And this is precisely the form that Wagner created, tending toward it from the outset, but truly fulfilling it only in the later works, including the Ring. The new Mime’s craft, however, contained an apparent contradiction. Though Wagner wanted it to be grounded in everyday, “natural” behavior (we note that this “natural,” “instinctive” quality that he wants to find in his Mimes is also what he valorizes in the young Siegfried), he then wanted this naturalness raised to “portrayal of an image above and beyond the experience of daily life,” to that of an ideal life, even as Goethe (he asserted) had in Faust raised his poetry to a “supreme ideality whose germ lay lurking in the homeliest element of the German Folk.” And in the Ring Wagner raised this bar to a dauntingly high level. For though there is no doubt that he created the “natural” continuity he envisioned, and that the stage life of this vast work moves along quite like actual life in its conversations, confrontations, and talking-to-oneself monologues, it does so in the world of myth, and in the world of song. The world of myth dictates that a “heavy,” epic quality, a special kind of ideality beyond that of, let us say, a nobly sacrificing ruler, imbues all its personae (and if we forget this, the music reminds us again and again). The world of song stipulates that all its happenings occur on a level of excitation, of energy mobilization, quite beyond that of daily life, or even that of the spoken theatre. The specific nature of these challenges in Siegfried, and how they were met in the Met’s performance of May 2, will be the subject of my next post.

˜ ˜ ˜

Mini-bibliography:

Cooke, Deryck: I Saw the World End/A Study of Wagner’s Ring,  Oxford Univ. Press, 1979

Donington, Robert: Wagner’s “Ring” and Its Symbols, St. Martin’s Press, 1963

Goldman, Albert, and Sprinchorn, Evert: Wagner on Music and Drama, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964

Horowitz, Joseph: Wagner Nights/An American History, Univ. of California Press, 1994

Wagner, Richard (Wm. Ashton Ellis, trans.): Actors and Singers, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995

Winkler, Franz E.: For Freedom Destined/Mysteries of Man’s Evolution in the Mythology of Wagner’s Ring Operas and Parsifal, Waldorf Press, 1974

˜ ˜ ˜

NEXT TIME: Siegfried, the Performance. On Friday, May 24.

# # #