As the
opening-night audience listened to the premiere of the latest works by Richard Wagner in mid-August 1876, they got what they anticipated, and then some
with his “Ring Cycle": a totally immersive musical theater experience,
requiring a maximum commitment of time and devotion.
I’m not
sure you will find another cultural figure who created something so enormous,
so innovative, or requiring so many resources. Drawing on Norse mythology,
Wagner proposed o stage four operas connected by a symbol, to which he gave the
name of the whole cycle: Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of
the Nibelungen”), totaling 15 to 16 hours.
Only one
person he trusted to act as librettist, composer, overall artistic director,
stage director, producer, prompter, and supervisor of his acoustic and seating
innovations: himself.
Each of
the four operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried,
and Götterdämmerung) needed not one, but two intermissions. And he
wanted, and got, a theater built to his specifications in the city of Bayreuth.
Along the
way, Wagner was unbelievably fortunate to have the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. I don’t think I was the only tourist ever to view the
latter’s castle, Neuschwanstein, and think, “This guy was crazy.” (In fact, he
was sidelined for good—after all but sinking Bavaria into bankruptcy—in 1886,
and died shortly afterward under mysterious circumstances.)
In some ways,
Ludwig differed from the composer. He would have preferred Munich rather than
Bayreuth as the site of the Festspielhaus; he upbraided Wagner for his antisemitism;
and, when the monarch compelled his genius friend to turn over the scores of the
first two parts of the “Ring,” Siegfried and Die Walküre, it led
to a quarrel and a temporary construction halt until Ludwig extended a loan
that allowed the festival to open.
Moreover,
Ludwig believed in Wagner enough to support him financially when the composer
sought to fend off creditors and keep his quarter-century dream of the gesamtkunstwerk,
or “total work of art.”
In short,
it was inconceivable that Wagner would have realized his dream if not for the
patron he privately nicknamed “Parsifal” after his pure, idealistic hero.
Not
everyone was enamored with Wagner’s work or the mystique accruing to it. In this prior post, I noted that Mark Twain did not, contrary to belief, write that
“Wagner is better than he sounds.”
But he did
approvingly pass along that observation by someone else, and he did devote an
extended essay, “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” that took issue with
Bayreuth’s cuisine and the composer’s songs (“Nothing can make a Wagner opera
absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal
parts”).
I have to
admit feeling much the same as Twain. But it would also be impossible to deny
that Wagner fundamentally changed musical theater—and, arguably, paved the way
for so much in 20th-century culture through his innovations,
including:
*orchestral
arrangements that incorporated new instruments;
*powerfully
built singers who could make themselves heard over these 80-to-100 piece
orchestras;
*signers
as fully committed to naturalistic acting as to their vocals;
*pits
covered, with orchestras unseen so audiences can concentrate on what is
onstage;
*leitmotifs,
or short, recurring instrumental cues associated with characters, objects, and themes,
the better for audiences both to remember them over multiple hours and to
subliminally signal emotions;
*continuous,
“through-composed” music that blurred traditional distinctions between opera’s
arias and recitative sections;
*seating
“in the round,” with audience members seated democratically, without regard to
pricing;
*theater
lights darkened during performances so audiences would concentrate on the
action and not on what others around them were doing;
*ambitious
subject matter dealing with the most convulsive human emotions: greed, power,
love, and salvation.
Even if
you have never attended the performance of an opera, it is hard to miss the
widespread influence of Wagner:
*films
that either use his music directly (most famously, “The Ride of the Valkyries” in
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) or his leitmotif device
(the scores of John Williams);
*J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which, despite the novelist’s denials, employed
a similar plot as the “Ring Cycle”: the complications involved in possessing an object of miraculous power; and,
*most
controversially, fusing romantic nationalism with antisemitism, leading to exploitation
by one of his greatest admirers, Adolf Hitler.
