Allegory and Its Limits in the Ring: Bernard Shaw and Patrice Chéreau on Wagner

When Bernard Shaw first published The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), his treatise on Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen as an anarchist-socialist allegory, he sparked furious debates among British Wagnerians but failed to inspire further socialist appropriations of Wagner. J. F. R. (John F. Runciman), the music critic in the Saturday Review, voiced what would become a commonplace English response to Shaw’s interpretation by refusing the subordination of art to politics: “We must all remember that a work of art stands or falls accordingly as it is good or bad, that an artist is greater than a political economist, that a beautiful thing is perhaps better than all the political economy in the world and perhaps does more in the long run to influence those whom the economy wishes to influence.”¹ Shaw, meanwhile, pronounced his fellow Fabian socialists “inveterate Philistines” for refusing to follow his lead by sponsoring a special edition of Wagner’s essay Art and Revolution.² The Wagnerite reappeared with new prefaces and additional chapters in 1901, 1907, and 1922, each of which echoed Shaw’s claim that the Ring must be read as a dramatization of Wagner’s sympathies for radical politics and each of which castigated his audiences, with giddy ferocity, for refusing to see past the surface spectacle of the operas.

If Shaw’s reading of the Ring as a record of the abuses of capitalism was neglected in his own time, it began to dominate progressive productions in the 1960s and 1970s. Hans Meyer’s essay, “The Ring as a Bourgeois Parable,” appeared in the 1966 Bayreuth yearbook as a self-declared ramification of The Perfect Wagnerite. Joachim Herz’s repoliticized Leipzig Ring (1973–76) drew extensively on Meyer and Shaw to placate East German authorities (who were wary of the pessimism and religiosity of Wagner’s late operas), presenting gods and dwarves as “typical industrial landlords and underdogs.”³ Götz Friedrich’s neo-Shavian Ring followed at Covent Garden (1974–76). Perhaps the most influential and complex engagement with Shaw, however, was Patrice Chéreau’s Bayreuth production in 1976, which fused elements from Teutonic mythology, industrial manufacturing, and Romantic painting into an allegory about environmental devastation and the exploitation of labor seeded in the late nineteenth century. While critics insisted on Shaw’s direct impact on his mise-en-scène, Chéreau was publically ambivalent about his debt to The Perfect Wagnerite.⁴ Chéreau, for example, believed that his account of Siegfried as a man “deliberately programmed as if he were not programmed” represented a different and more sophisticated use of allegory than Shaw had imagined. For Shaw, Siegfried is largely modeled on Mikhail Bakunin, Wagner’s comrade during the Dresden uprisings of 1849. He is “a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin [sic], an anticipation of the ‘overman’ of Nietzsche.”⁵ For Chéreau, on the other hand, “he isn’t Siegfried-Bakunin anymore, as Bernard Shaw called him, but rather an immature adolescent, superbly stubborn, but unfinished and paralyzed by his ignorance of himself and the world.”⁶

What is at stake in Chéreau’s disagreement with Shaw is the function of allegory as a mode that can illuminate historical processes without devolving into simple one-to-one equivalencies between appearances and hidden truths. According to Chéreau’s rubric, Shavian allegory is an unmasking of veiled historical identities, whereas Chéreauvian allegory examines how history is inflected through ideology, myth, and psychological experience. But this simple dichotomy is complicated by the ways in which Chereau swerved between thinking of allegory as a political tool that either concretized history in specific images or abstracted history into the forces that subtended those images throughout the 1970s. David Fancy has identified Chéreau’s directing as generally in service of a théâtre allégorique, which Chéreau first attempted to define in 1973 when he was directing Pierre de Marivaux’s La dispute, not long before he began work on the Bayreuth Ring:

“I’m thinking increasingly of qualifying...