Attending Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung does not feel like going to any other opera. It could be that it’s a weeklong commitment spread across four nights. Or that while people dressed up, they also sported headbands with wings, in the style of the protagonists’ helms.
Maybe it’s how, between the acts, people ask each other about the other Rings they’ve seen. Or perhaps it’s how attendees share tips about where to eat around the theatre during the production (As Edith Wharton once noted, rather caustically, the duration of Wagner’s “caterwauling” can make dining rushed).
In any case, you’re entering into a whole fandom – bonds interwoven with people’s relationships with their grandparents and spouses. Wagner’s work has inspired such enthusiasm since he was only the Dresden Kapellmeister, a young leftie firebrand – that’s when, in 1847, the term “Wagnerian” was coined (derogatorily).
Since then, it’s been used to describe figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Herzl, Stephan Mallarmé, W.E.B. DuBois, Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel. This past May and June, for three Ring cycles – the complete four operas from Das Rheingold through Götterdämmerung – hundreds of Wagnerians gathered at the Deutsche Oper – and your correspondent here was among them.
You might suggest that I’m focusing on the wrong thing – I should be looking to the stage rather than scanning the besuited and fur-and-latex-adorned crowd. But the nature of the crowd is a question thematised by Stefan Herheim’s staging of the fourth and final part of the cycle, The Twilight of the Gods, which turns its gaze upon the audience.
It is not only that this final instalment opens with a set that looks exactly like the Deutsche Oper’s foyer, but there’s also a moment when the lights go up and the side doors open, and a group of elegantly-clad, playbill-clutching opera-goers wander on stage. I must admit that I looked around enviously. Who of us had the luck to be invited to take part in The Twilight of the Gods? How were they chosen? But I couldn’t see any empty seats. And when the seeming civilians began to sing as part of the proto-fascist Hagen’s rally, it was clear that these talented singers only looked like us; no audience could boast such talent.
With such theatrical choices, Herheim suggests the audience itself is part of the spectacle, and demands they consider how they relate to the performance. And the audience did reflect – with frequent conversations among the crowd about how they reconciled their fandom with Wagner’s rabid antisemitism.
The man and his work might be controversial, camp, vicious even
“They say Wagner was antisemitic,” I hear a man say to his significantly younger companion. “But nobody is spotless.” Besides, he added, you have to place him in the context of his time. But Wagner’s antisemitism was, for any moment, particularly venomous. In his Jewishness in Music, a screed that he published twice in his life and that targeted Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer by insisting that they could only imitate culture, not make it, he calls Jews (in a phrase later parroted by Goebbels) “the plastic demon of the downfall of humanity”.
Herheim – and the stage designer, Silke Bauer – have clearly considered this aspect of Wagner’s work in their staging. There is an unsettling contrast between the opulence of the Deutsche Oper foyer for this final section and how the performance began five days earlier, with the arrival of refugees in Das Rheingold whose suitcases are the cycle’s dominant visual motif.
By making the search for home a major theme, they try to unsettle Wagner’s framing of Jews as a “corrosive foreign element”, a prejudice embedded in the very music and libretto. And yet, rather than push forward the question of “existential homelessness” that the staging so eloquently broached, the production was content to recognise their Otherness by turning Jewish-coded characters Alberich and Hagen into evil clowns, and another into a gnome.
But if its address of Wagner’s antisemitism was not completely satisfying, I can at least attest that the production did successfully slip the charges of indigestion. With Siegfried beginning at 4 pm, you do have to plan to ensure you have adequate ballast to enjoy the bombast. If you have deep enough pockets, you can preorder the Ring Menu (€67). Or you could, as I did one intermission, go to Crispy Döner, located just outside the opera house, in the middle of Richard-Wagner-Straße. (They really should start selling onion rings, so they can offer their own “Ring Menu”.)
There, I found myself eating my börek next to a man with “I ♥ Drama” tattooed on his wrist. And perhaps that’s the best explanation for why people turn out again and again for Wagner: the man and his work might be controversial, camp, vicious even, but – and this is very much true of Herheim’s rendition – it’s never boring.