Wagner , Love and Civilization.

[RobertH]

What does a loveless world look like?
Wagner gave us the answer in what is probably the greatest single piece of art ever written. Something which transcends even Shakespeare in a sense, because it carries drama into music and then beyond. Everything in the 'Ring' is based on brute force and violence, or on contracts and the law and therefore self interest. Wagner's utterly brilliant insight is to show us that these are two sides of the same coin, so Wotan on behalf of the Gods preserves law and contracts that are carved onto the spear that he holds, but he is himself deeply flawed and is involved in all sorts of grubby compromises and he cheats and steals and breaks promises. His alter ego, on the other side of the same coin is the horrible dwarf Alberich, who wants to rape the Rine maidens, but when they reject him, he renounces love and becomes possessed by insane ambition for gold.
This is a brutal sadistic and violent world. It is our world. The world all around us. At the start of the opera we see how the world came about through creation and then, after the initial wrong had been done, all the evil manifesting itself like a disease. On one side of the coin is manipulation and deception , scheming and cheating of the so called civilized society we live in represented by Wotan. On the other side, is the naked violence and terror and coercion of Alberich, who having renounced love by some strange power manages to subdue a whole race of beings who had before lived in a carefree state of nature, the Nibelungs, who only exist to constantly toil and work for Alberich down in the mines, heaping up more and more gold for their evil master. The women are cast to one side - Brunnhilde put on a mountain top surrounded by fire for the first hero that can dare to release her.
This is an utterly inhuman barren wasteland , and Wagner is telling us, this is the hell that we have created around us, because we have renounced love for power. Interestingly, the characters are all gods , giants, dwarfs, or mythical beings of one sort or another, and it is not until the second opera, the Valkyrie that we get human feelings and emotion. Wagner is saying , our society is so disordered , because it has banished the basic and primal human feeling and love within the total order of things, and we are going to reap the consequences.

[Sorrano]

Nicely put! I find myself drawn to The Ring from time to time and have pondered the representation of all of these base emotions. Siegried and Brunnhilde's short lived but pure relationship is, of course, corrupted by all the evil that surrounds them and everything is destroyed.

[Preston]

What does a loveless world look like?
Wagner gave us the answer in what is probably the greatest single piece of art ever written. Something which transcends even Shakespeare in a sense, because it carries drama into music and then beyond. Everything in the 'Ring' is based on brute force and violence, or on contracts and the law and therefore self interest. Wagner's utterly brilliant insight is to show us that these are two sides of the same coin, so Wotan on behalf of the Gods preserves law and contracts that are carved onto the spear that he holds, but he is himself deeply flawed and is involved in all sorts of grubby compromises and he cheats and steals and breaks promises. His alter ego, on the other side of the same coin is the horrible dwarf Alberich, who wants to rape the Rine maidens, but when they reject him, he renounces love and becomes possessed by insane ambition for gold.
This is a brutal sadistic and violent world. It is our world. The world all around us. At the start of the opera we see how the world came about through creation and then, after the initial wrong had been done, all the evil manifesting itself like a disease. On one side of the coin is manipulation and deception , scheming and cheating of the so called civilized society we live in represented by Wotan. On the other side, is the naked violence and terror and coercion of Alberich, who having renounced love by some strange power manages to subdue a whole race of beings who had before lived in a carefree state of nature, the Nibelungs, who only exist to constantly toil and work for Alberich down in the mines, heaping up more and more gold for their evil master. The women are cast to one side - Brunnhilde put on a mountain top surrounded by fire for the first hero that can dare to release her.
This is an utterly inhuman barren wasteland , and Wagner is telling us, this is the hell that we have created around us, because we have renounced love for power. Interestingly, the characters are all gods , giants, dwarfs, or mythical beings of one sort or another, and it is not until the second opera, the Valkyrie that we get human feelings and emotion. Wagner is saying , our society is so disordered , because it has banished the basic and primal human feeling and love within the total order of things, and we are going to reap the consequences.

I think that what you have written is desperately terrifying, disturbing to the point of burning in fire - might as well burn forever, etc. - it is probably happening somewhere - for all we know. Also, what you have written is true and seems to come from a clearer understanding of life and care? You are right, imo, in, society as a whole, one will push another another in the fire and run for their lives, and vice-versa. It is this lack of care and compassion for the other that leads to the sickening disease and unimaginable stupidity - called inequality.

Why is it like this? Why are we like this? Imo, one purpose should be the entire point of life, maybe one question - though it is a next to infinite amounts of questions - if it is even questioned.

All The Best,

[Preston]

in general and short: sorry if i'm not entirely clear

Missed something: Imo, greed is unfair - and when too much is taken it is very unfair, which is why I do my best to live a life free of greed - I am not saying I always succeed - I do not know? Probably not. Human beings are unfair - that is what we are - that is what we were born to be. The primary focus should be - achieving a more spiritual state - though, it is not - as a whole.

Speaking of pain - does it really exists in the most extreme forms - seemingly so, from our perspective. Though does it - is burning forever happening? If so, I would like to shoot myself now. Though, it is through our perspective that the world is in the state it is in. I fear pain, I hate pain, etc.

we see how the world came about through creation and then, after the initial wrong had been done

I wouldn't put too much into that, though that is me. I understand Wagner was a Christian - I know little of him. This sounds like Christian dogma - the initial wrong? Imo - I believe The Holy Bible does not really lead to a nature based religion. This is why I attempt to steer from it and focus on more natural religions. Things like - "flesh of thy flesh and blood of thy blood" - I find strange.

Anyway back to the point (and not correcting my points) - money. What I have come to believe, at least for now, is that inequality is wrong and something that cannot be helped (and something I don't want to participate in). And yes from the human-perspective - money could possibly be said to be the "root of all evil" - though I think I wholly disagree? - because we are/were born to be unfair. It is when people are too unfair that it is wrong, imo? Also, imo - there are people who are wealthy and kind, and people who are poor and kind - and - there are people who are wealthy and terrible, and people who are poor and terrible. So - does that make sense - no. I think when judging goodness, one cannot look, wholly, at the outer, but, must also look at the inner. Goodness - is much more diverse than money.

If one was to think money was the root of all evil - they would hate people with money, to a point of terrifying hatred.

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. - Yoda

Do not be to quick to deal out death and judgement. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. Many who die deserve life and many who live deserve death. - Gandalf

A riddling quote if I may say so!

[RobertH]

Interesting Preston.

The ' Ring' is showing us a world full of pain. The inner pain or mental suffering in a sense being worse than all the pain we see around us with the terrible things man does through war. Wotan is filled with pain, but that's because he is living a lie and he needs to get out of old ways of thinking and doing things. He gave up one of his eyes for wisdom, but he still can't see straight, and he now wonders the earth looking for something, anything, to try to find an answer to all the pain and the madness.
Wagner want's us to know that there is only one way out of this hell that we have created and that is love. He viewed love as a denial of the will , whereby one gave oneself to the other person in a free giving and to achieve a union in some higher realm of spirit and truth. He was very influenced by Schopenhauer whom he sent a copy of the score of the Ring to and who acknowledged to be the greatest philosopher since Plato.
Schopenhauer said, that the ultimate ground of our being is one and not differentiated. If I injure you, I injure in some way my self, we are all one or the same, this explains compassion, the ability to identify with someone else in their suffering.


ps. there was more to this post but it did not all go in.
Not sure if we are limited to short posts.

[Preston]

The ' Ring' is showing us a world full of pain. The inner pain or mental suffering in a sense being worse than all the pain we see around us with the terrible things man does through war. Wotan is filled with pain, but that's because he is living a lie and he needs to get out of old ways of thinking and doing things. He gave up one of his eyes for wisdom, but he still can't see straight, and he now wonders the earth looking for something, anything, to try to find an answer to all the pain and the madness.

Robert, the depth yet grace of your tone is soothing to my soul. Knowledge is power, and power is greed - knowledge should only be used when necessary. Greed is powerful.

If I injure you, I injure in some way my self, we are all one or the same, this explains compassion, the ability to identify with someone else in their suffering.

There is no denying that, it is fairness. Here is a quote from Shakespeare elsewhere on this forum:

or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling —'tis too horrible!

There is no answer to pain - except omnipotence, to my mind.

[Chaszz]

What does a loveless world look like?
Wagner gave us the answer in what is probably the greatest single piece of art ever written. Something which transcends even Shakespeare in a sense, because it carries drama into music and then beyond. Everything in the 'Ring' is based on brute force and violence, or on contracts and the law and therefore self interest. Wagner's utterly brilliant insight is to show us that these are two sides of the same coin, so Wotan on behalf of the Gods preserves law and contracts that are carved onto the spear that he holds, but he is himself deeply flawed and is involved in all sorts of grubby compromises and he cheats and steals and breaks promises. His alter ego, on the other side of the same coin is the horrible dwarf Alberich, who wants to rape the Rine maidens, but when they reject him, he renounces love and becomes possessed by insane ambition for gold.
This is a brutal sadistic and violent world. It is our world. The world all around us. At the start of the opera we see how the world came about through creation and then, after the initial wrong had been done, all the evil manifesting itself like a disease. On one side of the coin is manipulation and deception , scheming and cheating of the so called civilized society we live in represented by Wotan. On the other side, is the naked violence and terror and coercion of Alberich, who having renounced love by some strange power manages to subdue a whole race of beings who had before lived in a carefree state of nature, the Nibelungs, who only exist to constantly toil and work for Alberich down in the mines, heaping up more and more gold for their evil master. The women are cast to one side - Brunnhilde put on a mountain top surrounded by fire for the first hero that can dare to release her.
This is an utterly inhuman barren wasteland , and Wagner is telling us, this is the hell that we have created around us, because we have renounced love for power. Interestingly, the characters are all gods , giants, dwarfs, or mythical beings of one sort or another, and it is not until the second opera, the Valkyrie that we get human feelings and emotion. Wagner is saying , our society is so disordered , because it has banished the basic and primal human feeling and love within the total order of things, and we are going to reap the consequences.

An able summary of the meaning of The Ring, maybe the best I've ever read.

IMO, it is too bad that the final work, Gotterdammerung, is so filled with ridiculous plot devices that it collapses dramatically and is partly saved only by its music. After knowing it fairly thoroughly, I still cannot sum up in my mind the entire plot, with its twists and turns and nonbelievable motivations. To begin with, at the start Siegfried and Brunnehilde are living in love and contentment and he leaves her for NO OTHER REASON than to go adventuring - why? because he is a Hero and that is what Heroes do - without a menace or real motivation that would believably drive the story. Any third-rate novelist would come up with a better reason to break up this happy couple, who have been seeking each other for so long. And it is downhill from there. Siegfried forsakes her and decides to marry someone else not for any other reason than the kind of mistaken identity device that was used in I Love Lucy. No metaphor, no symbolism, no meaning, just a forgetfulness drug. After several more hours that would not even make a good comic book, Brunnehilde commits suicide in order to purify the world. How this will purify the world we are not told. But then she is only following the paths of other Wagner heroines who expire in acts of will. Pity her poor horse who must walk into the flames with her. Since she has been made human by her father, I assume the horse has been made horse and can feel the pain.

Well, not trying to make your summary less than it is, Robert, because it is very good. And make no mistake, I hold Wagner as high as, if not higher than, any other composer as a creator of music. I attend his operas regularly for this reason. I just don't feel that as a dramatist he is consistently good. He is too prone to plots that have little real human motivation but instead give us absurd idea-driven Victorian melodrama. He is certainly not in the realm of Shakespeare and Aeschylus where he is sometimes placed.

However, he is not consistent is his dramatic absurdities. Some parts of every one of his works are I think dramatically very good. And Die Walkure is in IMO a theatre masterpiece. But I don't think the other Ring operas are on its level - as drama. And when there is a grand theme - which you have ably summarized - and the artist's stated goal is a fusion of theme, drama, music and visual aspects, in my opinion dramatic shortcomings weaken it significantly as a work of art.

[RobertH]

Thanks Chaszz, yes I agree. To my mind Rhinegold and die Valkure are incomparable. I have always felt a bit less than happy with Seigfried. To my mind the key to Wagner is the point about renunciation of the will . He got this from Schopenhauer of course, to whom he sent an autographed copy of copy of the manuscript. Schopenhauer , for Wagner was the way out, or get out of jail card, from the prison of the senses that he Wagner thought Kant had condemne man to. Schopenhauer had a mystical view of man and the universe, where it was essential for us to escape from time and space and be at one with the eternal or abolute. You could only do this by renouncing the will. Everything had gone horribly wrong for man because he was making bad choices and that was due to his will. The Ring abounds with this theme.
Alberich renounces his lust for the Rhine maidens, but in return is mysteriously filled with an astonishing power , whereby he subjugates the entire race of the nibelungs and gets them to slave for him. So the paradox is, he renounces his will in one area, only to get it back in another.
Wotan needs to give up his will to simply build a bigger and better Valhalla through the giants, but he has no idea what giving up his will could possibly mean, which is why he has to wonder the world in disguise and try and find out what such an utterly changed landscape would look like.
I agree at the end, Wagner says, the only real way out from all of this is a complete inundation, or purification and a remaking of the entire world.
Wagner saw his task of trying to redeem religion and religious significance, away from what he thought were dead rituals and be recreated through great art. Even non relgious people I think would acknowledge that there is a tremendous mythic power or truth here, which we have simply lost sight of in the modern world.
I think the Met is now the worlds leading Wagner platform, apart from Bayreuth, which is a special case of course. James Levine is an awsome conductor and far away to my mind the best interpreter of the Ring.

[Peter]

I agree at the end, Wagner says, the only real way out from all of this is a complete inundation, or purification and a remaking of the entire world.
Wagner saw his task of trying to redeem religion and religious significance, away from what he thought were dead rituals and be recreated through great art. Even non relgious people I think would acknowledge that there is a tremendous mythic power or truth here, which we have simply lost sight of in the modern world.

Here of course lies the problem many people have with Wagner - the Nazis agreed with this idea of 'purification and remaking of the entire world'. My own views are that Wagner was not personally responsible for the events of 1933-45, because without Hitler such attrocities could not have happened, however it is hard to deny that his thinking had an influence. That Wagner could talk about human love on the one hand and yet on the other write such contemptible trash as 'Judaism in music' exposes the hypocrisy of his philosophy.

Without doubt Wagner is one of the great figures of the 19th century and had it not been for subsequent events, his antisemitism would have been seen in its proper 19th century context, still abhorrent to us, but also common amongst many European intellectuals of the time.

[RobertH]

Here of course lies the problem many people have with Wagner - the Nazis agreed with this idea of 'purification and remaking of the entire world'. My own views are that Wagner was not personally responsible for the events of 1933-45, because without Hitler such attrocities could not have happened, however it is hard to deny that his thinking had an influence. That Wagner could talk about human love on the one hand and yet on the other write such contemptible trash as 'Judaism in music' exposes the hypocrisy of his philosophy.

Without doubt Wagner is one of the great figures of the 19th century and had it not been for subsequent events, his antisemitism would have been seen in its proper 19th century context, still abhorrent to us, but also common amongst many European intellectuals of the time.

No, I think its more basic than his influence, Peter.

The terrible irony is that Wagner was a great kind of apostle for the creed of renunciation of the will, but the person who hero worshiped him, idolized the will, as Rieftensthal portrayed in ''The Truimph of the Will." But there is no mention of anti - semitism in the operas, i think we have to be clear on that. People have said that Parsifal is about racism and nazism because it refers to the purity and preservation of blood. In fact Parsifal was the one Wagner opera Hitler hated and reviled for its Christian message of love and redemption and banned its performance Even today no doubt because of the terrible crimes of the Nazis we haven't really got Wagner in focus. Wagner did believe in compassion because he accepted what Schopenhauer said that when i injure my neighbour i injure myself - this is the oneness doctrine. But he was an immensely complex man and undoubtedly had a cruel side to him.

[Chaszz]

No, I think its more basic than his influence, Peter.

The terrible irony is that Wagner was a great kind of apostle for the creed of renunciation of the will, but the person who hero worshiped him, idolized the will, as Rieftensthal portrayed in ''The Truimph of the Will." But there is no mention of anti - semitism in the operas, i think we have to be clear on that. People have said that Parsifal is about racism and nazism because it refers to the purity and preservation of blood. In fact Parsifal was the one Wagner opera Hitler hated and reviled for its Christian message of love and redemption and banned its performance Even today no doubt because of the terrible crimes of the Nazis we haven't really got Wagner in focus. Wagner did believe in compassion because he accepted what Schopenhauer said that when i injure my neighbour i injure myself - this is the oneness doctrine. But he was an immensely complex man and undoubtedly had a cruel side to him.

Here is the reason that unless I am mistaken more books have been written about Wagner than almost any other figure except Jesus Christ -- there are so many issues about him that will never be settled but that so many people want to give opinions on. First, let me reiterate my opinion that his operas are often flawed as works of art, because of their dramatic absurdities and excesses. What Robert says about The Ring's meaning is well said, but it is after all not a work of philosophy but of art. As art, it has gaping flaws as drama. You cannot really take your place with Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus and so on with this kind of flawed work. If we overlook this and look to its social meaning, yes I suppose it is a good argument for renunciation of the will.

I would now only curmudgeonly point out that Wagner hardly renounced his will and showed compassion to his long-suffering wife Cosima when he tried to commit adultery with the singer who played one of the Flower Maidens during the Parsifal first run. This affair precipitated a later intense argument with Cosima that set off his fatal heart attack. And Schopenhauer hardly showed compassion when he threw his landlady down the stairs because he thought her voice was too loud in the hallway. for which action he was sued and paid a large settlement. In other words, physicians, heal thyselves. Seriously, though, these incidents do exhibit the same kind of hypocritical behavior as that of Wotan. Humans' problem is often not that we don't know what's right, but that we can't resist the temptation to do what's wrong.

As for Hitler and Wagner, well, that issue also will never be settled. Wagner died forty years before the Beer Hall Putsch let alone the Holocaust. It simply is not fair to blame him for what was done by a madman long after his death. He was one of a very large number of antisemites in Germany during his life and afterwards. On the other other hand, because of his prominence, his greatness as a composer, and the more-than-typical virulence of his antisemitism, IMO he does bear a heavier burden than the average antisemite in preparing the ground for what followed.

[Peter]

I think that's extremely well put Chaszz, thank you.

[Peter]

No, I think its more basic than his influence, Peter.

But there is no mention of anti - semitism in the operas, i think we have to be clear on that.

I thought the character Beckmesser from Meistersinger was often taken as antisemetic?

[RobertH]

I thought the character Beckmesser from Meistersinger was often taken as antisemetic?

I don't think so Peter, It is bit like saying the Flying Dutchman is a symbol for the Eternal Wandering Jew, which indeed some scholars have tried to make out.

[Peter]

I don't think so Peter, It is bit like saying the Flying Dutchman is a symbol for the Eternal Wandering Jew, which indeed some scholars have tried to make out.

Yes I think you are probably right and this is the unfortunate consequence of the Nazi approbation of Wagner. In a way I've always thought it odd that Richard Strauss has generally escaped the level of hostility levelled at Wagner over this issue, when he was actually directly involved with the events in a way that Wagner never was. Having read some of his letters, they contain really abhorrent antisemitic views which are expressed freely well before the Nazis came to power. Cosima Wagner herself was I think an even more repellent character than her husband.