Comments

1
A sequel? Are you taking requests? I'd like an exhaustive four-day diary of the long dance-chant ceremonies in New Mexico. You're a fun writer.
2
The sequel is "Das Rheingold"
3
Unless they changed it, I'm stupefied by your reaction to this production's finale. But some critics down through the years have felt that the music is anticlimatic.
4
Sex during finals week?
5
I think you have a gift for sizing up the situation accurately and making often amusing observations about your experiences. Of course, I hate Ricard Wagner's later work for the most part. But, I LOVE Mudhoney and, I'm a Dead-Phish head.
6
Really good writing, again!
7
@2 FTW. Of course there's a sequel. That's the point.
8
Oh, and thanks again for the write ups. Hope I get another shot at going in this life.
9
There are basically two major schools of thought on the ending of Götterdämmerung, one being the Shavian interpretation (and please, by all means read Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite...it's short, witty, and. IMHO, completely wrong, but well worth the read), in which the Ring cycle is an allegory for the introduction of the socialist paradise. (The reason I think Shaw was wrong has to do with a lot of stuff that happens in this final opera, most notably Siegfried's death)

The other, more interesting one, is the proto-psychological/mythological interpretation (Wagner antedates both Freud and Jung, whom he particularly anticipates), in which the current state of humanity is personified in Wotan especially. If there's any work of art that approaches the mythology of the Ring Cycle, it's 2001 (note that the movie, too, begins with the creation of the world, moves to a conflagration in which the sum total of human understanding, HAL, is destroyed, and then something wonderful and new is born)

Probably the best introduction to the Ring that I've read is Fr. Owen Lee's Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Around. It's short, very readable and aimed at beginners. It improved my understanding and appreciation for the cycle immensely when I was just starting out.
10
@2 @7, actually, if you pay close attention to the music at the end, you'll find that Das Rheingold really can't be a sequel, even though the Ring ends up back in the hands of the Rhinemaidens. There's definitely an arrow to history in the Ring.
11
@9 I've always held the position that whatever Wagner thought he was doing with the Ring, in the end it totally slipped the leash, which is one of the things that make it a work of genius and true art. Shaw really helped me get to this conclusion because his obvious over the top wrongness really freed me to experience and interpret the Ring wholly on my own.

@10 It seemed to me that when Brunhilde invokes the End, it turns everything to slag, except the "elementals" like Loge and the Rheinemaidens, leaving the foundation rebirth from the beginning. But I'm with the review here, I confess that by that point I'm swept up into a semi(?)conscious experience of the event.
12
I always thought it would be interesting to find out what happens to Gutrune, who was sort-of-innocently mixed up in this by her family. Say if she doesn't die in the apocalyptic fire/flood, and is carrying Siegfried's bebbeh.
13
@12 Gutrune stabs herself committing suicide at the end of the opera. You don't see her fall dead but I believe that death is implied.
14
@11 I think it's very true that Wagner didn't consciously understand everything he was doing with the whole cycle. And of course, the wonderful thing about it is that it can be understood on so many different levels and in different ways, which is why I find it endlessly fascinating decades after I first discovered it and truly started studying it. It's the rare work of art that still gives you sudden insights (that zen moment) over and over again for years and years and years. There's a depth there that I haven't found anywhere else.

There's a couple pieces of evidence I'd offer to suggest that things don't return to the status quo ante. First of all, the gods and Rhinemaidens are all on the same level, of the same species really. Wotan himself, Sky-Father, as he's sometimes called, is an elemental like Loge. Ambitious, yes, but fundamentally, he's a god of the air, like Donner or Froh.

Second, there's strong evidence (at the beginning of the 3rd act of Siegfried and the beginning of Götterdämmerung that Erda, while not consumed in the end, has fallen into endless slumber, indicating that her time, too, has passed. And Loge himself, at the end of Das Rheingold pretty clearly sees disaster not just for Wotan's family gods, but himself too. This is a true twilight of all the gods, a real passing of the whole order.

And then finally, as Lee points out, there's the issue of the key changes in the final bars, where instead of returning to E♭ (the key of the primal element motif at the beginning of Rheingold) as you would expect, but rather in D♭ instead, with heavy emphasis on that Brunnhilde motif otherwise heard only when she rescues Sieglinde at the beginning of act 3 of Die Walküre.

All of this leads me to believe that this is not a return to the beginning, but rather the beginning of something new, that cannot be foreseen from where we are.
15
@13, does that happen, or is it some director's idea of what happens? If it happens in this production, well, I haven't seen it & won't be able to. I haven't looked at the libretto in a long time.

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