Wagner as Dramatist and Allegorist

Abstract

Wagner’s architectonic and metaphysical excess, particularly in the Ring, does not encourage modesty in the critic, who also ends up wanting to say everything, rather than one specific thing. If I had to do the latter, like a good scholar or philologist, an erudite commentator, I would probably try to say something about the magic potions in Wagner; and may still briefly touch on that. But as a specialised topic that would also require us to deal more centrally with Tristan; and here clearly it is the Ring that demands our full and complete attention, not least on account of the interpretive controversies it continues to cause. So perhaps one guideline should be, not so much what Wagner really ‘meant’, but rather what interpretation and meaning might actually be in the ‘case of Wagner’. This is a dialectical problem that greatly transcends the traditional questions about the Ring: namely, whether it is about Wotan or Siegfried, and also what ‘the gods’ can be said to mean (in order for them to undergo a twilight, indeed a wholesale conflagration and extinction). On a philosophical level, this problem traditionally confronts Feuerbach with Schopenhauer; and meanwhile, in another part of the forest, lurks the question about the meaning of the ring itself and how much it may be said to represent capitalism, as Shaw famously argued. What it is now dialectically important to do is to suspend all the alternatives such questions ask us to choose, to step back in order to ask what such questions themselves mean. We need to ask what meaning means in this situation, and therefore what interpreting it might involve. And it is crucial to retain our specification ‘in this