Richard Wagner was born in the year 1813--the same year, by a happy coincidence, in which Guiseppi Verdi came into the world. A male child born in 1813 would have been lucky to have had a life expectancy of about 50 years. Had Verdi and Wagner died in 1863, what would opera lovers have lost?

Only Aida, Otello, Falstaff, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal and the completed Ring of the Nibelung!

Fortunately for us, Wagner made it into his 70^th year, and his redoubtable Italian colleague lived to see the dawn of the 20^th century! [d.1901]!

Although Wagner obviously had nothing to say in the matter, 1813 was in truth a good year to be born in what we now call Germany. The country’s humiliation at the hand of Napoleon would soon be forgotten, and a period of relative political stability was about to begin. More important: being born in 1813 meant that Wagner would spend his formative years in the afterglow of the most remarkable explosion of genius since the Renaissance.

If one arbitrarily draws a "time-line" from 1765 to 1815, one finds within this discrete timeframe, first of all, most of the greatest composers the world has even known: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Weber, Mendelssohn and--yes, Richard Wagner; secondly, the most important philosophers of the modern era:--the best known are Immanuel Kant, and G.W.Hegel, and thirdly, at least a dozen poets, playwrights, and authors of the highest rank, any one of whom could have provided a lifetime of study for a serious scholar of German literature..

This eruption of genius swept away the barriers between professions and disciplines: philosophers, theologians, poets, painters and musicians greeted one another at soirees; Beethoven and Goethe corresponded and even took the waters together at a Bohemian spa. Poets and philosophers destined for later fame turned out to have been roommates at the same university. Austria’s leading dramatist hung his hat in the same coffee house in Vienna as Schubert and Beethoven.

It is hardly surprising that this intellectual cross-pollination spawned new theories of art, especially since the great historical movement we now call "Romanticism" was about to sweep across Europe. Soon it became clear that another great era was passing: the Age of Enlightenment, the foundation of reason and classicism.

In Germany--at that time a collection of loosely bound territories-- a new movement called the Sturm und Drang arose. A bloodless revolution, the Sturm und Drang began as a literary protest. At great risk to themselves, young idealists like Friedrich Schiller flung forth dramas that cried out against the evils of the day: arbitrary rule by petty princes; the humiliations of a rigid caste system; and the stifling of all individuality.

Inevitably, the release of pent-up emotionalism carried over into other genres such as lyric poetry. With the early nature poems of Goethe, in which nature was seamlessly integrated into the poet’s highly subjective and intense emotional outpourings, the Sturm und Drang became the forerunner of German Romanticism.

No nation had a singular claim to be the birthplace of Romanticism . Whether their names were Goethe, Victor Hugo, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, or Beethoven: all were Romantics inasmuch as they were shouting for the glorification of the individual spirit, freedom from formality and stylization.

Yet it must be said that Germans have a way of being a bit more thorough than other people. Whereas in other countries Romanticism appeared to spring up spontaneously, in Germany the new movement was buttressed by a solid body of theory.

For that reason, perhaps, German Romanticism seems more complex, more nuanced, and certainly more problematical than say, English Romanticism. Suddenly, words such as "universality" and "the infinite" were on every German Romantic’s lips.

In defiance of taboos, the German Romanticists also explored what has been called the "night side" of Romanticism. Soon their tales and poetry teemed with dreams, hallucinations, inexplicable phenomena, Doppelgaenger or "doubles," masks, magical transformations, pagan sensuality, the lure of distant times and places, of love beyond the grave.. Years later, the Romantic rejection of the sun-drenched day of Reason in favor of the mysterious ambiance of the night would find its ultimate artistic expression in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Richard Wagner was the heir to this extraordinary Geniezeit, or era of genius, and to this rich lode of Romantic motifs, hardly one of which is missing from the canon of Wagner’s works. Think of the innumerable evocations of nature in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: the E-flat undulations of the River Rhine in Das

Rheingold; the whiplash "Storm music" in the overture to Die Walkuere; the "forest murmurs" and chirping birds in Act II of Siegfried. These and other "tone-paintings" reveal the great debt Wagner owed both to the nature lyrics of Goethe and his successors, and the "Pastoral" symphony of that early musical Romantic, Beethoven.

Up to the age 14 Wagner could claim Beethoven as a living contemporary; up to the age of 19, Goethe. How proud he must have been to speak the same language as these two immortals, and to breathe the same air of a land that, only a century earlier, in the wake of the devastating 30 Years War, had been the "sick man of Europe," a political and cultural wasteland!

But throughout his long life Wagner drew not only spirit but substance from the great Romantic era. The new generation of young German theorists had cast a critical eye on traditional forms of literature. Soon they called for the abolition of the rigid categories between epic, dramatic, lyrical and even musical forms.

Eager to put their theories into practice, these author-theorists began experimenting with open-ended works reaching into infinity, with novels that suddenly burst into song, with dramas with epic plot lines, with lyric poetry that conveyed mood rather than content. This Romantic striving for a synthesis of the arts would later evolve into Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art.

Keen students of German history, the early German Romantics probed beneath the detritus of the 30 Years War and uncovered something remarkable: that glorious 50 years from 1150 to 1200 AD that gave the world not only its finest versions of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, but an epic whose title will have a familiar "ring" --no pun intended--to all of us: Das Nibelungenlied.

Given the fact that the early German Romanticists were searching for their roots, it seems surprising that the rediscovered Nibelungenlied did not immediately insinuate itself into the national consciousness. The Nibelungenlied is, after all, a sort of German Iliad: The first half of the two part-work deals with the life and death of the archetypical Germanic hero Siegfried and his mythological counterpart, the ‘superwoman’ Bruennhilde; the second part of Das Nibelungenlied recreates--in rather gory detail-- the historical annihilation of the Burgundian tribe at the hands of the Huns around the middle of the 5th century AD.

Why this half-hearted embrace of a national treasure? Dating back to the Renaissance, German universities--and much later, secondary schools--had exalted the Greek and Roman classics as the models for what the Germans call "Bildung," a word that suggests intellectual refinement and the proper shaping of aesthetic taste. After the all-too-successful attempts of the Catholic Church to extirpate all traces of Germanic "paganism," little attention was paid to what was left of Germanic mythology.

And now for some cold water!: despite the misleading congruence of the titles, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung has in fact little in common with the Nibelungenlied. The connection between the two works is a tenuous one, and exists chiefly in the minds of underpaid writers of program notes, who may be forgiven for their error. For example: Wagner would have had no use at all for the Christianized Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied, who is the offspring of perfectly normal parents. How much more dramatic it was to invent a Siegfried who is the forbidden fruit of an incestuous coupling of sibling twins! As Fricka complains in Die Walkuere: "Who has ever heard of such a thing?"

Likewise, the Bruennhilde of the Nibelungenlied is no disobedient Valkyre sleeping on a rock, but a flesh-and-blood princess, albeit one gifted with superstrength. Yes, the death of Siegfried at the hands of Hagen, described in touching detail in the Nibelungenlied, does find its way into "The Twilight of the Gods," but otherwise it must be said in all candor that Wagner could have composed his Ring without reference to the Nibelungenlied at all!

The plot of Wagner’s Ring, is in fact a pastiche: part Icelandic saga, part Prose Edda, part Germanic mythology and part Nibelungenlied, a pastiche that owes its coherence to the extraordinary artistic intuition and poetic imagination of Richard Wagner.

For all his spiritual kinship with the German Romantics, Richard Wagner was the product of a later era, one to which literary historians have given diverse names: the Age of Biedermeier, The Age of Early Realism, The Era of Poetic Realism--these are the some of the favorite labels. The argument could be made that by choosing subjects and themes that supposedly died with the Romantics decades earlier, Wagner was in fact an anachronism, an artist out of step with his times.

In retrospect, these times are defined by works such as Georg Buechner’s starkly realistic Wozzeck, a drama left unfinished by the author’s death in 1837. Wozzeck-- written by a precocious genius barely out of his 20’s--is the first major drama in German literature featuring the anti-hero, the "Little guy," the "loser." As every opera-lover knows, the composer Alban Berg found Wozzeck so appropriate to his own time--and to ours-- that he created the opera that has proved to be one of the enduring masterpieces of the 20^th century.

For a prose pendant to Wozzeck one may cite "A Village Romeo and Juliet," a gritty and depressing, yet masterful novella written by Wagner’s frequent table companion of the Zuerich years, Gottfried Keller. This story, too, survives in the form of an early 20^th century opera, albeit a rather obscure one composed by Frederick Delius. Beyond Germany’s borders, the leading writers of the day--Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoi, Dostoyevski--were creating the great body of realistic novels that is one of the glories of the 19th century.

But was Wagner really out of step with his times? Of course not. . The arts, after all, do not always march in step with one another. Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt and above all Chopin were carrying Romantic music to its peak long after the theorists and practitioners of literary Romanticism had faded into the past.

As for Wagner’s music dramas Lohengrin, Tannhaeuser, and Tristan und Isolde : these works have only their trappings in common with the misty evocations of the German Romantic poets. As the musicologist Robert Donington and other writers have demonstrated: behind this Romantic facade lies a psychological realism rooted deeply in our collective unconscious.

Under the spell of music that has no equal, our surrender to what might be called "Wagnerian realism" can keep us fixed to our seats--even the uncomfortable seats in Bayreuth--for 16 hours! It is a realism that imparts believability to Wagner’s most far-fetched plots.

And no plot was as far-fetched as that of Wagner’s tetralogy dealing with the Nibelungs, a plot that begins and ends beneath the waters of the Rhine River. Wagner, with the sovereign creative freedom mandated by early Romantic theorists, moves his characters arbitrarily between the clouds of Valhalla, the subterranean chambers of the Nibelungs, and the earthbound platform of temporal existence.

But more than dry philological research went into Wagner’s Ring plot over its long period of gestation. Among the shaping forces were the philosophical currents flowing through three turbulent decades. The philosophical idealism of the Enlightenment philosophers, like early German Romanticism, had faded into the past. In its place were new philosophies bearing new labels: anti-Christian, science-worshipping philosophy; materialistic philosophy; economic-oriented philosophy.

Best known to those of us who have lived through at least a part of the 20^th century, are the socio-political philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Wagner’s association with these new theories ranged from flirtation to a lifelong obsession. However, in varying degrees--the ideas propounded in these new theories all flowed into the Ring.

Two examples of the influence of anti-Christian philosophy on the Ring will have to suffice: first, Wagner’s rejection of the Christianized Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied in favor of the pagan superhero of the Icelandic sagas; and secondly, the very Godless-ness--in the Christian sense of the word--that lies at the heart of the Ring. Gods and goddesses abound in the Ring, but God--with a capital "G"-- is noticeably absent.

An even more powerful influence, however, is attributable to Karl Marx, whose seminal work, The Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in 1848, on the very eve of the German revolution. Marx, like Richard Wagner, was a participant in the failed revolution, and like the composer was driven into exile. Much scholarly ink has been spilled on the subject of Marx and Wagner, but to review these arguments would go far beyond the scope of this presentation.

Among Marxist-oriented stagings of the Ring, the best-known is not only much admired, but also available on video, and that is the Patrice Chereau interpretation that set off tremors in Bayreuth in 1976--ironically enough, the Centenary Year marking the 100^th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival!. The conclusion of the first cycle of the Chereau Ring created something of a scandal in the once-conservative Festspielhaus: vociferously voiced differences of opinion in some cases led to an exchange of blows.

But tastes change as time passes, and the 1976 Ring has now acquired the status of a classic. Well. . . why not? Watching Alberich bullying the Nibelungs and exploiting their gold is enough to make instant Marxists of us all--at least for 15 minutes!

Among contemporary philosophers, however, it was Arthur Schopenhauer who had the greatest influence on Richard Wagner. The enormous Wagner literature has elucidated this influence in detail, but mention can be made in passing to some Schopenhauerian aspects of the Ring. These might include the enrichment of the role of the orchestra in Siegfried. This shift in emphasis is in conformance with Schopenhauer’s argument that the arts are not, in fact, equal, and that music must predominate.

To this can be added the more sharply defined figure of Wotan as a Schopenhauerian concept, a personification of the Will of the world, committed to renunciation and, ultimately, self-destruction. One

would be tempted to add the figure of Alberich in Das Rheingold, whose forswearing of love could have been written by Schopenhauer! Full disclosure, however, requires the admission that this scene was conceived long before Wagner had his Schopenhauer epiphany!

Although most of the Ring was already in score by the time Wagner met Friedrich Nietzsche, the interaction between these two geniuses claims a chapter in the intellectual history of the 19^th century. It is ironic that Wagner, whose attempts to meet with Schopenhauer were coolly rebuffed, was now himself being courted by a young philologist whose later fame as a philosopher would equal Wagner’s own renown.

A gifted amateur pianist and would-be composer, young Nietzsche was besotted with Wagner’s Tristan and determined to meet the composer who seemed to him to embody the spirit of the ancient Greek dramatists.

Welcomed by both the composer and Cosima, the brilliant young classicist was soon a regular house guest during Wagner’s 6-year residence at Tribschen in Switzerland. On many a cold, clear Swiss night, while Cosima fretted in the not-quite-conjugal bed, Wagner’s cozy study must have crackled with energy as two of the finest minds of the 19^th century engaged in the thrust and parry of uninhibited intellectual exchange. What a pity that no tape recorder was available to preserve these discussions for posterity!

The story of Nietzsche’s gradual disillusionment with Wagner, accelerated by the composer’s turn to a Christian subject in Parsifal, the later polemics hurled at Wagner and Wagnerism, and Nietzsche’s final descent into madness: these are topics best addressed in a three-day Smithsonian seminar, to which you are all cordially invited!

What about musical influences on Wagner during the period of the Ring’s gestation? Influence in music, as in literature, is sometimes difficult to pinpoint. During Wagner’s apprentice years as a composer he was quite understandably influenced by contemporaries such as Carl Maria von Weber, and Vincenzo Bellini. But by the time Wagner began the actual composition of the Ring, he had, as a composer, become a law unto himself with a unique, unmistakable voice.

That said, we must remind ourselves that Wagner, a lifelong student of harmony, surely profited from the countless hours spent in his music room with his great friend, champion, and later father-in-law, Franz Liszt, a much underrated composer whose later works, especially, are marvels of harmonic innovation.

No ivory tower recluse, Wagner--although sometimes a prickly and hypercritical colleague-- took pains to maintain contact with his fellow composers, such as Hector Berlioz, whom he regarded as a kindred spirit of sorts. Nor did his practiced ear ignore the outpouring of musical masterpieces that flowed from all corners of Europe, including Russia, that made up the astonishing corpus of 19^th century music.

Three well-known contemporary composers—Edvard Grieg, Camille Saint-Saens, and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky--attended the first Bayreuth Festival--; others were invited but chose not to brave the Bayreuth summer heat and limited hotel accommodations--conditions that deter the wary pilgrim even today.

Given the fact that Tchaikovsky neither understood nor liked much of Wagner’s Ring-music, his observations on the Ring are marvels of objectivity. To quote Tchaikovsky:

"Even if The Ring of the Nibelung seems at times boring; if much of it is at first confusing and incomprehensible; if Wagner’s harmony occasionally suffers from over-complexity and over-subtlety; if Wagner’s theory is false; if a large part of it is pointless Quixotery; if the vast work is doomed and the Bayreuth theater will sink into perpetual sleep, to be abandoned to its own fantastic memories of a gigantic labor--still: The Ring of the Nibelung constitutes one of the most significant events of the history of art. . . one of the most colossal artistic enterprises ever to be conceived in the mind of man" [end of quotation]

Finally, as time permits, a parting glance at the historical/political framework for the Ring. The twenty-eight years that bracket Wagner’s composition of the Ring were years of turbulence and change not only for the composer but for Germany. Unlike our own country, Germany did not emerge from the Enlightenment with an intellectual class bent on realizing grand ideas of personal liberty and egalitarianism; its lands--alas!--were still divided between warring princes and barons.

Yet the conservative forces that suppressed the Revolution of 1848 could not forever suppress its ideas and its ideals, for what we now call Germany, like other European countries, was inexorably moving into the beginnings of the modern era. A mood of optimism alien to Schopenhauer’s ethic of renunciation now prevailed, a mood that arose from Germany’s increasing industrial growth, national wealth, and social cohesion, coupled with the rise of Prussia under the leadership of Bismarck.

Sad to say, this so-called progress was coeval with a rising tide of anti-Semitism. The industrial revolution had created a new middle class in Germany. Grateful for its elevation, apprehensive about the permanence of its status, and jealous of those who had "struck it rich," this new middle class was quick to identify the putative threat to its permanence: history’s whipping boys, the Jews.

To what extent Wagner’s notorious anti-Semitism was a shaping force in his composition of the Ring is a matter of heated debate--and strong opinions on the subject both pro and con have been exchanged at recent Bayreuth symposia. What is indisputable is that Wagner’s wrong-headed tirades against the Jews--and not just Jews in music-- have aligned him forever with Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, and Arthur Schopenhauer --among others-- as great Germans whose otherwise clear-eyed visions were tragically clouded by anti-Semitism.

When Wagner began work on the Ring, probably the last thought that crossed that unique mind was that the completed tetralogy would be his gift to a new, united Germany. The composer’s one conscious contribution to Prussia’s victory over France was, in fact, the forgettable "Imperial March," a work few of us can boast of having heard. Wagner, after all, was no heel-clicking Prussian but a Saxon with a jaundiced view of Prussia’s monopoly of power. Wagner knew only too well that German unity had been purchased at a high price: through power politics and militarism--the very forces young Wagner had challenged at the barricades of 1848!

Richard Wagner in fact had spent years living outside of Germany: in Riga, in Zuerich, in Tribschen, in Paris, in Vienna, and in Venice. At times Wagner even gave serious consideration to emigrating to America! Taken together, these qualifications would today make him an ideal representative of what is now called "The new European!" Nevertheless: with the premiere of the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876--Kaiser Wilhelm I was present--the new Germany was in fact made instant heir to a rare gift indeed: the presentation of its own mythology on a world stage.

As mentioned earlier, generations of Germans--even those bearing the coveted designation of "gebildet"-- had grown up conversant in the Greek and Roman classics but ignorant of their own mythology. 1n 1862, Friedrich Hebbel, Germany’s pre-eminent dramatist, had tried to breathe a little life into old legends by composing a Nibelungen-trilogy for the stage; the plays were a failure and survive only as curiosities. But now a new generation, inhabiting a new Germany, eagerly embraced the improbable rouged figures in winged helmets and bearskins cavorting on the stage of the Festspielhaus. Wagner’s counterfeit gods and demi-gods were therefore accepted as valid representations of a mythology that was both echt and indigenous.

Specifically: by resurrecting the figure of the superhero Siegfried just at the time that a newly united Germany, aspiring to dominance in Europe, was preening itself over the Prussian defeat of France, Wagner presented Germans with a symbol of near-invincibility that sprang from Germany’s own "Blut und Boden"--their native soil. Wagner’s Siegfried myth would outlive its creator by many years, first dominating the Wilhelmine era up to the year 1918, and then, after a relatively brief period of suspension during the Weimar Republic, returning-- in ghastly form!--in the years of the Third Reich.

Whither Siegfried?. . . Although one cannot of course predict the future, one feels safe in asserting that the Siegfried myth perished in the near-Carthaginian defeat of Germany in WW II. The pacifist, progressive, European-oriented generations that have grown up in post-WW II Germany have zero tolerance for superhero myths or for claims of racial superiority. The time has passed--thank God!--when the spirit of Arminius, or Barbarossa, or--Siegfried--could be evoked to inspire German youth to march against Poland, or France, or Russia.

Is it too much to hope for that another demon has been exorcised? The era of Furtwaengler, Knappertsbush, Clemens Krauss, and Karl Boehm--each one associated in greater or lesser degree with the Third Reich-- has faded into the past. In recent decades, audiences privileged to experience a world-class performance of the Ring would almost certainly have heard that performance conducted by Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, or James Levine--all of them welcome at Bayreuth--and all of them Jews.

Both within and beyond Germany’s borders, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung now enjoys popularity undreamed of by its creator. Far from being a call to arms, however, today’s stagings of the Ring tend to be ironic and at times humorous. Yes, now and then one encounters a conventional staging--complete with spears, shields, costumed gods and goddesses-- aimed at satisfying us hidebound traditionalists.

But one is much more likely to encounter--especially in Mr. Jenkins’ house-- Rhinemaidens in bikinis, Valkyrs on bungee cords, and Wotan in a three-piece suit. As for the superhero Siegfried: the chances are that he will have exchanged his bearskin for a pair of well-fitting, designer jeans!

Somehow, one suspects it is healthier this way.