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 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…

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold I

In this and the posts to come I’m going to be presenting a social, political, and economic interpretation of what’s going on in the operas composing Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. Now of course the usual reaction to such interpretations is to back away from the crazy person as quickly as possible, and…