unfortunately, the fact that we love opera makes us a lot poorer, not richer!!

A Wild Buffalo writes:

I am sorry to see that, once again, our entire species is being crudely and unfairly stereotyped as a result of the actions of a tiny minority. As bovines go, we are in fact one of the most polite and considerate species and will invariably queue patiently at the watering hole of our choice without any so-called 'buffaloing' going on at all. Indeed, as a little basic research would have revealed, we usually operate a numbered ticket system. It is therefore all the more saddening to find that, yet again, we are all tarred with the same brush and made scapegoats and whipping boys [Check if those are all possible at the same time. Ed] because of an unrepresentative minority.

Yours sincerely

Bill

Bill,

You think you got problems? Jeez! Just take a moment and think about those goats being scaped not to mention the boys being whipped and all. Strikes me your pain is all in the mind. For them, it's the real physical thing.

Yours,
U Thinkyagottitof,
Grass Is Always Greener Dept,
Ministry for the Unmixing of Metaphors.

No, indeed not - in fact, in the late-night company of a large gathering of my compatriots (including Ronald Stevenson, no less) in a wee village to the south east of Edinburgh some 18 or so years ago I once declared that I considered Wagner to be one of the greatest symphonists of the 19th century. I don't recall ever having brought about such horrified total silence anywhere since ordering a gin and tonic in English without a shred of Welsh accent in a busy Aberystwyth pub at least a decade earlier. I have never visited that Scottish village or Aberystwyth since and have, in any case, subsequently learnt at least something (albeit arguably by no means enough) of the virtues of keeping my mouth shut. Who needs to be in "unadulteratedly good company" when Wagner is on the agenda, anyway?! Not me, that's for sure! Having said this, I am now reminded of that glorious illustrative passage from Gurrelieder that Norman del Mar quotes in his splendid book Anatomy of the Orchestra and which Schönberg scored for muted(!) Wagner tubas in such a way as to sound more like Wagner than anything Wagner himself could have penned, methinks...

Best,

Alistair

http://www.bpo.org/

You see, buffalo are not just opera lovers...

Hey, just hit my 1000th!!!

Rather you than me - how would you do that?

Yes, but Shaw succeeds more in showing it to contain anti-capitalist motives, which doesn't imply any necessary progressive socialist alternative (rather The Ring to me strongly implies some primitivist, ruralist opposition to capitalist industrialisation, an ideology which of course runs deep within Herderian romanticism, and is not so different from, say, the ideals of right-wing militias in the contemporary American south).

An explicitly formulated ideology as such (or a political movement founded upon such an ideology) did not exist at that time, but the seeds of such a thing were definitely in place and quite advanced (fascism did not come out of nowhere, it represents a particularly extreme manifestation of the most reactionary currents of nineteenth-century ideologies). But a case could be made for the cycle by noting the ambivalent portrayal of Siegfried, archetype of brutish, ruthless, fearless Aryan youth such as would become an icon of those later times, and how the seeds of his own destruction (and the world around him) are thus sown. It could even be seen as horribly prophetic in such a manner. However, despite Wagner's explicit sympathies with Wotan instead of Siegfried, I'd still not really like to be the one attempting to construct such a reading, though.

Well, you've already made some of the case in reply 46 above - and I'd certainly agree that the seeds of what became fascism in the twentieth century were sown and flourishing in the nineteenth.  (I'm also aware that fascism is a notoriously slippery concept, and in my earlier post I might have been better off referring to authoritarianism)

This is more a collection of quick (and far from exhaustive) thoughts than an attempt at a properly formulated argument, but I think the issue is largely one of Wagner's reaction to power, particularly the patriarchal power implicit in the identity of Wotan and in the whole Valhalla project (if one can call it that!).  Valhalla starts as a symbol of power and becomes, pre-eminently, a war machine, presided over by Wotan in an absolutist way; Fricka represents the traditional Poujadist values of family, hearth and so on - expressed in a more brutal way through Hunding; and it is in defying and rejecting these things that the argument of the Ring unfolds.  Loge gives the game away with his speech at the end of Rheingold ("Ihrem Ende eilen sie zu"); Nibelheim is an obvious metaphor for capitalist industry (as Wagner himself acknowledged); we sympathise with Siegmund and Sieglinde as they break free from Hunding's family values; Siegfried is laid low by hubris and what Jungians would call inflation (the fearless Aryan youth is also a horribly incomplete human being); Gutrune paints a horrific picture of Wotan in his bunker awaiting the end; Hagen seals his relationship with Siegfried with a classic image of blood and soil, the swearing of blood-brotherhood, an image of pure malice.  And so on.

Obviously there are aspects of what we would today describe as fascism that aren't in the Ring (there is nothing here about nationality for a start, and little about the economic basis for fascism, although Shaw and others have pointed out how Alberich and the Nibelungs fit this particular mould); and I take the point about nature-worship and Herderian romanticism.

All of which is a long way from the crude caricature of Wagner, which is the point I was trying to make!