Yet more "Consider the Ring"

It turns out that Brisbane is not the only place about to stage a Ring Cycle.  As I have explained before [just search "Ring Cycle" in the side bar - I like most of my past posts about this], I'll be there in December, to see if my "sink or swim in 15 hours of dense Germanic storytelling" introduction to the artform pays off.   

But in this lengthy article in The Guardian, I learn that the Royal Opera House in London is about to stage it as well, directed by Australian Barrie Kosky, whose style is most often described as "flamboyant".  That's not a descriptor in the arts world that has natural appeal to me, although I guess that some would say these particular operas are intrinsically flamboyant, so what am I on about?

Well, all I can say is that I consider it a good thing that the Brisbane production is being directed by a Chinese guy who, as this video indicates, has a pretty grounded approach: 

 

I am, by the way, a bit bothered by the lack of media attention being given to this forthcoming Brisbane production, which has been delayed years by Covid.   I hope it gets noticed soon.   

Anyhoo, back to The Guardian article that talks again about the Cycle generally:

Wagner has never felt more culturally marginal than today, even though, paradoxically, many leading cultural franchises, from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Game of Thrones, are unthinkable without his influence. On the face of it, 2023 needs nothing so little as bombastic white-male-supremacist art composed by an antisemitic megalomaniac whom even one-time superfan Nietzsche came to see as a kind of cultural Covid. “Is Wagner a human being at all?” Nietzsche asked. “Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.”

Of course, such a paragraph means that it will be followed by several explaining why it is, in fact, still culturally relevant, including its constant re-interpretations:

Wagner at least thought he was issuing a deep, unified statement of cultural truths that could change how we live. “He felt there had to be some kind of drastic step taken in order to revolutionise the way people lived and their demands on life,” Wagner scholar Michael Tanner said. “Otherwise they would just sink to a level where they didn’t mind the fact that they were living so much less fully than they could do.”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw interpreted the Ring cycle as an allegory of the collapse of capitalism. But it is endlessly interpretable. It can serve not just as Marxist tract but as a Third Reich allegory; a sado-masochistic indictment of the have-yachts in the posh seats, or a Buddhist-inflected music drama in which the high body count suggests the death of the ego that Wagner thought, in line with his beloved philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, was desirable.

Richard Jones, director of two-fourths of ENO’s current Ring, favours something like the last account: “Ultimately it’s about the idea of self-renunciation. It’s like great Greek drama. Since it was first performed in 1876, there has never been a period when it wasn’t germane to the contemporary world,” he told the Guardian when his cycle opened in 2021.

Certainly, Wagner supposed his music drama would offer quasi-religious experience in the ancient Greek manner. “His idea was that a sufficiently potent new art form, such as he was perhaps uniquely able to write, would, by being experienced, communally change people’s consciousness,” said Tanner. “You would emerge a different person.” Wagner even built a temple to this cult in the form of Bayreuth’s opera house.

Yes, the radio interview I heard when the Brisbane production was announced did note that many claim that  viewing a Cycle production is life changing.   One has one's doubts that this will be way I react, but I'm willing to go through the experiment.