Twilight of Descartes

Last Saturday, the Met broadcast its production of Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), the fourth and final part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  Ever since I first heard about this opera, I’ve wanted to see it, and now, thanks to the glories of Met in HD broadcasts, I have.  Altogether, it’s about a 15 hour long opera—the fourth part alone was a 6 hour event (including two intermissions).  The production was stunning, and the opera was every bit as amazing as I had always thought it would be.

So, what is the message, point, or conclusion of Wagner’s Ring?  I have absolutely no idea.  It is a sprawling, messy work.  Indeed, trying to forge some sort of coherent message here seems to me to be a Fool’s Errand.  It is the spectacle that matters, the recurring leitmotifs, the gods and dwarves and giants and dragons.  It is the rise of the man who knows no fear and the transformation of Brunnhilde from loyal daughter of Wotan to lover of Siegfried and the curse of Alberich and the failure of Wotan—all of these wrapped up into a massive, overwhelming, awe-inspiring tribute to…what?  One can, as Shaw did, spin this as some socialist tale showing the problem of the cursed lust for gold, but such an argument makes the opera too small.  If all of this is simply a footnote to Marx, then so what?  Every attempt to spin a moral tale makes this opera too small.

What I find intriguing about Wagner’s monumental mess is that it points to the idea of something which cannot be reduced.  A streamlined Ring, a Ring in which there was a coherent theme would be a very different thing.  And a much poorer thing.  Am I supposed to admire Siegfried or not?  Honestly, if that question could be answered, Siegfried gets smaller.  Am I supposed to mourn the Twilight of the Gods or not?  And again, to answer that is to diminish the opera.

In other words, this opera strikes me as the Triumph of Romanticism.  There is a wild, unknown, unknowable thing out there which is still True, but I have no ability to articulate it in cold, logical rational statements.  The Enlightenment dies in Wagner’s Ring.  The Gods and Dwarves and Giants and Heroes all Die in a great conflagration. And we are left with what?  The Wasteland.