Ring Cycle Films

[jallanite]

Götterdämmerung: Review

Introduction

This film is of course, mostly superb. Its the conclusion of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and, as such, one of the most praised pieces in the history of opera.

So perhaps it might be more interesting to instead try to find everything that might possibly be wrong with it.

Opera

First, why an opera? An opera limits one to (mostly) fat singers orating in a most artificial music style. In most adaptations of traditional stories, one must cast out or downplay what is most effective in the originals. Surely if a musical drama is even considered desirable, then one more in tune with the surviving originals would be more suitable.

Opera today is supported not by any mass audience but by public funds and private donations by extremely wealthy individuals and by large corporations.

Story

The centre of the medieval story is the fall of the Nibelungs in which Gunther and Hagen are deceived into going to what purports to be just a friendly party at the court of Attila the Hun. But the fix is in! Hagen, realizing they have stepped into a death trap, begins matters in his traditional way by openly murdering his and Gunther’s nephew at the banquet. In the end almost everyone on both sides is killed.

But Wagner, after telling his version of the events leading up to the main course, untraditionally kills off Gunther and Hagen quickly, leaving out the main story altogether. It is as bad as Shakespeare leaving out the second part of the story of Hamlet (including Hamlet’s Scottish wife), Shakespeare giving a tragic ending to the story of King Lear, and as bad as the recent Hollywood films First Knight and King Arthur which ignore the genuine medieval stories for mediocre modern invention.

It is very little better than leaving out Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire from Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.

Even taking only Götterdämerung into consideration, and allowing that some simplification is justified, what point in Wagner messing up in his presentation of the quarrel over the Ring? In all surviving medieval accounts that present this quarrel, Siegfried has given the Ring to his wife and she flaunts the Ring openly to Brünnhilde in a quarrel over precedence to show that her husband, not Gunther, had actually won Brünnhilde and that after taking the Ring from Brünnehilde as spoils, Siegfried had bestowed the Ring on her, his true love and wife. Wagner, unlike his sources, makes the quarrel over the Ring be directly between Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

Brünnhilde’s fiery suicide on Siegfried’s pyre of which Wagner makes so much is mentioned in the sources only in the Norse Lesser Lay of Sigurð and in the Norse Vǫlsungassaga. It may well be a late and unessential addition to the story. In the Þiðreks saga and in the Nibelungenlied Brünnhild/Brynhildr is last mentioned viciously and joyfully exalting over the corpse of Siegfried/Sigurð who had betrayed her and then is never referred to again.

Wagner does not integrate all his sources well and does not integrate them with his his own interpretation of the Ring as a ring of supreme power. Why does Wagner’s Brünnhilde remain on her rock and not accompany Siegfried out into the world? Wagner’s Brünnhilde knows about the Ring and its power but says nothing of it to Siegfried. Exactly how does the Ring passing through fire dissolve Alberich’s curse? Alberich had simply taken the Rhine gold by force from the Rhine maidens. Why cannot he or anyone willing to forswear love / carnal lust simply do so again? How does Alberich’s forswearing of love / carnal lust agree with Alberich’s fathering Hagen on Grimhild, King Gibich’s wife? At the end the return of the Ring to the Rhine apparently undoes the forging of the Ring and sets everything back to the beginning, so why do Wotan and the gods perish. Valtrauta earlier strongly implied that if only Brünnhilde had cast the Ring into the Rhine before the complications began that everything would be all right for the gods.

Presentation

Grane, Siegfried’s horse, is represented by a life size puppet, but not a realistic one as in the dramatic production of The War Horse. (See http://www.mirvish.com/shows/warhorse .) Instead it appears as a puppet of the plate steel armour apparently worn by the horse. Is Grane supposed to be invisible when he isn’t wearing his plate armour?

Fortunately Grane doesn’t sing.

Siegfried continues to breathe when supposedly dead. That’s a difficulty that arises when the camera provides a closer view than one would normally get in the theatre.


The chorus of courtiers take both Siegfried’s death and Gunther’s death rather casually. They seem to know they are in an opera and are taking the opportunity to enjoy the music without raising any fuss.

Some might claim that anti-racist political correction has been taken too far. Some of Gunther’s courtiers are of Asian origin. That can be explained however. Historically the Huns were of Asian origin, not of Germanic origin, and contemporary descriptions indicate their Asian appearance. It is likely enough that the historical Burgundian kingdom included some Huns among their warriors. A dark-skinned maiden at court is more difficult to explain but not impossible. See http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2010/...n-britain.html . What is true of Britain would presumably be true of other parts of what was once the Roman empire.

I Take It All Back (Mostly)

Despite my qualms, Wagner’s Ring Cycle has since its first appearance in full in 1876 been recognized by enough people as a superb musical work that it must be so accepted. That my complaints are mostly valid just don’t matter. The naysayers are often people who claim not to like any opera. There are a smaller group of people who like opera in general but do not like Wagner and the reverse is true.

Most of those who very much like Wagner quite recognize most of my complaints, but just don’t care. For them, the work transcends any criticism, however valid that criticism might be.

[Bêthberry]

I wonder how much the mechanical staging effects owe to similar staging in the LotR musical? Did you see the musical when it opened in Toronto? I didn't but heard there were similar problems with getting all the lifts to work correctly.

Does viewing the Ring cycle give you a different perspective on LotR? What are the parallels between the two works? There are two books out (well, one already published and the other forthcoming) that look at Wagner and Tolkien. They sound interesting. One is Tolkien and Wagner:The Ring and Der Ring by Christopher MacLachlan and the other is Wagner and Tolkien: Mythmakers by Reneé Vink. Very intriguing comparison between Gandalf and Wotan, apparently in the first! (I haven't read the book.)

Both are from Walking Tree Publishers and can be found here.

[jallanite]

I didn’t see the Toronto Lord of the Rings musical either.

Problems with new mechanical scenery devices are normal enough. In computerese it is usual to interpret leading edge as bleeding edge. If you are trying something entirely new, it should be expected that it will not work altogether properly. The genuine bugs in “the machine” had been worked out by the time the films had been made.

Beyond that, opera itself depends a lot on willing suspension of disbelief in any case.

I really don’t see many parallels between Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Lord of the Rings beyond the totally obvious. Both have a supreme Ring of Power. Sméagol’s killing of Déagol parallels Fafner’s killing of Fasolt. The are more parallels between the Siegfried story and Tolkien’s story of Turin.

Wagner and Tolkien have almost no philosophical base in common and Wagner changed some of his ideas during his writing of the Ring Cycle which partly leads to the contradictions within his work. Partly the problem is that Wagner is adapting stories where the originals have nothing to do with a Ring of Power. Tolkien’s work is far more coherent. Wagner’s popularity has more to do with his amazing music, individual pieces of drama, and the panache with which he carries off the impossible.

The Ride of the Valkyries, in particular, succeeds on its own terms, unconnected with Wagner’s basic plot.

For years I have heard various people announce that they planned to write an essay comparing Wagner and Tolkien but none of these planned efforts have appeared. I suspect that this is because when these persons began to seriously think about it there is so little that is similar beyond the grossly obvious.

Wotan/Óðinn is of course obviously similar to Gandalf in some ways. But so are Merlin, Maugis of Aigremont, Väinäimöinen, Teiresias, Elijah, Elisha, Vashistha, Visvamitra, and some other traditional figures.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by jallanite

For years I have heard various people announce that they planned to write an essay comparing Wagner and Tolkien but none of these planned efforts have appeared. I suspect that this is because when these persons began to seriously think about it there is so little that is similar beyond the grossly obvious.

Wotan/Óðinn is of course obviously similar to Gandalf in some ways. But so are Merlin, Maugis of Aigremont, Väinäimöinen, Teiresias, Elijah, Elisha, Vashistha, Visvamitra, and some other traditional figures.

The first book I referenced has already been published while the other is listed by the publisher as forthcoming. Given that Walking Tree is a very credible, respectable press, I think both books should be interesting.

[jallanite]

The first book, Tolkien and Wagnar: The Ring and Der Ring by Christopher MacLachlan I have found to be mostly horrible.

MacLachlan does a reasonable job in showing that some scholarly and fan comment on Tolkien are misguided but the shows himself to be even more misguided. He misinterprets Tolkien’s famous statement:

Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases.

MacLachlan understands this to refer to Wagnar, but Ohlmarks’ statement includes a large amount that does not appear in Wagnar at all and Tolkien correctly refers to this being from the “Old Norse″ side and finds it a farrago of nonsense. It is even more so if one attempt to interpret it as a summary of Wagnar’s Ring Cycle.

MacLachlan ignores the rest of Ohlmarks’ rubbish and interprets it be mean that Tolkien is lying about the influence of Wagnar’s Ring Cycle on his work when the letter is not about the Ring Cycle at all. MacLachlan then attempts to show that there is a purposeful conspiracy begun by J. R. R. Tolkien and continued by his son to deny the influence of the Ring Cycle on The Lord of the Rings.

The claim is that Tolkien based almost the entire Lord of the Rings on Wagnar’s Ring Cycle and no-one has noticed until now. But the parallels MacLachlan draws between the two works require a great amount of special pleading to accept. In two cases MacLachlan thinks that it proves something that he thinks that Jackson’s film resembles Wagnar more than the book.

His main point is that Wagnar’s Wotan is the prototype to Tolkien’s Gandalf and tries to make Gandalf’s career to resemble Wotan’s, principally by trying to claim that Gandalf increasingly withdraws from the action. This means that Machlachlan must ignore Gandalf’s healing of Théoden and later the increase in courage that comes when Gandalf wanders among the defenders of Minas Tirith, as supposedly Gandalf like Wotan should be leaving all actions to others at this time.

MacLachlan claims more than once that the post-resurrection Gandalf noticeably performs less magic than the pre-resurrection Gandalf. That is simply not true.

In an Appendix MacLachlan blames Christopher Tolkien for not including more on the Ring Cycle in an Appendix on The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún but does not mention any details in the Ring Cycle also found in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún that are not in the Norse texts which answers why more does not appear. Apparently it does not bother MacLachlan at all that the Nibelungenlied, or the Thiðreks Saga, or William Morris’ The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, or other medieval or more modern reworkings are not treated by Christopher Tolkien here. He doesn’t see anything but Wagnar.

One outrageous statement by MacLachan on page 106 is complete fantasy:

Later Tolkien would try to identify his Necromancer with Sauron himself, thus trying to connect the plots of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring, although in fact problems of chronology would in the end defeat him.

The second book is Wagnar and Tolkien: Mythmakers by Renée Vink and it is a very different book, quite wonderful. Vink clearly indicates that Tolkien’s “Both rings were round, …” statement is not related to Wagnar at all and mostly simply talks about differences and similarities between Tolkien and Wagnar. She has great fun in cutting up the work of more than a hundred authors who have tried to distort either Tolkien or Wagnar to fit what they wish were true. She also fully discusses Wagnar’s use of alliteration and other Norse poetic devices in Wagnar’s librettos and Tolkien’s rendering of the Old Norse lays in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.

This book is almost perfect in my estimation.

I have had a review of MacLachlan’s book published in the August issue of Nancy Martsch’s fanzine Beyond Bree. A review of Vink’s book and a discussion of Tolkien’s “Both rings were round, …” statement have been accepted for forthcoming issues.