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38 THE PERFECT WAGNERHE: SHAW'S READING OF THE RING By Thomas D. O'Sullivan Jamaica, New York George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite1 is generally recognized as a lucid, witty, and informative introduction to Richard Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. Shaw's allegorical exegesis of the Ring has often been characterized as unbalanced, however, because of its heavy emphasis on political economy. Robert Donington, for example, describes The Perfect Wagnerite as "a one-sided study which does full justice to the economic issues but to very little else."2 John DiGaetani, admitting that Shaw's "view of the Ring ... is very well defended and still valid," says that "he does, however, ignore other possible interpretations of the tetralogy."3 And Paul A. Hummert characterizes The Perfect Wagnerite as "Das Kapital tempered by Shaw's Fabianism and set to the tune of Wagner's cycle The Ring of the Nibelungs."4 Although Shaw's interpretation does have defects—particularly with respect to the significance of the character of Siegfried and the validity of the love theme—I would suggest that evaluations such as these are less than fair. Shaw certainly does direct the attention of his readers to the economic and political implications of the Ring. Between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, Europe of course saw profound social, economic, and political changes. The center of power moved from throne and altar to boardroom and bank. Many artists and thinkers realized the importance of this tremendous revolution, and tried to come to grips with it in their work. Marx and Engels described and criticized it in their economic, political, and historical writings, as did Balzac in the Comédie Humaine. Shaw argues that Wagner, in the Ring, did the same. In interpreting the Ring as an anticapitalist allegory, he makes no secret of his own sympathy with the sentiments he professes to discover there. In the preface to the second edition, he remarks wryly that some readers felt he had written The Perfect Wagnerite "in a paroxysm of senseless perversity" (xvii). Now, when a man is exiled from his fatherland for a decade because of his participation in an abortive revolution, and he writes a series of dramatic works centering around a protracted, often violent contest for power over the world—a power embodied in gold—it is scarcely perverse to suggest that his works are intended, at least in part, to convey a message about political economy. Although Shaw often liked to pose as a propounder of astonishing paradoxes, his allegorical reading of the Ring is firmly grounded in an understanding of Wagner's life and opinions, in a careful study of the text, and in plain common sense. 39 O'Sullivan: Perfect Wagnerite Shaw cannot be accused of offering an interpretation of the Ring that seeks to reduce it to a mere mechanical allegory. He points out that "an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty. . . . There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us" (28). If Shaw seems to say less about the sublime emotions of characters like Wotan, Brünnhilde, Siegmund, and Sieglinde than he does about the entrepreneurial greed of Alberich and the industrial enslavement of the Nibelungs, it is mostly because the former are sufficiently obvious to anyone able to understand the words and listen to the music, while the significance of the latter was often overlooked by his contemporaries. In most countries, the audience at the opera house has tended disproportionately to be drawn from the middle and upper classes. The cultural life of modern England in particular has been deeply divided by distinctions of class and caste—far more so than that, for example, of modern Germany. This inevitably led to a one-sided neglect of Wagner's social and economic themes among members of his English audience. In Victorian and Edwardian England, most discussion of Wagner that went...

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