The literature on Wagner is vast - you could construct a castle as imposing as Wotan's own with the sheer tonnage of Wagner biographies, critical analyses, and musical exegeses - so I was looking for something digestible that gave an overview of the Ring Cycle's plot, themes, music, and context without getting too bogged down in over-philosophizing. That's harder to do than it sounds, since Wagner's grand artistic project practically demands that intellectually-inclined listeners start attaching their various manifestos to various portions of the Ring Cycle's scaffolding, and though Shaw is hardly immune to this pontification, as his lengthy excursions into the history of socialism or racial theorizing demonstrate, he approaches his critical ask with both love and rigor, which is all you can ask for. As he says, "to be devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is devoted to his master, sharing a few elementary ideas, appetites and emotions with him, and, for the rest, reverencing his superiority without understanding it, is no true Wagnerism." I'm not sure you'll be a "perfect" Wagnerite after reading this, but surely you'll appreciate and enjoy it even more.

I read this while I was relistening to the whole Ring Cycle, following some advice to give the 2012 remastered version of the famous 1965 Decca recording by Sir Georg Solti a spin (it was excellent, a worthy companion to the 1953 Furtwängler and the 1970 von Karajan versions I've also heard). I've listened to this enormous beast several times through in my life - watching a televised version on PBS and reading the subtitles to my then-toddler-age brother is one of my earliest musical memories - yet I've always been a bit hazy on many details of the plot since I don't speak German and I'm not in the habit of reading librettos for fun. Shaw's explanation of the windings of the narrative, its inspirations, and its themes are as good as you'll find anywhere, laying out the internal logic of Wagner's vision as well as some of the more curious decisions he made. A full performance of the Ring Cycle is four nights of three or four hours each, which doesn't sound like too much in this era of full-season TV binge-watching marathons, but there's still a lot for the modern aficionado to unpack.

Reading through Shaw's summary while listening to the music, I was struck by what a delicate balancing act Wagner was trying to strike between the legacy of the source material - the Nibelungenlied and the Eddas, but also plenty of his own vaguely period-era invention - and a plot that was firmly about modernity. Shaw finds lots of anti-capitalist ideology in the Ring Cycle (fairly plausibly), but there's a lot to ponder about how humanity is portrayed in The Ring Cycle versus, say, Greek mythological arcs. For all its imposing density and complexity, the Ring Cycle is ultimately about the rising power of humanity against the declining power of the gods, and in the scenes showing the dangerous power of the ring or the cruelty of Alberich's machine workshop you can see the inspiration for countless modern works, not least The Lord of the Rings. The tragedies in the lives of Brünnhilde or Sieglinde, or even Wotan or Alberich, are masterfully conveyed by Wagner's careful plotting and characterization:

"If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it is unreadable. 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. Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does not, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man. Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship, and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative and cynical one."

Something I was almost heartened to read was that Wagner sometimes made mistakes. James Joyce once had that line about "A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery," but the convolutions of the Ring Cycle are not always as intentional as they seem. For example, Wagner came up with the idea to set the Nibelungenlied and the Eddas to music first and decided to work backwards to add more foundation to the plot from there. So Götterdämmerung came conceptually before Das Rheingold, which explains why certain parts of Götterdämmerung, like the opening scene with the Norns, seem so out of place from a narrative logic perspective. When I was listening to it, I immediately thought of the famous opening scene with the three witches in Macbeth, but whereas Shakespeare's witches are an integral part of the play, Wagner's Norns are not very well-integrated into the rest of the story:

"The very senselessness of the scenes of the Norns and of Valtrauta in relation to the three foregoing dramas, gives them a highly effective air of mystery; and no one ventures to challenge their consequentiality, because we are all more apt to pretend to understand great works of art than to confess that the meaning (if any) has escaped us."

And yet it's somehow comforting that there are those little imperfections, as it makes the grandeur of the whole thing more human, especially in the face of all that music. The music is the most famous aspect of the Ring Cycle, and though I've been listening to it for decades, I am still absolutely transported by songs like "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey" every time I hear them. To me, even though Wagner's leitmotif system has become commonplace it's never been bettered or even equaled, and as Shaw discusses in his (too brief) musicological sections, that system may not necessarily be "better" music than what Wagner termed "absolute music" like a Bach fugue or a Beethoven symphony, but it works differently than his predecessors' works did: "A Beethoven symphony (except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added thought and produced the music drama." The idea that music could express emotions was not new, of course, but in Wagner's music the idea is expressed very differently; from a musical theory perspective Wagner is working on a whole different level of songwriting:

"There is not a single bar of "classical music" in The Ring - not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like."

And Shaw makes a good comparison between the music of that Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner trio:

"After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music, and that the vicissitudes of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest aspiration, can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much, perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful webs of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite beyond all ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft was thoroughly popular and practicable: not to save his soul could he have drawn one long Gothic line in sound as Bach could, much less have woven several of them together with so apt a harmony...."

Shaw can periodically wander away from the point: for one example, the entire section of "Siegfried as Protestant" starts off quite reasonably as a vaguely Weberian analysis of how the hero's energetic aspects reflect quite real Christian allegories in the Ring Cycle and also something of Wagner's own relationship to the Christian divides in Germany, but then detours into eugenicist musings which sit uncomfortably with the fact that Siegfried is, of course, a product of incest. Much of the discussion of socialist (or at least anti-capitalist) themes is likewise heavily inflected by Shaw's own views, frequently more enlightening as an elucidation of Shaw's politics than Wagner's famously idiosyncratic ones. Yet overall Shaw's explanation of what happens in the Ring Cycle and why it matters is enormously useful, not only revelatory but inspiring. His appreciation for the power of love in the Ring Cycle is a real delight to read, as is his conclusion about the ultimate aim of one of the grandest dramatic works in all of human history:

"The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring is not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually driving onward and upward - not, please observe, being beckoned or drawn by Das Ewig Weibliche or any other external sentimentality, but growing-from within, by its own inexplicable energy, into ever higher and higher forms of organization, the strengths and the needs of which are continually superseding the institutions which were made to fit our former requirements. When your Bakunins call out for the demolition of all these venerable institutions, there is no need to fly into a panic and lock them up in prison whilst your parliament is bit by bit doing exactly what they advised you to do. When your Siegfrieds melt down the old weapons into new ones, and with disrespectful words chop in twain the antiquated constable's staves in the hands of their elders, the end of the world is no nearer than it was before. If human nature, which is the highest organization of life reached on this planet, is really degenerating, then human society will decay; and no panic-begotten penal measures can possibly save it: we must, like Prometheus, set to work to make new men instead of vainly torturing old ones. On the other hand, if the energy of life is still carrying human nature to higher and higher levels, then the more young people shock their elders and deride and discard their pet institutions the better for the hopes of the world, since the apparent growth of anarchy is only the measure of the rate of improvement. History, as far as we are capable of history (which is not saying much as yet), shows that all changes from crudity of social organization to complexity, and from mechanical agencies in government to living ones, seem anarchic at first sight. No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in general death from exposure. Nevertheless, the most elaborately housed beings today are born not only without houses on their backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them." ( )

Bernard Shaw loved music. His life included a stint as a published Music Critic for a newspaper, and this is a result of that time. Wagner is a justly famous composer, and though the librettos of the Ring of the Niebulings are not great poetry...the experience of a performance can be exhilarating. Join with Shaw as he tries to define that experience, in the prism of nineteenth century musical culture. Epigrams abound. I read the book in 1966, so, the rest of the entry is for the modern reader. ( )

Excellent survey of the Ring Cycle. Shaw's Marxist approach is by no means controlling. Very useful as a guide. ( )