Wagner\'s _Ring_ as Eco-Parable
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Wagner’s Ring as Eco-Parable
Thomas Grey (Stanford University) [Fassung: 5 April 2015]
In the late 1990s the influential environmentalist critic Lawrence Buell
sought to define what he called a “toxic discourse” informing texts from the early industrial revolution to the present day that portray the effects of modern ecological crisis. Key elements of this “toxic discourse” include: (1) a “mythography of betrayed Edens”; (2) “images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration”; (3) “the threat of hegemonic oppression from powerful corporations or governments”; and (4) a “gothicization” of urban squalor, surveyed through “guided tours of the industrial underworld” (on the model of Dante’s Inferno).1 Anyone even glancingly familiar with trends in the staging of Wagner’s Ring cycle over the past four decades will immediately recognize the centrality of such “toxic discourse” to modern interpretations. 1. “Toxic” discourse in productions of the Ring since 1976
Nibelheim under Alberich’s dominion is of course the principal locus of
“toxicity.” The essential starting point of this reading would be Patrice Chéreau’s celebrated Bayreuth centennial production of the Ring (1976-‐80) – – the first production to put on stage George Bernard Shaw’s now seemingly
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unexceptionable insight that Alberich’s Nibelheim is the direct analogue of a mid-‐nineteenth-‐century coalmine, mill, or factory (see figure/Abbildung 1) [Abbildung1: Nibelheim, Das Rheingold, sc. 3: dir. Chéreau/Bayreuth 1980] Since Chéreau, however, Nibelheim has more often taken on the aspect of an underground laboratory or research facility: the Tarnhelm and the Ring become the products of some modern mad science, chemical or nuclear in nature; the Nibelungs have typically been harnessed to the production of a nuclear arsenal, or some other weapons of mass destruction. (Figures 2-‐5 illustrate variations on this theme from Harry Kupfer’s 1988-‐92 Bayreuth Festival production through Keith Warner’s 2012 revival of his 2004 produciton for the London Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.) [Figures/Abbildungen 2-5: Das Rheingold, sc. 3: dir. Kupfer/Bayreuth 1992; dir. Holten/Copenhagen 2007; dir. Padrissa with La fura dels baus/Valencia 2009; dir Warner/Royal Opera House 2004/2012]
A related strand of imagery common to some of these productions
might be summed up as “futuristic techno-‐dystopia” –– a trope that seems to suffuse the Valencia/Fura dels Baus Ring cycle directed by Carlus Padrissa, depending on how we choose to read the riot of digital imagery (see Figure/Abbildung 4). The Norn’s Prologue in Götterdämmerung as staged by Francesca Zambello (Washington 2006 and San Francisco 2008) Götterdämmerung provides a further suggestion of this idea, with its chaotic tangle of computer cables representing the increasingly troubled threads of destiny woven by the three Norns.2
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[Figure/Abbildung 7: Götterdämmerung, Prologue, sc. 1, dir. Zambello/San Francisco 2008]
Another important catalyst in this regard was Chéreau’s vision for the
opening scene of the cycle. Instead of representing the primeval “depths of the Rhine” pure, undisturbed environment of the “Rhine Gold” in its emblematic natural state, Chéreau depicted an ominous industrial apparatus that was part hyrdo-‐electric dam and part nuclear reactor, wreathed in clouds of steam which, as Gundula Kreuzer has pointed out, joined Wagner’s own technology of phantasmagoric stage illusion with the dominant emblem of the industrial revolution (that is, steam power).3 [Figure/Abbildung 8: Das Rheingold, sc. 1, dir. Chéreau/Bayreuth 1980 Harry Kupfer’s Bayreuth cycle from late 1980s portrayed the “toxic” effects of the Ring as being present throughout the cycle. The elements of industrial wasteland or sci-‐fi dystopia in the Bayreuth Ring cycle of Harry Kupfer (scene design by Hans Schavernoch) have continued to inform many productions, through Francesca Zambello’s Washington/San Francisco cycle (2006-‐12) and Keith Warner’s Covent Garden production (2004-‐12), illustrated above, or Frank Castorf’s current Bayreuth Festival production.
Kupfer along with his influential German contemporary, Götz Friedrich
(in his long-‐running Ring production for the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, 1985-‐ 2011), both frame their interpretations in post-‐apocalyptic terms: the consequences, no less than the origins, of the gods’ downfall are meant to be ever-‐present in the mind of the audience. This is most obviously the case with
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Friedrich’s Ring. Friedrich presents the whole action as a ritual reenactment of the “twilight of the gods,” which is already a fait accompli from the beginning. (Harry Kupfer’s flashback effect at the beginning of his Bayreuth Rheingold sends a similar message.) All the action of Friedrich’s cycle is contained within the confines of a kind of subterranean fallout shelter, his so-‐ called “time tunnel.” The whole cycle is thus interpreted as a ritual doomed to be repeated ad infinitum in hopes of achieving some adequate understanding of the Ring’s story. (Put that way, it might sounds more like an allegory of the Bayreuth festival itself, rather than global apocalypse?) [Figures/Abbildungen 9-10: Das Rheingold, sc. 1; Götterdämmerung, Prologue, sc. 1: dir. Götz Friedrich/Deutsche Oper, Berlin 2011] Harry Kupfer prefaces his cycle with a post-‐apocalyptic moment of silence, as a gaggle of dazed, speechless gods gather around a smoking crater that will remain center-‐stage throughout. All the nature imagery in Kupfer’s cycle is colored, either explicitly or potentially, by the effects of environmental degradation. Kupfer’s Rhine flows through his own variant of Friedrich’s “time tunnel,” as if part of a vast industrial sewage system, its lurid electric green suggesting at once primal ooze and toxic slime (see figure 11). [Figure/Abbildungen 11: Das Rheingold, sc. 1: dir. Kupfer, Bayreuth 1992] More explicit are the transformations of the nature-‐settings in Siegfried: Mime’s forest hut as a toxic waste dump, and the primeval forest near Fafner’s cave as an exploded nuclear power-‐plant (figures 12-‐13).4
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[Figures/Abbildungen 12-13: Siegfried Act 1, sc. 1; Siegfried Act 2, sc. 2: dir. Kupfer/Bayreuth 1992] Indeed, the norm in contemporary European productions of Siegfried is to substitute some form of modern urban blight for the forest pastoral of the Waldweben, underlining the proximity of this setting to Fafner’s toxic lair, where he has been sitting on the Ring since the end of Das Rheingold.
Whether viewing the Ring as a single apocalyptic trajectory or as a
repeating cycle of environmental degradation, these productions share some basic assumptions about its allegorical foundations. Alberich’s theft of the “Rhine Gold” and his forging of the Ring are, of course, presented unequivocally by Wagner as an allegory of the subjugation of “love” to wealth and power in modern civilization. The theft of the Gold is clearly represented as the disturbance of an original “natural order,” an act whose character of original sin is underscored by the ritual-‐like “renunciation of love” required to make use of the Gold. The natural (if also magically endowed) substance of the Gold is turned into an object of artifice, the Ring, which generates wealth through the enslavement of a subject population. The darkness lamented by the Rhine Maidens, after the theft of the Gold, represents both the moral effects of Alberich’s “Fall” and the despoliation of nature. Wagner’s particular myth of the Fall is, indeed, distinctly modern in the way it relates moral corruption to man’s alienation from nature: specifically, in the act of exploiting nature for the purposes of wealth and power.
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In the age of nuclear weapons and global warming, it is also easy to
hear the gesture of apocalypse that concludes the Ring cycle as resonating with some kind of environmental catastrophe. In fact, it is almost difficult not to – despite the musical gestures of rebirth and redemption composed into the grandiose finale by Wagner. (In a 2011 panel discussion on the new sub-‐ discipline of “ecomusicology,” Alex Rehding writes that: “apocalypse is the master metaphor of environmental imagination” today.)5 But to what extent does Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung actually support the logic of such cautionary environmental parables? That is the question I want to open up, at least, in this essay. In raising the question, I should add, I do not mean to argue against the validity of such parables as the basis of the directorial gambits I have been reviewing here; as I will suggest later on, I believe Wagner and his Ring cycle might well have played some part in the development of a modern, post-‐Romantic ecological consciousness in the West. But as a “work,” does the text of the cycle, or do its musical language and musical structure contribute to an “environmental” message in any concrete way? Is the vision of nature in the Ring –– whether drawing on ancient myth, medieval poetry, or Romantic philosophy and music –– consonant with the agendas of modern environmentalism and “eco-‐criticism”? How “green” is Wagner, ultimately?
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2. Ideas of nature in the genesis of the Ring
We might begin by interrogating the Ring itself –– not the whole cycle,
that is, but the central object: the talisman secretly forged by the dwarf Alberich sometime between the first and third scenes of Das Rheingold. As noted, the Ring originates with a symbolic act of aggression against the natural order. In the last installment of the cycle, Götterdämmerung (although not before, apparently), we hear that returning the Ring to its natural state could avert the impending doom of the gods. What exactly the Ring does –– as opposed to what it might symbolize –– is of course a tricky question. It secures Alberich’s dominion over the other Nibelungs, but any demonstration of its alleged powers pretty much ends there. Siegfried and Brünnhilde remain blissfully ignorant of those powers; Siegfried’s parents, Siegmund and Sieglinde, have never even heard of it, so far as we know; nor has the rest of humanity, aside from Alberich’s son, Hagen. Since Wagner himself was famously unsure about what really “happens” at the end of the cycle, it is necessarily difficult to say what exactly the Ring has to do with any of that.
Is the doom of the gods, in Wagner’s modern mythic vision of it,
brought about in any way by the mismanagement of natural resources? Yes, perhaps, if we include “gold” as a natural resource, but that’s a different matter, of course: a matter of currency and exchange value rather than with the science of mineral extraction. Should Wotan’s violence against the World Ash Tree, as narrated later by the Norns with reference to the origins of Wotan’s spear, as the emblem of his sovereign powers, be read as violence
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against the ecosystem in a modern biological sense? The main question regarding the eco-‐metaphorical implications of the myth might be this: does the restoration of the Ring to its original form and habitation, as “Rhine Gold,” ever really promise the renewal of a pastoral golden age, whether for gods or for men –– or for that matter, dwarves?
The difficulty of answering any of these nagging questions has much to
do with the fact that Wagner’s allegory of the Ring and the Rhine Gold was largely an afterthought to the story of “Siegfried’s death,” and following that, his youth.6 It was the consequences of this situation that aggravated George Bernard Shaw so much: the contemporary social allegory set up in Das Rheingold quickly breaks down as Wagner approaches his less clearly political starting point in the drama of Siegfried’s deeds and death.
Even so, the original “Nibelung myth” that Wagner sketched out in
1848 did include at least the seeds of the allegory of the Gold and the Ring. In the 1848 text headed “The Nibelung Myth as the Sketch for a Drama” we read: “Alberich gained possession of the pure, noble Rhine Gold … he abducted it from the depths of the river and forged from it, with great cunning and art, a ring which granted him complete mastery over his race, the Nibelungs.”7 Alberich, we are told further, forces the Nibelungs to amass a treasure-‐hoard for him, and instructs Mime to forge the “Tarnhelm” –– a cap or helmet that confers invisibility and the power of shape-‐shifting. But at first there is no mention of “foreswearing love” as a condition of making the Ring, nor is the symbolism of the gold’s natural state, guarded by the Rhine Maidens
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suggested. Only later in the Sketch, when Wagner reaches the material that will become Act 3 of Siegfried’s Death (and eventually Götterdämmerung) does he mention “three prophecying daughters of the deep, from whom Alberich stole the gold in order to forge the powerful, fateful Ring.”8 And now he adds this: “The curse and the power of this Ring would be destroyed, if it were returned to the water and thereby resolved into its original, pure element.”9 Thus, this crucial claim (as regards the political and possibly “environmental” allegory or the Ring) does appear in the earliest source, but even here, only as a kind of afterthought.
In the next stage of the libretto, the dramatic text entitled Siegfried’s
Death, we again hear that Alberich has cursed the Ring when forced to yield it to the gods. Because of this curse, the Ring will bring death to anyone else who possesses it, although no special powers of world-‐domination beyond sovereignty over the Nibelungs. The Rhine Maidens plead for the restoration to the Ring (now symbolizing the its source-‐element, the Rhine Gold). But the only impending threat they cite is that of Siegfried’s death, following from the curse on the Ring –– not the end of the gods as a race and regime. The libretto for Siegfried’s Death concludes with a sort of “controlled” apocalypse of ordinary grand-‐opera proportions: fire and flood on stage, but no global or heavenly repercussions, such as we have in the final version (as Götterdämmerung). At the end of Siegfried’s Death Brünnhilde accompanies the spirit of the slain Siegfried to Walhalla, where peace and order will be restored, and the reign of the gods will continue.
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3. Logics of apocalypse in the Ring: anarchism vs. environmentalism Both the “controlled” apocalypse of Siegfried’s Death and the expanded one in Götterdämmerung involve a promise of renewal, especially through the musical setting of the latter. This implicit promise of renewal can be traced back to the origins of “twilight of the gods” trope in the Norse Ragnarök story as told in the Völuspa or “Seeress’s Prophecy” from the Poetic Edda. As with other related mythic tropes (in particular the Flood), the promise of renewal is contingent on the cleansing, purging effect of some divine apocalypse. The beneficial effect of such mythical-‐natural purgation is, of course, quite a different matter from averting natural (global-‐environmental) catastrophe. The warning embedded in so many contemporary apocalyptic fictions, and in the Ring stagings that echo them, has to do with averting a global environmental apocalypse; generally these do not recognize the mythic trope of beneficial purgation –– apocalyptic catastrophe as a structural requirement for spiritual, moral, and possibly physical renewal. Something of the mythic trope, however, still applies to the utopian-‐anarchist vision of Wagner’s own times: the promise of social renewal for mid-‐nineteenth-‐century anarchist ideology depends on the outright destruction of the existing order. The anarchist vision targets the social-‐political order and its institutions; it is unclear whether the natural environment is to be sacrificed as collateral damage. (The question probably did not generally come up for nineteenth-‐ century anarchists.)
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It is clear enough that Wagner’s politics were more anarchist than
environmentalist at the time he conceived of the Ring cycle: anarchy was big then, environmentalism not yet conceived, as such. George Bernard Shaw, who was highly attuned to the anarchist dimension of the Ring’s genesis, saw the project in terms of an unresolved tension between a potentially cogent allegory of modern socioeconomic and political themes, on one hand, and the detritus of grand-‐operatic aesthetics, on the other. Wagner had renounced the “grand opera” element in theory, but was he was still trying to rehabilitate in practice, including the grand spectacle that concluded the cycle.10 For Shaw, the character of Siegfried did convey a coherent allegory of anarchism or “neo-‐Protestantism” (as he called it), a position committed to overturning the old order, even if it lacked any reasoned policy for a new one. But Siegfried’s anarchism, Shaw ruled, has no more useful lesson for modern society than what he dismissed as Brünnhilde’s “love panacea,” promulgated throughout all versions of the text. (A simplistic humanist nostrum that might be summed by pop adages such as “Love is all you need” or “Love will find a way.”) Thus Shaw also rejected the promise, introduced late in the day by the valkyrie Waltraute, that “the gods and the world” could be redeemed from the curse of the Ring if it were restored to the Rhine Maidens. He states flatly: “This, considered as part of the previous allegory, is nonsense.”11 It is nonsense, Shaw means, because it has nothing to do with the Marxist allegory of old feudalism, contemporary capitalism, and the promise of socialism that
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he saw in the in the first –– but only subsequently scripted –– portions of the Ring (Das Rheingold and, to some extent, Die Walküre).
Despite these inconsistencies, the motif of the Ring’s restoration to a
natural state remains perfectly legible as the basis of a potential environmental parable. The power structures controlling the destinies of old gods, new men, and those indeterminate Others, the Nibelungs, are all compromised by the “curse” of the Ring, interpreted as the loveless and reckless exploitation of Nature (and of uncorrupted “human nature,” embodied by Siegfried and the Volsungs). The symbolic rejection of this curse, in the “purification” of the Ring, and the restoration of a prelapsarian natural order as the starting-‐point for some future society –– these are all plausible goals within the other allegorical logic, what I am calling the “environmental logic,” rather than Shaw’s socio-‐political or anarchist logic, of the cycle’s concluding apocalyptic gesture. How much of the rest of the Ring cycle, between its beginning and end, also engages with this “environmental logic” remains an open question. (And the basic point remains: if it does so at all, it is by virtue of an ideological affinity with a position yet to be articulated in practical political terms.)
The abundance of symbolic and allegorical cues embedded in Wagner’s
text –– not to mention the ever-‐fluid semiotics of his music –– continues to fuel staged interpretations at an exponentially increasing rate. In this sense, the Ring cycle itself is a renewable resource; and the notion of myth as a culturally renewable resource was obviously one of Wagner’s core beliefs.
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I do believe, finally, that among this abundance of interpretive cues in the Ring we can at least find the seeds of a legitimately “environmental” reading, regardless of authorial intentions. I also believe that it would be valuable to investigate the historical status of an emerging environmental consciousness in nineteenth century in relation to Wagner’s own evolving thought during the long span of the Ring’s inception, realization, and early reception. Wagner the later apostle of vegetarianism and “regeneration” (however problematic that discourse) was adopted by utopian reformists of all stripes across the fin-‐de-‐ siècle.12 Investigating his appeal to the first generations of explicitly environmentalist thinkers –– not just the appeal of his ideas, but also his music –– may be a small patch of still virgin terrain in the landscape of Wagner research.13
For now, this project remains a work in progress. Let me just sum here
up a few thoughts on the potential of the Ring as “eco-‐parable,” regardless of conscious intentions that may or may not have accompanied its original genesis, and suggest other possible approaches to an eco-‐critical reading. Just as Shaw failed to find a coherent allegorical critique of modern capitalism in the cycle as a whole –– merely the roots of one –– the same probably applies to attempts reading the Ring as environmental parable. This is hardly surprising, since, as I have been emphasizing, an awareness of impending environmental crisis in the developed world was necessarily much further from Wagner’s mindset around 1850 than were notions of socialist political reform –– whether “coherent” or simply utopian notions. The gesture of
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apocalypse at the end of the cycle, however multivalent, is primarily a ritual of cleansing and renewal, to which was subsequently added the symbolic demise of an old order, i.e., the conflagration of Walhalla.14 It would be difficult to argue that Wagner depicts nature in terms of a biological eco-‐system directly threatened by the behavior of gods, men, or dwarves. (One exception might be the fate of the World Ash-‐tree as described by the Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, mentioned earlier.) On the whole, what critic Greg Garrard says of nature’s status in the work of Wordsworth and the British Romantics, despite their importance in the genesis of modern eco-‐criticism, could probably also be said of Wagner. In fact, Garrard’s comments on the distance between Romantic views of nature and modern ecological consciousness seem equally valid if we simply substitute Wagner’s name for Wordsworth, like this: [T]he ‘nature’ that [Wagner] valorizes is not the nature that contemporary environmentalists seek to protect. Romantic nature is never seriously endangered, and may in its normal state be poor in biological diversity; rather, it is loved for its vastness, beauty and endurance. By focusing attention on sublime landscapes, mostly mountainous, [Wagnerian] Romanticism may have diverted it from places that are more important and under more severe pressure ecologically but less ‘picturesque,’ such as fens, bogs and marshes.15 Nonetheless, there might be a case to include Richard Wagner among figures from Wordsworth to Emerson, Thoreau, or even John Muir as a significant influence on modern environmental consciousness, especially as regards the contribution of artistic representation. The whole rhetoric of “nature” in Wagner’s prose writings may or may not play a role here, too, although it
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figures there mainly as an established Romantic metaphorical trope, rather than signifying awareness of mankind’s place in a biological ecosystem.
As Kate Soper reminds us, Romantic valences of nature as aesthetic
and psychological figure, and reactions against Enlightenment “utilitarianism and instrumental rationality,” already tend to invest value in nature as both a spiritual and a material “resource.” For the early Romantics, just as for Wagner in the Ring, “the point is not to return to a past primitivity, but to discover ‘in nature,’ both inner and outer, the source of redemption from alienation and the depredations of industrialism and the ‘cash nexus’ deformation of human relations.”16 The threat of those depredations is manifest throughout Das Rheingold, while the more general promise of “redemption from alienation” resonates at least occasionally through the cycle (for example, the Waldweben episode in Siegfried). Soper’s locution of nature as a “redemptive resource”17 for the Romantic imagination applies to nearly all of Wagner’s oeuvre, creative as well as theoretical. It is this consciousness that opens the doors, at least, to subsequent stages of environmental consciousness in the modern sense. In any case, a closer interrogation of the key “figures of nature” in the Ring cycle, as well as in Parsifal, from an eco-‐ critical perspective is certainly warranted.18
These “figures of nature” begin of course at the beginning, with the
Rhine, the Rhine-‐maidens, and their Gold. But they persist throughout the cycle. Erda, for instance: why did Wagner refashion the obscure, sibylline “wise woman” of the Eddas in terms of a prototypical “earth-‐goddess” who is,
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in that form, mostly missing from his sources? What motivates this earth-‐ goddess to address Wotan in Das Rheingold, warning him to beware the Ring? Why exactly does Wotan summon her later on, in Act 3 of Siegfried? What meanings does Wagner invest in the “World Ash-‐tree,” whose mythic prototype (“Yggdrasill”) suggests, indeed, the emblem of an ecosystem under constant distress from the populations it sustains? (Two deer are forever nibbling at its leaves and the evil squirrel named “Ratatosk” foments both organic and discursive damage as he races up and down the trunk every day.) What about the ordinary ash-‐tree that supports Hunding’s dwelling? (The dwelling itself is the first sign of human “culture” we encounter in the Ring.) What can we say of Nibelheim before, as opposed to after, Alberich’s original crime against nature (the theft of the Gold) and his forging of the Ring? How clear-‐cut is the apparent dichotomy of nature vs. culture in the “case of Siegfried,” as the hero progresses from Mime’s forest smithy to the Hall of the Gibichungs? What can we learn from attending, along with Siegfried, to the “voice of nature,” whether in the voices of wood-‐birds or of dragons?
Many of these questions have been posed often enough, but mostly
without taking into consideration Wagner’s broader discursive (largely metaphorical) construction of “nature.” Closer consideration of that discursive construction might also encourage us to try viewing the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk itself as a kind of “eco-‐system” of mythic, linguistic, and musical signs. Reading Wagner’s music dramas through the figure of an “eco-‐ system,” and not just through a catalogue of the manifold nature effects they
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present, or through analytical uses of the organicist critical trope, could direct our attention beyond, say, the timbral signification of horns and woodwinds, or the role of perfect fourths and fifths, major triads, and melodic neighboring sixth degrees as building-‐blocks of the leitmotivic network, toward a more dynamic conception of nature. Such a conception might be metaphorically applied to motive, tonality, language, timbre, voice and forth. Even if we don’t finally suppose that the Ring cycle was consciously intended by Wagner as a call to save the planet from ecological catastrophe, reading its mythic-‐musical landscape through terms derived from real, biological landscapes could be a productive strategy for relating Wagner’s concerns to some of our own –– as scholars, critics, and listeners, but also simply as human earth-‐dwellers of the twenty-‐first century. * * * * * NOTES 1 Lawrence Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 24:3 (639-‐65). See also Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge MA: Belknapp Press, 2001), 37-‐41 and Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 12. 2 The main idea behind Fura del Baus´ staging of the Nibelungen Ring is to show “the degradation of nature by technological man,” says director Carlus Padrissa. Mostly Opera 16 March, 2012: http://www.mostlyopera.blogspot.com/2009/07/fura-‐del-‐baus-‐valencia-‐ ring.html 3 Chéreau’s Rhine-‐Maidens were costumed as prostitutes from the Klondyke of Shaw’s preliminary parable, likewise anticipating the state of Ring’s dominion soon to follow.
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4 A related trend in recent stagings is to portray Mime’s forest-‐smithy in the iconographic terms of modern suburban “trailer trash,” as in the Stuttgart Siegfried production of 2002-‐3, directed by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, as well as in Francesca Zambello’s Washington/San Francisco cycle. 5 Alex Rehding, “Ecomusicology between Apocalypse and Nostalgia,” contribution to Colloquy on “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticsm and Musicology,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64:2 (Summer 2011): 410. Rehding refers here to the eco-‐critic Lawrence Buell, cited in note 1 above, and his foundational study The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 6 As Shaw comments in Perfect Wagnerite regarding Das Rheingold: “the preface is always written after the book is finished.” (Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 4th edn. (London: Constable & Co., 1927), 79. 7 Richard Wagner, “Der Nibelungmythus as Entwurf zu einem Drama” (1848), in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1887), vol. 2, 156. 8 Ibid., 163. 9 Ibid. In the next stage, the brief Prologue to Siegfried’s Tod, the Norns explain in three short tercets that: 1) Alberich stole the gold and forged the Ring with which to dominate his kin; 2) They are his slaves, but he was also enslaved when Ring was stolen from him; 3) The dark-‐elves, including Alberich, “will be free when the Rheingold rests again in the depths!” 10 Ironically, it was precisely the musically “advanced” sections of the cycle composed later on –– Act III of Siegfried and all of Götterdämmerung – that Shaw regarded as hopelessly regressive in their aesthetic conception and their lack of an ideological one. 11 Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 81. 12 See for example Peter Wollen, “1906: An Alpine Vegetarian Utopia,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery et al. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 663-‐7 on the Tyrolean community of “Monte Verità” in Ascona (Ticino, Switzerland) and the German Lebensreform movement. “Its regimen included vegetarian meals, radical politics, sunbathing, airbathing, earth cures, water cures, discussions of theosophy and sexual radicalism, as well as recitals of Wagner’s music” (664). 13 The PhD dissertation project of Kirsten Paige (University of California, Berkeley), “Richard Wager’s Political Ecology, 1850-‐1900,” aims to pursue this line of research in its proposed 5th chapter, “’Green’-‐ing Wagner around 1900.” 14 Most productions that flirt in one way or another with an “environmental” theme do realize this: by depicting the corruption of nature in progress throughout the cycle, they allow for the idea that this process might be reversed or overcome by the return of the Ring to the Rhine and the end Wotan’s rule.
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15 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 43. All of this could be said, as well, of the Wirkung of Wagner’s music in cultivating a Romantic appreciation of “wild nature.” 16 Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford, UK and Cambridge MA, USA: Blackwell, 1995), 29. 17 Ibid., 29-‐30. 18 A valuable starting point for such an investigation is provided in chapter 3 of Mark Berry’s study, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and religion in Wagner’s “Ring” (Aldershot, UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), “The Natural World and its Despoliation.”
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