With all the bad luck that's befallen Peter Gelb's Ring cycle lately--scenery malfunctions in Das Rheingold, personnel malfunctions in Die Walküre--Classicalite figured it was passed time for the great Irish critic George Bernard Shaw to step and save the production from itself.
Below, in this first excerpt from his brilliant 1898 work The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring, Shaw offers a few "preliminary encouragements" on why everyone, everywhere should experience one of the greatest achievements in classical music.
After all, it is the bicentenary of Richard Wagner's birth.
Moreover, as a worried source close to Classicalite tells it, Gelb's re-mounting is only selling around 51 percent of the Met's seats.
A few of these will be welcome to the ordinary citizen visiting the theatre to satisfy his curiosity, or his desire to be in the fashion, by witnessing a representation of Richard Wagner's famous Ring of the Niblungs.
First, The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the life he is himself fighting his way through, it must needs appear to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation by the principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of view, The Ring is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes, both orchestral and dramatic. The nature music alone--music of river and rainbow, fire and forest--is enough to bribe people with any love of the country in them to endure the passages of political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come. Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short, the vast extent of common ground between The Ring and the ordinary music we use for play and pleasure. Hence it is that the four separate music-plays of which it is built have become popular throughout Europe as operas. We shall presently see that one of them, Night Falls on the Gods, actually is an opera.
It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and searching philosophic and social significance. I profess to be such a superior person; and I write this pamphlet for the assistance of those who wish to be introduced to the work on equal terms with that inner circle of adepts.
Want to read more of G.B. Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite? Well, you're in luck. Classicalite will post a second "encouragment" from Shaw on Thursday.
