A. C. Douglas calls it a "Superb Essay Apropos Wagner's Art". I agree, although on the basis of far less knowledge of Wagner than Douglas has. The piece in question is by British conservative Roger Scruton, and is entitled Desecrating Wagner. Read all of it, says Douglas. I did, and recommend others to do the same. Douglas also supplied the direct link to the piece, which I wouldn't have been able to get to without such help.
This rang a particular bell:
Wagner tried to create a new musical public, one that would see the point of idealising the human condition. This attempt was already doomed when he first conceived it: kitsch culture was already eclipsing the romantic icon of the artist as priest. Since then, Wagner's enterprise has acquired its own tragic pathos, as modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, decide in their turn to make a mockery of the dramas. Of course, even today, musicians and singers, responding as they must to the urgency and sincerity of the music, do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner intended. But the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted commas, and reduced to the dimensions of a television sitcom. Sarcasm and satire run riot, as in Richard Jones's 1994-6 Covent Garden production of the "Ring", because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner's message and to mock every heroic gesture. As Michael Tanner has argued, in his penetrating defence of the composer, modern productions attempt to "domesticate" Wagner, to bring his dramas down from the exalted sphere in which the music places them, to the world of human trivia, usually in order to make a "political statement" which, being both blatant and banal, succeeds only in cancelling the rich ambiguities of the drama.
As a special treat, a few months ago I bought myself the entire Ring Cycle on DVD, in the only production then available in that format, the 70s Bayreuth one directed by Patrice Chereau and conducted by Pierre Boulez. The singing is, to my un-Wagnerian ear, pretty good, and Boulez, not my favourite musician in all the world, does a fine job of keeping things moving, in both senses. It sounds great, I think. Most of the singing is very fine. Thanks to the magic of subtitles (which makes DVD such a boon for opera) I now know far better what the blazes it is all about. But Chereau's staging is an oddhybrid. You never know if you are going to be faced with something really quite Wagnerian, like the Valkyrie rock, or not very Wagnerian, like the shamelessly mechanical dragon in Siegfried that fills in for a real one, or not Wagnerian at all, like characters dressed as mid-twentieth century librarians instead of Wagnerian baritones. The giants in Rhinegold look just like giants and are excellent, but the Rhine itself is a hydro-electric power station, which can't be what Wagner originally put, surely. Wotan looks like Wotan. But Gunther looks like he works for Sky TV. And so on.
This might explain the fact although at first utterly gripped, I became progressively less involved as the Cycle churned on. It sounds great throughout, but the thing itself progressively eluded me. Rhinegold, despite the industrialised Rhine and despite the fact that this is the one in the tretralogy that contains by far the fewest Wagner best bits (only the wonderful entry of the Gods into Valhalla really qualifies), is splendid. This is, I think, because the action in it is the least "mythical" and accordingly the sort of thing that Chereau is least embarrassed by. Loge (Heinz Zednik) is an especially splendid creation. He looks the way the soul of Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister would look if you ever got a glimpse of it. But as the action of the Cycle gets ever more inescapably "mythical", I found myself more and more put off by the staging oddities. Nor did it help that Siegfried (Manfred Jung) looked like exactly what he was, namely a middle aged man pretending to be twenty years younger.
The trouble with an "authentic" Ring, of the sort someone who agrees with Scruton would presumably attempt, is that it is awfully liable to look even more ridiculous than the dafter bits in the Chereau Ring. Put a contemporary singer in a ye olde Wagner costume, and he or she is liable to look like exactly that and nothing more, making the suspension of disbelief even more impossible. Years ago I caught a few acts on TV of the Metropolitan Opera Ring conducted by James Levine (which is now available on DVD but wasn't when I was picking one for myself), and I now remember quite a lot of it as looking idiotic – with mysteriously singing accountants and district nurses clumping about in am' dram' costumes, and look about as mythical as Xena the Warrior Princess, in fact quite a lot less so. But maybe that was just me, then, resisting the spell of Wagner by deliberately distancing myself from it all.
Our best hope, I think, is that the ever-evolving art of cinema animation may one day give us an embarrassment-free and appropriately mythical Ring Cycle on DVD or its subsequent equivalent which truly presents Wagner's original intentions in their amazing entirety. When I first saw Terminator 2 and was blown away by the still incredible special effects in it, I wrote a review of it which included the words "I wonder if Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Wagner nut."
