Though the allegory is multi-layered, there is no doubt as to the meaning of the Ring: it is the whole of human history, past and future, depicted through 15 hours of the most sublime music ever written.Īt the start there is only nature – the Rhine depicted by an orchestra bubbling around a single chord for several minutes. In the final scene, Brünnhilde throws Siegfried’s gold ring into the Rhine, declares an end to the world of the gods and jumps on to a burning funeral pyre. Siegfried is drugged, persuaded that he hates Brünnhilde and then gets murdered by a family of half-dwarves fathered by Alberich. Siegfried recognises his own human nature, admits his hatred of the dwarf, kills Mime, kills the dragon, gets the gold and weds Brünnhilde.įinally, in Twilight of the Gods, everything goes wrong. In Siegfried, Wotan’s human grandson is being nurtured by Mime, Alberich’s dwarf brother. This goes wrong when Brünnhilde, the chief Valkyrie, disobeys. He has also fathered a race of Valkyries, whose job is to bring fallen warriors to protect him from the surviving giant (who has turned himself into a dragon). In The Valkyrie, Wotan has fathered a race of humans who can – because of their heroic nature – win back the gold without breaking the sacred contract. But his business contract with two giants means it is they who walk away with the gold and – because it is cursed – one immediately kills the other. In The Rhinegold, Wotan kidnaps Alberich in order to extort the gold for himself. To understand the challenge, we need to recap the story of the Ring Cycle. After all attempts to expiate the antisemitism in Wagner’s work after all the confrontational productions of the past 20 years after all attempts to separate the beauty of the music from the vileness of its guiding idea, how can we still stage Wagner? It had all the characteristics of a 19th-century mob attack on Jews: rape, torture, infanticide, indiscriminate murder, with the videos of the gleeful perpetrators going viral and whispered commentary across the internet to the effect that the victims “had it coming”. That was on September 29.Įight days later, I woke up to pictures of the Hamas terror attack on Israel, which prime minister Rishi Sunak rightly described as a pogrom. It worked, for me, and I came away from the Royal Opera House elated and inspired. Kosky turns the drama into a conversation piece where all the “races” of Norse mythology confront each other on the same, level, human playing field. He is a hapless artisan whose love of bright things transmutes into hatred and vengeance when confronted with injustice. How do you fit that into a production slated for the mid-2020s? Kosky, who is himself Jewish, does so by making Alberich simply human. Image: Getty Valhalla’s Downfall by Fritz Roeber (1851-1924), undated. Alberich seducing Queen Grimhilde, leading to the conception of Hagen, from Götterdämmerung. He embodies the commercialism that Wagner, and the left-wing intellectual circle he was part of in the 1840s, associated with “Jewishness”: the opposite of their ideal of “pure humanity”. In Wagner’s original, Alberich is unmistakeably an antisemitic caricature: greedy, lascivious, so ruthless in his desire to amass wealth and control the world that he renounces love. Which leaves only the problem of Alberich, the dwarf who steals it. The theme is the human despoliation of the planet: the gold stolen from the Rhine takes liquid form, and oozes like industrial sludge from the carcass of a dead tree. Kosky has chosen to stage The Ring as a human drama only, turning its giants into Japanese gangsters, its gods into polo-playing aristocrats and its Rhinemaidens into a Goth girl band. This is Erda, the earth mother of Norse mythology, and what’s about to happen is her dream. It opens in total silence, with a 92-year-old woman walking hunched and naked across the stage. Barrie Kosky’s new production of the The Ring of the Nibelung, whose first instalment The Rhinegold opened at Covent Garden in September, gives one answer.
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