Wagner's Influence on: J.R.R. Tolkien

This is another guest post from my wonderful wife, Leslie.  We are still in travel mode, so she had the post in the can for this week for me.  Isn't she great?  - Robin

In the fall of 1962, while living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, my father started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings aloud to our family every evening. Dad was on sabbatical, and we were spending the year traveling around South America. Isolated as they were—separated from family and friends—and in such a foreign environment, I can well imagine that being nightly swept away by the heroics of Frodo and Gandalf and Aragorn was a great comfort to my folks. Being only six-years old, I neither noticed the isolation nor fully appreciated the nuances of the story, but since that year the Tolkien universe has been a solid fixture in our family. 

For a tenth grade English paper I researched the sources of The Lord of the Rings, and was fascinated to learn about the Scandinavian and Germanic sagas that inspired the work.

[web photo—source]

I no longer have the paper, but I’m pretty sure it made no mention of Richard Wagner, no doubt because the few articles and books on the subject I managed to locate in that pre-Internet time also failed to credit the composer with having any influence on Tolkien.

Once I discovered Wagner and his ring, I of course immediately saw the similarity in the stories. Learning that Wagner and Tolkien had drawn from many of the same mythological sources, I asked Robin, my go-to gal for all questions Wagnerian, “Was there a ring in the original sagas?”

“Not an all-powerful ring like in the Ring cycle and The Lord of the Rings,” she said. “Though I’m sure there are rings, as in most mythologies.” She was right. As explained by Edward R. Haymes in a 2004 lecture (transcribed here),

Wagner found sources for the idea of a cursed ring in at least three of his Icelandic sources: the “Reginsmál”, a poem contained in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Saga of the Volsungs.... 

… Tolkien must have absorbed Wagner’s notion of the ring even though he probably knew the Icelandic sources Wagner had used better than the composer himself. After all he had read them in the Old Norse original. There are too many aspects of Wagner’s specific adaptation of the ring motif that show up in Tolkien for this to be an accident. The Icelandic versions of the story do not provide any characteristics of the ring besides its ability to create riches for Andvari and the curse he places on it. The curse is extraordinarily effective, leading to the deaths of Hreiðmar, Fáfnir, Reginn, and Sigurðr, but there is no specific association of these events with the curse on the ring in the sources. The curse is never mentioned again. The original thief of the ring, the god Loki is not affected by his deed. No one seeks to gain the ring. It does not have any mysterious effect on anyone. In Wagner and Tolkien the ring has virtually the same mysterious effect. It draws men and women to desire the ring, even at the cost of their own lives. It affects everyone who touches it in some way, although some more than others.

Nevertheless, Tolkien went to his grave denying he was influenced by Wagner: “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,” he famously asserted.

Much as I love Tolkien, this statement is just plain hogwash. Take a look at what the dwarf Alberich sings about the Ring in Das Rheingold:

Jeder giere nach seinem Gut,
doch keiner geniesse mit Nutzen sein!
Ohne Wucher hüt' ihn sein Herr;
doch den Würger zieh' er ihm zu!
Dem Tode verfallen, fessle den Feigen die Furcht:
solang er lebt, sterb' er lechzend dahin,
des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht 

Translation:

All shall lust to possess it,
but none shall delight in its use!
Without gain, its lord shall guard it;
it will draw his executioner to him!
Destined to die, let fear fetter the coward:
so long as he lives he shall pine for death,
the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring

Compare this to what Elrond tells Boromir in Tolkien’s Ring:

We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know too well. It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil. Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only for those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron’s throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise.

But it’s not just the ring that is similar. As noted by Rebecca Brown in a recent article about this summer’s Ring cycle at the Seattle opera,

[l]ike Wagner’s, Tolkien’s Ring is a story of good and evil, redemption and faith—and it contains a river at the start; a corrupting and powerful ring; a short, dark, creepy creature who possesses it; a magical sword; an invisibility garment; distinct and warring “races”; a tall, skinny, wandering wise man; an intense relationship between landscape and people; an innocent redeemer; people wearing awesome headgear; and flying animals.

And she doesn’t even mention numerous other similarities: a dragon guarding a hoard of treasure; a city in a pit filled with creatures pounding metal; a riddle-contest; dead soldiers reanimated to fight again; a woman warrior who rides into battle against her father’s orders; a character who builds his/her own funeral pyre; an all-cleansing fire; and a castle that crumbles at the end.

I get why Tolkien would have been unhappy with comparisons between him and Wagner, for they were about as different as two people could be. Bradley J. Birzer explained in a lecture he gave about Wagner and Tolkien:

In their own personal lives, the two had little in common. Wagner was a nineteenth-century German socialist, a believer in the apotheosis of man. Tolkien was a twentieth-century English unconstitutional monarchist, a devout Roman Catholic, and a strong believer in the limitations placed upon humans by Adam’s original sin.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

[web photo—source]

But no one can seriously dispute that Tolkien was influenced by Wagner. Not only was Wagner the biggest thing around in the early part of the 20^th century when Tolkien was a young man, but one of Tolkien’s closest friends, the writer C.S. Lewis, was an ardent Wagnerite. Lewis and Tolkien are known to have had passionate, late-night discussions about Die Walküre, and to have attended at least one Ring cycle in London together. (See Birzer lecture link above.)

Wagner and Tolkien had similar aims with their Ring works. For example, both strove to create a mythology for their own cultures, where one had been previously lacking:

German nationalists of the early nineteenth century saw a Germanic equivalent of ancient Greek and Roman mythology in the so-called Nibelung legend. It was common at that time to refer to the Nibelungenlied as the “German Iliad.” Mendelssohn and others were urged by nationalist thinkers to write an opera on the Nibelung subject. The goal was to establish a cultural past that was equal to, if not superior to the Greek and Roman literature they had all grown up on and to make it a part of the popular consciousness. Wagner hoped that his use of Germanic myth would somehow tap into this racial memory and speak directly to the soul of the German people.   

… Tolkien envisioned a very similar goal for his work. In a letter to a prospective publisher of the Silmarillion he wrote: “I was from the early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me) but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.” Tolkien shared with Wagner the desire of providing a mythology for his own people.  

[See Haymes lecture, above.]

Moreover, both men were aghast at the industrialization of modern society—with its concurrent destruction of nature—and the themes of nature vs. industry are strong in both Rings.

one of Tolkien’s own illustrations

[web photo—source]

Witness, for example, what Alberich does to Nibelheim in Wagner’s Ring, and Saruman’s ruin of Isengard and the Shire in Tolkien’s.

Perhaps the most important theme the two stories share is that of redemption. But here, too, lies their biggest difference. Tolkien’s idea of redemption was based on a Christian model. As noted by Professor Birzer (see above),

Tolkien viewed a sanctified northern, pagan myth as a means to return the modernist, heretical West to Christendom. “The greatness I meant was that of a great instrument in God’s hands—a mover, a doer, even an achiever of great things, a beginner at the very least of large things,” Tolkien wrote from the trenches in France in 1916. The 24-year old hoped, he continued “to rekindle an old light in the world,” to carry on the Old Truths in the ravaged, post-war world.

Thus, Frodo is ultimately flawed, and unable to destroy the ring by himself. It takes an outside force, the hand of God, if you will (Gollum, in a sort of Judas role), to finally get the deed done. It should be noted as well that it is only because of Bilbo’s original act of mercy in sparing Gollum (“It was Pity that stayed his hand”) and Frodo’s subsequent similar actions, that Gollum is around at the end to be the catalyst for the ring’s demise. These themes of mercy and forgiveness, of course, have a distinct Christian tone to them.

In Wagner’s Ring universe, conversely, it is the mortals—not the gods (Brünnhilde has lost her godhead at this point)—who are able to save the world. And more importantly, it is romantic love that brings about their redemptive acts: first Siegmund and Sieglinde’s love for one another, and then Brünnhilde’s love for Siegfried, which finally brings about the return of the ring to its rightful place in the Rhine, and the downfall of the gods.

Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried

in the Met’s 2012 Götterdämmerung

[web photo—source]

Contrast this with The Lord of the Rings, where what few love stories do exist (e.g., Aragorn and Arwen) happen offstage and are not what you’d call passionate. (The most compelling love story in Tolkien’s Ring, to my mind, is that of Sam’s love for Frodo—but that could be a whole separate post.)

If you want to read more about Wagner’s influence on Tolkien, the web is chock full of articles on the subject. The links provided above are all worth checking out. In addition, this is an interesting comparative study of the two Ring works.

Wagner Tripping - Talks on Wagner and The Ring

Well, the Ring is over and we are on the drive back home. In general, Seattle’s production was wonderful. I have my quibbles with it, but then I know there can be no such thing as a perfect Ring. Not that people aren’t looking for one; in fact, the quest to see such a thing drives Wagnerians to productions all over the world, but the quest is as illusive as chasing the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

However, as I mentioned last week, Seattle Opera has a wonderful opera education program, which greatly enriches the immersive experience of a Ring festival. While their education program in general is multi-faceted, particularly focused on youth, it is their adult education as I have experienced it at their Ring cycles that I want to highlight. I cannot imagine that any opera house in the world exceeds their standard.  So now I am going to write a bit about their educators, and then provide a contrast with less effective educators.

Speight Jenkins

Before Speight Jenkins was General Director at Seattle Opera, he was first a guest lecturer. His knowledge of and passion for Wagner so impressed the Board of Directors of the Opera house that they asked him to leave his post as the New York Post music critic to lead their company. Among many other plans to improve Seattle Opera, his vision was to create an opera education program that would inspire people to really want to go to the opera because it sounded so damn wonderful and fun (and would make some money to offset the venture at the same time). Speight provided these lectures on Wagner’s Ring early in his tenure, which were fun and folksy—his Texas twang helping that along—with captivating descriptions of the cycle. While these talks are out now of circulation and are very expensive at Amazon, if you are interested in hearing them, let me know and I can provide a copy.  This review hits the nail on the head.

Leslie took this photo of Speight at his 
"greeting spot" while I was passing by.

Speight has been at the helm of the Seattle Opera now for 30 years and has done a great job in moving Seattle from a small, regional company to one of international prominence, particularly via the most recent production of the Ring cycle. He is retiring at the end of next season, so this was his last hurrah, and he received a fitting send-off. After the last opera of the last of the three cycles was over, the cast and creative team was cheered strongly, with lots of the audience on their feet, but others, like me, remained seated, preferring to hold standing ovations for those rare and extraordinary moments when they feel compelled out of my seat. When Speight was called to the stage, it was such a moment. The entire audience erupted in a true, hearty and Wagnerian-length standing ovation to honor the job that he has done. It was a lovely tribute.¹

Perry Lorenzo 

“We must start creating and sharing Art that gives people a glimpse of God's Beauty and inspires people to live lives of Goodness and Truth!” - Perry Lorenzo from a comment within his blog

“Only Perry could make someone go from knowing nothing about opera, to not only loving opera but loving WAGNER.” - Former student of Perry's (in a eulogy)

The late, wonderful Perry Lorenzo

Speight lured Perry Lorenzo from his job as a well-regarded high school teacher to take over the educational program at the Seattle Opera in 1992, and he served as the head of the initiative—and chief lecturer—for 20 years until his sad and untimely death of cancer at age of 51 in 2009.  In this eulogy, Jenkins writes:

He took a fledgling Education program at Seattle Opera and expanded it exponentially, drawing to him a devoted core of speakers and discussing opera in many forums. He worked with students in many communities all over the state as well as in the Seattle area. At Woodinville High School, for example, he was well known as the “Opera Guy.” 

Perry was a great speaker, and seemed like a really great guy. I raptly listened to his lectures when I first arrived in 2001 and, again in 2005, when I dragged Leslie and her parents along to see him speak. The lectures were three hours per opera, so along with the 15 hours² of actually watching the Ring, I happily spent another 12 hours listening to Perry talk about the Ring. And we each paid $100 to do so.

From all reports, he was an amazing man. Here is a typical online memorial from one student about him:

I have known Perry Lorenzo since 1990 when I became a member of the debate team he coached and later a student in his Humanities class at John F Kennedy Memorial High School in Burien. Words cannot describe his quality as a teacher and a person, but those who experienced him know how inspiring he was. He made the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary sublime.

And another:

Perry had coached the debate team at Kennedy and I was a competing high school debater from another Puget Sound high school. In a testament to his remarkable humanity, even as a coach of a competing team he reached out and supported me and my teammates over the years... Funny thing, I'm sure at least a thousand people felt equally loved and encouraged by Perry.

Perry Lorenzo is a legend. A man of remarkable depth: intellectual, spiritual, artistic and humane. May his memory live as a blessing and a challenge to all of us, in all of our dimensions, to strive for excellence, compassion, encouragement, love and artistic beauty.

Perry was an intellectual, and his lectures drew from a vast knowledge of art and literature. That said, there is nothing in them that is a bit snobby or pretentious. He was also a devout Catholic, and though his talks were inspired by his faith, there was nothing in them that was off-putting to me, an atheist. His belief in God’s divine presence in art was at the heart of his passion, and I found it moving in spite of my lack of such faith. He wrote this blog to explore his religious, artistic passions.

As Perry explained in his blog, the starting point for his analysis of art is: “The famous Analogy of Being sings that all Being shares four common aspects, characteristics, attributes--Unity, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.” In this post he gives an example of his process:

Take, for example, the experience of the Beauty of a poem. We could enjoy forever beholding that poem, being dazzled by its clarity, being amazed by its structure and stricture, being healed and harmonized by its balance and daring, its symmetry and sublime expression. 
 
But then, we might venture further---how is the Beauty of the poem Good or True? How does the poem give us a glimpse of the way things really are? How does the poem ennoble human action? Does the poem inspire us? Inspire us to what? 
 
And further, how does the poem draw us, almost by a kind of erotic attraction, to the Unity of things?

His lectures, then, were informed by this approach: seeking and finding the truth, goodness and beauty in Wagner, and ultimately the unity of things within in it. At the same time, he also made clear that the Ring could also be just great entertainment, a “swell time at the theater,” he liked to say. But he was drawn to the work for reasons much deeper, and he tries to pull people into his sublime experience through this more profound route.

While his blog is, ultimately, too Catholic for my taste to explore in depth, if you happen to be a Catholic who loves art, I absolutely recommend it to you. Nonetheless, I do think his methods of exploring issues of “truth, goodness and beauty” in art are profoundly right. I don’t end up with God as he does, but I do come equally to the unity of all things. And I believe the importance he placed on art in getting to Truth (writ large) is absolutely correct. While we might all differ somewhat on what the ultimate truth is, in this quest, Perry, I and Wagner are one.

A shorten version of his lectures, focusing on broad questions and themes in the Ring, can be bought here.

There is one final thing I want to say about Perry. In this obituary, the Seattle Times writes:

Paul Hearn of Seattle, Mr. Lorenzo's longtime companion, said they met when Mr. Lorenzo gave a lecture at the University of Washington 13 years ago. Though Hearn was not Catholic, their first date was to St. James, he said. Hearn said Mr. Lorenzo brought him to the Catholic Church and broadened his appreciation of opera. The two would pray together and do morning liturgies. "We were monks in love," he said.

In case that wasn’t clear:  Perry was a chaste gay man, believing his church’s teaching that homosexual sexual expression—though not homosexual love—was a sin. There is a fascinating debate among Catholics on this issue in terms of Perry on the internet. It starts here with a blog post from a well-known Catholic blogger, Mark Shea, along with the follow-up comments.  He said that he felt Perry was both a “gay man” and a “saint” led, which to a lot of fierce debate. Shea then followed-up with another post on the debate itself, here. I must note that Mark Shea absolutely is against gay marriage, gay adoption, etc. So, we are not talking about a left-leaning Catholic here, but instead a debate among more conservative Catholics on issues of being gay.

I am so far from Catholic—and very far from thinking of sex as a sin—that I find this weird on many levels. That said, his abilities as an opera speaker had everything to do with his intense passion which stemmed from his belief in God and his church. So I love it, and respect it, at the same time.

Perry Lorenzo: A great man, a great speaker, and gone much too young.

Sue Elliot 

Sue Elliot was hired in 2010 to follow in Lorenzo’s huge footsteps. We once again paid to see the three-hour-a-day lecture series, trusting that Seattle would hire someone worthy of the position. I can now report that without doubt she is no Perry Lorenzo; she is completely Sue Elliot, utterly delightful and completely following her own path. A gotta tell you, of all the people I have met who work at Seattle Opera, she has catapulted to the top as my favorite. I even like her better than Myrna Mishmash, the gal who used to get money out of me for Seattle Opera.

Leslie took this photo as Sue was leaving the Opera House

Where Perry’s lectures were very organized, with broad themes and points to be made, Sue’s are down-to-earth, much more scattershot, and very interesting and fun. She spent a good amount of time on deconstruction of small sections of the Ring, to show the ways in which Wagner made his musical effects which “broke all the rules” of the time. She geared the lecture to non-musicians like myself, working on ways for us to grasp musical concepts easily, trying to find effective analogies. I am not going to explain how she worked this into the lecture:

But anyone who manages to find a logical way to include Endora in a lecture gets an A from me.  (To make her musical point, she was actually showing the clip to use Uncle Arthur for the analogy, but I am a big fan of Agnes Moorehead who played Endora.)

Sue also gave a lot of insider information about the staging. So, for instance, we learned that to train Grane—Brunnhilde’s horse; they use a real live one—they first start by blasting Wagner’s music in its stall weeks before the performance. Lucky horse! (Oh, that reminds me of something my brother Russ wanted me to mention about his alma mater, Cal Tech. This is a little loosely related trivia. Did you know that every final’s week each morning at 7 AM sharp, the "Ride of the Valkyries" is blasted through the sound system as a kind of reveille? Now you do!  You can read about that tradition here.)

Sue also touched on many other aspects of the Ring, such as its broad themes, instrumentation, Wagner’s composition history, and so forth. Like I said, a little scattershot, but very effective.

Next time they do a Ring cycle, I might not pay to go to the opera, but I would still pay to listen to her lectures. Actually “lectures” seems too regimented a term for her presentations. “Guiding thoughts for your own exploration” might be a better, if too-long, description.

Also, I gotta admit that I would be pretty shocked if Sue has a religious blog out there (not that she might not be religious, but that is a different thing), while I wasn’t at all surprised that Perry did. And though I know absolutely nothing about her private life, I would also be surprised if she is in love with someone but yet a long-term celibate. Point being: as much as I liked and respected Perry, Sue seems to be more of my kind of "normal" person.

Good hire, Speight.

Jonathan Dean

Jonathan is yet another one of Seattle Opera's talented stable, though he is no longer one of their speakers. (I did hear him speak in the past, however, and he was also outstanding.) He has another job with Seattle Opera now, but he was very involved with the Ring in that he wrote the excellent subtitles. 

So you can trust their speakers to be good, is the point I am trying to make. Yes, they charge you. Go ahead and pay for it; it’s worth it.

Leslie snapped a shot of me saying hi to Jonathan

In Contrast

Most opera houses do not make you pay for pre-opera talks, and their quality ranges greatly. My experience is that, in general, San Francisco’s opera talks are very poor. The people who do them are often academics, but not the talented ones! I go to them because they are free and I always hope for a good one, but it is pretty rare.

The Los Angeles Opera, on the other hand, has had very good speakers in their free pre-opera talks. For example, their Ring was lousy, but the conductor, the hyper James Conlon, did the talks and I really enjoyed him. On other occasions when I have been there, it has been similar. That said, they aren’t on the Seattle level, keeping the talks too brief for any deep insight.  I'd rather pay the $10 for a pre-opera talk that Seattle charges then go to the free ones that other opera houses offer.

The Great Courses - Wagner series

Even when I don’t care for the talk from an opera, I rarely get mad at the speaker. They just sometimes have dry speakers who have very little of interest to say. But now I want to move on to the the Great Courses series on Richard Wagner featuring Robert Greenberg, which was put out this year to celebrate Wagner's bicentennial. It sucks on virtually all levels.

Robert Greenberg

Before getting into the depth of its dreadfulness, I want to point out the Greenberg is the person the The Great Courses use for their musical series. I had picked up his How to Listen and Understand Great Music course for $5 at a garage sale, and it was generally fine. He makes not-very-funny jokes, but beyond that, I enjoyed them. Thus, when they put out the Wagner series for a fairly low price, I thought it would be a perfect thing to listen to while we were doing this Wagner trip to Seattle.

The problem is that Greenberg has no in-depth understanding of Wagner or his music dramas or his prose writings, and has little understanding or sympathy for the works. The whole enterprise has a first-year college level feel to it, clearly “crammed” and completely lacking in nuance; it has the feel of "cutting and pasting" from a very limited variety of second-hand sources. If you have read a lot about Wagner as I have, you soon learn that nothing written about him should be taken on face-value unless you do the homework and go to the original source. This Greenberg clearly did not do. I know far more about Wagner than he does, and I find it pathetic that the Great Courses would put out such a course given his paucity of knowledge.

You know this saying? A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure. Greenburg is a man with one watch and it looks like this:

His principal source for his biographical material and analysis is pretty much plucked whole from the one-dimensional and twisted biography, Wagner: the Man, His Mind and His Music by Robert Gutman. This is the “distorted watch” Greenberg rests his course upon. Essentially, it is “junk in, junk out.” (Read here to see the failures of Gutman’s biography.) 

Both Wagner the man,  and the works themselves, are consistently described by Greenberg in a sneering, sarcastic and mocking manner. Any musical analysis—why and how Wagner is so effective at writing music of emotional depth; his use of the orchestra, harmonics, melody, rhythm, silence, and time —is almost completely absent. His excerpt choices are often bizarre, ignoring much that is a “must hear” selection and instead using minor passages. While he repeatedly says that the music is the most important part of the music dramas—a point that is universally acknowledged, including by Wagner himself—he then spends an inordinate amount of time reading libretto text, often without any point being made.

Greenberg often repeats biographical myths or half-truths, and does so in a way that a listener who does not know the biographical material is led astray. He states as FACT (his emphasis) things that are not facts, but conjectures. He consistently exaggerates his material. His understanding of Wagner’s beliefs are often completely wrong. His libretto analysis is generally crude and often without any basis in text or music.

I would love it if there were a full course on Wagner on CD. But this is certainly not it. If you are interested in learning about Wagner, it is far more beneficial to go to one of the available Ring lectures, like Perry’s or Speight’s, as I linked above. Another excellent source is here, where you can download the excellent John Culshaw lecture series about the Ring (probably my favorite of all the Ring analyses) and also a 3-part program about the Ring from the New York Met.

If you want a more general analysis of Wagner and his musical effects on a podcast, I would like to link you again to the wonderful, incisive talk by Nicholas Spice here. (You can also download it as a podcast.) 

---

End Notes

1. I don’t want to give a too-rosy picture. There were people very critical of Speight’s tenure. And through my many short conversations with him over the years, he showed lots of signs that he was, perhaps, not completely a warm and fuzzy guy. Whatever. I do think he has done a great job, hired great people, and the house is in good artistic shape for the future. It, like all opera houses, has had its financial struggles. Some—like this guy—lay those problems at his feet, due to what they feel are his too-grandiose visions for a small company. Obviously, Wagnerians don’t tend to be too critical of grandiosity.

2 The time for a Ring actually can vary widely. The fastest recorded Ring is about 1 ½ hours shorter then the longest recorded Ring. I don’t have the timings of these with me on this trip, but if anyone wants to know more about this, drop me a note and I will send the information once I am home.

Wagner Tripping - in Seattle

I first conceived this blog on my original car trip to Seattle in 2001 to see the Ring, as I wrote about in my introduction here. This is the final year for this particular production, thus I came to see it for the last time while completing a personal cycle (culminating in the creation of this blog) on this year of Wagner's bicentennial.

This is my third viewing of the Seattle production, plus I have been to four others nationally – two in New York, one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles. That might seem like a lot, but it barely counts among Wagnerians, for whom traveling to Ring cycles is de rigueur. Here is a picture Leslie took Tuesday of me with Verna, who is a fellow member of The Wagner Society of Northern California (WSNC).  This is her 67^th Ring!

Toasting Verna on her 67th Ring cycle.

Wagnerians are analogous to Deadheads in their enthusiasm for traveling around the country, and world, to see performances.  But Wagnerians have been doing it steadily since 1876, so we really are the original “trippers.”  There are some links between the two sets of travelers, in fact. Within the WSNC, there have been a number of Deadheads who felt there was a similarity between the experiences of both, as Pamela Potter wrote in the quarterly journal Leitmotive:

Wagner and the Grateful Dead demanded the very same attributes from their devotees: a tolerance for very long sequences with very little action, and the understanding that one doesn’t necessarily “get it” on the first encounter, but has to be willing to subject oneself to repeated experiences before fully appreciating the phenomenon.¹ 

One Wagnerian was Grateful Dead member Phil Lesh—also a one-time member of the WSNC—who convinced the Dead to cancel two concerts so they all could go to a San Francisco production of the Ring in 1988 (My friend Ian, who had tickets to that show, said it totally bummed him out when they cancelled). Jerry Garcia saw three of them, but according to Lesh, “In the end Jerry didn't make it back for the final opera of the cycle, having made previous plans to take his daughter Annabelle to see Phil Collins at the Oakland Coliseum. ‘What?’ I asked when he told me. ‘You're going to pass up Twilight of the Gods for Phil Collins?’; ‘If it was just me - but I promised Annabelle.’”² 

For those who are reading this who don’t know much about the Ring cycle, it consists of four operas in which the power of love is juxtaposed against the love of power, greed and dominance. The love of power tragically gains the upper hand, leading to the downfall of the Gods and society as a whole. However, the heroine Brünnhilde renounces power and embraces love though a self-sacrificing action that leads to a new beginning for the world. Oh yeah, and there is a ring involved. 

The absolutely best way to learn about the Ring while also being greatly entertained (via one of the best comic monologues in history) is to watch Anna Russell. This is the first of three parts; if you haven’t seen it, try this nine minutes. I am sure you will want to go on and watch the other parts once you have seen this much:

Originally—ten years ago—Leslie and I had planned to try to get tickets to the Wagnerian mecca, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Germany, for their annual festival on this bicentennial year.  But then I decided another trip to Seattle was the better plan. Given the recent uproar—mostly a whole lot of booing—about the new production of the Ring coming out of Bayreuth, I think I made the right choice. 

Simply put, the Seattle Opera is the best place to watch Wagner operas in the United States, and probably the world. This is no accident. Wagner’s music is ingrained in the opera company's history, part of their explicit mission, and the musical passion of their founding director, Glyn Ross, and their second and current general director, Speight Jenkins.  

As a young opera company in 1975, Ross decided to do a very audacious thing, which was to stage the Ring cycle. At that point in the American opera history, there had not been a Ring festival—showing all four operas in the same week— since 1939. Part of the reason was the massive expense to put on the cycle; it had only been done by the major American houses before: Chicago, New York and San Francisco. For a small, very new house—it had been founded in 1963—this was just unprecedented. While some critics grumbled about the production, it was popular. Here (with a excerpt below) the company tells the story of what happened after the initial Ring cycle at Seattle:

That year was so successful that Ross convinced the Seattle Opera Board that the Ring should be repeated, and the audiences and press came from even farther away. Soon the annual summer cycles of the Ring (one in German, one in English) became a tradition and were repeated every year.  The repetition established Seattle Opera worldwide as a Ring center; it did more: it inculcated into the Seattle opera public a liking for Wagner’s works and a familiarity with them that is probably still greater per capita than in any city outside Germany.

The Seattle Opera team agrees with my general view of Wagner, which is that whatever his individual sins and peccadilloes, he composed operas of amazing depth, beauty and humanity, and therefore, productions should reflect these qualities. Wagner constructed his operas in order for the listener to be “knowers through feeling.” That is, he didn’t want the audience to intellectualize the experience but to surrender to the drama, the music. And, indeed, that is exactly when Wagner is at his most profound: when a listener can quiet a thinking brain and, instead, just be in the emotional moment. Therefore, I seek to attend Wagner performances that enhance the ability to do this. This is what Seattle Opera excels at.

In the rest of the world this is decidedly not the trend. Instead, directors impose their vision—and weird visions they frequently are—to trump, circumscribe and comment on Wagner’s works and life. These directors want you to think, and think critically, while listening. I am happy to think about Wagner’s music dramas—and his life—anytime other than when listening. When I listen, with headphones on at home or in a seat in a theater, I just want to feel. In Europe, and increasingly in America, what many call "Eurotrash"—closely linked to what is called regietheater—has conquered.³  Even Bayreuth has completely succumbed; Alex Ross, in the most recent New Yorker, describes the new Ring production that generated what is being termed the “boo-vation” as “a sprawling act of operatic Dadaism that falls between Buñuel and South Park.” Yep, that sounds like now-classic Eurotrash. 

Here is a photo from the Bayreuth Siegfried set that give you a little flavor of Eurotrash:

In contrast, here is the set for the same scene from the Seattle Opera, which is set in a forest as it was in the original production.

Speight Jenkins, who was an opera journalist before his 25-year stint as general director, has turned Seattle into one of the premier opera companies of America, and the envy of other opera houses. The city of Seattle has the highest per capita attendance of any opera house in America, and the opera house draws its audience from every state and many countries (people came from 22 different countries for this Ring cycle). Part of the reason, of course, is certainly their thoughtful, intelligent and emotional productions. But they have other draws, too. They are a very intimate company; they try to make their patrons feel like part of a big family. Speight greets you personally as you enter the opera house for both the lectures and the operas.

Here Speight greets me in my finest for the Rheingold lecture. 

At the end of each opera, he comes on stage and will answer any question that comes his way. He is the model for all the rest of the company, as every staff member I have ever interacted with over the years has been wonderful. Hell, I ended up with a personal relationship with the woman who called seeking donations from Seattle.  She—sadly—no longer works for the opera, but I used to look forward to my yearly calls from Myrna Mishmash—what a great name, right?—to catch up on life at Seattle Opera. Clearly, an opera company is doing something right if you look forward to their fund-raisers calling you.

The real thing that puts Seattle Opera above all other companies is their commitment to education, both for children and for adults. While most companies have an education component to try to introduce opera to those who are new to it, Seattle’s outreach is just spectacular in terms of quantity and, most particularly, quality. I come here as much for their lecture series as for the operas themselves, which is saying quite a lot. I will write about that more next week.

A little tidbit: the staff gets a paid holiday to celebrate Wagner’s birthday.

So far, we have watched Rheingold and Walküre and await the next two operas.  Here are two pictures from the Seattle Opera this week:

A piece of an enormous Ring mural on the sidewalk at the Seattle Opera House.
I'm heading into the fire with Grane (Brünnhilde's horse)...

Leslie (on right) and me between acts at Walküre.

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End Notes

1  Leitmotive, Vol 24, 3, Fall 2010, page

^{2. Lesh, Phil, Searching for the Sound - My Life with the Grateful Dead, pages 273-274}

3. I don’t want to go into the horrors of Eurotrash here, but this blogger is the one to read if you want to read more about it. He hates it! 

Wagner's Abnormal Mind - Part 2: His Formative Years

Before focusing on Wagner’s mind, I need to give enough biographical details to make his mental development intelligible.  I will do this in two parts. The first part will take us to the point he decided to become a composer, drawing the portrait from his own autobiography as well as a variety of secondary sources.¹ The second part will be focused less on biography per se, but more on his emotional development in adulthood, with his own letters providing the road map, supplemented with necessary biographical information. This will be a rapid tour, highlighting those things I think important to understanding his mind, but please see both my bibliography here and the footnote below if you want a want a more extensive biography.

Wagner was born in May of 1913 into a large family of nine children; he was the second to last child in the family.² His birthplace was Leipzig³ in the Saxony region, which was soon to be the location of one of Napoleon's greatest defeats: the Battle of Leipzig, in which about 100,000 were killed. In the aftermath of this battle, his father, Carl, caught typhus and died. While he would obviously have no memory of this time, it can’t be great for a baby’s development to have lived through the chaos of the war, along with the ensuing loss of his father and his income, plunging the family into economic woe. 

An actor, painter and playwright named Ludwig Geyer soon rescued the family by marrying his mother, Joanna, and the family moved to Dresden. For his formative years, then, Geyer was seen by Wagner as his father, and he was given his last name. (He changed it himself at 14 for reasons I will go into below.)

Geyer, in fact, may have been his true father. It is impossible to say this definitively, but there is evidence on both sides, with more on the Geyer side of the equation. Very much is made of this issue, probably way too much. It certainly wasn’t a preoccupation of his youth, and there is no documentation that Wagner even thought about the issue until fairly late in his adulthood. Most biographers jump to all sorts of fanciful conclusions. For instance, many say Wagner was “tormented” by this question, but that is a fairly strong word for virtually no evidence of this—and significant contrary evidence—beyond opera analysis.⁴

For those who want to play the “who was Wagner’s father” game, some of the evidence is visual. Take a look:

His brother Albert (14 years his senior)

Step-father Geyer

Wagner at 29 as drawn by his friend Ernst Kietz

Mother Johanna

Son Siegfried

Wagner in his 50s

I came to no conclusions from the pictures.  Albert (whom we know was Carl's son) looks like Richard, but the younger Wagner has similarities to Geyer.  His son, Siegfried looks more like Geyer than Wagner does. Evidence: inconclusive. Moving on...

Wagner was a sickly toddler, and later recounted that his mother had told him that she “almost wanted me dead owing to my seemingly hopeless condition.” He rallied to health and became “a bundle of energy, ” generally wild, incorrigible and extremely sensitive, crying or screaming or otherwise emoting regularly. Geyer called him “the Cossack,” given his penchant for resisting authority and following his own drummer.⁵ According to Cosima, Richard said of his childhood, "I grew up in the wildest of anarchy; it had to be, for then as later no known method ever fitted me, but how much should I have been spared if I had been accoustomed to obeying! To my sister I was just a wild and forsaken being who never conformed.” (Cosima's diary, July 5, 1871)

He had a very vivid imagination and was full of fears. For instance, while he loved to look at fruit or flowers, he refused to touch them. (One biographer suggested this was because Geyer had yelled at him for touching those things while painting still-life canvases.) He had fears of reflections, such as those on the stone beer bottles as they “seemed to him to be ‘grimacing devils’, taunting and mocking him with their ‘constantly changing shapes.’” He even had a fear of bells, as he looked into what he referred to as their “jaws.”

Beyond fears, as a child he developed deep aversion and horror when seeing people and, particularly, animals, in pain. This aversion remained intense throughout his life, and the depth of his feelings in this area were frequently recounted by friends as well as a oft-mentioned in in his letters.

Because he was such a difficult child, he was often shunted off to live with others. At the age of seven, his first “exile” occurred, when he was sent to live with a pastor for more than a year, ostensibly to help with his education, but primarily due to his unruly nature.  His stepfather, in the meantime, had his own problems. According to the author Joachim Köhler, in Wagner: The Last of the Titans, Geyer “started to withdraw from his friends and seemed to sink into deep despondency. Whereas they had earlier been struck by the ‘dual aspects of his character’, causing him to veer between high spirits and melancholy, he was now in a permanent state of depression.” He contracted tuberculosis and died when Wagner was eight.

Wagner had been summoned from the pastor’s house when it was clear that Geyer was dying, but was returned to the pastor the very next day. Soon he was shunted to Geyer’s brother for ten months, and then to his paternal uncle, Adolf Wagner. At this house there were portraits on the wall which he hallucinated were alive, and he had nightly nightmares about them. In fact he was generally terrified “of inanimate objects coming to life.” According to Köhler, “[e]ven ordinary pieces of furniture could induce a sense of terror in him when he was alone in a room and fixed his attention on them. In his panic-stricken fear that they might suddenly come to life, he would invariably scream for help.”

Adolf couldn’t handle the terrified child, so he returned him to his mother. Thus, his two-year exile ended at age nine. Back at Dresden, though, Wagner’s nightmares continued. He said of them:

Until late in my boyhood no night passed without my awakening with a frightful scream from some dream about ghosts, which would end only when a human voice bade me to be quiet. Severe scoldings or even corporal punishment would then seem to be redeeming kindness. None of my brothers and sisters wanted to sleep near me; they tried to bed me down as far from the others as possible, not stopping to think that by doing so my nocturnal calls to be saved from the ghost would become even louder and more enduring, until they finally accustomed themselves to this nightly calamity. 

To the end of the days, he hated solitude—except when composing—which his biographer Newman suggests was because “solitude brought up out of the subconscious depths of him all sorts of lurking fears.”

In should be noted that his family was highly theatrical, with most of his siblings making their living through the acting or singing arts. Wagner was, therefore, a “theater brat”—he knew it as well as anything in life. Of the theater, he wrote that the world “would serve as a lever to lift me out of a monotonous everyday reality into that fascinating demoniacal realm. Everything connected with the theater had for me the charm of mystery, an attraction amounting to intoxication.” 

In his autobiography, Wagner spoke highly of his mother, but it is clear through his actions—and later letters—that he was also critical of her and generally preferred distance from her. The highly sensitive child who grew up to be a very sensual man lived as a youth in a home, as he put it, in which “there was little tenderness...particularly as expressed in caresses.” In a letter to his younger sister Cäcilie when he was 29 he said, “our good mama is utter hell for everyone around her...[still] I always enjoy seeing her once in a while: she has many charming qualities.”  What is clearly true is that he never enjoyed the parental love he craved. He told his first wife Minna that “on the whole...[I had] a miserable youth.”  The one bright spot of his youth was his older sister, Rosalie, who filled the role of early supporter, protector, inspiration and muse.

By adolescence, though relatively small,⁶ Wagner was physically fit and quiet athletic. He had a life-long ability and interest in acrobatics, having learned to walk a tightrope at age ten, and retained the love of such feats—and an ability to preform them—for the rest of his life. For instance, to greet—and impress—a female visitor at age 60, he scurried up a tree. Throughout his life, he enjoyed walking, includes long hikes and mountaineering. These outings helped to calm his nerves, and put him in the peacefulness of nature, which he found tremendously regenerative. He never liked the noise and hustle and bustle of cities and longed always for quiet and solitude.

As a student, he showed no follow-through for subjects he considered dull, such as mathematics. But he was an avid reader to the point of obsession with those things he found fascinating, such as the classics, particularly Greek culture and mythology.

Wagner's living arrangements became somewhat random in his early adolescence: sometimes with his family, who had moved to Prague where the breadwinner, Rosalie, had a well-paying acting job; sometimes with a Dresden family; sometimes with his Uncle Adolf, in Leipzig. By his early teens, he was quite independent. He would set off on journeys by foot of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of miles to move from place to place, occasionally with a lift from a passing coach. Such a walking trip took him to his Uncle’s house in Leipzig as a 14 year-old. This trip was a turning point towards the more cerebral, as he bonded with his Uncle, who conversed with him about ancient Greece and other wide-ranging literary and philosophical issues. It was at this time he first read Shakespeare and Goethe’s works. He learned from his uncle that he inherited a number of books from his father, and was ecstatic with acquiring the library. From this point on, Wagner viewed his uncle as the father-figure that he had been long missing. It was to please his uncle—who always hated Geyer— that he took back the name of Wagner.

His mother and the two other younger siblings, Ottilie and Cäcilie, had moved to Leipzig at this point, so Richard did live with them, but he spent hours walking and talking with his mentor, Adolph. He hated the school at Leipzig with a passion and decided to teach himself whatever he wanted to know, with the help of Adolph’s fine library and astute mind.

The 14-year-old thus ceased going to school—unbeknownst to his family— and instead hid up in the attic to write a Shakespearean-inspired blood-soaked tragedy, full of the stuff of his nightmares: ghosts, murder, rape and insanity. It’s name was Leubald. It was the kind of thing that would have gotten a school-kid in our day and age sent straight to a psychologist for evaluation and on a watch-list of some kind. When his labors were discovered, everybody was indeed quite upset, mostly that he was wasting his time on this, but his uncle reacted to the content with “shock and astonishment.” (To my mind, Wagner was trying to take control of his ghostly fears through artistic means, purging his subconscious fears, and replacing them with his creation.)

Wagner realized two things from this ordeal: First, since he thought his play was wonderful, he felt both misunderstood and alone, and he decided that the only real problem with the play was that it needed music to make it emotionally intelligible. Second, he concluded he needed to learn music to complete his great work. And so he went to the library and checked out a book to begin his musical education as his aim was now set: to become a great composer of dramatic works.

This is quintessential Wagner: highly optimistic and supremely self-confident, undeterred by criticism, systematically taking the steps necessary to achieve his dream, nay, his destiny.

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End notes:

For the next two weeks I will pause this series, as I am in the midst of “Wagner tripping,” as in a road trip to—among other things—see Wagner’s Ring in Seattle beginning Tuesday. It was such a trip in 2001 where I first conceived what has become this blog. (Originally, I was going to write a book, but blogs are so much better!) Thus, I come full cycle as befits the Ring. The next two posts, then, will be from the road and focusing on thoughts and feelings on and related to this trip.

By the way, I just got legally married to Leslie, my partner of 28 years, on Monday. We had an extra-legal ceremony 18 years ago; our ceremony Monday was on our anniversary. We had this trip to Seattle planned for years, but it became our “accidental honeymoon” when the Supreme Court made it’s ruling.

We “marched,” of course, to Wagner’s "Bridal Chorus." I wrote about the history of that chorus here. For fun, our recessional was this.

Here we are coming down the aisle:

Leslie (who edits and wrote the Joyce blog) is on the right.
(photo by her sister Laura)

1 I drew this portrait from these sources: Wagner, My Life; Millington, Wagner; Köhler, The Last of the Titans; Newman, The Life of Wagner, Volume 1; Millington & Spencer, eds., Selected Letters of Wagner. I am not going to use too many footnotes in this post as I am on the road and don’t have the time. If you want specfic references for anything I assert, I am happy to give them to you. Just write.

2 He was the last child of Carl Wagner, at least that’s the story. His younger sister Cäcilie was the the child of Ludwig Geyer.

3 Leipzig was the town in which Bach served as Kapplemeister for 27 years at St. Thomas Church. Wagner was baptized in that same church, something he later saw as some sort of sign of his destiny.

4 A bunch of writers tie this question to the issue of his anti-Semitism. That is, they think he may have thought that Geyer was both his true father and Jewish (which he wasn’t), and so that is what tormented him. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Wagner thought or worried about Geyer being Jewish. It’s a complete fabrication.  He did entertain the idea that Geyer might have been his father, but he came to the conclusion that Carl Wagner was, according to Cosima's diaries. In any case, he showed no torment over the subject to Cosima or in his letters.  The opera analysis “evidence” is that Siegfried was tormented by wanting to know who his real parents were. Beyond that, there is no one in his works with this sort of father issue. This is pretty skimpy evidence for being “tormented.”

5 They were called Cossacks from the Turkish “kazak” meaning “free man,” referring to those “who anyone could not find his appropriate place in society and went into the steppes, where he acknowledged no authority.” 

6 How tall Wagner was is variously reported from about 5’ to 5’6”. The latter is the only one with evidence, as a surviving passport lists him at that height. The reason many thought of him as particularly small is because his head was much larger than a normal person of the same size, highlighting the contrast.