Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Review

Report
Program
Keynote speakers
Speakers
Panel Discussion
Final Comments

Final Comments

As the first such event I have attended, I found the Symposium stimulating and rewarding. There were many useful and interesting insights, which I have tried to highlight in the other pages of this report.

It was a source of some pleasure to me to think that the Symposium was being held at the end of another century, some 116 years after Wagner's death, thus attesting to the continuing power of Wagner to attract and hold people's attention.

There is clearly a healthy Wagner "industry" around the world, with no easy consensus on the "real" meaning of Wagner's work or of his achievement, except to say, perhaps, that he must be significant because he provokes such high orders of passion - intellectual, musical, ideological, and emotional - in those for and those against him.

As one "for" Wagner, I have to acknowledge that there are aspects of his works, particularly his didactic and discursive writing which suggest a personality and character with disturbing (to me) elements of prejudice and irrationality, which one has to take into account in determining one's view of Wagner. The Symposium helped me considerably in thinking about these complex issues.

One aspect of the Symposium, with its title, Wagner at the Millennium, that disappointed was the total lack of any discussion of the relationship. It seemed to me that the apocalyptic nature of The Ring Cycle, with its world coming to an end at the end of the work, in conjunction with a performance of the Cycle so close to the end of the millennium, should have stimulated at least a few of the speakers to millennial speculations.

It seems to me that, with the re-emergence of a variety of millennial frenzies, there was rich ground for analysis of the impulses which drive people or opera characters to welcome the end or to set themselves up for an end with a "terminal" attitude to the world, or to search for transcendental ways out of the millennial terminus.

The myth of the Rheingold is capable of translation into a millennial fantasy which would have many satisfying parallels with the society we live in at the end of the second millennium. Many sects have emerged as the end of the millennium approaches with prophets who promise an escape to a better world, as long as we sacrifice everything, including our autonomy, to his power.

As the saying goes (more or less), the end of things concentrates the mind wonderfully. It brings to the surface hopes and fears which may be quiescent at less symbolic times. The Ring Cycle is full of these hopes and fears as it presents characters confronting a world in which the king of the gods has withdrawn and wishes his own end.

In the Hall of the Gibichings, the Gibichings and their vassals appear to have little regard for such teleological matters. Regardless of their indifference, the chains of actions engendered by Wotan's desire to end it all have their impact on them as Siegfried (ironically Wotan's one time instrument for seizing absolute control of the world through the repossession of the ring) enters and precipitates the end of their world.

One could read modern parallels in the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. From such small seeds, the end of the modern world could grow. The decision by the US President to launch a de facto war in his final period as president could be read as both a desire to enter the history books and a desire to end the history books. The powerful protestant religious culture in which the President, and many others, grew up is predisposed to millennial ecstasies. A number of sects grew up in US in the latter half of the 19C in the belief that the end of the world was nigh, and had later to modify those beliefs to accommodate reality a little more directly.

One needs a work like The Ring Cycle to remind one that one's own world is constructing and reenacting myths of one sort or another. While one trusts that the above analogy remains an analogy, The Ring Cycle reminds us, as Jung later more discursively recapitulated, that when a myth takes over our minds great and terrible things can follow.

We must be on guard against being possessed by a myth of any sort - a myth of absolute power or absolute possession, a myth of ecstatic love or virulent hate, a myth of superiority or a myth of separateness - unless we can ensure that those consequences, and not some other horrifying, oedipal consequences, will follow.

So, do we follow Brünnhilde over the edge into a possibly better world after death? Or do we follow Wotan into self-willed (and possibly wilful) despair and death? Or do we leap with Hagan into the Rhine in a foredoomed attempt to wrest back the ultimate power he lusts for? Or do we side with Siegfried and attempt to remain a child at heart while tackling dragons whose significance we have no knowledge or desire to know? Or do we mingle with the vassals, stunned at the millennial catastrophe which has just overturned their world wondering who will appear to lead them now - or even worse, wondering if they will have to take responsibility for their own lives? Or do we side with the arch-opportunist, Alberich, lurking in the wings waiting for his moment to come, when there is no longer any threat from higher powers, when he can repeat his rape of the Rhinegold and achieve consummation this time?

Terence Watson - 8 May 1999