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The End of the Ring: Wagner, Ferris Wheels, and God

The End of the Ring: Wagner, Ferris Wheels, and God

Last updated on: April 26, 2017 at 10:05 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

The End of the Ring: Wagner, Ferris Wheels, and God 2017-04-26T10:05:28-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Our opera looked nothing like this or anything else traditional.

The gods we create can be destroyed, but there is no hope in mankind either. Whatever Richard Wagner intended, that is the message I found in Houston Grand Opera’s concluding opera in the Ring Cycle.

About the Houston Grand Wagner Experience

We began in 2013 and now we have seen all of the four operas: the story is fully told. The staging was not good, it was as if Michael Bey had decided to do some transformers work, but then ran out of money. Pity those of Chestertonian girth asked to wear costumes that frequently looked like Awana uniforms.

The voices were outstanding (to amateuar me) and it was Wagner. That is a mixed bag for an older man coming to opera later in life: five hours of anything is a challenge and five hours of Wagner is titanic torrents of Teutonism for this Tory. If nothing else, this was a reminder that there is so much to learn, so much beauty to challenge me. I have hardly touched the riches of Western Europe while whole continents hold cultural splendors to challenge.

About the Opera with Amateuer Eyes: Götterdämmerung

The Twilight of the Gods makes Shakespeare’s King Lear seem cheery. Shakespeare leaves hope for England, but little is left at the end of the Ring. The old order is changing, but unlike Tennyson’s Idylls, Woden isn’t coming back like Arthur.

The version we saw interpreted the opera for us: the gods were dying as mechanization and science caused the next phase of cultural evolution. Mankind has to grow up. If that means less color and heroism, as humanity, we also gain control of our destiny. The fates do not control us anymore. If we cannot look to the gods to save us, then heroes are going to fail as well, killed by lesser modern men. Hagen kills Siegfried.

The difficulty is that the music reaches further than the plot. To the extent the Ring is influenced by Nietzsche, the philosophy seems immature. At his best, Nietzsche punctures all balloons and if that ends in ugliness, the philosopher would say he is just reporting things as they are. Wagner wants more than disappointingly dead gods and his music strives for meaning in the brutality of the gods, heroes, and other beings. Like his onetime friend Nietzsche, he wants nothing to do with Jewish and Christian monotheism. Our God lacks the brutal ruthlessness that Wagner found romantic or at least necessary in a world controlled by Darwinian standards. Still, one can tell who one is supposed to like (Siegmund, Sieglinde, Brunhilde, and of course Siegfried) and even their deaths are made grand.

After all, a good death in an opera isn’t a bad thing. The actors are happy, the audience is happy, and everyone goes home alive!

Yet if we are to take hope from the death of the gods and the end of the Ring, I am hard pressed to know how. The age of heroes ends with the gods as there will be no more dragons to fight. In any case, there was not person, deity, or being in the Ring that I liked. Nobody in the Opera would have been good to share mead with. Wagner writes glorious music, but his characters are all odious.

A Good Word for the Ferris Wheel

The full cycle was being produced by the late 1870’s and eventually Wagner would build a whole opera-world to stage his productions. This was about the time Chicago staged the great Columbian Exposition in 1893. The two events could not have been more different: one was the product of one genius, the other of a multitude of brilliant men. One told of the twilight of gods, the other was full of pious Midwest Christianity.

The exposition had enough artistic pretensions to make Buffalo Bill set up outside (where he made a mint) and to hire some of the best practical designers the nation has ever had. It is easy to forget that the greatest architects of the 19th century helped transform a wasteland into the Great White City. The great feature of the Exposition was the giant Ferris Wheel (much like the London Eye) that showed what science could do. Perhaps it is easy, too easy to sneer: am I about to compare the Ferris Wheel to the Ring Cycle?

Yes. I am.

The Columbian Exposition had a huge influence on America. Walt Disney’s dad worked on it and it is not a stretch to see Disneyland born in the attractions and buildings of the Exposition. More importantly, the Exposition featured fire control, waste management, and technology that showed what a city might be. This vision of urban living, so different from most city dwellers lived experience, became a goal for America and the designer of Central Park in NYC (Mr. Olmstead) came and helped Chicago’s exposition look East coast! If our alabaster cities gleam, it is in part because the Chicago Exposition with its temporary buildings made of “stuff” painted white gleamed in the imagination.

The applied science behind the Ferris Wheel was just the biggest example of what was happening in Chicago. Americans believed in the future, even in the midst of a severe recession. We knew things would be better soon, because we had managed to build a White City in a swamp! By contrast, the Germanic vision of Wagner is gloomy. Americans loved science, Wagner dreaded it. Americans loved doing things, this opera delights in endless conversations and recapitulations. Americans in 1893 wanted “can do” and Wagner pointed out “cannot.”

You cannot imagine anyone in the Ring cycle getting a cone and riding the Ferris Wheel and that is part of the problem. If childhood must end, can’t it end on a Ferris Wheel eating fried pork rather than in a hectoring five hour opera?

————————

This cycle inspired me here in 2015 and 2016 and 2017. My piece on the first Ring play was lost at HBU in the twilight of my time there.

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