No creative artist has cast a longer shadow over the past century than Richard Wagner. By the time of his death in 1883, he was the object of the sort of cultic adulation we nowadays associate with pop stars or footballers. "Wagnerism" thereafter remained a potent force and a protean one, his name invoked over and again.
In 1918, the German high command used the codename "Hagen" for their final great offensive on the western front (although the staff officer who chose it seems to have forgotten that Hagen perishes miserably in the Rhine at the very end of Der Ring des Nibelungen). A quarter century later, after the catastrophe at Stalingrad, German radio played Siegfried's Funeral March. More terribly, a line from Das Rheingold was used as another codename, for mass murder: Alberich's "Nacht und Nebel" was the night and fog into which the European Jews were to disappear.
And Wagner's work-itself a parable-has again and again been taken as a parable for something else. In a book published in 1931, Hedley A Chilvers wrote: "Just as the power of gold to shape mighty destinies was the theme of the old saga which Wagner used in his Ring, so in the story of the Witwatersrand have we a homily-albeit one from real life-on the power of gold."
Those words (which I used as an epigraph for a book about the South African mine-owners) came back to mind during the Royal Opera's Ring cycle given at the Albert Hall in the week bridging September and October. They were an extraordinary four nights. There was an electric tension-beyond that produced by the singing and the magnificent playing of the orchestra under Bernard Haitink-because this was a swansong from an opera company under sentence of death. On top of the prolonged closure for rebuilding the opera house itself, we had just learned that the whole company was to be shut down at the end of the year; all performances in 1999 cancelled, orchestra and company disbanded. It was hard not to sense some connexion between Wagner's terrifying homily and the dismal story of what greed, incompetence and official neglect have done to a great opera company.
The singing was variable, from so-so to superb; but has there ever been a Ring cast at a consistent level of excellence? That apart, we learned a thing or two. Wagner built an opera house at Bayreuth where the orchestra is invisible. At the Albert Hall the orchestra was entirely visible behind an apron stage on which the singers performed in an exiguous "production," with basic costumes and a minimum of props.
And yet I've rarely been so gripped or moved by a Walk?re Act III, or Siegfried Act II. Certainly not when watching through a proscenium arch with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of scenery on stage, the whole thing in a travesty of a production by some mountebank from Paris or Berlin. Not least for political reasons, Wieland Wagner's New Bayreuth productions in the early 1950s stripped the Ring of the traditional panoply of Teutonic-mythological costume and scenery. Productions were minimalist: just serious acting and skilful lighting.
"Just acting" was what we saw perforce at the Albert Hall, and much of it was as wonderfully dramatic as it was musical. It thus cast a fascinating light on the whole idea of the opera producer, which Hans Keller used to call a "phoney profession." He meant one which had not previously existed (like "the viola player"-until this century, there was no such person, only violinists who happened at that moment to be playing the viola), and whose invention created more problems than it solved.
"Arts minister" sounds like another phoney profession. At any rate, Chris Smith did not attend the Ring, nor did Colin Southgate, the recently appointed chairman of the ROH. Perhaps they thought they would have been in personal danger. The huge crescendo of applause which mounted night by night, was unmistakably a political demonstration, culminating five minutes after the end of G?tterd?mmerung, when Haitink stopped the cheering and told us to lobby our MPs: "This is serious."
In the second interval of Siegfried, I had bumped into a former Tory cabinet minister and his wife, who said how appalling the treatment of the orchestra was. I agreed, and added playfully (to a man who had been sacked by Thatcher), "I'm a Thatcherite and a free-marketeer, but this is an old-fashioned lock-out by the boss class." He replied without a smile, "Since you mention her, Mrs Thatcher wouldn't have let this happen. Whatever else about her, she believed in excellence. And national prestige." He might be right.
Just before this Ring, we learned that yet another head of the ROH had been appointed (I believe, incidentally, that at one point last year there were three different chief executives drawing salaries simultaneously). It's tempting to say to Michael Kaiser, "Einem Starken noch ist's nur bestimmt," but Hagen's words-It needs a stronger man than you-are unfair if not unapt. Let's just say to the new American head: "The best of British luck." He'll need it.
