Falstaff and Me
Wagner’s Ring by a Wagner Noob
by Roscid Cup
or,
I May Not Know Art, But I Know What I Kinda Sortuv Almost Like
Roscid Cup gives his first impression of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Edited January 2019.
I’m not a complete noob. These days I’m only half the noob I used to be. I have studied music theory all my life; I know orchestration; I even went to the opera before. (Does watching the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera count as going to the opera?)
But there’s opera and then there’s opera. There’s the recitative-aria-applaud-rinse-repeat bel canto of someone like Bellini, whose arias are so pretty that when performed live they draw an audience to tears and when performed on a record by someone like Maria Callas they make the tooth come out so much easier at the dentist’s office.
And then there’s Wagner. This isn’t opera, it’s opera. It’s pedal-to-the-metal, kill-da-wabbit Opera. When people say “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings,” they aren’t talking about Salieri, Mozart, or even Verdi. They’re talking about Bugs Bun— er, about Brünnhilde: the armored, helmeted, braided fat lady of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This is the side of opera that I’ve never seen much before, nor have I ever wanted to.
But when I hear that the Ring Cycle will play in my home town (San Francisco) this summer, and that tickets were even attainable, I debated with myself whether it was worth it. Could I withstand fifteen hours of sitting in a hundred-fifty-degree pit full of senior citizens with poopy diapers over the course of four days?
Since I’m smart rather than stupid, I bought a performance DVD (remember DVDs? never mind…) of the Cycle (the Jahrhundertring performance with Gwyneth Jones and Donald McIntyre, in case you’re interested), and watched the whole thing over the course of four days. This is binge-watching by my standards. Was I able to withstand it at least from the comfort of my own home? In a word, yes. But I’m still not going to put myself through the torture of a live performance.
What follows is my first impression. It is a gone-Hollywood aesthetic appraisal; it is not historicist, structuralist, feminist, Marxist, humorist, horticulturalist, or any other “-ist”. Such constructs have no meaning beyond the meager boundaries of their own existence, and they are used mainly to justify the careers of people who write about other people who write. And I don’t know anything about Schopenhauer (although I’m sure he owes me money), so you won’t hear any egg-headed philosophy here.
But first, here is some tl;dr content for people who don’t like reading full sentences and complete thoughts.
| Moral: | No moral, just exposition. Make Wotan look like a conniving jerk. Greeeeeed… |
|---|---|
| Best Character: | Alberich |
| Best Scene-Stealing Character: | Loge |
| Best Character Moment: | Any moment with Loge, because of his low-key scene stealing. |
| Best Musical Moment: | Finale (“Entry of the Gods Into Valhalla’) |
| Most Poignant Moment: | The Rhine maidens’ plea during the finale. |
| Warnings to Stage Directors: | Sometimes a piece of gold is just a piece of gold. |
| Moral: | Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. |
|---|---|
| Best Character: | Brünnhilde |
| Best Scene-Stealing Character: | Fricka or Hunding, depending on the acting. |
| Best Character Moment: | Every second between Wotan and Brünnhilde. So basically, half the opera. |
| Best Musical Moment: | “Kill the Wabbit,” of course! |
| Most Poignant Moment: | Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde. |
| Warnings to Stage Directors: | Out-of-shape, middle-aged sopranos are not stuntwomen. |
| Moral: | If you want to forge a sword, all you need is a song in your heart. |
|---|---|
| Best Character: | Wotan |
| Best Scene-Stealing Character: | The giant dragon puppet, if used. |
| Best Character Moment: | Wotan’s battle of wits against Mime |
| Best Musical Moment: | Forging Nothung (“Hoho! Hoha!”), which is more or less the low-key entertaining passage of the Cycle. |
| Most Poignant Moment: | When Erda calls Wotan out for punishing Brünnhilde. |
| Warnings to Stage Directors: | Make sure Siegfried wears safety glasses while forging Nothung. Better yet, don’t have him actually forge it on stage. |
| Moral: | Do NOT piss off a Valkyrie! |
|---|---|
| Best Character: | Brünnhilde |
| Best Scene-Stealing Character: | The ring, if it’s sufficiently ridiculous looking |
| Best Character Moment: | Brünnhilde’s last words. All twenty minutes of them. (Cf. “Moral” above.) |
| Best Musical Moment: | The final orchestral expressions of the “Redemption” leitmotif in the last few measures of the opera. |
| Most Poignant Moment: | “Ruhe! Ruhe, du Gott” |
| Warnings to Stage Directors: | The Rhine is a river, not an urban conduit. |
Medieval Source Material
The main players: Nibelugenlied, Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, and Völsunga Saga. There are others, but I either never read them or I long forgot anything about them.
My Review in a Catch-Phrase
I loved it! … except when I hated it.
First Impressions
First, some random small observations, to get them out of the way:
- A Wagner-Kipling comparison is inevitable. The works of each have been reduced to a cross section of their authors’ politics and/or psyches. But Wagner, like Kipling, actually did have a very keen insight into human folly.
- On paper, the unholy union of Sigmund and Siglinde is technically not the biggest WTF ever in opera history. Think of the ending to Salome. But Salome’s and other operas’ big WTF moments almost always existed for their shock value. Not so for Sigmund and Siglinde. It was played completely straight, making it the biggest can-o’-WTF of them all! Did Wagner really expect me to side with Wotan against Fricka on this matter? Is there some long-forgotten, perverted 19th-century German geek culture (like today’s furry fandom) that would explain this?
- There’s a Ring of Power in this story. I had to keep reminding myself that, because I kept forgetting. It’s so unused and unimportant that it barely even serves as a MacGuffin. This is refreshing, given my distaste for pop mythology.
- Shouldn’t Alberich have died of old age before Twilight of the Gods? Was his conversation with Hagen just part of Hagen’s half-conscious reverie?
- Siegfried is… well, he’ll get a whole section below, so I’ll save my rant until then.
Wagner
We have all heard or read about what’s wrong with Wagner. And I’m not even talking about Wagner the person (which is far beyond the scope of this blog post). Instead, I’m talking about the artistic indictment against Wagner. He doesn’t know what subtlety is; his music is all pomp and no circumstance, all peaks and no valleys; it’s completely lacking in humanity; it’s hyper-masculine; and so on… But after watching Ring, what is my (always correct) opinion?
Well, for all of Wagner’s reputation for size and scope, Ring‘s “size” lies only in its large quantity of small, intimate moments — “compounded of many simples,” you might say. I’ve always heard about how “inhuman” Wagner’s music was, with all its ancient gods, Valkyries, giants, dragons, and dwarfs — but surprisingly, no! Ring is very human after all.
I still agree with the accusation that Ring is all peaks and no valleys. I could not distinguish any specific aria in the whole piece, nor was there any recitative. There was no “applaud” moment for any of the performers after they sang a virtuoso passage.
But even though the fatiguing amount of crescendi sans quiescence diminished the music’s power, the drama’s power replaced it. Context (good staging and acting, among other things) is essential for Ring to be truly appreciated.
Context and Drama
or, Are You Even An Opera, Bro?
If “the medium is the message,” then the message of most operas seem to be “This is an excellent singer, and this is good music,” and possibly an additional “what lovely costumes and stage design!” …but mainly “This is an excellent singer.”
But McLuhan’s famous remark doesn’t apply much to Wagner’s Ring. Perhaps there was a time when Wagner’s use of leitmotifs stood out in his operas, but today they pass subconsciously over the heads of viewers who are used to being musically manipulated in a very similar way while watching movies.
In Ring, so much focus is on the drama, orchestration, and more conventional forms of storytelling that I barely even noticed just how impressive some of the passages were. Brünnhilde’s opening war cry, for example, were her first notes, without any kind of recitative or previous singing (on stage) to warm up with. But she has to screech it over a hundred-piece orchestra that is going full-metal (literally, at one point in Rhinegold), every. Friggin’. Second.
But it’s not just the music. Many operas make a nice abstraction between their singer and their characters. A baritone’s character isn’t necessarily good at singing like the baritone himself; and the baritone — let’s be honest — is never as young and handsome as the swain he portrays. Because of this clean abstraction (and because a typical opera singer’s acting is stagy at best), I have little difficulty switching my brain into “opera” mode. It’s kind of like watching a Shakespeare adaptation in a modern setting but with the same antiquated language: after five minutes the brain calibrates itself. But my brain doesn’t have a “Ring” mode. It’s more like switching back and forth between Branagh’s version of Much Ado About Nothing and Whedon’s version, without enough time in between for mental calibration.
For Ring, then, the performers need to be good actors, not just good singers. It’s unfair to expect them to look the part (cf. the tl;dr tables above, “Warning To Stage Directors”), but they do need to sell the role, which requires theatrical acting chops and personal charisma.
Maybe I need to explain this from another angle…
Context and Context
or, The Best Dinner I Ever Listened To
I could listen to The Barber of Seville, recitative and all, on a phono record (by which I mean Spotify) and still enjoy it the same as much as if I saw it in a video recording. (Seeing it in person is a different matter, since that involves audience ritual and thie excitement of anything-could-happen live staging.) But this is definitely not true of Ring.
It is in this way that Ring’s music better resembles a 20th-century movie soundtrack than an opera. As much as I love a John Williams or Bernard Herrmann soundtrack, large sections of their scores don’t play out as well on a CD (remember CDs?) as they do in their movies, because they were intended to be played at the same time that the movie was shown. This has a positive-feedback effect. If it’s a good movie, then the music enhances the drama in the movie, and the drama will enhance the music as well by giving it non-abstract meaning.
But if it is a bad movie, then even good music cannot help the drama, and the drama will diminish the music. Remember that cringey love story in Attack of the Clones? Oh, I see you managed to forget. Well, take my word on it, it was pretty embarrassing to watch. John Williams wrote a beautiful love theme (”Across the Stars“) for that. I had the good fortune to listen to the soundtrack before going to see the movie, so at least for a short time, it was one of the most beautiful pieces of music I ever heard. I imagined what kind of old-fashioned silver-screen tragic romance could have inspired such a lovely number. An then I saw the movie, which robbed the music of all its power. I cannot listen to it the same way again.
The Ring Cycle has many scenes in which the music enhanced the drama and the drama did likewise for the music. But there were also those scenes that robbed the music of its power. Like with my “Across the Stars” example, I had heard “Siegfried’s Funeral March” on CD many times before and I always thought it underscored something amazing and dramatic. But now that I have seen its context in Twilight of the Gods, as well as the character it was written for… Oh well.
This leads me nicely into Ring’s biggest problem.
Siegfried
Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer. I didn’t want to bring that up — I always thought it was meta-context, that it had nothing really to do with Wagner’s work, that it was the domain of Internet trolls — but after seeing the character Siegfried, how can I not mention it!
Siegfried is the ultimate proto-fascist “hero,“ in that he doesn’t do anything particularly heroic, but he is physically stronger than everyone else, more handsome than everyone else, and purer than everyone else — so pure, in fact, that his parents are twin siblings. He takes what he wants by force, but I am meant to believe he deserves it, because we already established that he is stronger than everyone else. He isn’t courageous; he simply doesn’t know what fear is, and so his feats are spurred on by a quirky form of ignorance that even infants don’t have. He never undergoes any kind of character arc, and why should he, since he’s already the most physically strong?
Most of Siegfried’s “greatness” is not demonstrated; it is only sung about, mainly by Brünnhilde, who won’t shut up about him. I have to take her word on it. Her praises are unspecific. She never mentions what a gentleman he is, because he is demonstrably ill-mannered. She never mentions how smart and sensitive he is, because… well, how do I explain this? In Siegfried, a bird warned him of the poison Mime was about to give him. Later, in Twilight of the Gods, the duplicitous Hagen — completely changing the subject of their current conversation — reminds Siegfried of that bird and asks Siegfried about the bird’s warning… while handing him a drink. Actually, Hagen does this twice, only seconds apart. In short, the elevator don’t go all the way to the top; he’s ten cents short of the dime; not the sharpest knife in the drawer…
Someone can be an aggressive alpha and also be a character that the audience will accept and even like, both at the same time. Even in a contrived fiction you can have your cake and eat it, if it is written carefully enough. Take Orlando from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the physically strong but socially awkward meat-head. Rosalind undertakes to give him some schooling in manners and courtship. Orlando consents, not only because he loves Rosalind, but also because he has demonstrated on several occasions a desire for self-improvement. Orlando is willing to learn from a teacher (Rosalind); Siegfried never learns a thing. Orlando is a different person by the end of the play than he was at the beginning; Siegfried is thoroughly immutable. And of course, Orlando knows what fear is; Siegfried does not.
I wouldn’t mind any of this if Siegfried was an intentionally ironic character. But he is on stage for most of Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods; he has the second coolest leitmotif in the Cycle; he has some of the most spectacular music otherwise (such as the above-mentioned funeral music); his greatness is prophesied via his leitmotif before he’s even born; and of course Brünnhilde, a Valkyrie and therefore an authority on the matter, constantly praises his magnificence. Was Wagner trying to force Siegfried on me? How did Wagner not see how un-earned Siegfried’s every emotional payoff was? How did Wagner not see the wealth of far more interesting characters right under his nose, despite being their very creator? I would not even consider complaints like these with other operas, but remember: this is not just opera, it is a synthesis of the arts; conventional elements of storytelling like plot and character hold just as much weight as the music, so I expect better.
But like I just implied, Ring does deliver better, however with misplaced emphasis.
Wotan
Of all the characters from Wagner’s source material, Wotan (Odin) is the one I am most familiar with. I remember that he sacrificed an eye to gain wisdom, that he is obsessed with learning anything he can about Ragnarok, and that he has a hobby of visiting strangers’ homes in disguise and matching wits with them. I remember all this despite having never seen a Thor movie (unless Adventures in Babysitting counts, but I was like five then).
As a person, he is both greater and lesser in character than someone like Siegfried: lesser, because his every word betrays his selfishness, his duplicity, and his hypocrisy — Siegfried’s ignorance and buffoonery make a lame excuse, but they do make an excuse — and greater for reasons that I suspect Wagner did not intend with respect to Siegfried but that he did intend with respect to Wotan. I suppose that if Wagner was trying to portray Siegfried as a New Hero that would set right things that our Old Hero Wotan could not fix because of bindings of his own making, Siegfried’s stupidity was meant to come across to the audience as innocence. It didn’t work for Siegfried, but the flip side of that, Wotan, does work. The story declares Wotan to be a god, but it portrays him as a human.
Wotan’s story arc starts off like that of many tragic heroes: He is mighty and great but mightily flawed. His double-dealing and equivocating; his grasping for legal loopholes; his acute awareness of his own flaws; his apparent belief that his actions, good or bad, are for good intentions; the apparent reality that his intentions are more selfish than “good”: These character traits, come out more like doggerel if written by an amateur, but if written by a master craftsman — and poetry does seem to be one of Wagner’s great strengths — make a character both sympathetic and fascinating.
But Wotan falls just short of tragedy, at least in the classical sense of the word. His power as a character lies less in his own arc and more in his interactions with other characters. His battle of wits with Mime; his confrontation with Sigmund at Brünnhilde’s rock; his confrontation with Fricka in the mountains; his confession to Brünnhilde in the same location, about his past sins; his farewell to Brünnhilde: In all these scenes he is seen not only by the audience but also by someone else on stage, and the audience is more likely to see the story through their eyes than through his. These drive the story more than any investment the audience might have in seeing whether Wotan achieves his goals or has a tragic downfall.
If these scenes and others are performed right, Wotan’s posture and bearing demonstrate him not as he is, but as he’s perceived by those around him. Take for instance, The Valkyrie Act II. Wotan should be chipper and playful at the start, when he enters the scene with carefree daddy’s-girl Brünnhilde. He should be calculating and sneaky when speaking to Fricka, and ultimately dejected and inferior when Fricka sees through him and forces an oath. He should be frightening when, as his image is shattered in Brünnhilde’s eyes, he makes vague threats to her about defying him.
That last point — Brünnhilde’s shattered image of Wotan — illustrates something else that makes Wotan so powerful as a character: he is a catalyst for other characters’ development. In that scene, Brünnhilde discovered her own conscience and will, which is disharmonious with her father’s. This was the beginning of her own journey as a character. Even Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde derives its power less from being a “Wotan moment” and more from a convolution of music, drama, both characters (not just Wotan), and an innate human response to the relationships between parents and their children, and to the self-denying conflict between desire and obligation. (If well performed, this final scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde can be one of the most powerful scenes in all of opera and storytelling in general.)
***
I have no recollection of Wotan’s fatalism, though it might be there in the Edda somewhere. In Ring, I did not see this character trait until his final conversation with Erda — his next-to-last scene before Siegfried shattered his spear. Fatalism didn’t seem to be part of his nature. He simply gave up. Even Macbeth, after his despairing “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, kept fighting until the bloody end.
Wotan’s final appearance was only by proxy, when Waltraute visited Brünnhilde. Waltraute’s sad narration of Wotan was the final nail for Wotan as a character. He was no longer a tragic hero; he was the pathos character. Every Hamlet needs an Ophelia to make the story sad. On one hand, this diminishes Wotan as a character. On the other hand, Wotan’s earlier brilliance as a character does far more than any Ophelia could do to make it poignant. And Wotan is just the right character to make this change. It would have been unforgivable if the more innocent but equally dignified Brünnhilde went out like this. (Or perhaps not. More on that that in the next section, but I’ll mention here my suspicion that Wagner had a similar author’s weakness for both Brünnhilde and Wotan.)
So Wotan does have a great character arc throughout the story, albeit a depressing one, going out not with a bang, but with a whimper. But his isn’t even the greatest character arc.
Brünnhilde
Brünnhilde is Ring’s second most problematic character behind Siegfried. She is also the best character, and the saving grace of the entire Cycle. Without her none of it would have worked, at least in a traditional storytelling way.
Everything wrong with her as a character can be found in just her first scene. Wotan is about to have a quarrel with Fricka. Brünnhilde teases him for it, because she gets to go off into battle instead of stick around and watch the two bicker. Well, it all just seems too easily macho. Was Brünnhilde Wagner’s male fantasy of a woman?
Some writers have a bad habit of putting female characters either up on a pedestal or down in the gutter. (Female writers are as guilty as men are; look up the origin to the expression “Mary Sue”.) Even worse writers place a woman on a pedestal at the start, next drag her through the gutter, and finally restore her back on to the pedestal right before the end. (I tend to avoid animé for this reason.) Poor Brünnhilde undergoes this fate. She was quite the hero in The Valkyrie, but then she endured one humiliation after another — losing her god-like status to become subservient to a mortal man, being betrayed by that man, being force-wed to another (even) less worthy man, and being tricked into getting revenge on the wrong person — before finally going out in a literal blaze of glory. I’m no psychologist, but I’d call this kind of thing — the concatenation of humiliation and apotheosis — a fetish.
On the other hand, Brünnhilde is the most wonderfully human character in the whole Cycle. Her heroism is real, her virtues are believable, and she is not devoid of human flaws. Most importantly, Brünnhilde is the only Ring character who learns and grows throughout the story.
Another kind of character falls from grace and gets dragged through the mud before undergoing some traumatic end to provide catharsis for the audience: the tragic hero. Is Brünnhilde Ring’s true hero and protagonist then? Well, no. But first, let’s hear the case for reasonable doubt:
- Unlike Siegfried, Brünnhilde is an actual case of “show, don’t tell.” She is demonstrated to be heroic, not merely boasted about by other characters. The best example is in The Valkyrie Acts II and III in which, upon her awakened conscience, she defied Wotan and tried to save Sigmund from Hunding. After failing that, she (successfully, this time) saved Siglinde by facing Wotan’s wrath, giving Siglinde time to escape. And as the scene with her sisters demonstrates, she does this knowing full well what fear is (unlike some characters).
- Brünnhilde, not Siegfried, is the one on stage for the last thirty minutes of Twilight of the Gods. (Well, Siegfried is there, and he’s only mostly dead…) In a lesser melodrama, Twilight would have ended in one of two ways: (1) Brünnhilde would see that Siegfried is dead, have a few woeful last words, and then promptly kill herself before over staying her welcome, or (2) she would go all-out Beatrix Kiddo on everybody and the final half hour would be her roaring rampage of revenge. Both of these expectations are half-met, half-subverted. She does kill herself — thirty minutes later. She does (in a round-about way) destroy Valhalla and kill all the gods — but with her thoughts not toward revenge, but rather towards reconciliation and fulfillment of Wotan’s own will. She doesn’t even bother to kill Hagen. (It was more satisfying anyway, to see him too frozen to do anything about it.)
- Brünnhilde is far more noble and just plain likable in Ring than she is in any of the medieval source material that these operas are based upon. But the exact opposite is true of Siegfried. (I never detected anything like Wagner’s Aryan chauvinism regarding Siegfried/Sigurd in Nibelungenlied or the Völsunga Saga, but I could just be dense.)
As a noob (I never read any of Wagner’s letters, essays, or stories, and from what I’ve heard about them, I don’t want to, either), my final impression is this: Wagner originally envisioned Ring as Siegfried’s story, eventually lost interest in him, and finally allowed some of the characters to get away from him and write themselves. Authors falling in love with their characters are common. I am certain that Shakespeare allowed this to happen with Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra. (I owe some of this opinion to Harold Bloom.) Their conception was limited to the needs of the story, but they ended up bigger than the story they inhabit, Falstaff literally 😉.
This gives Ring a disjointed story that put the wrong characters on stage at the wrong time. Wotan was a great tragic hero during three of the four operas, but he was absent through all of the final opera. Hagen is one of the greatest tragic villains of all time, but he does not even appear until the final opera. Siegfried was a mere caricature, but he’s on stage for most of Ring’s second half, complete with extensive solo time. Brünnhilde is apparently the only well-placed character, by entering the story early in the second opera, existing as a key plot point in the third, and possessing the fourth with greatest authority.
Conclusion
Maybe you just can’t synthesize the arts. Take for example Brünnhilde’s denouement. This compromises her as a character. Is she a hero in the end? Certainly not! Many divas have immolated themselves and the audience never passed judgement, so long as the singing was good. But since Ring tries to be a holistic drama of music, acting, and a boatload of bombast, characters matter, and when they do opera-character things… Operas have good singing, but they do not tell good stories, so they shouldn’t try.
Perhaps that is what the critics were really saying when they criticize Wagner’s excesses on stage. There’s that old joke that Wagner is “not as bad as he sounds.” It’s too bad that he wrote operas whose ambitions would have made them great but for a defining flaw in those very ambitions. It’s like trying to roll the twist out of a Moebius curve.