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Wagner in Washington
| Article
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17423 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
3,886 Words |
| Author
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Lee Edwards
Lee Edwards is senior editor for the Current Issues section
of THE WORLD & I. His latest book is The Power of Ideas: The
Heritage Foundation at Twenty-five. |
When several thousand citizens of Washington, D.C., (where the favorite aria is "Hail to the Chief," high drama is a Senate confirmation hearing, and opera is something presented either in New York City or Nashville) pay as much as $380 to attend a sixteen-hour, four-opera epic by a notorious anti-Semite who died more than one hundred years ago, one is obliged to ask: Why Wagner?
When the same work, Der Ring des Nibelungen, inspires so many interpretations - Marxist Rings, Nazi Rings, Freudian Rings, and the time-tunnel Ring offered in Washington - and such controversy (George Bernard Shaw called Wagner "the summit" of nineteenth-century dramatic music, whereas Friedrich Nietzsche described Wagner's music as "hysterical, convulsive, distorted"), the question persists: Why Wagner? What is there in his musical dramas, especially the Ring, that inspires or enrages so many?
Some ninety years ago, Shaw provided an answer: "The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its watermaidens 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." If Shaw had been referring to the timelessness of the Ring's basic themes of greed, self-sacrifice, Armageddon, and redemption, I would agree; but Shaw, ever anxious to score a point for socialism, insists that the Ring is, in reality, a condemnation of capitalism. For him, the Nibelungs are the exploited masses, the giants underpaid artisans, Alberich an avaricious industrialist, and Wotan and the other gods the sybaritic upper classes; Siegfried, on the other hand, is the shining Fabian hero born to save the world from capitalist greed and religious decadence. The analogies are very Shavian and very
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