Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Review

Report
Program
Keynote speakers
Speakers
Panel Discussion
Final Comments

Notes and Personal Highlights - accounts of papers by Keynote Speakers

As the Program suggests, there were many interesting subjects being offered by the presenters, most of whom kept their promise. Since I have no musical training I found the technical analytical papers somewhat beyond me, although they made me realise how much I was missing out on. My summary is split into Keynote Speakers (see below), Speakers, and a final summary.

John Deathridge

Professor Deathridge set the standard in his his discussion of the role the German trauerspiel (sorrow play) played in Wagner’s development of the Ring. Deathridge (following Walter Benjamin) noted that trauerspiel was characterised by an indecisive tyrant whose lack of decision, during which time seems to freeze, leads to catastrophe as a way of bringing history (which demands decisions) to an end. It was mentioned that Waltraute’s scene in Götterdämmerung was added in the final version of the opera in order to provide a final picture of the indecisive ruler waiting for Brünnhilde to take action for him.

Deathridge also points out that Wagner, during the writing of the Ring, carried on an elaborate debate with himself about whether or not the Ring was history or tragedy (the latter would have linked him to the idealised/idolised) Ancient Greeks.

Oswald Bauer

Having met Dr Bauer at the Wagner Society dinner in Sydney as he was on his way to Adelaide and had an interesting discussion with him, I was looking forward to his talk.

Bauer focussed on the significance of scenery in the Ring. He noted that Wagner used a basic dichotomy: mythical man’s space is nature; historical man’s space is architectural. This is illustrated in the transformation of Wotan as he arranges for Valhalla to be built under a contract with the Giants. Wotan is effectively translating himself into the historical world and subjecting himself, probably unconsciously, to historical forces over which he has no control and which is, by necessity, subject to an end.

Wagner reflects this transformation in his "scenographic score" using different manifestations of nature and human architecture to emphasise the philosophical and psychological points.

However, it took some time to break out of the Bayreuth tradition which used, even in 1876, ossified stage images derived from 19C landscape painting and face the question of how to interpret Nature in ways which were relevant to our times. Bauer emphasised that this was an artistic/critical decision, not a technical one.

Bauer pointed to two major turning points – Mahler’s 1915-16 productions in Vienna with Roller, a Sezessionist painter as the set designer; Appia’s concept of moving space/moving light and early use of electric light.

Significantly, Bauer was one of a few speakers who expicitly contemplated Wagner in the new millennium:

Dieter Borchmeyer

Borchmeyer answered his opening rhetorical question as to whether or not it was possible that Wagner had global relevance by citing a John Steinbeck short story, "The Pearl of Great Price", which has striking parallels with the story of The Ring Cycle, and which, itself, was based on a South American Indian myth.

He then continued to posit the view that Wagner intended the progress of the Rhinedaughters’ vocal line from the opening of Das Rheingold as moving from an approximation of the sounds of nature through to comprehensible speech, from "wave and cradle" to the song of the earth.

The Rhinegold and Wotan’s spear both represent acts of despoilation of nature, through their forcible acquisition and subsequent fashioning into an instrument of power, and have destructive consequences.

Borchmeyer then suggests that Wagner incorporates history (ie actions with consequences occuring in time) as an aspect of the circular (Viconian, or even I would suggest, Vedic) nature of myth. I understood Borchmeyer to be saying that the historical actions of Wotan and Alberich create a "story" which has to run its course because of the deterministic laws of history. When the story has run its catastrophic course, and almost everyone is dead, the mythic component reasserts itself, although mutedly, through the rise of the Rhine and the Rhinedaugters’ retrieval of the ring. [So Anna Russell is right: we have to come right back to where we started!]

Borchmeyer also drew attention a number of other mythic parallels in The Ring Cycle, including Siegfried as a atavar of Apollo (the sun god) conquering night (Fafner smothering the Rhinegold) and simultaneously releasing Spring. He recapitulates the Egyptian style myth enacted by Siegmund and Sieglinde, the divine twins, trapped in Hunding’s hut until love/spring releases them.

In an interesting follow on to Susan Sharkey’s paper, Borchmeyer suggests that the "redemption by love" motif should more accurately be called the "birth or rebirth of love".

Barry Millington

Millington provided a timely warning about the dangers of preserving a style of production for a work of art by citing the incident in which Wagner took the designer for the first Ring Cycle to see a production by the Meiningen Project – a theatrical revolution in the court of Duke Frederick at Dresden. The Ring Cycle designs which were created then ossified into a tradition of Ring production which couldn’t be changed.

Millington contended that the wrongful elevation of the music over the drama (in contradiction of Wagner’s own repeated statements, I could add) reinforced the stultification of the dramatic aspects of Ring productions.

As a result of theatrical revolutions in the course of this century, the tradition of Ring production style has been challenged by a range of interpretations, including the current emphasis on directorial interpretations, although the more literal stagings still persist and are very popular.

Terence Watson - 8 May 1999