A Response To Philip Kennicott

Were a patient presenting with symptoms of amnesia to submit his case to a neurologist, the diagnosis would almost surely be one that involves some degree of organic brain damage, temporary or permanent, but one for which no corrective surgical or chemical treatment is yet available. Were that same patient to submit his case to a psychoanalyst, the diagnosis would almost surely involve the psychodynamic phenomenon of repression that may or may not be susceptible to correction by an intense and rigorous psychoanalysis.

That sort of specialist diagnostic bias was the very first thing that leapt to mind on reading the article written by Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott published in the September 2010 issue of Opera News titled, "Ring Ideal". Were that article written by anyone other than someone with Mr. Kennicott's professional credentials, we would have simply shrugged our shoulders and shaken our head at the purblind specialist bias displayed in almost every paragraph of the piece, and taken no further note of the matter. We Wagnerians are pretty much inured to biases on the part of non-Wagnerians, but given Mr. Kennicott's credentials, and given as well the opera-world prominence of the publication in which the article appeared, that's not possible in this case, and so the following response.

Mr. Kennicott's thesis that,

Like the Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China, the Ring cycle exists as if by miracle. But unlike those wonders of the world, the forces that sustain it are entirely ephemeral, subject to the vicissitudes of fashion and the economy. Wagner's Ring could disappear in a matter of years, or decades, if the zeitgeist turned sour,

depends on several premises, most of them dubious at best, and most due Mr. Kennicott's manifest purblind specialist-biased view of the work to hand (be it remembered, please, that Mr. Kennicott is a culture critic, not a critic of classical music and opera even though both come within the purview of his umbrella specialty).

For instance, there are these following notions put forward by Mr. Kennicott who, astonishingly, like any hack writer with a pop understanding of both Wagner and the Ring, considers the Ring "an over-scaled work [that] might have [been] nibbled...down to size a century ago, if Wagner and his minions hadn't so thoroughly intimidated the conductors, impresarios and fans who carried its torch into the future."

According to Mr. Kennicott,

• "There doesn't seem to be a single trend in the cultural ether that bodes well for the long-term endurance of this fifteen-hour work. Today, even respectable novelists strive to comply with the book-club-friendly 300-page limit, and films are toxic at the box office if their directors can't tell a story in less than 100 minutes. Allegory is also out of fashion, perhaps even archaic. Clarity, accessibility and irony define most new aesthetics of storytelling."

• "The nexus of nineteenth-century intellectual passions that give the Ring its overarching coherence have mostly dwindled into dust. Revolution has lost its luster in an age when unified economies bring the world into ever closer though never perfect communion."

• "Wagner's Ring, more than 130 years after its premiere, still benefits from the dutiful largesse that well-trained audiences used to feel in the presence of the avant-garde."

• "[I]s [the Ring] really analogous in its riches to the birth of modern consciousness in Shakespeare or the comprehensive psychological atlas of Proust? [...] Two forces in particular...have kept the Ring alive. There is the reactionary fidelity to Wagner...[and]...the almost equally longstanding willingness of artists to break with that fidelity and reinterpret the work, as if the Ring were always about something else...."

The above notions (and there's one more to follow that arises from the same purblind specialist bias — and it's a doozy — which we'll address momentarily), are all notions that could be held only be someone who 1) hasn't paid proper attention to the Ring, or 2) imagines that the drama of the Ring is made manifest in and transmitted via its text (libretto), or 3) has no comprehension or grasp of what lies below the immediately accessible visible and audible surface of the work, or 4) any combination of the foregoing.

To keep this entry within our self-imposed blog entry word-length limit (a limit it will nevertheless exceed by a bit in any case), we won't here rebut further the above notions point-by-point, but move on to that doozy of a notion we above referred to, for, as if the above notions were not wrongheaded enough, we then have from Mr. Kennicott the monumentally purblind grand notion that,

[T]here is an Achilles heel to the Ring, a weakness that could suddenly deflate the singular and inspiring power it has retained despite all its absurdities, its extraordinary longueurs and its punishing demands on those who stage it, sing it and watch it.

Keep your eye on Siegfried. If the status of Siegfried begins to change for the worse, the whole Ring could come crashing down with him. He is the cycle's most problematic figure, its most volatile element. For decades (especially since World War II), he's been both its hero and its antihero, attractive and odious at the same time, and somehow perpetually in motion between these extremes. As long as we can suspend judgment about the character of Siegfried, the Ring can go on. But if, in the future, audiences reject him, Götterdämmerung [sic] for the Ring could come at the end of Die Walküre.

It's not just that he's the central figure of well more than half of the Ring cycle, or that everything, musically and dramatically, leads to his birth and death. And it's not only that he embodies the worst political and personal traits that bedevil Wagner's reputation as a man — the anti-Semitism evident in Siegfried's treatment of Mime, or the blithe and hollow murder of Fafner in dragon form. Siegfried, the young man who forges, seeks, seduces and betrays, is also Wagner's dramatization of the artist. In Siegfried (and his forebear Tannhäuser), Wagner articulated a vision of artistic license. In Siegfried, the notion that the genius can be forgiven anything is enacted — and it is precisely that code of free conduct that has protected Wagner, and his works, from hostility that would have sunk any ordinary opera. For as long as audiences play the Siegfried game — suspending judgment, loving and hating him, but never banishing him — Wagner's Ring will continue to thrive despite the great tide of forces that oppose it.

[...]

[Siegfried] was supposed to be the great instantiation of freedom, absolute freedom, anarchic and beautiful and capable of bringing down the old corrupt orders. But we live in an age deeply uneasy about the side effects of that freedom, whether manifested in political instability, social disruption or environmental degradation. We must, by necessity, become ever more dependent on each other, ever more circumscribed in our old liberty to consume at will, move about at will, despoil and destroy at will. Can Siegfried be relevant in the age of teamwork, recycling and volunteerism? Does dragon-slaying have any poetic resonance in an era of oil spills that can destroy in a few weeks an entire ecosystem?

The problem child is now the elephant in the room, and it will be hard for Wagner-lovers to continue the old apologia. Siegfried must be reinvented if the Ring is to continue in its old form. Otherwise, he will begin to seem ever more repellent, ever more irrelevant. And the Ring will no longer be sacrosanct and exceptional. It will be merely a product of its time, its characters both familiar and foreign, like the cardboard kings of opera seria and the unhinged hysterics of bel canto. [...] That doesn't mean the Ring will disappear. But it will become what it has always been, despite the mostly successful efforts of its partisans to claim otherwise. It will be an opera, just an opera — a lot longer, but essentially the same as any other.

There are so many things wrong with almost all of that, and almost the entirety of that wrong due a gross (and given the author, just this side of an unbelievable) failure of fundamental understanding, that we hardly know where to begin to demolish it.

Let us begin with this little bit of nonsense.

Mr. Kennicott speaks of "[The Ring's] absurdities, its extraordinary longueurs and its punishing demands on those who...watch it."

What "absurdities"? There are none unless, like a philistine, one rejects the entire fictive core and edifice of the work. What "longueurs"? There are none unless one approaches the work as if it were "just an opera [that's] essentially the same as any other," which is indeed an absurdity. And, What "punishing demands on those who watch it"? There are none unless one insists on traversing the work's entire fifteen-or-so hours via DVD at a single sitting, in which case the "punishing demands" are made not on one's attention and involvement, but on one's derriere.

In short, these are all baseless objections that could be hurled at the Ring only by one thoroughly antipathetic to the audacity behind the creation of the tetralogy and what it's fundamentally about which most emphatically is NOT the trials and woes and tragic end of Siegfried, notwithstanding that's what Wagner had intended originally. What it's about are the trials and woes and tragic end of Wotan, Siegfried's grandpapa (it's not for nothing Wagner renamed the final music-drama Götterdämmerung), who is clearly "the cycle's most problematic figure, its most volatile element," and who forever (not merely "for decades (especially since World War II))" has been "both its hero and its antihero, attractive and odious at the same time, and somehow perpetually in motion between these extremes," not Siegfried, and who is the central tragic hero of the cycle, even when he's not physically present onstage; the character about which "everything [in the Ring] musically and dramatically" revolves, leading ultimately to his and the world's end. For by the time Wagner's single, three-act, French-style Grand Opera, Siegfrieds Tod, became the four-music-drama cosmic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, Siegfried had become little more than a naïve, boisterous, reckless, not-too-bright adolescent hotshot, and a mere helpless pawn caught up ineluctably in the prior machinations of Wotan, the Ring's central tragic hero. Anyone who managed to miss that or who has dismissed it, willfully or otherwise, has, as we've above suggested, not been paying proper attention to the work at the very least, or, worse, has taken his understanding of the work from what's been written about it rather than from addressing what's made manifest in the work itself.

Today, as in times past and into the foreseeable future, we readily look with an at least understanding if not altogether admiring eye on the Siegfried of Siegfried. He's dramatically just what we expect and want him to be and we'd be hugely disappointed were he anything other (and I here pass over largely in charitable silence the preposterous notion that anyone other than a PC-contaminated ideologue or an outright Wagner ignoramus would see in Siegfried "the worst political and personal traits that bedevil Wagner's reputation as a man," and imagine Siegfried as displaying Wagner's "anti-Semitism evident in Siegfried's treatment of Mime, or the blithe and hollow murder of Fafner in dragon form"). It's a cardinal failure of Wagner's that, when writing Götterdämmerung, he refused adamantly to let go of that Siegfried, and by that refusal fairly made nonsense of the idea of Siegfried as a heroically tragic "free hero". Siegfried's death is in fact pathetic rather than heroically tragic as the Siegfried of the Ring as we have it possesses no genuinely tragic dimension whatsoever, his majestic and deeply moving Trauermarsch notwithstanding. If we as audiences "play the Siegfried game" at all, it's a game of pretending we can take the Götterdämmerung Siegfried seriously as the heroically tragic "free hero" Wagner intended him to be instead of the naïve, boisterous, reckless, not-too-bright adolescent pawn Wagner made of him, a failure we examined in some detail in our February 2005 entry, "The Trouble With Götterdämmerung".

And so the "singular and inspiring power" of the Ring depends not one whit more on how we respond to the character of Siegfried as Wagner has drawn him than it does on how we respond to any other of the principal characters other than Wotan himself, as Siegfried is but a helpless pawn in Wagner's colossal drama despite his onstage time, not the lynchpin tragic hero of the piece, and therefore no "Achilles heel to the Ring" even were one to grant Siegfried's imagined lack of "relevance" to "an age of teamwork, recycling and volunteerism"; an age in which "[w]e must, by necessity, become ever more dependent on each other." In fact, in such an age, tales of fearless dragon-slayers, reckless adolescent pawns or not, are more relevant than ever and resonate more powerfully because they serve to remind us what it means to be a genuine, fearless individual in a world of herd animals. If the Ring does indeed have an "Achilles heel" it resides solely in its huge cost to mount properly, and in its requirement of absolutely first-rate performers of a special sort, from conductor down to the most minor of singer-actors.

But, then, Wagner knew all about all of that, and in spite of it persevered to create his deathless and timeless masterpiece — deathless and timeless even in the face of "the vicissitudes of fashion and the economy" — rather than capitulate to the insistent demands of a reality comprised of mortals made of lesser stuff and infinitely lesser genius.