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Wagner’s Ring is an ambitious cycle of four operas relating world history from Primal Swirl to End of Days. It took twenty-six years to write, takes fifteen hours to perform, a double-size orchestra to play and a specially built opera house to stage.
In Story of the Century, Michael Downes, the director of music at St. Andrews University, places the fons et origo of the epic in Wagner’s frustration as a kapellmeister, when he wrote, unsolicited, to his boss the King of Saxony, proposing a total revamp of the royal music scene. No reply was forthcoming. A second proposal was also blanked. Furious, Wagner flung himself into the Dresden uprising of 1848, financing the manufacture of hand grenades and giving bloodthirsty speeches from the barricades. Simultaneously, he was trying to get the king to stage his latest opera Lohengrin. Wagner never did get the hang of reconciling burning idealism with playing the game.
At the end of the Ring, free love triumphs over the contractual variety. As it did with Wagner
The king exiled him. Fleeing to Switzerland, he forged a career as a peripatetic celebrity conductor. In London, he hated everything and everyone except Queen Victoria. The pollution that inspired Monet’s sublimely foggy pictures left Wagner ranting against industrialization. London became the blueprint for Niebelheim, the underworld in the Ring. To create its soundtrack he added eighteen blacksmiths’ anvils to the orchestra, hammering out the hellish rhythm of the factory’s clatter-and-clank. He wanted to make his new drama sound like nothing ever heard before. Adolphe Sax’s saxophone, saxhorn and saxtuba didn’t sound quite right; so he invented the Wagner tuba.
Operas customarily have a separate composer and librettist. Wagner’s magic consists in him being both. Words first — mostly written in exile in Switzerland; music later. The story drives the Ring, an extended soap opera concerning gods, mortals, mermaids, heroes, femmes fatales, dragons, giants, magic spells, sibling incest and lots of motivating gold. Assumed to be pure Germanic myth, in fact it’s myth-mishmash, heavily inspired by medieval Burgundian accounts of slaughtering Huns. The proto-Nazi dragon-slaying Siegfried was based on a Netherlandish hero. Wagner would later play down the international origins of the piece. As did Hitler, who credited his political awakening to hearing Wagner’s early opera Rienzi, a burst of which was played at every rally.
In exile, Wagner lived in surprising luxury, mostly thanks to the wives of rich Swiss. A lot of unsatisfied yearning went on as they loosened their husbands’ purse strings. Meanwhile, Wagner and his wife, who were unsuited in every way apart from overwhelming mutual lust, unravelled. He wrote this autobiographical problem into Wotan, chief god, and his wife Fricka, goddess of marriage. At the end of the Ring free love triumphs over the contractual variety. As it did with Wagner.
Amnestied after eleven years, he returned to Germany with a flourish, publishing the Ring libretto alongside an appeal to “a music-loving prince” to finance it. When King Ludwig of Bavaria sent up his visiting card, Wagner suspected a creditor dunning for money, but it turned out to be the real deal.
No sooner had his bromance with Ludwig solved his money problems than Wagner self-sabotaged by taking up with Cosima, the wife of Hans von Bülow, the best conductor and interpreter of Wagner’s music, whom Wagner could not do without. Von Bülow’s devotion to Wagner remained strangely intact when Cosima’s latest baby was fathered by Wagner.
The person Wagner had to hide Cosima from was the desperately jealous Ludwig. He had both the money and the commitment to enable Wagner’s dream of a custom-built opera house in which to stage the Ring, but his ministers and his subjects deeply disliked Wagner for his political meddling, undue influence and insatiable need for money. The sight of Cosima leaving the treasury carrying heavy sacks of coin didn’t help.
Wagner left Bavaria for Bayreuth. The city fathers were welcoming. Wagner the idealist planned a wooden opera house to go up in flames at the Armageddon that closes the Ring, but Wagner the prudent materialist prevailed. A solid red brick structure was built and remains to this day, housing the annual festival.
Wagner lived to see only one Ring cycle performed. He gave the designer an impossible brief: “From a period of culture remote from our own, having no association with any known experience.” The designer took refuge in German clichés — bearskins, chainmail, horned helmets. Brünnhilde’s horse was a real live stallion, gifted by Ludwig. Wagner thought the whole thing a ghastly failure — as all idealists do when they see their dreams realised. Bits of the dragon were missing, shipped to Beirut instead of Bayreuth. Steam from the opening scene of the river Rhine untuned six harps in the orchestra. The conductor in the pit couldn’t hear the singers, so he had to rely on lip-reading.
Wagner was mortified; but none of this mattered to the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, a member of the celebrity audience that included the Khediv of Egypt, who Europe was sucking up to on account of the Suez Canal, and shy King Ludwig wafting about “incognito” while wanting lots of adulation. Grieg, carried away by the magic of the whole thing, summed up the composer in absolute terms: “A true giant in the event of the history of arts, comparable in his innovation only to Michelangelo.”
The first full score of the Ring does not survive. Presented to Hitler as a fiftieth birthday present in 1939, it somehow got lost. The eternal problem with Wagner comes down to the greatness of the music drama set against the ghastliness of its nationalist, racist, antisemitic composer, plus the appalling political consequences of the fever-dream that Wagner brewed in Hitler’s brain.
This poses enormous difficulties for those who get carried away by the music’s sublimity while being horrified by its legacy and the moral positions of its composer. Probably wisely, this is not addressed by Downes, who writes superbly about the complicated musical development of the piece. The book’s prose is anchored so deep in the rhythm of the Ring that if you know the music you’ll hear it in your head as you read.
