I've recently been listening to some of the BBC Proms concerts on ABC-FM. The last couple of evenings they broadcast the first two parts of Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen (for those that don't know, they are The Rhine Gold and The Valkyrie). They were meant to be doing the third opera - Siegfried - tonight, I thought, but that seems not to be the case.
Anyway, last night the BBC presenter was waxing enthusiastic about how this was opera for everyone, and how that was Wagner's dream in essence: that the Ring cycle would be staged at Bayreuth, at a price that the ordinary folk could afford, and provide them with a kind of mythology of their own. I was a little surprised when I heard this. It seemed to me that our civilisation had already *seen* such a popular adoption of Germanic myths. It was called the Third Reich.
This got me to thinking that, perhaps, the Third Reich could not have been imagined had Wagner's music not existed. At least, it could not have been imagined in the way it was realised.
I'm not saying that Wagner himself would have approved of the Reich. At the least I think that, having died fifty years before its inception, he should be given the benefit of the doubt. But his music ensured it would have a kind of monstrous majesty that comparable regimes did not.
For example, there had certainly been genocidal regimes before. Rome's destruction of Carthage comes to mind, as does the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. But, I think, both of those were qualitatively different. The destruction of Carthage can fairly be seen as Rome deciding that the Mediterranean was simply not big enough for two major powers. The slaughter of the Armenians, too, seems to have been less an ideological campaign than a empire deciding to ensure that one of its subject peoples needed to be firmly ground down. I'm not excusing either event, or denying that they represented genocides. But both also look like the ordinary fruit of human cruelty.
Equally, the Third Reich was hardly the only authoritarian regime of its time, but it was in a singular class too. The administration in Imperial Japan, for example, looked like the sort of cookie-cutter quasi-military government one can find in modern history from Ghana to Chile. The regimes of Franco, Mussolini and (maybe) Pétain were anti-democratic and thoroughly nasty, but at some level seem to have contented themselves with an ideological patina on the iron glove.
It seems to me that Nazi Germany was different in both respects. Both in its genocidal and authoritarian urges, it seemed to obey an internal logic whereby even the grossest crimes became right , just and rational. My instinct (I don't think it rises even to being a hypothesis) is that the operatic order and drive that Wagner manifested in the Ring, and in Parsifal and Rienzi and Tannhäuser, supplied a kind of intellectual trackway along which along which a certain line of Germanic thought could develop.
My instinct is strengthened by an argument running the other way: one can't watch Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro", with its skewering of Count Almaviva, without seeing the deflation if the Second Estate that would eventually explode into the French Revolution. By a similar process (in the opposite direction) one can see the Germanic, hero-worshipping drives in Wagner that would come to power in 1934.
So where am I going with all of this? I'm no supporter of censoring ideas, or thoughts, or music. And I think I've fully absorbed the point George Orwell made about Newspeak, as a tool for preventing the wrong ideas even being thought. And yet: judges by its (unintended) fruits, shouldn't the Ring and its ilk stand condemned as the midwives of a nightmare, and be decently ignored, forgotten, and not again performed? Or am I making too much of too little?
Would love to have your thoughts.
