The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung

No composer of operas is easier to dislike or mock than Wagner, and few works of art set themselves up to be misunderstood and parodied as does his Ring Cycle, four long, intense and very noisy operas full of substantial maidens in horned helmets singing German alliterative verse. Wagner’s dodgy political reputation — which was only partly his own fault — also means that modern directors feel compelled to stage his work in austere post-industrial settings, which doesn’t necessarily make it easier to relax and enjoy the show.

But Wagner‘s operas are also very compelling works of art, once you can suspend your prejudices and listen properly to the music and words. And, once you get past his bad behaviour towards friends and show more patrons and the ill-advised way he generalised a feud with Meyerbeer into musical antisemitism, he was clearly a radical and innovative musician and dramatist, whose ideas had a lot of influence on the future direction of western classical music. So it is probably worth asking what happens if you take his greatest work entirely seriously as an intellectual project. That’s what Roger Scruton does here, taking everything apart into small pieces and putting it back together in the context of Wagner’s background as a reader — like his contemporary Karl Marx, whom Scruton doesn’t entirely approve of — of Hegel, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer.

Scruton is perhaps a bit too serious about all this: he doesn’t take prisoners, and he certainly doesn’t have much time for those who question Wagner’s artistic judgment, batting away alleged plot holes and inconsistencies with barely a glance. But he does present us with what feel like coherent and comprehensive explanations for why Wagner’s epic makes musical and dramatic sense to us as an exploration of religion, myth, and humanity’s place in a world where we can no longer look to gods as a source of authority. But also, of course, since this is Wagner, it’s all about (hetero-)sexual love, and about law, property and power.

I think I learnt a few things, even if my eyes glazed over at the flood of abstract nouns from time to time. Particularly about the way the Leitmotifs work with each other. I was interested by Scruton’s ideas about how the numerous recapitulations of “the story so far” that Wagner inserts along the way actually add to our understanding of the characters and their situations, rather than just spinning things out even longer. Also about the odd ways that time works during the cycle.

I’m still not quite at the point where I agree that the plot of Götterdämmerung makes sense, but I’ve definitely got some intensive listening sessions lined up for the next few days. Including that old Deryck Cooke “Introduction to the Ring” LP that came with the Solti recordings, if I still have it somewhere. show less