In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks
  • Stephen Thursby
Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks. By Daniel H. Foster. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xx, 377 p. ISBN 9780521517393. $95.] Music examples, appendices, bibliography, index.

In his autobiography Richard Wagner credited The Education of Dionysos by Apollo's Muses by German painter Buonaventura Genelli with helping to inspire his Art-Work of the Future, in which ancient Athens served as a model artistic culture (see Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 426). Scenes from this painting grace the cover of Daniel Foster's new book, Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks. While not the first book-length treatment of the influence of Greek drama on Wagner (see Michael Ewans's Wagner and Aeschylus: The "Ring" and the "Oresteia" [London: Faber and Faber, 1982] and M. Owen Lee's Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003]), Foster's is the first book-length study of Wagner's use of Greek epic and lyric styles as well. His main thesis is that every opera in the Ring represents a "particular phase in the cultural evolution of a mythic world modeled in part upon the ancient Greek world" (p. xi). He connects Wagner's development of the Ring with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's evolutionary model for Greek poetry (epic precedes lyric, which precedes drama) as expounded in his Aesthetics, also taking into account the primary and secondary sources on antiquity that Wagner is known to have studied, and how the composer used Greek aesthetics to support his ideological goals. Following Hegel's poetic model, Foster argues that Das Rheingold and Die Walküre represent the epic stage in a culture's development and Siegfried the lyric stage, whereas Götterdämmerung functions as a tragicomedy about civic identity and the individual's failure to fit into a corrupt society. Although Wagner often wrote disparagingly of Hegel and never mentioned having read the Aesthetics, Foster argues that there is good reason to believe that this work influenced both his thinking and his music: Hegel was "in the air" (according to Friedrich Engels) during Wagner's lifetime; the philosopher taught Johann Gustav Droysen, one of Wagner's favorite Greek scholars; and Wagner certainly read Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History and likely explored other works by the philosopher (pp. 6-7). Foster makes a compelling case for the applicability of Hegel's poetic model to the poetic and political development of the Ring, even if the case for Wagner's having read the Aesthetics is not rock-solid. Many scholars have been reluctant to take Wagner's theoretical writings seriously, perhaps because of the unwieldy prose, obtuse ideas, and the composer's seeming dilettantism. Foster argues that it is irresponsible to overlook them, since they are so abundant and because overlooking these theoretical pronouncements might be construed as "tantamount to dismissing" some of Wagner's "destructive ideological pronouncements" against the Jews, the French, and the Italians (p. 13).

In part 1 ("Epic") Foster examines Greek epic poetry and its influence on the Ring. Chapter 1 focuses on epic's role in defining national identity through depicting collisions between a nation and its enemies. He argues that both Wagner and Hegel used the ancient Greeks to seek answers to their questions about epic, and through this they Hellenized the genre of epic and also German national identity. In chapter 2 Foster discusses Wagner's use of Homeric retrospective narrative. Wagner began the Ring by depicting Siegfried's death, before conceiving the first three operas as a prelude to what happened in the fourth (a massive example compared with Homer's recounting of how Odysseus received his leg scar in the Odyssey). Foster defends Wagner's lengthy and seemingly redundant narrative sequences by arguing that the composer may have used them to "demonstrate his theoretical arguments" against epic (p. 59). In chapter 3 Foster argues that Wagner's orchestra functions like an objective narrator in a novel and as a mediator [End Page 571] between stage and audience. The orchestra expresses primarily through leitmotifs, and Foster...

pdf

Share