I bought this at Abbey’s bookshop in November. I wasn’t acquainted with the store layout and the staff were helpful and found this on the shelves for me.
Early on, the philosophical foundations of the Ring are outlined. This is rare for the reason that most artists don’t have specific works of philosophy in mind when they sit down to write, paint, or carve. But Wagner did, drawing on German tradition, especially the ideas of Hegel. Doing so puts him in the same category of creative as Marx, who was working at the same time and who, in developing his ideas, also drew heavily on a writers such as Kant and Hegel. Then, on the political front, there was revolution in the air during the 19th century; I felt glad to’ve read about the European uprisings of the 1820s. I’d started to read books about the 19th century with an eye to better understanding the Ring.
With respect to popular culture, the big topics of the middle of the 19th century were the links between European and Indian cultures and languages, as well as the burgeoning German nationalist project (which produced the works of the Grimm brothers). In order to write his magnum opus, Wagner also drew on Viking culture, especially Icelandic and Norse mythological narratives, which were available at the time. These artefacts offered a counterpoint to the usual Greek and Roman stories – obviously, Greek and Roman stories were very much discussed and plundered by artists working in the 1850s and 1860s – but in a way that privileged northern Europe.
This was Wagner’s goal, anyway. I’ve not read much philosophy and am still researching the period in question, but it’s safe to say that a nationalist enterprise was central to the identities of people living at the time in the area now known as Germany. Many people today dislike nationalism – for obvious reasons, not the least being the way German nationalism spiked into militarism in the 20th century – but it cannot be argued against an assertion that it is an engine of change, since it mobilises people to achieve (what they see as) shared goals.
I won’t go into the evidence of anti-Semitism here as it doesn’t seem very relevant beyond the necessity of mentioning it in order to acknowledge such ideas as present in Wagner’s mind at the same time as he was writing his lyrics and scoring his music. Early on in his book, Scruton mentions this aspect of Wagner’s mind (or education), but more broadly this author is intent on something else, and he demonstrates this “something else” using plain evidence. There’ve been books lambasting Wagner on account of unpleasant expressed views and no doubt I will get around, at some later point, to reading them.
For the moment, having given my introduction, I want to say something about the music – which is the thing that first drew me to the Abbey’s Bookshop in Sydney’s CBD.
Wagner represents for me a culmination of generations of a certain type of music, music I do not possess the cognitive tools required to eloquently classify, so I will use proxies in an effort to be specific and to help to orient the reader around my ideas. The 150 years leading up to 1900 were a time of amazing economic and political change and Scruton makes it plain that such changes functioned to motivate Wagner to create the ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ tetralogy. Notable influences were the revolutionary movements I mention above. Advances in scholarship, in science, and in politics were matched by shifts in emphasis in the arts. So Beethoven – who belonged to one of the two generations that came immediately before Wagner’s – was more different from Mozart than Wagner was different from Beethoven. Wagner and Beethoven both plumb emotional depths of the human psyche and, in using related auditory vocabularies, outline in their work the lineaments of humanity in a way that we recognise today as being, somehow, true.
We talk about progress and assume that, gradually, each artform moves inexorably toward a steady state of perfection. I won’t go into this in detail other than to say that such an idea is an oversimplification, and add as well that art is made by individuals working in communities. So while the values and ideas of the community condition the individual’s responses to the past, the individual is also able to act independently. While a man or woman is an echo time whelped, he or she struggles naturally against the constraints of his or her destiny. Singly or in concert with their peers, they rebel. Wagner addresses this dynamic in the work and, while by his day the apogee of the Church had well and truly passed and Enlightenment figures had repeatedly concluded that God was a relic, he takes a different tack and places religion at the centre of his work. What happens, he seems to be asking, if the gods really are dead.
Scruton’s study contains a detailed description, in chapter three, of the entire opera, punctuated by a welcome pause at the end of ‘Siegfried’ act two, at which point Wagner took a decade off from this labour and went away to work on other things. The composer came back again, in the end, to finish his work, and Scruton takes you through it in a blow-by-blow fashion, recording musical elements at their appropriate places (there’s a notated appendix that lists these motifs and themes, useful for those who can read music), and relaying the story in a way that allows you to gauge the influences he’d included in the previous chapter.
The effect is challenging but engrossing, helping the neophyte to understand the scheme of the drama and to assess the significance of Wagner’s vision relative to other works of art – for example other long poems that had appeared in other eras – as well as to the history of the times. Having earlier fallen in love with the music, I was happy to find that Scruton – though he gives a full description of the intricacies of the narrative used to make the opera’s libretto – always comes back to it.
Chapter four leaves the writing aside and here Scruton turns to the music itself, then in chapter five he loops back to the story again. This opera is so complex, and it has been interpreted in so many ways (its inherent complexity and innovativeness attracting both valuable and tendentious interpretation) that Scruton’s analysis is however not always easy. He proceeds in vertical categories (“Character and symbol” is chapter six) and then changes to horizontal ones (“Love and power” is chapter seven). Just as I noted in my mind this switch, it was because I was writing about the book’s density, and it was as though Scruton had anticipated my objection, and had decided, while writing (at a moment in time prior to my realisation), to facilitate my job (the reader does work, just as the writer does). Chapters five and six are so thick with references – both internal, within the work, and within the volume under discussion here – that at times you struggle to keep up. I hesitate to say that this is a weakness, but it seemed to me that taking individual themes as the jumping-off point – for example, the depiction of Albericht, the dwarf, and his role as nemesis and locus of power relative to Siegfried and Wotan; or the role of the Rhine-daughters and the redeeming power of nature, which is linked to the symbol of the Ring – might’ve made the messages Scruton is trying to convey more accessible. Often, I felt overwhelmed but, loving the music as much as I do, and conscious, reading the book, of the artwork’s power and reach, I persevered.
There’s no doubt Tolkien borrowed heavily from Wagner. The figures of Golem and Albericht are so similar as almost to make you cry foul. But the way the book ends compared to the opera is radically different, and while ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a brilliant work of art, ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ is most certainly more enigmatic and profound. While Tolkien gives the reader a typical quest story – an unlikely hero is given an apparently impossible task and sets out on a journey of discovery during which he meets obstacles and overcomes each of them to, finally, reach his goal – Wagner offers a different scenario. This is what I set out (on my quest, as a reader) to uncover, since originally (like Bilbo Baggins in the Shire) I had only become aware incidentally of the significance of what happens. With the tetralogy, you face – not dragons, orcs, or treacherous subhuman trolls – an historical conundrum since, despite its speculative (or mythological) elements, Wagner roots his work firmly in the context of the 19th century. As mentioned earlier, the work is a conscious attempt to come to terms with intellectual and political, technological and economic changes altering the face of Europe at the time he was alive.
Just a note about the cover: the design is fresh and mysterious. In it, four sections drawn by gold lines can be taken to represent the four parts of the Ring, and the sensuous and enigmatic lines (the colour representing the gold of the Ring, and the fluidity of the lines reflecting in the fact that it is the Rhine-daughters who give the Ring to Albericht) seem to point to the motive quality of music: something that is always in motion, but where assonance and dissonance alternate for the listener’s pleasure – the gold on the cover here shimmers, twists, and coheres but seems never to find a steady state. The lines are alternately parallel, then diverge, only to coalesce in coherent strands.
Something about Wagner’s narrative and the transcendental beauty of his music is matched by this elegant cover. I found the book challenging and enlightening, and was so struck by a passage in chapter eight (titled ‘Siegfreid and Other problems’) that it was almost as though I was reading something I had written myself. At least it was something I had long been searching for in print – or so it seemed to me as soon as I had consumed this deathless passage, which I quote below:
The true artist stands back from his work so that it speaks to us directly. The artist who steps forward to moralize does an injustice, not to us only, but also to his characters, who are, by this gesture, deprived of the right to speak for themselves. In giving an interpretation of a true dramatic work we are exploring the characters, and what they symbolize. We are also clarifying the underlying ideas and assumptions that set the context for the drama, so as to show just why these people in this situation deserve our interest and sympathy and just why they have something to tell us. But we are not, or not usually, in the business of extracting a message that can be formulated as a maxim or a recipe for life.
In bad art, the author or composer stands over the reader or listener like a parent standing over a child who refuses to tidy his or her room, demanding that a certain understanding be taken away from a work of fiction (it even applies to nonfiction). Scruton’s strong ethical stance – in relaying the above snippet of wisdom (for it is a wise thing to write) – is evident in his qualification; that “usually” added in the final sentence in order not to offend the artist who writes allegories or aphorisms – or other types of fiction that are designed to serve a didactic purpose. You can see Scruton summing up something that he strongly believes and that he offers to the reader as a corrective to the types of abuse that some creative people perpetrate by making their vision too rigid and not adequately true to life.
His exegesis is in parts very dense and apparently neat in its progress toward achieving the epistemological goals he had set himself at the outset. For this reason the reader will not immediately grasp the meaning of every utterance the book’s nine chapters contain – you wonder sometimes if Scruton is going too fast or, alternately, whether what he is saying about the Ring is perhaps not, in the music, quite the way as he describes (for you cannot – or, at least not easily – simultaneously listen to a piece of music and read about it) – the reward to be gleaned from reading this book is that it excites responses within you that other types of writing cannot. This is the great benefit of criticism: that it allows you to revisit, as though seeing it through a differently-coloured lens, a familiar scene. As a result you are transported, as if by magic, to a strange kingdom where there are things you recognise but others that you had never seen before. If a work of art is like a landscape or a city, then the critic is like Virgil for Dante: a guide, with his or her own map, a document that resembles that of another person only in its general outline – the streets have the same names but the shops marked to visit do not.
Scruton touches on the idea of verisimilitude and in broad terms he is congratulatory with respect to the Ring, although at the end of the book, through the lens of other commentators, he details some misgivings. The Ring is enigmatic to a degree that individuals apply their own thinking in talking about it, so it functions as a tabula rasa upon which generations of commentators have overlaid their views. Scruton isn’t shy of giving his own, and for the main I understood him. It helped me to read this as, now, when I go back to the music I’ll have a framework upon which to hang other images, other ideas, other was of imagining the meaning Wagner imbued the world with through his creativity. The edifice of the Ring will get higher still when I publish this review, an event that will, in its own small way, change the world.
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