The Awful Text Of Wagner's Ring

Well, this is most refreshing, and more than a little encouraging: a contemporary German opera director who knows his proper place.

I don’t like to play one profession off against another, but [in opera,] if the composer isn’t at the center, there’s something rotten. A director is only a manager. Our names should come last, after those of the conductor, the orchestra, the soloists.

Quite right, of course.

The above quote is from German director Sven-Eric Bechtolf in an interview with Wilhelm Sinkovicz, "the rapier-sharp critic of the Austrian daily Die Presse," on the occasion of Herr Bechtolf's staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Vienna State Opera this past May, and as quoted in an article by Matthew Gurewitsch for The New York Times focusing on a CD recording by Herr Bechtolf of a reading of the complete text of the Ring — sans music. Says Herr Bechtolf of Wagner's text:

Each character [in the Ring] is like a figure in a fairy tale. But take them all together, and you see the complex structure. Wagner’s language is full of alliteration, which to modern German ears sounds funny and strange. A lot of people say that the music is great, but the text is awful. So it’s an interesting experiment to see if an audience can just listen to the words without bursting out laughing all the time. And from my live readings it seems to be that people can tolerate long stretches of it surprisingly well.

Herr Bechtolf's reading of the Ring's text for its own sake follows in a long if sporadic tradition of such readings going back to Wagner himself who initially viewed his texts for the Ring (which he called "poems") as great epic-dramatic poems in their own right. He subsequently, and quite early on after his completion of the full text of the Ring, was disabused of that idea after he'd finished the full score of the music for the first of the Ring music-dramas, Das Rheingold, the first music written for the Ring. Wrote Wagner in a lengthy, detailed letter to one of his closest confidants, conductor and composer August Röckel:

The completion of [the full score of] the Rheingold (a task as difficult as it was important) has restored my sense of self-assurance.... I have once again realized how much of the work's meaning (given the nature of my poetic intent) is only made clear by the music! I can now no longer bear to look at the poem without music.

Nor should we be expected to be able to do so as, like all first-rate libretti, the superbly constructed text of the Ring is merely the armature about which the music-drama is constructed as we've on numerous previous occasions here on S&F taken the trouble to point out; an armature designed to provide the concrete narrative and factual detail which music alone is incapable of expressing, and which armature never competes poetically or dramatically with the music which is the principal carrier and transmitter of the music-drama's poetic and dramatic core.

Misguided and purblind critics of the literary and dramatic quality of Wagner's Ring text (as well as the texts of his other music-dramas), take note.