Putting the Pieces Together
or … Much Ado About Notung
SYNOPSIS: “But what does it all mean?” From the
pre-Wagnerian theories of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer through the influential
work of Shaw and Donington to the more balanced approaches advocated by Darcy,
Millington, Cooke, and others, numerous interpretations have been advanced that
offer clues to “the meaning” of the Ring. Through a consideration
of several major philosophical approaches to Wagner, participants will be
encouraged to seek their own meaning in a fresh consideration of the Ring
and the issues raised by the cycle.
1.
Good afternoon,
everyone.
2.
Near the end of his
famous series of William James lectures at Harvard in 1955, the philosopher
J.L. Austin began to draw his conclusions by saying, “I have as usual failed to
leave enough time to say why what I have said is interesting.”[1]
a)
It always seems to me
that that’s the usual fault of academic and cultural symposia as well.
i)
We spend all of our
time exploring interesting and relevant ideas …
ii) … and pause all too frequently to put the pieces
together, to talk about why everything that’s been said is interesting
or relevant.
iii)
We begin to wrap up
before we ever stop to ask, “Yes, but what does it all mean?”
b)
Well, as a way of not
falling into that trap, Jim proposed that we have a session at the end of the lecture
portion of this symposium that would include a brief exploration of what the Ring’s
all about … and why it’s interesting.
c)
And that’s the task
that I’ve taken on this morning.
i)
A survey of everything
the Ring means …
ii) … in less than an hour.
d)
It’s sort of a
daunting task.
3.
Now, the first thing
we need to realize, of course, is that it’s not going to be possible for me —
or, I think, for anyone — to give you any one “true” meaning for the Ring
… the one “meaning” that says it all and to which no further response is
possible … particularly not in the time we have available.
a)
The Ring is
inevitably going to have any number of “meanings” … depending on who’s doing
the interpreting … and when.
b)
And that’s not the
fault either of the critic or of the work itself.
c)
Rather it’s a
reflection of the remarkable richness of the Ring.
d)
Many of you are
probably familiar with Italo Calvino’s[2]
famous definition of a classic as “a book that has never finished saying what
it has to say.”
e)
Well, the Ring
is that kind of classic.
f)
It keeps saying
different things to us depending on who we are and what questions we ask it …
g)
… and every
generation’s going to find itself and its questions in this remarkably complex
and interesting “mirror.”
4.
But also I think we
have to remember that the Ring spans 28 years of Wagner’s life … if you
count the time from the very first word that he put on paper in 1848 to his
full-blown theatrical conception of the work in the first festival of 1876.
a)
And how many of us
look at the world in precisely the same way that we did four or five years ago,
much less 28?
b)
So, as the concept
for the Ring matured and grew over the course of nearly three decades,
Wagner inevitably added new layers of meaning reflecting his different thought
at different times in his life.
c)
As you study the Ring
and begin to peal away those layers, you’re inevitably going to find different
levels of meaning each time you look.
d)
To change metaphors
for a moment, it’s sort of like doing archaeology.
i)
Each stratum shows
you a different civilization.
ii) But what you see is ultimately dependent on where
you stop.
5.
And finally, I think
we need to remember something that Elizabeth Magee pointed out in the very
first line of her book on the cycle,[3]
namely that “The Ring text belongs to the most turbulent period of
Wagner’s varied life.”
a)
Think of everything
that was happening in the world as Wagner was shaping this work …
b)
… and to all of the
different philosophical, cultural, and intellectual influences he was exposed
to.
c)
In other words, it’s
no wonder at all that there are various strands of thought present in this
work.
d)
In fact, it would be
almost impossible for all of those different strands not to exist.
6.
So, if it’s not quite
possible to isolate the one, unchanging meaning of the Ring, what
we can do is to clarify perhaps three or four of the major interpretations that
various critics have found there.
a)
And, by so doing, we
can perhaps clarify — each of us on our own — what the Ring means to us.
b)
Or, at least, argue
against what the Ring has meant to others.
c)
And I’d like to begin
this process by starting with two schools of thought that actually antedate the
Ring, and that helped shape Wagner’s approach to his own work.
d)
We’re going to begin
by — very briefly — taking a look at the philosophies of Ludwig Feuerbach and
Arthur Schopenhauer, and seeing how Wagner used these philosophies to help
shape the Ring.
e)
And as we do this,
I’m going to apologize in advance to any of you who happen to be specialists in
nineteenth century German philosophy for the simplistic and cursory way that
we’re going to do this.
f)
Once again, it’s
simply a matter of the time we have available.
7.
To begin with
Feuerbach …
a)
Ludwig Feuerbach was
a philosopher who lived from 1804 until 1872, and so he was — by about a decade
— an older contemporary of Wagner.
b)
What makes him
important to us is that he was one of the great materialist philosophers of the
nineteenth century.
c)
In other words,
Feuerbach didn’t believe in gods, didn’t believe in any spiritual dimension in
life, but did believe that all religious phenomena could be explained in
essentially psychological terms.
d)
In his most famous
work, The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841,[4]
Feuerbach argued that religion was nothing more than the projection of our own
social values onto an imaginary concept of the divine.
i)
So, this is really
very interesting.
ii) In 1841, the very year that Wagner wrote the Dutchman
and began dealing with that theme of redemption that he’d return to again and
again throughout his dramatic works …
iii)
… Ludwig Feuerbach
published The Essence of Christianity in which redemption is treated as
a psychological, not as a spiritual phenomenon.
8.
And Feuerbach’s work
created one of those “layers” or “strata” in the Ring that I was
alluding to before.
a)
In 1848, when Wagner
wrote the prose sketch for what was going to be the Ring — a short essay
that we call The Nibelung-Myth as an Outline for a Drama[5] — and also the first of his dramas based on this
legend — Siegfried’s Death — Brünnhilde’s climactic speech was going to
contain a certain train of thought.
b)
We’ll look at
Brünnhilde’s words as they appear in the prose sketch.
c)
As you know if you’ve
studied the work, her words are slightly different in Siegfried’s Death,
but their central point is the same.
d)
This is what
Brünnhilde says.
Let the Nibelungs be free. Let the ring bind them no more. But Alberich
won’t have this ring. He won’t be your
master. No, he’ll be as free as you.
Instead, I give the ring to you, wise sisters of the deep. Let the fire that burns me cleanse all evil
from what was taken from you and welded to evil and to slavery. Only one will rule: you, All-father in your glory![6]
e)
And this is very
interesting because you’ll notice how Wagner originally conceived the ending of
his story:
i)
Alberich survives.
ii) In fact, he not only survives but ends up being
free.
iii)
And Wotan continues
to rule … a sadder but a wiser king.
iv)
Wotan, in the world
that follows the end of the story, is going to be sort of an enlightened
monarch.
v) At least that what this passage seems to imply.
f)
And that particular
outlook that Wagner adopted in this speech happened to fit in perfectly with
his political philosophy at that time.
g)
On June
14th, 1848, Wagner delivered a speech to the Vaterlandsverein or
“Patriotic Club” in Dresden.[7]
h)
And in
that speech, he outlined his vision for a future republic in Saxony that would
be a headed by an enlightened monarch from the house of Wettin.
…
we … ask the King [Wagner said in
that speech] … to be the first and
sterlingest Republican of all. … this
prince, the noblest worthiest King, let him speak out:— “I declare Saxony a Free State.” And let the earliest law of this Free State,
the edict giving it the fairest surety of endurance, be:— “The highest executive power rests in the Royal House of Wettin, and
descends therein from generation to generation, by right of primogeniture.”[8]
i)
Well,
it’s not too much of a leap to go from a Saxony ruled benevolently by a Wettin
monarch …
j)
… to a
Valhalla ruled benevolently by a Wotan monarch.
k)
But as 1848 continued
and 1849 began, two important things happened that influenced Wagner’s
political philosophy, and indeed his philosophy in general:
i)
August Röckel
introduced him to the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin …
ii) … and a political agitator by the name of Metzdorf
encouraged him to read the works of Ludwig Feuerbach.[9]
l)
Well, in Feuerbach’s
philosophy, as we’ve seen, there are no gods …
m) … and without any gods there can’t be any divine
right of kings.
n)
So, Feuerbach lent
Wagner the philosophical foundation that supported a new political outlook: one
that veered away from support for an enlightened monarch, and towards support
for anarchy.
o)
And this was the
political “system” — or lack thereof —
that, of course, Bakunin advocated as well.
9.
So, in 1852, after
having completed a study of Feuerbach’s writings, Wagner wrote a new ending for
the Ring that embodied that author’s philosophical principles.
a)
This is the so-called
“Feuerbach ending” of the work, and it runs as follows:
Were the race of the gods to pass away like a breath of air, I’d have the world be completely ruler-less. I’d offer it the full store of my most sacred wisdom. Neither property, nor gold, nor godlike splendor. Neither house, nor court, nor lordly magnificence. Not dreary contracts full of deceptive alliances. Not stern law masquerading as morals. No, let love alone be bless’d in its longing and in its suffering.[10]
b)
And it’s only with
the arrival of the Feuerbach ending … and the resulting anarchy that it implied
… that Wagner presented Wotan and Valhalla as needing to be swept away.
i)
What we have here is
something like a revolutionary purge.
ii) Valhalla burns like the Bastille.
iii)
Wotan is reduced to
the ash heap of history … rather like a divine Louis XVI.
iv)
People don’t need
rulers … least of all do they need “gods” as their rulers.
v) Love is exalted.
vi)
Property is condemned
as the root of all evil.
vii)
And the Nibeliungs
had nothing to lose but their chains.
10.
Well, in the late
1840s, these ideas were very much in Wagner’s mind.
a)
His essay “The Art
Work of the Future,” which dates to 1849 and was written in exile in Zurich,
was originally dedicated to Feuerbach and owed its title to that author’s book The
Philosophy of the Future.[11]
b)
And this might well
have remained what the Ring was supposed to be “about” if it were not
for the fact that, in the year following the “Feuerbach ending,” the German
poet Georg Herwegh reintroduced Wagner to the work of another philosopher …
Arthur Schopenhauer.
11.
Schopenhauer lived from
1788 until 1860, and much of his philosophy began with an exploration of how we
know the world and what, in fact, the world is.
a)
A number of European
philosophers in the period immediately before Schopenhauer addressed what we
tend to call today “the mind/body problem.”
i)
In other words, do
our minds actually know and experience the world “as it is” …
ii) … or do we come no closer to the world than our
impressions or ideas of the world?
iii)
Does the world, as
Bishop Berkeley argued, only exist to the extent that our minds perceive it?
iv)
Or was that all
refuted when Dr. Johnson kicked his stone?[12]
v) How is it ever possible to bridge the gap between
the intellectual level of thought and the hard physical world of “what really
is”?
b)
And Schopenhauer
suggested that there is a connection between these two … a connection that each
of us is familiar with on a daily basis.
c)
It’s to be found on
the level of “will” or “desire.”
d)
What happens, after
all, when I desire something?
i)
Well, first of all,
notice the connection that it gives us.
(1)
The desire exists in
my mind …
(2)
… but the thing I
desire is always something in the world.
(3)
I can think about the
square root of negative two, but I can never really desire it.
(4)
What I desire is
drink or food or warmth … always something out there in the “real world.”
ii) Second of all, the relationship between mind and
world becomes absolutely “seamless” through desire.
(1)
As Bryan Magee puts
it …
If
I get up out of this chair I am sitting in and walk into the next room to a
bookcase, take down the book I have just realized I am about to quote from, and
return with it to my desk, it is not the case that each of the voluntary acts
constituting this series is preceded by an invisible act of will which pulls
the levers which in turn bring about the physical movements, as if my body were
a vehicle being operated from inside by an invisible driver. The
voluntary act is the act of will. The fact that we use ‘will’ as a
substantive in this context is a misfortune, for it seems to imply that there
is a continuing entity which it denotes. There is no such entity: there are
only our acts, which we know as and when they occur, connected or unconnected
as they may be. This being so, the direct knowledge we have of our own
willing is not knowledge of an entity but knowledge of activity: as we
encounter it, our willing activity through and through.[13]
(2)
So, when we examine
our desires, we’re examining a direct connection between mind and world … one
without intermediary … without “ideas” or “impressions.”
iii)
And third, this
notion of the will or the desire helps understand something of the inevitable
tragedy of human life.
(1)
Because our will can
never be perfectly satisfied.
(2)
Every time you
satisfy one desire, another desire comes along, and then another, and then
another.
(3)
Life is nothing but
one never-ending series of unsatisfied longings.
(4)
The only way to
attain release from these longings is to attain obliteration … extinction …
Nirvana.
12.
Now, I use the term
“Nirvana” intentionally here because Schopenhauer was one of the first European
philosophers to take Eastern philosophy and religion seriously.
a)
Schopenhauer was
particularly interested in Buddhism, and much of what he writes in his
philosophical works has its origin in his reflective study of authors in the
Buddhist tradition.
b)
And Wagner had read
Schopenhauer early on in his career, but hadn’t been much impressed with him.
c)
But, by the 1850s, he
was ready for him.
d)
And when Herwegh
encouraged him to re-read Schopenhauer’s work … it just blew him away.
e)
Here’s what he says
about it.
I looked at my Nibelung poems and recognized to my
amazement that the very things I now found so unpalatable in [my first reading
of Schopenhauer’s] theory were already long familiar to me in my own poetic
conception. Only now did I understand
my own Wotan myself and, greatly shaken, I went on to a closer study of
Schopenhauer’s book.[14]
f)
So close a study, in
fact, that he read this book four times that year … no mean feat, as I’m
sure you’ll understand immediately if you read it even once.
13.
And, influenced by
these ideas, Wagner rewrote the ending of the Ring in 1856 to create
what is nowadays usually called the
a)
And here’s how Brünnhilde would have ended the drama in this
version:
Were I no longer to travel
to the fortress of Valhalla,
do you know where I would
go?
I would depart from the home
of desire,
I would flee forever from
the home of illusion
the open gates
of eternal becoming
I close behind me:
to the holiest chosen land,
free from desire and
illusion,
Ø wahnlos
Ø Very much like “Wahnfried.”
the goal of world-wandering,
redeemed from rebirth,
the enlightened one now
goes.
The blessed end
of all things eternal,
do you know how I attained
it?
Grieving love’s
deepest suffering
opened my eyes:
I saw the world end. –[15]
b)
And that last line is
said, not in despair or in sorrow, but in joy.
c)
To be free from
suffering and illusion, one has to be free from existence.
d)
And it’s Cosima,
we’re told, who didn’t like this ending …
i)
… not because she
didn’t like its ideas …
ii) … but because she found it undramatic.
iii)
She encouraged Wagner
to say all of this, not with speech, but with the music.
e)
And that response
reminds us that when Röckel asked Wagner, “Why, since that the Gold is returned
to the Rhine, is it still necessary for the gods to perish?” Wagner replied
that the answer to this question would be clear to the audience through the
music.
f)
And, indeed, Wagner
never really repudiated the ideas of the Schopenhauer ending …
g)
… he simply
repudiated it as a piece of drama.
h)
So, we may see the
“Schopenhauer ending” as one of the keys to “the meaning of the Ring.”
14.
Even so, however, in
the years following the staging of the first complete Ring cycle,
viewers and critics began to see other levels of meaning in the work, and to
suggest other interpretations.
a)
One of the first, and
most notorious of these was the interpretation that George Bernard Shaw
provided in his monograph The Perfect Wagnerite (1883).
b)
Shaw viewed the Ring
as an extended social and political allegory on capitalism and the nature of
kingship, godhead, and state law.
c)
And we recall that,
given Wagner’s thoughts when he was writing The Nibelungen Myth as an
Outline for a Drama, Siegfried’s Death, and the “Feuerbach ending,”
Shaw wasn’t not far off the mark from at least one level of Wagner’s
approach to the work.
d)
As Shaw says right at
the beginning of The Perfect Wagnerite …
The Ring,
with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its
wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama
of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been
written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with
events which were only then consummating themselves.[16]
e)
In Shaw’s
interpretation, Alberich should be seen as a plutocrat or an exploitative
capitalist.
f)
The Nibelungs should
be seen as proletarians or oppressed laborers.
g)
And Siegfried should
be seen as the cycle’s anarchist hero.
15.
Here’s, for instance,
how Shaw interprets Nibelheim and the oppression of the Nibelung slaves.
This gloomy place need not be a mine: it might just
as well be a match-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large
dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be a
whitelead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a railway shunting
yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little gin-sodden laundry, or a bakehouse, or a
big shop, or any other of the places where human life and welfare are daily
sacrificed in order that some greedy foolish creature may be able to hymn
exultantly to his Plutonic idol:
Thou mak’st me eat whilst others starve,
And sing while others do lament:
Such unto me Thy blessings are,
As if I were Thine only care.[17]
a)
… and here’s how he
describes Siegfried:
... the son knows no law but his own humor; detests the ugly dwarf who has nursed him; chafes furiously under his claims for some return for his tender care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the “overman” of Nietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life and fun, dangerous and destructive to what he dislikes, and affectionate to what he likes; so that it is fortunate that his likes and dislikes are sane and healthy. Altogether an inspiriting young forester, a son of the morning, in whom the heroic race has come out into the sunshine from the clouds of his grandfather’s majestic entanglements with law, and the night of his father’s tragic struggle with it.[18]
b)
Now, the interesting
thing about Shaw’s premise is that he notes that even he can’t sustain it
throughout the entire cycle.
c)
Shaw strongly
disliked Götterdämmerung — mostly, as it seemed to later critics,
because it didn’t fit his premise as well as the first three works — but in his
own view it’s because it’s here that the cycle “degenerated into opera.”
i)
Once again we’ve got
choruses.
ii) Once again we’ve got ensembles.
d)
But mostly we’ve got
an ending that Shaw simply couldn’t agree with.
e)
He thought that
“redemption by love” was nothing more than a “romantic nostrum” for the serious
ills of the world.
f)
And he concluded that
Wagner had simply changed his mind throughout the construction of his cycle.
i)
He’d seen the
“Siegfrieds of 1848” turn out to be failures.
ii) He was disillusioned with anarchy and its promise
of a better world.
g)
And so, he gave us a
romantic rather than a progressive ending … and that disappointed Shaw.
h)
Many of Shaw’s ideas
were incorporated into Patrice Chéreau’s Bayreuth centennial production of 1976
…
i)
… and you can even
see its influence in the Jurgen Flimm production that is currently being
staged.
j)
But not everyone has
been happy with finding this sort of political/economic “meaning” in the Ring.
k)
Others have preferred
a more psychological interpretation.
16.
And this brings us to
the influential work of Robert Donington, which first appeared in 1963.
a)
Donington’s book Wagner’s
‘Ring’ and its Symbols was an attempt to approach the Ring and its
music through the techniques and assumptions of Jungian psychology.
b)
The Psychologist Carl
Gustav Jung (1875-1961) believed that all human beings — regardless of
historical period or culture — shared a few basic mental images, patterns, or
“archetypes” that tend to show up repeatedly in folktale, art, and literature.
c)
Since all human
beings innately share these same images, certain patterns or stories appear in
the legends of culture after culture … even when those cultures could not
possibly have had any point of contact or historical development.
d)
Human beings all
possess, in other words, what Jung termed a “collective unconscious” that
shares all of the same archetypal symbols.
e)
Examples of these
archetypes are the anima — essentially man’s perception of the
female — and the animus — woman’s perception of the male.
17.
In Donington’s
interpretation, therefore, Wotan with his spear can be seen as the tendency in
all of us towards the willful dominance of the ego, the tendency all of us have
towards elevation of our own “godly” nature.
a)
As Donington says:
Wotan represents, above all, godhead. His other attributes are secondary to this tremendous fact. Even his very important political implications as a carrier of worldly authority follow upon the divine authority which he carries in his own right. Wagner must have found in this commanding figure of Nordic mythology something which echoed among his own deepest intuitions. We all have our intuitions of godhead, whether or not we recognize it under this or any other name. It is one of Jung’s best sayings that man cannot stand a meaningless existence. Everything which makes life meaningful for us is implied in what is here described as godhead.[19]
b)
The abundance of
light and color imagery in the drama reflects the fact that there are light and
dark sides of every character.
c)
In the end, for
instance, Schwarz-Alberich and Licht-Alberich have much in
common.
d)
Alberich’s
renunciation of love for power, Donington suggests, was Wagner’s metaphor for
the overcoming of infantile fantasies — the origin of the mature human mind —
which had to rise above animal instinct to attain its true power.
e)
The ring itself
represents the human impulse to make life whole, “round,” or integral … to
abstract meaning from the world — in the form of science, certainly, but also
in the forms of art and religion — in order to give meaning to our experience.