The Ring effect

So I saw Siegfried (number 3 in the Ring Cycle) last night, and as you might guess, I have yet more thoughts:

*    some commentary I have read and posted before about viewing a Ring cycle indicated this, and I reckon it's clearly true:   it's a cumulative experience that feels a little like your brain being re-wired by music and light.   This might be a particularly true of this digital video heavy production, where the colour intensity is often very strong, and for the most part, pretty mesmerising.  I have never been bored or at risk of falling asleep, and the biggest physical effect on me was being really tired the day after Die Walkure.   

*    Is it because of that effect that I felt last night's performance, from both singers and orchestra, was particularly good?   My doubts about the orchestra disappeared, and I don't think I was alone - the applause at the end was the strongest and most sustained out of the three so far.   

*    Having said this - I still don't know that the dynamic between aunt and horny nephew in the last 15 or 20 minutes really makes a lick of psychological sense.   But the puzzle over whether the story makes sense is part of the fun - pondering whether it's just nuts, or hiding a deep psychological truth (and of whom - Wagner personally, society, Schopenhauer?) that's lurking beneath the lurid?   

More later...

Update:

On the matter of incest, from an interesting short piece in the New Yorker:

The “Ring” is more than a refashioning of myth; from the outset, Wagner intended an allegorical assault on modern capitalist society. In that light, taboo relationships assume a different character: they voice a defiance of bourgeois restrictions on sexuality. In a crucial scene in Act II of “Die Walküre,” which I discussed in an article for the magazine in 2011, Wotan debates changing mores with his wife, Fricka. The god has tried to create a freely acting hero who can win the Ring back from the dragon Fafner without violating prior contractual arrangements. Fricka argues that the union of the twins exposes the corruption of his scheme. Wotan replies: “Age-old custom / is all you can grasp.” He is undoubtedly speaking for the composer, who conducted scandalous affairs, had a fetish for satin, and welcomed gay men into his circle. Wotan’s defense of rebellious love in the face of cold morality resonated with listeners who had to suppress their natural urges and conform to norms, often by way of sham marriages. Early campaigners for gay rights considered Wagner an ally, if not one of their own.

The love of Brünnhilde and Siegfried carries a particularly forceful message. While the pairing certainly has its peculiarities—Lévi-Strauss says that Brünnhilde is a “supermother” to Siegfried, having protected him since birth—its depth of feeling stands in contrast to the calculated marriage contracts of “Götterdämmerung,” in which Brünnhilde becomes an object of exchange. Wagner was no feminist, yet he had many feminist fans, who took inspiration from such ungovernable female characters as Brünnhilde, Isolde, and Kundry, in “Parsifal.” The turn-of-the-century Wagner soprano Lillian Nordica, a campaigner for women’s rights, once said that the world of the stage was the “only place where men and women stand on a perfect equality where there is true comradeship.”

Update 2:   a good blog entry by someone from Melbourne summarising a whole book called Wagner and the Erotic Impulse.  More than you ever needed to know, like this:  

In the chapter titled Pathologies Dreyfus explores Wagner’s reputation for degeneracy of which his love of silk and perfume, which Dreyfus call fetishes, was considered a part. I’ve read before that he liked sumptuous silk and velvet clothing as well as expensive house-hold accoutrements but didn’t know the extent of it. Or how it influenced his music.

Wagner was first named as having a pathological condition in a widely read denunciation in 1873 in which he was accused of moral degeneration in both his use of language and his personal behaviour including his affair with Cosima von Bulow. He was accused of delusions of grandeur and moral insanity and an unnatural increase in sexual desire as evidenced by the erotic element in Tristan und Isolde where he glorifies adultery and Die Walküre where he glorifies incest. 

 Next came Nietzsche who having first been an admirer became increasingly vitriolic in his criticism of Wagner who he said represented the quintessence of decadence. The Wagnerian opera causes Nietzsche to break out in a disagreeable sweat as opposed to Bizet’s more agreeable Carmen which makes him feel happy, … patient, … settled. Nietzsche is particularly opposed to Wagner’s attempts to find redemption and his misunderstanding of love. He prefers Carmen which reflects the real nature of love which is the “deadly hatred of the sexes!” and where the act of murdering a gypsy constitutes the only conception of love … worthy of a philosopher”. 

Ha!   Good old, mad old, Nietzsche, hey?!

Anyway, back to degenerate Wagner:

The final section in this chapter looks at Wagner’s longstanding fetish for wearing and surrounding himself with soft fabrics, especially satin and silk, without which he found it difficult to compose music. Nietzsche knew all about this because he had been inveigled from time to time, when friendly with Wagner, to purchase such products. Wagner spent a fortune, mostly other peoples’ money, on pink textiles and rose scented fragrances. This first came publicly to light with the publication in June 1877, a year after the first Ring performance, of a series of letters to his Viennese milliner. These included his detailed requirements, including sketches, for pink satin dressing gowns with flounces, satin undergarments, silk quilts and upholstery and curtains and much more. He had rooms furnished completely in silk, including walls and ceilings. He also required warmth in his clothes so his pink dressing gowns were quilted. There is also evidence that he had women’s dresses made up for him. All of this was very important to his compositional process. And there are lots of references to flowers and pleasing perfumes in the works of which the most explicit are the Flower-Maidens in Parsifal.

Oh my.   

So, just how gay sympathetic was he?   As with everything about this strange guy, it's apparently complicated:

The final chapter, Homoerotics, considers Wagner’s surprising regard for same-sexual love; which also surfaces in his operas. Wagner was friends with many men and women who lived openly in same sex relationships; this in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He notes how Parsifal in particular was viewed as sympathetic to homosexuality.

Overall he contends that Wagner was also accepting of same sex relationships as well as deep friendships between men. Dreyfus then considers in detail the relationship between Wagner and his great protector King Ludwig II of Bavaria. This includes extracts from the passionate letters the King wrote to the composer and Wagner’s responses that were more muted in tone and passion but equally crammed with pretentious prose. Nevertheless he suggests Wagner was infatuated with the young King as indicated by a public poem dedicated to Ludwig that was published in 1864. Even allowing for poetic hyperbole Dreyfus finds that the correspondence between the two leaves an extraordinary impression of infatuated friendship.

However Wagner’s tolerance did not extend to the acceptance of carnal sodomy or pederasty. Their homoerotics – those of the Greeks – must be sharply distinguished from our homoerotics, and in this statement one can most likely detect the perfectly understandable line Wagner drew between his awareness of classical same-sex love and his own configuration of Freundesliebe.