A Hundred Years of Wagner's Ring

When a stage work of exceptional length and complexity not only survives for 100 years, but grows in popularity despite virtually insoluble problems of presentation, it is appropriate to mark the centenary by asking why this should be. Wagner’s cycle of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung, is spread over four evenings and the uncut music requires between 14 and 16 hours for performance. To say that the appeal of the work reflects a general hankering after the larger than life merely touches the surface of the matter and it is necessary to grasp the extraordinary richness of The Ring. Apart from its musical grandeur it has a notable intellectual content, a wide emotional range, a potent symbolism and a capacity to involve the spectator in ways which he may hardly realise during or after the performance. The literature concerning Wagner in general and The Ring in particular is very extensive and different commentators have sought and found different kinds of evidence for pronouncing the cycle a work of genius and a landmark in Western cultural achievement. English speaking commentators have been prominent beginning with Bernard Shaw who published his handbook to The Ring, The Perfect Wagnerite, in 1898. This is now felt to be a curious mixture of good sense and nonsense, the latter arising from Shaw’s own attitudes and limitations. He was a social crusader and a dramatist who felt that stage works must have a serious underlying purpose even when dressed up as comedies, and the message of the piece should be perfectly clear. It is hardly surprising that he saw the first three parts of The Ring as an intricate but perfectly comprehensible allegory concerning the evils of capitalism, the exploitation of the poor and the mechanism of revolutionary change. His detailed analysis, though ingenious, now seems over-tidy and glib.