Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner's Ring (review)

Even by the exacting standards of the ever proliferating literature on Wagner, this is an ambitious piece of work. Though it can be conveniently categorized as yet another attempt to put the Ring into a context that is not primarily musical, it says little about the kind of literary sources treated at length by such writers as Deryck Cooke and Elizabeth Magee. But it goes well beyond the purely philosophical materials most comprehensively surveyed in recent years by Bryan Magee (Wagner and Philosophy (London, 2000)), favouring a wider mix of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who in the author's view influenced and illuminate the work's subject matter, with primary reference to the interactive polarities of Church and State, religion and politics.

Mark Berry is a musically literate historian, and the book derives from a doctoral dissertation. Although several of the score extracts quoted are defective—missing vital parts, and in one case (p. 64) printed upside down—there are only a couple of technical solecisms that a musicologist would, or should, have avoided. More importantly, the role of music in the drama is not seriously sidelined, and despite the absence from the references of some important music-centred studies, Berry's willingness to confront the Ring in all its multifacetedness fits with his view that it resists simplistic certainties, not least because, just as chromaticism cannot entirely completely supplant diatonicism, 'Schopenhauer never entirely replaces Young Hegelianism or socialism in Wagner's thought; nor does renunciation entirely supplant revolution' (p. 241). In Carl Dahlhaus's bold phrase, quoted on page 7, 'it is precisely to radicalise conflicts—so that "resolutions" are ruled out—that dramas are written'.

In order to attempt an adequate epistemological contextualization for such a multivalent enterprise, Berry refers frequently not just to Feuerbach, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, but to (among many others) Bakunin, Marx, Max Stirner, and Moses Hess; not just to Dahlhaus and Adorno but to Bloch, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. The result is still thesis-like when it turns into a rather breathless trawling through rich sources in order to highlight Wagner-relevant points. Page 232 has two succinct examples, with reference to the oath-taking in Act I of Götterdämmerung: 'Feuerbach sees the limitations of apparently self-determining egoism, Stirner the snares of society; Wagner appreciates the mortal dangers of both, the failures of Rienzi and Tannhäuser having signalled previous warnings': and later, 'Siegfried illustrates Hess's criticism that Stirner's egoist has no content, and so must always strive to seize upon a foreign content . . . He cannot create, for he has no content.'

Nevertheless, while these alignments might seem slightly comic taken out of context, there is nothing naive about their deployment here, stemming as they do from Feuerbach's declaration—he might have been describing Siegfried—that he 'who has no understanding allows himself to be deceived, imposed upon, used as an instrument by others'. Berry's perspectives on such nineteenth-century texts consistently reflect the double trajectory he finds in recent aesthetics: 'neither Adorno nor Marcuse denies the importance of the artwork's subject matter; neither takes a truly structuralist path' (p. 6). Yet Berry is hardly the first writer to conclude that 'Wagner is in many ways not really a systematic thinker at all'. His 'tendency, rather, is agglomerative, ideas and influences proceeding to overlap, rather like a rudimentary geological survey' (p. 10)—a useful point to remember when bringing writings to bear on Wagner's work which he did not necessarily know of at the time. Also, given Berry's openness to Wagner's less than systematic, agglomerative methods, it is odd to find him claiming that the Ring is in no sense a 'paratactic' work. But this remains a loose end within his conceptual scheme of things rather than a crucial flaw, not least because he ultimately concedes that the Ring's definitive ending 'encompassed and...