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To help members prepare for the Adelaide Ring Cycle, now only three
months away, Antony Ernst threw out a number of challenging and provocative
points for us to think about during his address on Sunday, 18 July.
Why has the number of Ring Cycle productions increased around the
world since the 1980s? “Any opera house that can and some that
can't!” - mount Ring productions, that is. For a
Director, the Ring Cycle has become the “grand aesthetic statement
about the world” through a performance tradition in which the
Director is expected to take position, have a vision. The statement
can be straightforward and representational, as tends to be the case
in US opera houses, or the radical interpretations more common in
European opera houses.
The impact of Ring Cycle productions on theatrical theory and practice
The massive cultural change in Europe and the US after World War II
had an impact on what was aesthetically valid in opera productions,
while Wagner's 19th Century “progressive” ideology
and associated aesthetics are disavowed. Wagner's intense rehearsals
for the Ring Cycle inspired later Directors to create a unified work
of art out of the multiple aspects of a music drama.
The relevance of Wagner's personality and preoccupations,
as mediated by the Ring Cycle, to the 20th Century “Wagner's
neuroses are ours”. Wagner's personality, with all its
ruthlessness, megalomaniacal, self-aggrandizing impulses has become
the “standard” for the 20th and 21st Centuries. These
neuroses, according to Wagner, had their roots in the rise of the
capitalist and industrialist society in the mid 19th Century and found
one of its most effective expressions in the music and imagery of
the dystopic Nibelungen foundry. The Ring Cycle is the only work of
high art that gives us an insight into our own world. The scale and
complexity of the work enables multifarious interpretations. The mythic
component of the Ring Cycle enables Directors to reflect the nature
of their times, as mediated through their own values, beliefs and
prejudices.
Wagner's heritage and the rise of the cinema The invention
of recording was instrumental in making Wagner's music available
at a time when serious art music was becoming more remote and inaccessible.
The Ring Cycle and the world of cinema, to a large extent, exploits
the same mythical material of the Hero, the journey, the trial, the
solving of the riddle, the restoration of the world to unity and purity.
In addition, Wagner's neurotic belief that the world is governed
by forces that no one, including the gods, can control, but which
need to be opposed even if they cannot be overcome, provides a basic
Hollywood plot line. The Hollywood fantasy factory has taken over
the concept of the Gesamtkustwerk to churn out cinematically complete
worlds. Many of Wagner's musical followers, such as Korngold,
Bernard, Ernst Gold, who left Germany for the USA in the 1930s, helped
to translate the musical idiom at the same time as film directors
were adapting Wagner's visual imagination and marrying these
to the mythic plot line. A younger generation conditioned by the Wagnerian
inheritance as adopted and adapted by Hollywood may, one day, make
it way to Wagner in the opera house.
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30-Aug-2004
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