianne Pieczonka showed herself fully in command of Chrysothemis’s treacherous vocal line. More than that, she drew upon a full array of vocal-dramatic colours. The darkness of Eric Owens’s Orest chilled to the bone: there was humanity there, to be uncovered at the end of the recognition scene, but there was psychopathy too. What a luxury it was to have so fine an Alberich sing the role and perhaps even to bring something of that role to his performance. Burkhard Ulrich’s Aegisth did what it should in the short time allotted. All five maids – this is surely tribute both to Chéreau and to their performances – presented plausible individuals, not mere numbered appendages. If the Fifth Maid touched me most, that is surely in part a reflection of the role, but also of the extraordinary capabilities, apparently undimmed, of Roberta Alexander.

 

The Met Orchestra sounded magnificent. It is probably here that a cinema relay suffers most; even with excellent sound, the experience will always seem lesser than in the house. And so, if I missed a little of what orchestras such as the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Vienna Philharmonic at their greatest might bring, that most likely reflected the lack of ‘liveness’ rather than a shortcoming in performance. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s coldly modernist starting-point brought something quite different to the score from anything I can recall previously having heard. There was no doubting Salonen’s knowledge of, immersion in, ability to communicate the extreme complexity of Strauss’s orchestral writing. By the same token, there was no doubting his command of musico-dramatic pacing. The waltz-writing suffered not a jot, but there was as much steel, or perhaps platinum, as gold here. The question of this score’s relationship, or otherwise, to Schoenbergian expressionism is complex. One can argue the toss either way – except of course that there are multiple ways. It was a great strength of Salonen’s reading that one might have experienced it with equal justice in Schoenbergian or Schenkerian aural-analytical terms; indeed, more so even than in his Philharmonia Tristan, the either/or was refuted.

 

Grumbles about presentation: the Met’s website and the sheet available at the cinema on the way out only give cast details for the ‘major’ five; some Internet scouring found me most of the rest, although neither the Confidante nor the Trainbearer. Artists deserve to be credited. And might we kindly be spared the gushing banalities of Renée Fleming’s ’wonderful’ introductions? They do not improve with age. But the drama, Strauss at his very greatest,a was the thing. Nothing could detract from it; nothing came close.

From the House of the Dead, Berlin Staatsoper, 13 December 2014

Schillertheater

 

Images: Monika Rittershaus (from the original, 2011 staging)

 

Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov – Tom Fox

Aljeja – Eric Stoklossa

Luka Kuzmič (or Filka Morozov) – Štefan Margita

Skuratov – Ladislav Elgr

Siškov, Guard – Pavlo Hunka

Prison Governor – Jiří Sulženko

Big Prisoner – Peter Straka

Small Prisoner – Vladimír Chmelo

Elderly Prisoner – Heinz Zednik

Cook, Blacksmith – Maximilian Krummen

Priest – Arttu Kataja

Cekunov – Ján Galla

Drunk Prisoner – Stephen Chambers

Sapkin – Peter Hoare

Kedril – Marian Pavlovič

Don Juan, The Brahmin – Ales Jenis

Young Prisoner – Olivier Dumait

Prostitute – Eva Vogel

Cerevin, Guard – Stephan Rügamer

 

Patrice Chéreau (director)

Peter McClintock (revival director)

Richard Peduzzi (set designs)

Caroline de Vivaise (costumes)

Bertrand Couderc (lighting, video)

 

Chorus of the Berlin State Opera (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

 

Let me find something to complain about. The typing of such a review is a nightmare: all those diacriticals, especially for someone who knows not a word of Czech. That would be it, really. Two of my abiding musical regrets are not having seen the production of Moses und Aron, conducted by Pierre Boulez at my very first Salzburg Festival (I opted for The Marriage of Figaro instead) and not having seen this production of From the House of the Dead (Z mrtvého Domu) when it was first staged, again conducted by Boulez. Neither of those omissions can be put right, of course, but at least I have managed to see my first and – again, alas – doubtless last opera production by Patrice Chéreau in the theatre. (That is, unless I somehow manage to travel to New York to see his valedictory offering, Elektra.)

 

Perhaps the ultimate joy – should that not be an utterly misplaced word with respect to this opera – of this production is to see something that is so well thought out, so well executed, so clearly what it intends to be and what an operatic staging should be, that one experiences almost anew the greatness of genre and work, in themselves and also in performance. Any element of ‘opera house routine’ is banished, likewise any idiotic directorial clichés and incoherences. (The contrast with Christof Loy’s self-regarding assault on Tristan earlier this month could hardly be greater.) Chéreau trusts the work, and it therefore trusts him, permitting re-creative freedom as opposed to mere licence. Realism is both apparent and yet called into question or extended, according to taste. By that, I mean that the prisoners are clearly prisoners, as we should expect to see them; the prison is clearly a prison as we should expect to see it, the behaviour and interaction of the prisoners is so clearly plausible that we might actually be there, and yet there is no delimitation. This could be anywhere, and even the period is unclear – without a hint of post-modernist incongruity. There is plenty of action to watch, more doubtless than one can take in from a single viewing, and yet none of it is gratuitous, none of it distracts. We witness the faithful creation and development of a world we can imagine, rightly or wrongly, as if that matters, Janáček himself creating when sketching and developing his opera from Dostoevsky. Richard Peduzzi’s fine set designs are likewise sufficiently realistic and sufficiently abstract, so much part of the action that one cannot conceive of ‘production’ and ‘designs’ separately. (My mind inevitably went back to the triumph of the Centenary Ring, one of the few DVD opera stagings I am happy to watch again and again.)

 

The coup de theatre, for Chéreau is nothing if not a man of the theatre, comes at the end of the first act, in which a collapse both physical, intellectual, and metaphysical arises, rubbish falling from above – but is there even an Above in a sense Dostoevsky would have understood? – to create pointless ‘work’ for the prisoners thereafter. Is there a hint that this debris might relate to the learning of books, and to the horror of their destruction in authoritarian societies?  I felt so, but perhaps that was just my own reading; either way, Chéreau’s staging and its exemplary revival under Peter McClintock allow us the openness of our own interpretations, again up to a point and without the reactionary chaos of ‘anything goes’. From the House of the Dead has been criticised as having little in the way of plot, even little in the way of ‘opera’. It is surely the composer’s most radical work – which is saying something. Chéreau’s production enables the musical performance to examine and to project its dramatic dialectic between individual character and collectivity, and to show not only its radicalism but also the deep humanity which ultimately places it decisively in the tradition of his earlier works.

 

That relationship between individual and choral collective was powerfully, indeed unforgettably, achieved by the artists themselves on stage. It is, more than usual, not only invidious but more or less impossible to single out members of the cast in such a work and performance. However, the men to whom Janáček more or less briefly grants prominence might usefully be mentioned. Tom Fox’s Alexandr Petrovič seemed just as the composer might have thought of him: noble, ‘different’, compassionate.    The role of Aljeja, the young Tatar, was taken by the tenor, Eric Stoklossa, rather than the more usual mezzo. Stoklossa nevertheless conveyed the character’s youth and vulnerability, without a hint of sacrifice to the integrity of musical delivery. The brutality of the third-act monologue and the horror of its outcome were conveyed powerfully, again with just the right balance between the specific and the universal, by Štefan Margita’s Filka and Pavlo Hunka’s Šiškov. Laidslav Elgr’s Skuratov offered a subtle development of character the work’s detractors would have one believe never present, again perfectly in keeping with Chéreau’s overall vision. Ales Jinis made a strong impression indeed as the prisoner taking the roles of Don Juan and the Brahmin in the second-act plays, his charisma hinting at a homoeroticism which may or may not be ‘there’ in work and setting (irrespective of intention?) The presentation of those two plays was exemplary throughout, all concerned pulling off the trick of convincing portrayal of amateur dramatics with knowledge of the darker forces at work. In that sense, the resentful violence of Vladimír Chmelo Small Prisoner and the frail wisdom of Heinz Zednik’s Elderly Prisoner framed the action and its parameters tellingly.

 

Sir Simon Rattle showed himself at his curtain call deeply appreciative of the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin. Rightly so, for theirs was playing at a level one might have expected them to reserve for Daniel Barenboim. Initially I wondered whether the sound were a little too ‘Romantic’, almost Brahmsian (ironically, given Rattle’s own rather odd way with  Brahms). But I rightly doubted my doubts and was quite won over; for one thing, this ‘old German’ sound is arguably very close to what Janáček himself would have heard and had in mind. One heard Wagner, Strauss, Debussy, even perhaps the Second Viennese School; and yes, one heard Janáček. Rhythms were tight and musically generative, but this was a different, less overtly modernistic composer than one sometimes hears. There is room for several Janáčeks, of course, or rather several manifestations, each shedding light upon the other. Indeed, we may then hear the intimate relationship between ‘late Romanticism’ – itself a deeply problematical concept, which often obscures as much as it enlightens – and ‘modernism’, ‘German’ and ‘Czech’. The final march chilled as it told of a compassion Janáček manages to imply as dialectically responsive to its Fatal inhumanity.

 

Last but certainly not least, indeed arguably foremost, was the contribution of the chorus. Its delivery of words and music, its portrayal of individual and collective, its situation as background and foreground, its clear commitment to work and performance: all of these and more were exemplary throughout. Janáček’s conception of this strange, visionary work emerged in disconcerting triumph. The ultimate test was passed: however difficult the message, I wanted to see it again immediately.

 

 

 

 

The Python in the Pit: Some Further Thoughts on Frank Castorf's Ring

 

 

 

 

When guest editing The Wagner Journal this time last year, I contributed a brief editorial, entitled ‘Wagner Rescued from the Opera House?’ I tried to suggest the incompatibility, as recognised by Wagner and his more discerning interpreters and successors, between Wagner’s works and the everyday life of a typical opera house. As Pierre Boulez, whilst at work on the Ring at Bayreuth, put it: ‘Opera houses are often rather like cafés where, if you sit near enough to the counter, you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!”’ What was needed, Boulez noted approvingly, ‘was an entirely new musical and theatrical structure, and it was this that he [Wagner] gradually created’.[1] Whilst deliberately leaving matters open-ended, I was hinting at the need for more opera houses to become like Bayreuth, or rather to consider a modern version of Wagner’s principles. Interestingly, however, some readers thought I was urging a transfer of Wagner performances from opera house to concert hall. Indeed, upon considering the matter further, I realised the uncomfortable truth that my two greatest live Ring performances had been, if not quite in ‘concert’, minimally staged. It is surely indicative that I immediately think of them with reference to their conductors, Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim, and not, as now tends to be the case with theatrical performances, to their stage directors.

 

I returned to such thoughts several times during this year’s Bayreuth Ring. A more fundamental disquiet than Frank Castorf’s manifold dramaturgical inconsistencies arose. In a number of ways, Bayreuth actually seems – without, admittedly, having taken the step of expanding its repertoire – to have travelled in the opposite direction, towards other houses. That is certainly not all to be regretted. Progress has been made with respect to accessibility, wresting a good number of tickets from the Fafner-like clutches of the various Wagner Societies, so as to enable attendance from something a little, if only a little, more akin to the broader public the revolutionary Wagner always desired, even demanded, even though free admission remains elusive. But musical values seem, with the magnificent exception of Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal, to have slipped further and further down the pecking order. Once, Bayreuth audiences would have expected respective roles’ greatest exponents to be largely present on the Green Hill. Now much of the cast, with some highly distinguished exceptions, would be well enough received in a second-ranking house, whilst falling considerably short of what Barenboim assembled for his Proms performances.

 

A more fundamental problem with respect to this particular Ring, however, was the apparent total lack of interest Castorf showed in the work as a music drama. At his best, and there are some good ideas amongst the debris, Castorf seems to have treated Wagner’s poem alone as the ‘text’. I do not propose a Debussyan ‘calling-card’ parody of Wagner’s method, making visual reference to an object every time its leitmotif appears, although Wagner’s particular brand of realism may sometimes invite such practice.[2] Yet, if one remains wilfully deaf to the voice of Wagner’s orchestra as Greek chorus, how can one possibly emerge with anything other than a partial understanding of Wagner’s drama and its countless possibilities and implications? How could one make any sense whatsoever – in one’s own mind, let alone on stage – of the Funeral March, the close of the Immolation Scene, or any of those numerous cases when the music intensifies, questions, even contradicts, the poem, reminds us of something, crucial to its understanding, which happened several hours previously or suggests something which will happen several hours hence? Just as Aleksander Denić’s set designs – magnificent, considered simply as sculptures – often seemed reduced to backdrops, so was the score reduced at best to the level of a soundtrack and, one suspected, a tiresome one at that for Castorf. He would surely have been happier, and the results preferable, had he followed his usual practice of cutting, interspersing other texts, and so forth, maybe presenting a new Ring in spoken form, at a venue such as the Berlin Volksbühne. Ironically, those passages in which he seemed to have lost all directorial interest – for instance large, often ‘Romantic’, swathes of Die Walküre – resembled the ‘bad old days’ of ‘park and bark’, highlighting from the other side the dangers of letting one musico-dramatic element predominate – especially when, as in Wotan’s seemingly interminable monologue, the singing proved less than convincing.

 

By contrast, Patrice Chéreau, although similarly new to opera, strove to learn as much as he could about score and meaning(s) from Boulez. The increasing strength of their partnership still asserts itself, in one of the few opera DVDs to which I regularly return. In the year of their first revival, Chéreau, writing of the end of the Immolation Scene, expressed his desire:

 

that the orchestra pit be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles – the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message. […] Should one not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?[3]

 

To enlist the services of a director who might think in such terms should not be the least priority for Bayreuth, or any other house, when forging a new Ring.

 

(This piece originally appeared in The Wagner Journal (8/3, November 2014), alongside a review of the cycle by Tash Siddiqui and another opinion piece by Peter Bloom. My full reviews of the Castorf 'Ring' may be found here, here, here, and here.)

---

[1]Pierre Boulez, ‘Time Re-explored’, in Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, tr. Martin Cooper (London and Boston, 1986), 262.

[2]Robin Holloway discusses – if at times with exaggeration – the strong realist currents in the Ring in ‘Motif, Memory and Meaning in “Twilight of the Gods”’, in Nicholas John (ed.), Twilight of the Gods/Götterdämmerung (London and New York, 1985), 13–38.

[3]Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau, ‘Commentaires sur “Mythologie et idéologie”’, in Bayreuther Festspiele: Programmheft, Siegfried (1977), 86–102, esp. 87.

 

 

Two reminiscences concerning the late Patrice Chéreau

 

 

Here speaks an opera director, that is, one as alert to the requirements of Wagner's music as to those of his poem:

... the orchestra pit [should] be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles – the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message. … Should one not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?

Indeed, writing in 1873 about his conception of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus then under construction, Wagner had expanded in similar terms upon his discussion nine years earlier with Gottfried Semper, concerning the abortive Munich Festival Theatre for Ludwig II. Between proscenium and audience would lie a ‘mystical abyss’, out of which the sounds of the concealed orchestra should emerge as an aural equivalent to the steam that once had risen from Gaia’s primæval womb, underneath the seat of the Pythia. Whether Chéreau knew that relatively obscure piece by Wagner, Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth, is in a sense immaterial. Either he had alighted upon the similarity by study or by musico-theatrical intuition; either way, it speaks of a directorial kinship rare indeed.

Equally important to the success of the ‘Centenary’ Ring was, of course, the collaboration with Boulez. The composer-conductor, a true successor to Wagner and Mahler, spent a great deal of time on the score with Chéreau. Boulez, however, clearly learned a great deal from his director too. The following observation was clearly derived – as Boulez acknowledges – from their discussions:

There have been endless discussions as to whether this conclusion is pessimistic or optimistic; but is that really the question? Or at any rate can the question be put in such simple terms? Chéreau has called it ‘oracular’, and it is a good description. In the ancient world, oracles were always ambiguously phrased so that their deeper meaning could be understood only after the event, which, as it were, provided a semantic analysis of the oracle’s statement. Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.

 

 

We rarely hear anything but praise for this production now, though there will doubtless always be a few irreconcilables. Yet it is salutary to recall how bitterly contested the Boulez-Chéreau Ring was at the time, especially in its first year, 1976. It is always worth asking ourselves whether we are likely to appear ridiculous, on the wrong side of history, in our fearful judgements, rejecting just that with which Wagner, Chéreau, and Boulez challenged us: 'a conclusion that remains shifting'.

 

The only time I saw Chéreau, a highly talented actor in his own right, perform was at the Proms five years ago. It was an unforgettable occasion both as a concert in itself, and on account of the connections between those involved: Daniel Barenboim, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Chéreau, and Boulez. I reproduce below my report on the concert:

 

Prom 39: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim, 14 August 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Boulez – Mémoriale (‘... explosante-fixe ...’ Originel)
Stravinsky – L’histoire du soldat (in French)

Guy Eshed (flute)
Patrice Chéreau (narrator)
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

The genesis of Mémoriale is complicated and protracted even by Boulez’s standards. A simplified presentation would say that it emerged as a piece for solo flute, two horns, and six strings, as a memorial for Ensemble Intercontemporain flautist, Lawrence Beauregard, the material originating in the ‘kit’ for ‘... explosante-fixe’, itself intended as a memorial for Stravinsky and therefore especially apposite for the present programme. Electronics thus play no part, although they do in ‘... explosante-fixe ...’, yet an interesting aspect of this performance was how much the strings were suggestive of such means. They also produced a beautiful halo-like impression, albeit with a properly Boulezian sense of the febrile. The music, to which all instrumentalists contributed with great sensitivity, captured an equally Boulezian sense of the shimmering and ever-expanding, serial music – and that of Boulez in particular –being characterised by its unending possibilities for continuation, development, and liberation from fixed endings. Guy Eshed was an outstanding soloist, both musically and technically. None of the intricacies of Boulez’s exquisite, almost culinary line held any fear for him, but this was never virtuosity for its own sake. Inevitable reminiscences of Debussy added to the finely-honed, ineffable ‘Frenchness’ of this excellent performance. It was touching to have Boulez in the audience come to the stage in order to share in the applause.

Boulez and Barenboim have been close musical collaborators and friends ever since they performed Bartók’s First Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1964. Patrice Chéreau’s name will ever be linked with that of Boulez as a result of their collaboration on the legendary ‘Centenary-Ring’ at Bayreuth, the first production of the three-act version of Lulu, and more recently, a universally-acclaimed From the House of the Dead; Chéreau also once acted as narrator for a 1980 Ensemble Intercontemporain performance of L’histoire du soldat under Boulez. Links with Barenboim have also been strong, including productions of Wozzeck, Don Giovanni, and most recently Tristan und Isolde. These various interconnections added another layer of interest to the intelligent programming. It is fair to say that this was above all Chéreau’s performance. He threw himself with such gusto into his roles as narrator, soldier, and Devil, that one could almost see the missing puppets. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s text was not always adhered to word for word, but that did not matter in the slightest. One sensed the genius of Chéreau as a director, an animateur, and indeed he proved himself no mean actor. (He actually appeared on stage as Siegfried at Bayreuth on one occasion, whilst a replacement tenor sang from the wings.) This was a visual performance too, which made it seem such a pity that many members of the audience rarely looked up from the text and translation in the programme. I suspect that one would have discerned most of what was going on from Chéreau’s expressivity even if one understood not a word of French. As the work progresses, it becomes more musical in nature. Barenboim and his players proved fine exponents of this extraordinary score. Its potent mix of rhythmic insistence, thematic and colouristic economy and yet expressivity, and of course its instant, nagging memorability, was captured well throughout. Guy Braunstein returned, to play on the Devil’s own instrument; his performance was everything one might have expected. I was also especially impressed by Dan Moshayev’s contribution on percussion. But all of the players contributed a great deal, both in solo and ensemble terms. Barenboim clearly trusted enough in their abilities to permit them considerable leeway at times, whilst directing them strongly where required. More than once I thought of Busoni in terms of the harmonies and general ambience. Barenboim has considerable experience with Busoni’s music, so a sense of kinship between the Italian composer’s Junge Klassität and a work heading towards Stravinskian neo-classicism may not have been surprising; that does not make it any the less welcome. There might sometimes have been greater aggression to be heard in so polemical a score than one heard here, but this remained an excellent performance. It projected well into the capricious, cavernous expanses of the Royal Albert Hall too.

R.I.P. Patrice Chéreau, 1944-2013

There are many other things for which he should and will be remembered, but the 'Centenary' Ring, still the most compelling on film, will always take first place. Alas, some of us were not around to see it in the Festspielhaus, but many years later, I was able to borrow the video cassettes one by one from my music teacher, to experience a Ring revelation second only (or at any rate, joint second with my first 'live' Ring, some years hence ) to my very first summer holiday immersion in the CDs and the scores. Unthinking reactionaries condemned him - and indeed Boulez - then just as indiscriminately as they spew forth hatred today at most of today's most interesting opera directors. They have been proved utterly, almost but not quite magnificently, wrong; they will be once again. But enough of that for the moment. For Konzept and Personenregie - as we have come to known them since - alike, this has never been equalled. Even with respect to that notoriously tricky medium of opera on film, where one may often be interested to see something once, or even twice, but will soon find oneself seeking Brünnhilde's neue Taten, the fascination never fades. If I were to recommend but one example of opera on DVD to you, then it would be this. And my own book on the Ring, for whatever this may be worth, has as its front cover an image from the Immolation Scene of this great production, Gwyneth Jones resplendent, the workers almost straight Brecht-Weill looking searchingly to us, to the future.

Norman Tebbit, Wagnerian? Or, Der Ring des Nibelungen: Love versus Inheritance

For the (dubious) benefit of overseas readers, who may until now have been living in blissful ignorance of Lord Tebbit of Chingford, his reappearance on the British political stage might prove, short of Margaret Thatcher’s resurrection, the ultimate in ‘80s retro. Notorious for stances that threatened to make the Prime Minister herself resemble a woolly-minded liberal – his advice to the unemployed was that they should follow his father’s lead, getting on their bikes to find some work, and he suggested a ‘cricket test’ for immigrants, to assess their loyalty on the basis of which team they supported – he seems more recently to have become obsessed with homosexuality, to the extent that a friend of mine suggested he should consider seeking asylum in Iran or Saudi Arabia. (The idea of him as the Abu Qatada of Teheran is not entirely without its amusing side.) He certainly has longstanding form, having written to The Daily Telegraph in 1998, perturbed that gay men might do each quasi-Freemasonic ‘favours’, were they to be permitted to attain political office. His latest intervention, an interview with The Big Issue reported today (click here) has as its context a failed bid by the extreme Right of the Conservative Party to derail legislation to enable gay marriage; Tebbit now finds himself exercised by the possibility of a lesbian queen who might have an artificially inseminated heir. Other interesting light is cast upon his subconscious by his concern that gay marriage might lead to his marrying his son in order to avoid inheritance tax. (If I were Tebbit Jr, I should probably now be in the departures lounge, nervously consulting my wristwatch.)

On the eve of Wagner’s 200^th birthday, I wondered initially whether this story might draw a few threads together. Might we out Tebbit as a Wagnerian? Had he simply been listening to too much of Die Walküre (see the clip below for Siegmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, declaring their love for each other, the curtain falling just in time to spare too many Chingford blushes.)

 

 

But alas, not. I reminded myself that in the world of Tebbit, the issue is about inheritance. He does not seem so much as to consider the possibility that some of those gay couples might wish to marry out of love. One might claim Wagnerian influence in that respect too; Wagner was at best ambivalent concerning marriage, arguing rightly, in Proudhonian fashion, that it was little more than an instantiation of bourgeois property relations, and having his Jesus of Nazareth stand as a liberator of mankind – and womankind – from all such constraints to human flourishing. Inheritance – ‘the world’s inheritance’ of the Ring and the Ring’s ring – is equally deadly. Yet in Die Walküre, Wagner straightforwardly offers us a portrayal of two human beings who fall in love, unconcerned with society’s judgement upon them, unconcerned even by the discovery that they are brother and sister. Their love, of the moment, refusing to be set in stone either by the runes of Wotan’s spear of law or Fricka’s dead hand of custom, defies bourgeois marriage, yet not after the fashion of Norman Tebbit’s Thatcherite reduction of all to financial and contractual concerns; quite the opposite. Now it may well be, as Wagner's intellectual development tends to suggest, that the hopes placed by many in love are illusory, that we should do better to attend to Schopenhauer than to Feuerbach, and that marriage may certainly not prove to be the best way forward for anyone of any sexual orientation; Brünnhilde belief that she is married, cruelly symbolised by the ring itself, does her and Siegfried no good at all. But Wagner points to renunciation; he certainly does not suggest that we retreat to a world of loveless marriages, such as those of Sieglinde to Hunding, or others conducted purely for reasons of inheritance. Wagner’s relevance? (Wagners Aktualität, as an essay by Adorno has it.) It has never been stronger.

Writing the 'Ring'

‘Yes, I should like to perish in Valhalla’s flames! — Mark well my new poem — it contains the beginning of the world and its destruction!’ Wagner’s words in an 1853 letter to Liszt, a copy of the Ring poem enclosed, express abiding theatricality, often overlooked, despite Nietzsche’s vicious attack on Wagner as ‘actor’. They point also to his framing of the Ring dramas on which he had been at work since 1848 and whose completion would lie more than two decades hence, in 1874.

The Immolation Scene from the 'Centenary' Ring
Copyright: Bayreuth Festival

It is well known that Wagner wrote his poems in reverse order, beginning with Siegfrieds Tod, soon to become Götterdämmerung, and needing to write three prequels, before composing the music in the order we know today: the trilogy ‘with preliminary evening’. Likewise that he broke off composition of Siegfried to write Tristan  and Die Meistersinger; likewise  that he found it necessary to write a number of verbal endings to Götterdämmerung between 1848 and 1856 before resolving upon the ‘wordless’ solution, or rather enigma, with which he continues to tantalise us. But the consequences for his dramas are often misunderstood. Wagner’s thought always tended towards an amalgam of the agglomerative and the synthetic. That characteristic renders him especially attractive to the historian of the nineteenth century. Ideas and influences overlap, not necessarily supplanting or resolving, but heightening conflict, the very stuff of drama, thereby rendering him especially attractive to audiences and to performers. Not every idea and influence need be reflected in every performance; were that attempted, we should most likely end up with an unholy mess. However, not only will any production, indeed any audience, have to make choices; they also need to consider what is being left out, or at least played down.

Feuerbach, Bakunin, Marx

 

Keith Warner’s production emphasises Wagner’s intellectual influences during the 1840s, as he worked not only towards the Ring but also towards active participation in the violent, abortive Saxon revolution of 1849. Precisely what role he took on the barricades remains unclear, but it is unquestionable that he was close to the visiting anarchist revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, and that he was consequently ‘wanted’ by the authorities, Wagner being exiled from German soil until 1860, an amnesty from Saxony taking longer still.

Bakunin

In Warner’s words, ‘Whatever you personally believe, Wagner is dealing in the Ring with the nature of God and the universe.’ Indeed, he is, which takes us to ‘the beginning of the world,’ or at least to the beginning of a world. It is actually more complex even than that, for Wagner presents us, like the Book of Genesis, with alternative beginnings. Take the following words, which describe the Prelude to Das Rheingold: ‘the gradual development of the material world … a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher,’ not ‘the vile matter of the idealists … incapable of producing anything,’ but ‘matter … spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive.’ Those words describe the opening perfectly, from the first sounding of the double basses’ low E-flat pedal, held throughout the Prelude, reflecting unchanging Nature: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be – or such would be the claim of the Church, and of many others. Except that those words were not written with Das Rheingold in mind at all. They come from Bakunin’s God and the State, the convergence a testament to both men’s preoccupation with the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx and Engels owed a similar debt. Indeed, the young Engels’s enthusiasm for Feuerbach and Teutonic mythology mirrored Wagner’s own.  Engels wrote in 1840, eulogising Siegfried as the representative of German youth. … We feel the same thirst for deeds [Taten, the same word with which Brünnhilde will send Siegfried out into the world from her rock] … we want to go out into the free world.’ Romantic words, one might think, for a founding-father of ‘scientific socialism’. That is the point: Engels’s socialism did not lack on account of his mythological enthusiasm; nor did Wagner’s.

Feuerbach

Feuerbach was a central figure in the movement that has come to be known as Left or Young Hegelianism. During the political, social, and religious repression of the period between the uneasy restoration of 1815 and the outbreak once again of revolution in 1848-9, a group of German writers wished to extend the revolutionary dynamism of Hegel’s ontology (philosophy of being) to human realms in which they believed their father-figure to have neglected, through self-censorship or otherwise, to follow its implications. Above all, radicals such as Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Bruno Bauer wished to extend Hegelian criticism to the world of religion.  History, it was claimed, in true Hegelian style, had a purpose; now was the time to cast out Christianity at least and perhaps religion itself from philosophy. In his Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that theology transferred authentic religious impulses, such as love, justice, and charity, to an object outside man, namely a God of man’s own invention. Now, however, was the moment to turn from God to man. Wagner would pay tribute to Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future by dedicating to him the 1849 essay, The Artwork of the Future.


Wotan and Alberich, Valhalla and Nibelheim

 

And so, in the Ring, Wagner unmasks – a favourite Young Hegelian conceit – the realm of the gods, built not upon that first ‘natural’ opening to the cycle, but arising from the second, counterpoised genesis, as told by the Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung. Not that the first is so straightforward as it might seem, for Nature, in the guise of the Rhinemaidens, acts cruelly to Alberich, denies the misfit dwarf love, and is violated by him in turn; there is no golden age in the Ring-cosmos. That said, the natural world stands preferable to the deeds of Wotan, chief of the gods and thus in some sense a representation of the godhead itself. Inscribing runes upon his spear, Wotan commits the primal sin of politics, defining principles which, even had they once been good in themselves, become outdated as soon as they find themselves represented in dead wood. Fricka, according to Wagner the voice of ‘custom’, simply cannot understand this, lamenting with all the outworn moralism of a believer who has forgotten quite why she believes, that Siegmund and Sieglinde should love one another. We never see her again, though she will be invoked, off-stage – out of Heaven? – by Hunding, not that she can help him, and as the recipient of vain burnt offerings in Götterdämmerung. Her day has passed.

The spear is also an instrument of domination; it is with military force as well as ideology that Wotan rules the world. Yet ideology in a sense comes first, which is why Valhalla is built, as much a religious as a political fortress, a classic instance of European ‘representational’ culture, which ‘re-presents’ its power to subjects who must be overawed. For, as Wagner and Bakunin were convinced, the ‘critique of religion is the essential precondition for all criticism’ (Marx on Hegel): that of Alberich’s capitalist tyranny of Nibelheim with its golden hoard, the modern factory incarnate, as well as Wotan’s more sumptuous, more ideologically complex castle in the air. It is intended, in the words of the celebrated Lutheran chorale, as ‘ein’ feste Burg’ (‘a stronghold sure’), yet note that it appears first of all to Wotan in a dream. In Feuerbach’s proclamation: ‘Religion is the dream of the human mind,’ in which ‘we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity,’ a view lent Wagnerian credence by Pierre Boulez’s observation, voiced whilst working on the Bayreuth ‘Centenary’ Ring, that  our first musical encounter with Valhalla ‘is not clearly delineated but belongs to a world of dream, phantasmagoria, and mirage.’ Moreover, the forced, disturbingly empty grandeur, or rather grandiosity, of Das Rheingold’s closing bars tells already of desperation, unnatural prolongation, deceit, and, as Erda has already foretold, ‘a dark day [that] dawns for the gods’. Freia and her golden apples may have been regained, but we have seen behind the throne, as has Alberich. Both Alberich and Licht-Alberich – the Wanderer, in his riddle-confrontation with Mime styles himself ‘Light-Alberich’, his ‘black’ antagonist’s power-seeking alter ego – commit crimes against Nature, one despoiling the Rhine, one sapping the life from the World-Ash Tree; both wish to extend that power through possession of the ring, forged in denial of that love, which was for Feuerbach the foundation of a true, human religion; both can be unmasked and thereby overthrown by extension of religious criticism beyond the ‘merely’ theological; and both have their deeds dialectically connected in the musical metamorphosis between the first two scenes of Das Rheingold of Alberich’s ring into Wotan’s Valhalla.

Loge, critic and god of fire

Built upon false contracts, entered into with Fasolt and Fafner, which was for guaranteed by Wotan’s very own spear of domination, and perpetuated by continued denial of the gold to the Rhine and its daughters, Valhalla and the gods’ rule are fatally compromised from the outset. The gods’ entrance, punctured by the Rhinemaidens’ plaints and Loge’s (Young Hegelian) criticism – ‘They hasten to their end, they who imagine themselves so strong and enduring’ – is already a dance of death, rendered all the more slippery by the destabilising, negating, almost Faustian chromaticism of Loge’s motif. Not for nothing has he been identified as the Ring’s sole intellectual, and, when one bears Bakunin and indeed the Wagner who prescribed a ‘fire-cure’ for Paris in mind, one realises that there lies no contradiction whatsoever between Loge’s twin roles as critic and as god of fire. Moreover, Loge’s ‘imagine’ (wähnen) is crucial not only in the Feuerbachian sense, but also in that it provides, in its anticipation of the Wahn (‘illusion’) of Schopenhauer, whom Wagner had not yet read, a textbook example of a concept that would acquire additional layerings of meaning as Wagner’s work on the cycle and elsewhere proceeded: recall Hans Sachs’s ‘Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn!’

The ‘purely human’ Volsungs

The contrasting world of the ‘purely human’, a term Wagner often employed in his theoretical writings, is experienced with vernal, magical immediacy in Die Walküre: ‘You are the Spring,’ Sieglinde exults, before submitting to her brother, the curtain falling only just in time, as the music’s passion requires us all to take a metaphorical cold shower during the interval. Feuerbach abides here, for not only does this celebrate love between Siegmund and Sieglinde; it commemorates Siegmund’s rejection of Valhalla, echoing Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality, whose opening pages include a ‘Humble petition to the exalted, wise, and honourable learned public to receive Death into the Academy of Sciences’:

He is the best doctor on earth;

none of his cures has yet failed;

and no matter how sick you become,

he completely heals Nature.

To be sure, he never has concerned himself

with Christian theology,

yet he will have no peer

in understanding philosophy.

So then I implore you to receive

Death into the academy,

and, as soon as possible, to make

him doctor of philosophy.

What Siegmund accepts, celebrating death and his love for Sieglinde in heroic defiance of the illusory promise of immortality in Valhalla, Wotan struggles towards, at one point willing ‘the end’ and yet, even at the last in Siegfried, making a stand, unwilling quite to ‘die in the fullest sense of the word,’ according to Wagner’s words in an 1854 letter. It takes, moreover, a free act, albeit unconsciously free, by Siegfried, revolutionary hope of Engels and Wagner alike, finally to shatter Wotan’s spear of law, and to return the god for good to Valhalla, to await, in Schopenhauerian resignation, the end. Siegfried’s undoing will be his lack of consciousness, though that spontaneity will also point to his greatness, a dilemma which, as revolutionary hopes faded yet never entirely died, became all the more pressing for Wagner. Indeed, it is only in memoriam, in the shattering Funeral March, that Siegfried proves worthy of the hopes invested in him, of Wagner’s stated desire in the Ring ‘to make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’. No longer quite the hero of the drama that he had been in the more straightforwardly revolutionary Siegfrieds Tod, Siegfried has neither quite triumphed nor quite been supplanted: again, Wagner’s intellectual method poses rather than answers questions.

Concluding, thinking, making sense of uncertainty

To have written that the dramas were completed in 1874 was in a sense misleading, for they remain magnificently open-ended, whether in performance or staging. The composer was notably dissatisfied with scenic realisation at Bayreuth. Wagner’s great effort to conclude remains, whatever his own ambitions towards Hegelian totality, stubbornly necessitates further questioning. This may be of the nature, ‘What happens to Alberich?’, not at all a silly question. Does such uncertainty of plot, hardly accidental, suggest that, whatever the ‘watchers’, the mysterious ‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’, at the end of Götterdämmerung may have experienced, even learned, that we are doomed to repeat the cycle ad infinitum? Such, after all, is the implication of a cycle, though what of Warner’s and Stefanos Lazaridis’s double helix, perhaps suggestive of Hegel’s favoured spiral? Indeed, whilst the ring itself tempts us to think in circular form, we should always bear in mind that, more often than not, its powers are ‘unmasked’  as illusory. All forms of power, love included, fall prey to Wagner’s deconstruction and savage indictment – his encounter with the philosophy of Schopenhauer here fuses with prior disillusionment with the more naïve aspects of Feuerbach’s ‘love-communism’ –  and yet we continue to ask ourselves whether a world without power is even conceivable, or merely ‘utopian’, to borrow from Marx and Engels. Siegfried is never better off than when he values the ring at naught; Brünnhilde is never worse off than when she considers it to betoken marriage, another form of property-based power. (The socialism of French writers such as Charles Fourier, with its celebration of something akin to what another generation would call ‘free love’, was always a potent ingredient in Wagner’s intellectual mix, likewise that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose most famous slogan remains ‘Property is theft’, instantiated in Alberich’s conversion of value-free Rhinegold into capital.)

Thus particular questioning readily transforms itself into the more general, conceptual variety, and vice versa. That whole ‘world’ of which Wagner wrote to Liszt develops before our very eyes and ears, both in performance and in subsequent contemplation. The Ring’s web of motifs encourages us to think in such a way, to dart back and forth, reminding us of its world’s past, hinting at its future, and tantalising us with alternative paths of development, which intriguingly become all the more ‘real’ the more strongly we know that they will be denied. What if…? This is not a work one can know too well, or even well enough. And yet, we know ,with Hegel, that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk; or, with Marx, that it is folly to write recipes for the cookery books of the future. It is no coincidence that Hegel and Marx were so taken with early theories of evolution, with their strong facility of backward explanation and their weak predictive powers. Wagner might speak theoretically of the ‘artwork of the future’, but he is wise enough in that artwork to stick to the past and present; he does not present us with science fiction.  The world is rightly given over to the ‘watchers’.

 What about us? We might do well to heed Warner’s words, ‘When you are torn apart at the end of Die Walküre – as I think you should be – it’s because you’ve had five hours of profound information about these people, not because you’ve been manipulated into weeping by mere theatrical or musical devices.’ Wagner, in his own words, aims at ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’, not at its abdication. The Ring acts as a standing rebuke to those people – Nietzsche might have called them ‘Wagnerians’ – who wish merely to wallow. An audience, just as much as a performer or a director, which fails to think is unworthy of the Ring, yet that incitement affords an extraordinary opportunity. There is clearly identification, albeit uncertain, to be had between us and the ‘watchers’ – we are all survivors – and a crucial clue here is that they are human. The end of Wotan’s rule is not hymned with words of revolutionary jubilation as it had been in one of Wagner’s projected endings, the so-called ‘Feuerbach ending’, yet there nevertheless remains a strong sense that, human though we may be in our failings as well as our strengths, our world is that Nietzsche would herald in The Gay Science:  

We philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone upon us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.

 

Uncertainty with respect both to the watchers’ position and to ours precludes glib chatter of a happy ending.Yet, informed as much by Schopenhauer’s ideas of compassion as Feuerbach’s unmasking of religion, they stand a little advanced upon the savagery we have witnessed, a beacon of hope to our world, which has signally failed to destroy Valhalla or Nibelheim. In the words of Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.’ There can be no final words when it comes to the Ring, but let us temporarily conclude with a return to Boulez:

There have been endless discussions as to whether this conclusion is pessimistic or optimistic [in our shorthand, ‘Feuerbach or Schopenhauer?’]; but is that really the question? Or at any rate can the question be put in such simple terms? [Patrice] Chéreau has called it ‘oracular’, and it is a good description. In the ancient world, oracles were always ambiguously phrased so that their deeper meaning could be understood only after the event, which, as it were, provided a semantic analysis of the oracle’s statement. Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.