This book is subtitled
A Novel of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
It tells the story of the four
music-dramas in short novel format and
at first sight may seem simply to be
an extended synopsis. Bearing in mind
that The Ring is one of the most
written about works of art in history,
the question is: do we need this book?
Well the innovative
thing about it is that it is structured
around the main characters or character
groups so each chapter bears the name
of one of these. How it works is that
each of the four dramas gets on average
just over 25 pages divided into a varying
number of chapters. So Rheingold,
the shortest drama, gets four with
Alberich, Frica, Loge and Donner,
and Götterdämmerung,
the longest, paradoxically gets only
one with The Gibechungs. You
wouldn’t know this, by the way, from
the table of contents – there isn’t
one! Bad mark for that.
Ian Runcie has set
himself a tricky task in trying to balance
a focus on the characters each with
their "lives, histories, philosophies
and psychology", with a story-teller’s
imperative to keep the narrative rolling
along. Under the circumstances I think
he copes remarkably well.
The book’s blurb suggests
that Runcie would claim that the raison
d’être for his work is the character-study
approach although I think there is also
merit in stripping the libretto down
to a damn good story. When sitting in
the opera house through one of the
Ring’s longeurs, it is easy to forget
that you are in the midst of a rattling
tale of sex and violence. Although Runcie
tells the story quite well he makes
a couple of mistakes, in my opinion,
which drag the format away from the
story-novel approach towards synopsis,
the result being a muddled compromise
between the two. First, he quotes chunks
of text to serve as dialogue. These
are in original verse format in (unacknowledged)
translation. Second, he is inconsistent,
in introducing quotes, with his use
of "says" and "sings".
The characters may do one or the other.
In novels, as in real life, people do
not normally sing to each other when
communicating, let alone speak in verse.
Very occasionally he
gets the characters to "speak"
in the first person and here Runcie
invents his own words. It is one of
the devices which enables him to get
at their psychology and indulge some
of his own interpretation.
His interpretation
owes a lot, or maybe everything, to
Robert Donnington whose book, Wagner’s
Ring and its Symbols, was published
forty years ago. Basically, this was
a Jungian analysis of the Ring’s meaning,
taking the characters as archetypes
so they are mother figures, child figures,
and so on. But a single character might
have several sides to it; and nearly
everyone has their dark side. In terms
of Wagner literature, Donnington’s book
seemed pretty trendy at the time and
reflected some of the extreme symbolic
aspects of Bayreuth productions of the
post-war years. Some people thought
it went too far, judging it a pretentious
intellectual game in symbolism. I was
suspicious when I read it and went so
far as to find a library that held Jung’s
complete works and found that the texts
were littered with specific references
to Wotan, Brünnhilde, Erda et al
as archetypes. It follows that Jung
was assuming his readers knew their
Ring – an interesting insight
into intellectual life in the German-speaking
world!
Anyone who has read
Donnington will find the influence on
Runcie plain to see. For example, there
is no chapter entitled "Wotan";
only a three page "epilogue"
bearing his name. This is on the grounds,
presumably, that all the characters
are aspects of Wotan’s own make-up,
or, to go further, he IS the Ring.
I enjoyed the little epilogue which
consists of Wotan’s cynical review of
the whole sorry business. It helped
to bring out what for me is the funny
side of the Ring, a story that
is a catalogue of human failings, where
people (I include Gods here) are driven
inexorably into no-win situations of
their own making and hardly ever learn;
a tale that is a monument to "the
triumph of hope over experience" and
where chief God Wotan ends up paralysed
by his wife’s nagging and his own dilemmas.
The consequences are so unremittingly
disastrous you can only laugh.
Among three short appendices
is a succinct four–page note on some
of the philosophy that informs The
Ring. This is taken from Bryan Magee
(acknowledged) who has written extensively
on Wagner and philosophy. Here Runcie
points out the influence on Wagner of
Feuerbach (which he spells "Faeueuberg").
It was only after Wagner had completed
the libretto of The Ring,
a work infused with Feuerbach’s thinking,
that he discovered the philosophy of
Schopenhauer. In spite of this, Runcie
admits that he is giving a Schopenhauer
slant to his interpretation. This could
perhaps be justified on the grounds
that Wagner said that on reading Schopenhauer
he realised he was a Schopenhaueran
all along without knowing it. But if
he had read Schopenhauer before,
then the Ring would have turned
out very different. We know this because
he did start to alter it and then changed
his mind. The ending of The Ring
as we have it is a Feuerbach ending
that belongs to Wagner’s anarchy days
and is based on the principle that a
prerequisite to a better and freer material
world is the destruction and sweeping
away of the old order. Runcie, in his
epilogue, bets on a bleak outlook which
does not lead to a better world. That
is Schopenhaueran in its pessimism.
I do not think a Schopenhauer
interpretation justified. Trying to
turn the Ring into Tristan
und Isolde (which was a Schopenhauer
creation involving the conflict between
earthly wanting and a desire for dissolution
into an "at-one-ness") doesn’t
work. For example, Runcie has a strong
sexual tension in operation between
Wotan and Brünnhilde with Tristanesque
yearning for at-one-ness thrown in.
This is not in the libretto although
admittedly it’s not too difficult to
do a pop Freudian sublimation take on
the relationship. But Runcie writes
his own script that sounds like a racy
piece of airport-novel romantic fiction.
So at the end of Die Walküre,
as Wotan says goodbye to Brünnhilde
prior to imprisoning her on the rock,
"Brünnhilde closes her eyes
and with tender kisses on her lips,
feels him firm against her." This
is her father remember. Then Runcie
goes into Wagner-speak for Brünnhilde’s
own words: "Wotan my father-lover
you have realised your destiny, your
true self, your great love. We are one.
I am your wish maiden." And then,
"She feels her breastplate being
lifted away. Blocking out all sensations
except the thrill of tightening to his
touch she relaxes to finally, ecstatically,
yield and fuse with him."
What Runcie is beginning
to do here is merge Wotan with Siegfried
so that when the latter turns up a generation
later to wake Brünnhilde, she sees
a lover who is a young-looking father
– or a father who has turned into a
young lover. You get the drift. Schopenhauer
meets Freud and Jung.
Paradoxically, when
it comes to sex that is unequivocally
in Wagner’s script – between Siegmund
and Sieglinde at curtain fall at the
end of the first act of Die Walküre
- Runcie describes it prudishly, making
it seem rather perfunctory and less
erotic than the near-miss between Wotan
and Brünnhilde: "The two lovers
rush towards the hills to consummate
their joy and complete their destiny."
On the back cover the
book’s stated aim is "to stimulate
old hands and inspire new fans".
My initial view was that the book could
be an enjoyable way for newcomers to
start to get to grips with both the
story and the issues. I worry about
some of the interpretive eccentricities
but maybe that is to patronise newcomers.
Old hands I thought would not get too
much out of it. But then here I am,
an old hand (albeit still learning)
who has been provoked by some claims
in the book and has therefore been made
to think. In a sense, therefore, I have
been stimulated and for that I must
be grateful to an English doctor from
Sussex. Thank you Dr Runcie.
John Leeman
