The myth continues to weave its web!

Dr. Christian Baier on Hartmut Schörghofer’s Ring production

It’s 1848. Amidst the turmoil of the March revolution, Richard Wagner shows up on the barricades alongside nationalist-minded students and commoners. He has already composed Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser. The Court Composer for the Saxon Court has a new stage work floating around in his head – Siegfrieds Tod. At the same time, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proclaims that “a spectre is haunting Europe...”

It’s 1876. Der Ring des Nibelungen is playing for the first time in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. And the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany holds its first party conference. It took 26 years for Wagner to complete his monumental music drama. It was the period when some of the most profound changes in European history began to take shape: far-reaching changes in the political landscape were paving the way for disastrous nationalism. The West was already on the long way ultimately leading to the dark days of the First World War. Forced industrialisation was leading to the capitalisation of life. Large parts of the population were becoming impoverished. The revolutions of the 20th century were becoming inevitable.

Der Ring des Nibelungen was first envisaged in the euphoria of German national consciousness and completed three years after the first German Reich was founded. It is a mirror of the period. Many stand before it only to confirm their own beliefs – like Snow White’s wicked stepmother. The sabrerattling Teutonism of the era of Emperor Wilhelm II used it to legitimise its irrational sense of history so that the small-state Germany that was to be united would commit to a shared historical origin. (Although the material comes from the Icelandic Edda saga and is only peripherally connected to Germany.) Occult rune researchers and dubious historians have let themselves be inspired to conceive outrageous racial theories by the work’s inherent mysticism way beyond the bounds of scientific ethics. Later, national socialism would help itself. Wagner’s work with the Nordic myths was like an operation on the open heart of a society which was similarly lacking in history and roots to the young American nation. However, while the Americans, cut off from the motherland, had to coin their own traditions, Germany mentally helped itself to the Ring like to a costume wardrobe. The contemporary caricature of the German archetype (Huns with loincloth, helmet and sword) matched the dominant cultural self-image.

The need to be overpowered felt at the time when it was made was met by the gigantic scale of the opus and, for many, it shifted their focus onto the studio theatre style depth-of-field with which Wagner traced the political and social circumstances of their present-day through the film of a primeval scenario.

Hartmut Schörghofer’s new production of the Ring makes the disastrous misunderstanding to which myths are exposed in times of global search for identity into the central theme. The iconographic arc of his interpretation spans from the surging Rhine, magical symbol of a nation, to the cosmic global conflagration. In doing so, he goes through all the aggregate states of the creative matter and establishes their relationship to destructive materialism; water and fire, air and earth. From these arises the Gold, the harmless toy of the Rhinemaidens and the driving force of the human greed for power.

As Wagner’s poetry ignites at the source of the universe, Schörghofer attaches a dimension of visual stimulation to the scene sequences showing the ascent, resplendence and decline of the Nordic pantheon which interlinks the specific actions with the mythological-natural element in a way that is rich in associations.

The form of presentation which was specially developed for the performance site and which takes advantage of all its architectural possibilities expands out of the concert situation and finally, using new media, ends in apocalypse and dystopia. In this way, this hybrid interplay of expressive devices and presentation forms comes much closer to the hubris inherent to the material than conventional performance practices can sometimes manage. Instead of overwhelming along the same lines, the director relies on the potential of subcutaneous penetration. As the philosopher Johann Georg Hamann recognised “The entire treasure of human understanding is found in images.”

Schörghofer’s Ring is a laboratory situation. In front of a background of visual worlds which have an overwhelming effect on the subconscious, the persons acting in the most vivid and most oppressively topical moments of the production look like lab mice. On the one hand, they have to subordinate themselves to the requirements of the mythical experimental design, on the other hand they are constantly driven to strive to break out of the corset of response constraints and to arrive at an individuality outside the myth. But a fatal conflict situation made up of economic obligations, social constraints and half-hearted assignations measures out stalemates in which the fathers’ loser generation leaves their lost sons to resolve a proxy war. However, no matter how modern his vision of the work is, the director always maintains great humility towards Wagner’s music and the human voice. This humility – a boon in this age of constant assertions of identity and self-enactment – is not the result of the blind/indiscriminate veneration with which, in the century and a half since the Bayreuth première, people have saved themselves the painful process of finding a personal relationship to the work. No, Schörghofer’s humility has almost educational characteristics. It is applied where Wagner himself localised the root of the disaster – with humankind itself. The downfall begins its cycle due to Alberich’s natural desire to be recognised by the Rhinemaidens. Rejected and unsatisfied, this longing for love mutates into a monstrous demand for greatness and power. With this hubris, the mythological balance begins to totter. The emotional wounding of the individual is poison for the naivete which feeds and animates every myth. If innocence is lost, the myth loses its enchantment. The twilight of the gods then turns into a bureaucratic bankruptcy proceedings. The final alternative plan to the demise of the myth is banal – unconditional love which see the global conflagration as the final resort. Schörghofer develops the charged interpersonal relationships from the existential starting situation of fatal proxy actions. Between the mystical summoning rituals and the mythomaniac fantasy scenarios, he brings us to understand one thing: the composer was not talking about the stock characters of a Nordic Skaldic poem. Wagner does not make it that easy for us! The loophole in our excuse is closed.

It’s about us, the people of the 21st century, as sober as we’re sobered up, rational checkers and rationalising doers who would so much like to ignore the fact that, to the sounds of “Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt”, under the thin coating of our (self) awareness, we are nothing other than driftwood in the stream of human history, thrown from crag to crag, playthings between the whirlpools and the shallows with our hands outstretched towards the banks. A solitary Wanderer stands there and watches as we struggle to survive...