By the time Richard Wagner got to work on Parsifal, his last opera, the conditions of his life had changed utterly from what they had been when he’d started work on The Nibelung’s Ring. A composer of romantic operas who’d set out to make some point in his libretto as inescapable as possible couldn’t have…
Tag: richard wagner
Intermezzo: The Ring and the Grail 2
The Holy Grail! Most people think they know a certain amount about it, even if their only exposure to the legends of the Grail come from watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and some forgettable film or other starring Harrison Ford. You can check this by asking a dozen of your friends to tell…
Intermezzo: The Ring and the Grail I
The end of The Twilight of the Gods, dramatically satisfying as it is, leaves the core questions raised by the tetralogy hanging in midair. The grand hope that motivated Wagner and his fellow radicals when he first sketched out the Nibelung myth as a scheme for a drama—the hope that a mighty upsurge of revolutionary…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Twilight of the Gods 2
Siegfried’s betrayal of his ideals and his love for Brunnhilde, the central theme of our discussion three weeks ago, is also the hinge upon which the entire story of The Ring turns toward its end. Our blond and brawny hero was doomed the moment he took the Ring from Fafner’s hoard, Alberich’s curse guarantees that,…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Twilight of the Gods 1
As the orchestra warms up for the final opera of the Ring cycle, the great conflict in Richard Wagner’s mind has been settled at last. Gone is the giddy utopian fantasy Wagner took from Ludwig Feuerbach, which led him to the brink of disaster in 1849, and forced him to flee for his life to…
The Nibelung’s Ring: Siegfried 2
As we saw two weeks ago, the action of The Nibelung’s Ring is rising toward crisis in this third opera of the cycle. Siegfried, the child born of the incestuous relationship between Wotan’s human children Siegmund and Sieglinde, has grown to young manhood in the deep forest under the dubious care of Mime the Nibelung.…
The Nibelung’s Ring: Siegfried 1
Before we go on with the third of the operas in Wagner’s vast tetralogy The Nibelung’s Ring, I’d like to take a moment to talk a little about my trolls. Yes, this sequence of posts has gotten a fair amount of trolling, and I’m sorry to say that none of it has been interesting enough…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 2
Let’s take a moment to review our story so far. In mythic terms, it’s a straightforward fairy tale: the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, stolen by the dwarf Alberich and turned into a magic ring, was then stolen from him in turn by the god Wotan, who then had to hand it over…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 1
Yes, I know we had a presidential election here in the US yesterday. The remarkable thing about it, after a campaign season so packed with improbabilities and absurdities, is that it was a normal election, with no more than the usual amount of vote fraud and a winner declared by sunrise. While everyone recovers from…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold 2
In the last post in this sequence, two weeks ago, we watched Alberich steal the magic gold from the bottom of the Rhine. This reenacted in symbolic form the process by which our Western civilization, like every other civilization in recorded history, abandoned the traditional human relationship with nature as a community of persons and…