Episode 22: Richard Wagner: Act I

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dah.

And I'm Laura Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we are in Bend with the Right.

We actually have a couple of announcements today.

And the first is that we are doing a live show.

That's right, folks, a live taping of your favorite podcast in Bend with the Right.

That's May 21st at 4 p.m.

here at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Tickets will be free, but but you do need to register.

And we're going to be talking to the inimitable Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About about a little lady named Anita Bryant.

So for those of you who don't know who Anita Bryant is, she is sort of the OG anti-gay crusader, you know, save our children, you know, the stuff that people can do about trans people today.

She pioneered all the way back in the deep 70s, which is a weird time in many ways, this one included.

And we'll be talking to Sarah about her.

We're both now reading Anita Bryant's book.

One of Anita Bryant's many books.

We're reading the Anita Bryant story.

She's a couple, yeah.

You have the actual thing.

I've been reading it on the internet archive.

I have an actual book with her angry face on it.

It's hilarious.

And Sarah Marshall is a really wonderful writer and a podcast pioneer, the kind of person who made me want to do a podcast because I love listening to her so much and had that like classic parasocial fantasy that she was always talking to me when I listened to her episodes.

And now she actually will be talking to me.

Now she's gonna.

It's a dream come true.

Yeah, we're very excited.

So it's a full crossover live, spectacular.

There's a famous picture where Anita Bryant got pied in the face.

Do not pie us in the face.

We have only like one set of mics, but still we're excited for this.

And then we have one more announcement.

What's that?

So Katie Lau, who longtime listeners or listeners of our show all the way through will remember as the composer of our amazing theme music, is joining the podcast as a producer.

As a little bit of background, Megan Kalfas, who was our producer, moved on to a different project.

And then for the last few weeks, and you may have noticed this, if certain edits sounded a little rough, we had a complete burnout edited for us, namely myself.

And I'm very excited that Katie, who is a absolute pro, will now take over and make us sound as good as we used to.

And so very excited for that.

Thank you, Katie Lau.

We're so happy to have you join the podcast.

Yeah, welcome to the family.

So I guess, you know, that brings us to the main thrust of our episode.

Adrian, what are we talking about today?

So, yeah, weirdly enough, for Katie's first episode with us, we're not going to use her amazing theme music for the simple reason that this is a music episode.

Well, it is an episode about a musician, about a composer that uses all the music that we could find in the public domain because we do not want to get sued.

Do not sue us.

If Universal Music is hearing any of this, like all this is allegedly public domain yeah it's like the new york times all the news that's fit to print and this episode is all the music by this composer that is fit to uh not get us sued exactly so mara what do you know about rich at wagner any of it good

i'm gonna i'm gonna be real with you none of it's good right okay yeah that's that's fair yeah yeah you know i know very little about classical music my wife is a big classical music nerd and when we were on a long road trip recently she was giving me an education playing all of these different pieces by all these different composers.

You know, she likes Bach.

I'm supposed to like Bach.

She likes Beethoven.

I've been instructed to like Beethoven.

She likes Mahler.

I think Mahler fucking sucks.

What?

I fucking hate Mahler.

Oh my God.

He's the best.

And then I said something, well, what about Wagner?

And she goes, we're not going to be listening to Wagner.

And that was the end of the conversation.

Like the tape was thrown out of the out of the moving car.

I mean, it's a common, it's a common sentiment.

I don't think she's alone in this.

There are people who really go all in on Wagner, and there are those who won't listen to him for very obvious reasons.

And I, you know, as someone who, I wouldn't say I'm a Wagner fan, but I have seen the Ring of the Neuvelung something like five or six times live, like every one of those four operas.

I have paid my dues and then some.

Actually, it's more than five or six, probably 10 or 12.

We should maybe remind listeners that Adrian, who does not have an accent at all, did in fact grow up in germany yeah and being taken to see the ring of the newlong is what they do in german kindergarten and for christmas holidays uh it's like the nutcracker it's like it's five hours long and uh they're giants in it but like yeah it's like it's like oh this is nice hot chocolate anyone but even so like i don't think i begrudge anyone if they're like nope not my cup of tea at all So TLDR for this episode, Wagner was not a great guy, but as bad a guy as he was, he had the worst fans, right?

That's the problem, right?

Like part of why Kat was probably a little reluctant to Blair Wagner in her car or in your car has little to do with the man himself and more with the fact that like you cannot gather a more monstrous fan club anywhere in human history than for Richard Wagner.

And I think that cuts all the way through it.

I don't think she'd mind me mentioning this, but my aunt, who is a big Wagnerian herself, somehow got tickets to the Bayreuth Festival, which is the big Wagner festival that happens in the summer in the city of Bayreuth.

At his home, right?

Well, at his, yeah, he built his villa there and he built his own theater.

It's his own theater.

And she was like, oh, it's very, it's hard to get tickets.

They're not very expensive.

They're keeping them deliberately cheap, but they're limited, right?

So they won't allow scalping, but they are hard to get.

Normally, you put yourself on a list and eventually you get them.

Like Shakespeare in the park.

Yeah, exactly.

And she eventually got some through some weird group that she didn't know very much about.

And they were like, oh, we also have a bus going to Bayreuth and we'll have some nice talks like to prepare prepare you for the opera.

And she's like, That's fine, I'll do that.

And apparently, she claims that, like, an hour into, she's like, Oh, it's this kind of group, and got out.

And I was like, I'll just take the train.

This is uh, these people are fucking creeps.

That's like, still, right?

Like,

wound up on the Nazi bus to Wagner, is what you're saying.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

In a twist that is truly shocking only to those who have not paid attention.

And she, I don't know if she, I don't think she was shocked.

I think she just, she was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for a, for a free ride, and and then was like, nope, I'm out.

And yeah, and so this problem is well documented.

And I will say that I don't begrudge any listener if they're like, this is not making me want to check this guy out.

The other thing I should mention is that we're going to be kind of looking at even the most unsavory parts of this guy for the simple reason that like, this is a political podcast.

So we're not going to be listening to a lot of music.

I mean, there's a bunch of the music that I would defend.

You know, if you give me 12 hours of podcast, I'll defend it for 12 hours.

But that's obviously not what we're interested in here.

We're interested in his political impact, which is really considerable compared to like even someone like Beethoven, even someone like Mozart, right?

Like, and it's not by accident.

He wanted to be politically effective and he was.

And what is that saying?

Those whom the gods wish to punish, do they grant their desires?

Like, he probably wishes that he was just like...

remembered as a composer at this point.

But I think that that's pretty important.

We're not going to be talking about Wagner, the composer, as such.

We're going to be talking about him as a kind of figure of philosophy, of politics, et cetera, et cetera.

So top line for listeners following along at home, Richard Wagner, 19th-century German composer, primarily of opera, very

deliberate and pointed political commentary in his work and in his writing.

Well, more so in his writing.

Like you could look at the operas and miss it.

Once you know what you're looking for, it's hard to miss, but you could, could, right?

You could sit through Tristan uzeulde, for instance, which is just two people falling in love and then dying together, like and think this is not a particularly political work.

But Wagner was always there with like an essay to be like, by the way, this is what I meant.

And half the time that turned out okay.

And half of the time it's like, oh, what if he had not hit send on that?

And then because of this political writing and its resonances in his work, he has become a figure of great imagination, particularly in the German right.

Yeah.

The German right, that wonderful, classically wonderful place to be.

I feel like basically everybody knows what the German right is about.

Yeah, yeah.

They've become pretty famous.

They've become household names, as it were.

So it's important to note that you say he's a composer, and that's exactly right, but he wouldn't have just regarded himself as a composer.

He thought of himself as a theater director, a poet, a conductor, a music theorist, and even a philosopher.

And while he was a bit of an amateur at a lot of this stuff, his contributions in these various fields were taken pretty seriously at the time.

So people did kind of read him also as a philosopher, right?

Like there are other composers who write theoretical treatises and like colleagues will read it.

But Wagner, people took serious his theories.

I mean, to just give an example that people are probably familiar with, it's the Gsam Kunstweg, the total work of art, right?

Like that's been influential in the history of aesthetics, right?

So like this idea that you're integrating different aspects of the theatrical production in certain ways.

That's something that, you know, Hollywood got interested in.

That's something that theater people got interested in.

That's something that other composers drew on, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's not necessarily just like a compositional thing.

He had a whole, he had treatises where he explained why he thought this was so important.

And we'll talk about that.

But like, yeah, so he basically had this outsize influence, right?

We already talked about how Nietzsche and Weining are both kind of like radicalized by their contact with this guy.

And that's part of his ambition.

He didn't just want to be a composer in the sense that, like, the generation right before him had been composers, right?

So Wagner was born in 1813 in Leipzig, in what is today Eastern Germany.

And if you think about the generation before that, so that's your Beethovens, that's your Mozarts.

That's not quite the generation right prior, but like they've just all kind of died.

And these people largely still were professionals, professional music writers, often more or less in the employ of wealthy families, usually noble families, right?

And Wagner is part of the generation that breaks away from that and says, no, we're actually equal contributors to kind of social life, right?

I'm not your employee.

I don't work for you.

I work for myself, right?

Like his first job is at a Hoftheata, so at a court theater.

And what does he say?

I got to build my own theater, man.

Like the idea is he wants to kind of get away from this old model where the composer was just basically like, you write a concerto and then like your noble patron is like, I don't like the oboe, make it a clarinet concerto.

So you make it a fucking clarinet concerto, right?

Like, that's not what Wagner is doing.

Like, he's like, everything here is because I wanted it this way because this is my entrepreneurial vision, my artistic vision.

So he dramatically left the New York Times to relaunch his own sub stack.

Is that what you're telling me?

Exactly.

He's not going to work for the institutions.

He's going to be his own free thinking, free railing man.

Yes.

And it turned out well for him, too.

No grift there at all.

But what you're saying is he understands his artistic integrity and independence as a matter of his self-respect, right?

It's very, very important to him to be unmediated between his vision and its expression.

Yeah.

And this is something where we can already kind of flag something for folks.

Full disclosure, a large part of this episode will be a plot summary of the ring of the kneeballons.

But listen for this, right?

Like if you think about like Wagner sees this model of the composer and says, this is inorganic, as you say, it's inauthentic, right?

It's not creatively true.

But of course, you can go two ways there.

You can either say, oh, this is a person who wants to go back to some kind of pre-modern mode where the artist is sort of in an unalienated relationship to the people.

And Wagner thought that way.

The other way you could look at that, of course, and you already mentioned the sub stack, is to say, oh, this man is going into into business for himself, right?

And that's what the Bayeroid Opera Festival was also.

It's a family company that basically is running the shop, right?

Like he's on the one hand, kind of presenting himself as this almost this bard figure, right?

Like I'm not just a contractor for these rich assholes, but he's also kind of presenting himself as a self-made.

entrepreneur right and so this question of like to what extent that whole project crazy as it is and this is very very unusual.

Very few composers in history have been like, fuck it, I'm building my own theater, right?

Whether or not that's forward-looking or backward-looking, whether that's anti-capitalist or capitalist, like this is going to be a big, big question and it's a big, big theme because capitalism turns up in his music everywhere, right?

Or in his opera plots everywhere.

And so the fact that he's in this very weird space where you can look at him either way, right?

Be like, oh, this is totally pre-capitalistic.

Or he's like, nope, it's a corporation.

He invented a, you know, a family corporation.

a profit making profit motivated enterprise that trades in fantasies of a pre-commercial and pre-capitalistic past like gee i've never heard of that before yeah

yeah he was the og trad wife yeah or even just you know hobby lobby oh yeah but like okay so this is his ideological yeah sort of birth or his career birth maybe is he leaves the established channels for people who write music in his age You know, this sort of patronage system, it's either collapsing already on the way out.

It's not for him anyway.

And he makes this bold stand to start his own enterprise.

And when does he do that?

Well, that's going to start in the 1850s and 60s.

So that's, that's much later in his life.

So, and I should say that there are also a lot of other people who try this, right?

Like the other way to do this is through music publishing.

right?

Contemporaries, other contemporaries of his are just like, buy my music.

That's how I'm going to make my money.

Right.

So he's just unusual in the way that that it's both forward-looking and backward-looking.

Because if you basically rely on cheap print to make your money, right, you're kind of embracing the modern.

And he's sort of in this weird middle ground.

I mean, as we already mentioned in the Nietzsche episode, of course, the Bayreuth Theater then also gets paid for by a king, which, like, again, like, it's not the most modern thing you can think of.

It's like, can I have a fairy tale king, please make me a theater?

Like, fuck, is this a fairy tale or something?

You know, anyway, so he's born in 1813.

He studies in Leipzig and has his his first kind of jobs there.

He takes his first real job at an opera house, kind of programming and conducting in Riga, which is today in Latvia.

So first thing to note about him, and this is something that a lot of people who write about him do note, is the other thing about someone who like is like, I'm going to start my own theater.

Your Majesty, can you please invest in this?

It's kind of con artist shit, right?

And like he had something of the flim flam man about him.

Like apparently he had like an outrageous number of shoes.

he was like really bad with money and a lot of these moves early in his life are really about debtors yeah the german-speaking world at that time is extremely fragmented politically meaning if you can make it across a border it can be extremely painful to like try to retrieve debt money yeah and so and and this is why he keeps moving basically but okay so you're also touching on something that i thought was a little bit surprising to me because you know now i think of classical music as a very rarefied world that people don't really get into unless they're born from the elite.

You're talking about him writing letters to kings asking for money and them, in fact, giving him money.

But he's not actually from particularly elite origins, right?

He's from a fairly humble background.

Yeah, he was born into a middle-class family.

His dad dies like within, I forget, but weeks of him being born.

He has a lot of family in theater and music.

And yeah, classical music at the time was at best a way towards respectability

from something less than that, right?

Like classical music was a form of social climbing.

Yes, it puts you in touch with, you know, counts and kings, et cetera, et cetera, because they all liked that stuff.

But a lot of them came out of a kind of performance world of the 18th century, which frankly was like to be in a theater troupe in the 18th century was like pretty, right?

Like it was being like a slightly artistically more ambitious carny.

It's not a very good living.

You're extremely dependent on the forbearance of these rich assholes.

It's a living, but it's not like an amazing one.

And yeah, Wagner had money problems, I think, throughout his life, basically.

Maybe not at the very end, but it sort of followed him around for most of his career.

Now, some of that was because his appetites just grew and grew, but also just the composer's life was not lavish at the time, and very few of them really came from money or privilege.

And we might mention that he first goes to Riga.

He has to flee there because of his debts.

He ends up in Paris.

Paris is at the time sort of the center for opera making.

The grands au para are super popular.

It's sort of the moment when special effects really are brought into opera, right?

This is when they use steam and gas lamps, et cetera, et cetera.

Really cool sort of sound effects and light effects.

And he takes a lot of that on, but he finds it all a little bit inauthentic.

This is very stagey and a little bit sort of cheap these newfangled technological innovations are ruining the form we need to go back to basics i'm sorry i'm just thinking of him as like a gen x cancel culture grifter right yeah he's got a sub stack he's like mad at the kids these days with their tick tocks and only listens to music on vinyl you know there's a something about the tenor and the like cantankerousness of his conservatism that feels very familiar today.

Yes, except this is the interesting thing.

And this is where we might not call him a straightforward conservative.

He's on the one hand, yes, he thinks that some of these newfangled things are a problem, but he also thinks that that's just because they're used wrong.

What they really should do is create sort of a second immediacy, right?

He says, through all this bullshit, you can actually get somewhere very real, right?

People could have a quasi-epiphanic, quasi-religious experience in an opera house.

It's just, if you just kind of use wind machines, like you're not going to get that.

But like, you could use steam in interesting ways you could use acoustics in really cool ways but but what you're doing just happens to be cheap so he is both kind of a modernist and kind of a traditionalist and if you're thinking huh what what is someone who has nothing against technology but wants to use it to like restore the immediacy of, you know, the people.

It's like, uh-oh, like you're entering into a real danger zone.

That's a bad quadrant to be in.

Biden will not end up there quite yet.

But you can sort of, you're detecting the early rumblings of like the fact that the Nazis were not totally wrong to be like, oh, this guy speaks our language.

Like in this way, yes, he does.

I think that's fair to say.

But the first political turn we get from him in Paris is that he who had been kind of sort of a baseline, I think, conservative or moderate, gets really into this idea of revolution.

He really gets into this idea of democracy.

and becomes very, very infatuated with the French revolutions of the 1830s, basically.

Update us on these other revolutions, because this is not the famous French Revolution.

This is the latter French Revolution.

Exactly.

And of course, Wagner, born during the Wars of Liberation, during which, you know, the Germans kind of had to throw Napoleon out of Germany.

You weren't going to find a lot of people who were like, oh, yeah, the French Revolution was a cool thing, right?

So he very much was socialized into a world where people tended to regard the French Revolution as something that, you know, might have had some good ideas, but also killed Uncle so-and-so in Russia.

Or, you know.

No, it's, I think we can all relate to those who hate the French.

I think that's a very

standard sentiment.

A lot of people don't like the French.

I won't endorse this.

They're so straight.

I'll say that until the next Parisian waiter is rude to me.

I'm like, all right, the last map stood up for you all.

But exactly.

So by the 1830s, France is sort of once again rocked by these kind of quasi-revolutionary and then eventually full-on revolutions that culminate in the 1848 revolution.

And Wagner is there for a lot of the four shocks.

There are all these precursors to it, and he fully understands what they are.

Everyone understood at the time what they are.

If people want to read more about these, I would recommend Chris Clark's new book about 1848.

He goes through that in some detail.

It's very, very good.

If you're a podcast person, Mike Duncan has covered the

first half of the 19th century in France, like very, very thoroughly.

That's right.

That's right.

Always a charmer.

Yeah.

And so in his autobiography, Wagner points out that like, yeah, he did really undergo a conversion in Paris.

And I'll quote him here.

I now fully took the side of the revolution, which presented itself to me in the form of a courageous and victorious popular struggle, free from all the stains of the terrible excesses of the first French Revolution.

So let's keep that in mind, I think.

Like, this is someone whose politics are actually fairly radical for the 1830s and 40s.

And so is his course of reading, I should mention.

In the 1830s, in late 1830s, in Paris, he's reading Rudwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What is Property, right?

Famously, property is theft.

Keep that in mind for the stuff later, right?

So, this is edgelord leftism, right?

Basically, like, this is the, you know, these are the young Hegelians, this is, these are the early anarchists.

This is no longer sort of polite discourse.

He's he's going through a punk phase, let's say.

At the same time, he doesn't really manage to connect with Paris artistically.

It's not about the fact that he's German.

There are a lot of German composers and authors who are doing very, very well there.

For instance, he gets to meet Heinrich Heine, a famous poet whom he admires greatly at the time.

Note the present tense.

He meets Giacomo Meyabia, another great composer of operas who's extremely successful in Paris.

And in the slightest bit of foreshadowing, a lot of the people he meets there who are successful in Paris are Jewish, Jewish Germans.

So just putting that out there, make of that what you will.

this might come back later might become important but his kind of relationship to jewish artists is basically fraught from pretty early on, but not in the sense that he's like fully anti, but that he also like is extremely indebted to them and then kind of won't acknowledge that fact.

So it's the anxiety of influence and perhaps also some professional envy.

That's what I'm detecting.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Right.

And so then he relocates to Dresden, so that's in Saxony, southeastern Germany.

And There he has his first successes as an opera composer.

His first opera is, well, he's written two that basically are only performed as curios today.

And then his first opera that sort of starts sounding like Wagner is Rienzi in 1842.

Then you get the Flying Dutchman, which is the

first that gets sort of, that we would today, that, you know, the San Francisco opera might put on.

Usually people don't put on Rienzi.

That's in 1843.

Then Tannhuiza in 1846.

Then he starts an opera called Lohengreen that sort of is also very frequently performed.

And then we get to 1848.

And that's sort of when we get the first break in this biography and where we might leave him for a second, because he does three important things in 1848.

He becomes an active participant in the revolutions of that year.

It's very interesting that the revolution sort of starts in Paris and then travels by the speed of mail coach, basically, across the European continent, right?

The kingdom of the two, Naples.

Austria, and then to Berlin and to Dresden, etc, etc.

And so when it arrives in Dresden, Wagner is in the mix.

He's in it.

He gets all wrapped up in it.

As we mentioned, he had this kind of rabble-rousing inclination already.

He was a pretty fervent anti-capitalist.

He was like, let's fucking do this.

So that's the first thing he does.

The second thing he does is, and this is maybe more significant, he also writes about this, which is a problem if you're not going to win the revolution, right?

And that's exactly what ends up happening.

This is why he has to flee, and this is why we have him in Switzerland, right, in our Nietzsche episode.

So he's fleeing the country after the failed revolution of 1848, not because he's in debt, but because he's subject to political persecution.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, he might have also been in debt, to be quite frank.

But he's usually running away from creditors.

And right now he's running away from a restored regime.

Exactly.

And he's just put some things in writing that you cannot really take back.

And they're not very, and no one's very chill about this, right?

There's a huge, what we today call a brain drain in the German-speaking world after 1848, right?

A lot of people around sort of the Marx circle kind of relocate to France and to the UK.

Wagner goes to Switzerland, which likewise has pretty loose laws around freedom of expression.

But of course, a lot of people leave for the United States in 1848, the so-called 48ers, right?

Who a lot of them settle in Milwaukee and Chicago, and some settle even in San Francisco.

I believe, you know, have you ever had Corbel Champagne?

I think I have, yeah.

It's a local, it's a California vineyard, and I believe they came over from Prague after 1848.

Wow.

I think the kindergarten came, that's why that's a German word that came in through the 48ers, because these were, you know, these were intellectuals, artists, students, basically.

Not because like the entire 48 Revolution was that, that's sometimes a misapprehension.

It's because they could flee, right?

Yeah,

a little bit more money.

Get out.

Yeah.

But anyway, so let me cite briefly from his revolutionary writings, just because it's kind of helpful to think about.

So first of all for him, and this is very much in the mode of Feuerbach, his critique of the politics of his age is routed through a critique of religion, right?

This is a theory of Christianity and why it's bad, but it's really also a theory as to why aristocracy is bad and why capitalism is bad, right?

So let me just read this.

If Christianity really wanted to create a world of art that corresponded to its faith, it could not represent the sensual beauty of the world, which for Christians is a manifestation of the devil, right?

So, he says, really, the artwork of the future has to leave Christianity behind because it is about sensual reconciliation, it's about being one with the world.

And Christianity is all about an alienation from this world because this world is a fallen world, and we should leave it behind as quickly as possible.

He says, Yeah, there may have been a time when you could make great Christian art.

You can't make Christian art now, right?

And then he says, like, basically, the art of his time is just fallen in all these various ways.

And I'll quote him again here.

So this art's real essence is industry.

Its moral purpose is to make money.

Its aesthetic pretense is to entertain the bored.

Our art draws its lifeblood from the heart of our modern society, from the center of its endless circulation of capital, from large-scale monetary speculation.

It borrows a heartless grace from the lifeless, remains

mere medieval chivalrous convention, and from there, with apparent Christianity, not disdaining the poor's share descends to the depths of the proletariat unnerving demoralizing dehumanizing everywhere so what do you note about this passage i mean it's it's both condescending towards the audience in a way that i find kind of snobby and also

rejecting what seems to be capitalist motivations, right?

So it's, it's pointing the accusing finger both up and down on the class hierarchy, right?

It's like these striving, greedy, capitalist artists are condemnable and their stupid, slop-eating proletarian fans are also contemptible.

You know, it's kind of it's kind of universally angry.

Yeah.

So I think that's very, very important here.

And I think that would make three points, exactly.

So your first one is very well taken that it's both kicking up and down.

It's basically a cultural critique.

It's saying our culture industry or something like that is bullshit, right?

but also y'all are

for for falling for this stuff right and that's of course like you know wagner will in some ways cast himself as a populist and say like you know i'm trying to return art to the people but then again like these are five and a half hour operas like how populist can you really be yeah right like he never quite resolves this and in his bitter operas i should say he even reflects on the fact that that's not It's a little hard to reconcile these two things.

Damn, you mean to tell me that somebody who claims to be serving the people with his work and intellectual contributions is actually in many ways only reifying the interests of the elites?

That's crazy talk.

It's a shocker.

It's a shocker.

You heard it here first, people.

But I mean, but the point is, is still like this could be, I mean, this isn't straight up Adorno, but this could be like Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry, right?

Like the idea that like it replaces with Hollywood movies and like you could have printed this, like this could have been Dwight McDonald writing this, right?

Like mid-cult is basically this, right?

And I think that's important.

The third thing, though, is like he's fairly specific about like the transactional nature of capitalism.

And like, he's got some very real things in mind here, right?

Like, an opera, mind you, is a big business in the sense, not necessarily in that it makes a lot of money, but that it like involves a lot of people, many of whom do not draw a very high salary, right?

Like, it's it's the most commercial of all the art forms in a certain way, because like, you know, you can put on a symphony with like four stage hands, like an opera is a big business it's just like it's a big concern a going concern but the other thing to note here is that like he's definitely thinking a lot about monetary speculation and the endless circulation of capital that again like i would like you to sense the slightest sense of foreboding uh right like there does appear to be all capitalism does appear to be bad but Some capitalism seems to be much, much worse than others.

Gotcha.

Yeah, I feel like I know where this is going.

Yes, yes.

The three brackets brackets are coming out, are starting to make their first faint appearance, right?

So that's the second thing he does.

He writes these texts, which are pretty unmistakable in their politics, which will make kind of work in what's then the German Confederation impossible.

But the final thing he does is he begins a draft of a prose sketch called The Nebulums, which would over the next 20 odd years evolve into the work that he's probably best known for today, The Ring of the Nebulums.

And I would now suggest that we leave Lichard Wagner here just for a little bit and really talk about that opera in detail, just because I think you can show a lot of the weird ambivalences in Wagner's persona and his artwork and in his outlook that sort of transmitted itself to so many people in the late 19th, early 20th century through these four operas.

So the Ring of the Nibelungs is a quartet of operas.

They're meant to be performed in sequence.

If you see them the way they're supposed to happen, it's supposed to be four days.

You go to the opera every single night, basically.

And technically, they're not four days.

It's three days and a pre-day.

So, like, there's a short pre-day, and then there's, yeah, it's like Marvel fandom.

Like, who, who the fuck knows why?

But, like, yes.

Are they densely interreferential?

Do you really need to have scene one to understand the next one in the sequence?

Okay.

Yes, you're, you're, they're, they're musically highly interwoven.

They follow each other's plot exactly.

And you're supposed to to be able to devote four days to this, which is already kind of like, you can see why people think of this as both hyper-capitalist, like, hey, I need to sell you four tickets for four nights.

No, you got to, you got to take them all.

Sorry.

Right.

Pretty convenient.

On the other hand, like, it's a pretty bold move for someone hawking a product to be like, I'm sorry, you have to take the better part of a work week off to appreciate this thing, right?

Like, this is not, you know, quibby, right?

Like, this is a, this, this will, this will fuck up your week week in a major way.

And, and that's his idea, right?

Like, he's like, this is not transactional.

You should be here because you want to be.

You're not here to see and be seen.

We'll talk about that a little bit more later.

You're not here because everyone's doing it.

You're here because you want to be, right?

Like, either you're the kind of person, and this is exactly where Kat might agree with him.

Either the kind of person who loves this shit and is there for all five and a half hours of it, or the person is like, just fucking miss me with the whole thing.

And he's like, that's fine, right?

Like, I don't want to be there for everyone.

This is really, I want the nutters, I want the crazy ones out there, you know.

It demands a lot of its audience, right, in terms of its investment and money and time, and it makes sure to not give them anything back except for the art itself.

Exactly, right?

None of the, you know, I'm sure what Wagner would describe as sort of like the corrupting,

like non-affective economy that can happen around artwork, like looking cool and using it as a modes of conspicuous consumption.

That's kind of that's organized out of the VOA experience.

Which is all that opera was, frankly, at the time.

And like he, he calls that out.

And I don't think he's entirely wrong about that, right?

So just to give you a very simple example, in Bayreuth, they dimmed the lights all the way, right?

In most opera houses, that was not done because people wanted to look at each other while they were watching the opera.

And a lot of the court operas had big boxes and they were arranged in kind of a kind of a horseshoe shape, meaning if you looked straight ahead, you just saw another person.

by void is laid out in such a way that everyone has a pretty good view of the stage there are no better and worse there are no boxes so there's no vip anything like you're sitting in the rows with everyone else the seats are uncomfortable because like he decided that the cushions were killing the acoustics and so like you'd have to sit on board for four and a half hours five and a half hours or at least you did in the 19th century and yeah and so basically the idea really is this isn't for the other shit right and the other thing of course is that like you weren't really supposed to be talking during any of it.

And he has this wonderful description of Italian opera houses at the time where he's like, people just kind of come and go.

They chat each other up.

They go and get another hot dog, whatever.

It's like a baseball game, basically.

And he's like, that's

fine, but that's a carnival.

That's not an opera.

This really needs to be like, you come here, and it's really going to be a little bit more like church.

Like, you're going to be absorbed.

You're going to be in your seat, et cetera, et cetera.

Funnily enough, though, he kind of ran afoul of this himself.

There's a very famous example where it's often supposed that Wagner sort of banned the idea that you should clap between numbers and opera, which is no longer done, really.

You're not supposed to do that.

It's often thought that Wagner kind of outlawed that, but it seems like his audience kind of did that.

There's a famous incident where during a premiere, I think during the Rheingold, he claps after a particularly good aria was over that he thought had gone particularly well, and he gets shushed by his own audience, right?

Like, but that's new, right?

So like, basically, we'd gotten to a point where people were like, no, it's you and the music and no one, nothing else.

The other stuff is for when you pick up your baguette

at intermission.

It's not for while you're there communing with the artwork.

So there's an attempt to really purify the form and restore it to a place of primacy, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he's also got this like reverence for the form itself that seems like it's achieved almost a mythic status.

Yeah.

And he's thinking of this like in terms of the ancient Greeks.

He wants to reconstitute the Greek theater.

He's like, that was a ritual.

These people did not just go there to be entertained.

That was a ritual.

It told them something important about their world, about their lives.

And the Gesamtkunstweck is supposed to do something kind of similar.

It's not a fantasy world, right?

It's not like he didn't think that it had nothing to say about the modern world.

He understood that it was an antipode to the modern world.

But he thought what it does is it taps you into something bigger about this world than like, hey, can you believe what blah, blah, blah was wearing at the opera last night, right?

Like that's what he didn't want.

And there's a very nice phrase that said about Wagner, but I think about, it might be a Georg Lukach line, about romanticism of alienation.

And Wagner is like fucking mainlining that shit.

This is the idea that like any two terms that are opposed in like modern capitalist society were once unified, right?

And wouldn't it be great if we could bring them back together?

They're now alienated from each other, right?

The audience and the art, you know, the inside and the outside, right?

Like all these things have become kind of interlaced.

And the total work of art is supposed to be doing away with these kind of wanton divisions that modernity and capitalism have imposed.

Why don't you give us, for listeners like me who don't really know a ton about the ring cycle, why don't you give us a plot, right?

Because my sense of Wagner's Ring Cycle is that it's derived in kind of a distant way from the sort of Norse myth that now animates a lot of like heavy metal music and like the nerdier kinds of American white supremacy, right?

It's pre-Christian, it's very involved, it's very sort of epic style, but I don't know much about the actual characters and plot.

Yeah, yeah, well, I'm glad you asked because buckle up.

And I mean, people who've seen the Thor movies will recognize some people too, right down to the villain/slash hero who keeps everything in motion will be very, very familiar to subscribers of Disney Plus.

So I should say that the plot is basically Wagner's creation, but he's drawing in a kind of pastiche way on all these ancient, what he thinks of as Germanic legends, but as you're saying, they're Norse myths, really.

He's just kind of like saying, oh, close enough, right?

In that way that like.

the Nazis kind of later would, right?

He's like, oh, it's all kind of Aryan, right?

Whatever.

He doesn't use that word yet.

It's like, this is the kind of white we like is what it is.

He's like, this is an aspirational kind of whiteness for my esoteric 19th century worldview.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fun fact, I believe the term Aryan was popularized by his son-in-law.

So just, it's, it's all in the family.

It's all in the family.

Anyway, so he's drawing on, do you know the, you know, do you know what the Edda, the prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson?

This is a 13th century Icelandic collection of Norse myths.

It's sort of, if you're watching a Thor movie, a lot of that stuff comes from there.

The poetic Edda, especially the Voluspa, I hope I'm saying that right.

If I have any Norsemen in the audience, please.

All our Viking listeners are going to be so mad at your mispronunciation.

Fuck.

We're coming.

We're coming.

We come from the land of the ice and snow.

And he's drawing on the Niebelogenlied, which is an epic poem written in Middelheim German around 1200, but that's drawing on much older motifs.

And he mashes this together basically with a whole bunch of other stuff.

He's pretty convinced that

these myths don't really matter by themselves.

They matter as the core.

He's almost doing a little bit of structural analysis.

He's saying like, what's the core of the story?

And he kind of tries to drill down on that.

Another thing that he thought he needed to do in order to kind of modernize opera was to get rid of like dumb plot contrivances.

So he's like, you know, it's never like blah, blah, overhears someone else talking and then like, oh, he's no longer in love with me.

Like he's like, fuck all that.

No, no.

Like, what's the core thing?

right two people want to be together they cannot be together because of the law the end right like we don't need the other shit like let's just, you know, let's cut to the core of this, of the myth, right?

Which is another form that he thought like another way of kind of rescinding an earlier alienation in some ways.

Anyway, so we start with Das Rheingut, the pre-day.

So this is the first of the four operas.

Yes.

Coming in at a measly two and a half hours.

That is one of the shorter Marvel movie lengths, you know, if you're, if we're still going by the Marvel movies.

It is definitely one of the shorter Wagner operas too.

Yes.

You could, you know, watch a Dune movie in this time um so we open on the bottom of the rhine river there are three rhinemaidens playing in the water and a nibelung a dwarf appears named iberich they kind of tease him and they well basically sexually humiliate him they're like we are three hot rhinemaidens i imagine they're kind of mermaid like sireny sexy and he's a dwarf and they're like you yeah we're hot and you're a dwarf yeah okay you're not exactly yeah and as always that turns out really well basically the sun comes up and it turns out that the three are guarding the rheingold of the title which is this magical gold treasure that as they very helpfully inform iberish can be fashioned into a ring that basically lets you rule the world i feel like i've heard some version of this before and that didn't wind up great either One ring to rule them all?

You know,

I just feel like this is a bad idea and it's been covered as a bad idea.

I know, right?

I've I've often actually kind of marveled at like,

what would happen if they're just like, shut up?

Like, why are you telling me about this stupid gold?

Like, oh, it's nothing.

Just keep swimming, you know?

I do think the idea is that they inform him that basically in order to get it, you'd have to forswear love.

And I think part of why Wagner presents it that way, he wants us to.

realize that like for the Rhine maidens, the idea that someone would do such a thing is pretty absurd, right?

They're like, this is just not a thing that a being can do, right?

It would be absolutely unnatural to forego Eros, right?

That's the way this world operates.

There's going to be a second moment in the opera where, likewise, they're like, who the fuck would do such a thing?

I didn't know this was even in the cards, right?

And then there's somebody who has a different, perhaps more disciplined and worthy worldview

that can stand in contrast.

Yes, who does not care about love, but cares about gold.

He loves only gold.

This is some incel shit, though, I got to say.

Like, oh, yeah.

The hawk girls sexually humiliate a unattractive but worthy man, uh, and then they live to pay the price.

Exactly.

So, in what can only be described as a Shymelan twist, uh, Iberich does exactly that.

He's like, I forswear in love and fucks off with the gold.

And they're like, What?

Uh, anyway, that's what happened.

And I think we're already

kind of getting in the spirit of the political allegory here, right?

Like, there's something here about frustrated masculinity, there's something here about frustrated desire,

and about desire that sort of turns into something else, right?

That gets sublimated and gets turned into something ugly, right?

The ability to kind of not feel solidarity with other creatures in that cosmos, basically, which is what love, I think, means to the Rhinemaidens.

They're not saying like, they're not talking about sex necessarily, right?

Like, is the precondition for a mode of value generation that is not you know, subtly coded as capitalistic.

This is a, this is an allegory of the genesis of capitalism, I would say, right?

The thing that they cannot even imagine, right, that you would exploit nature in this way.

He's like, yeah, fuck it, I'll do it.

I'll open up that uranium mine.

Let's do this.

You know, there's an eco-parable here, too.

Anyway, he fucks off with the gold.

Now we're heading to Valhalla.

Well, the area immediately outside of Valhalla, where Votan, so this is...

Odin, for those of you who are conversant in Marvel, ruler of the gods, is hanging out with his clan.

And so yeah, he's kind of a

Zeus figure in this.

Yeah, he lives on top of a mountain, right?

Yeah, where Valhalla is.

And he's got like a patriarchal authority thing going on.

Huge horn dog.

Yeah, he's got a lot of children and sort of sexual appetites that attest to his power and status.

Yeah.

And some of his children are kind of magic.

Yeah.

So the interesting thing is, in preparation for this, I actually looked at this

very interesting book by Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm, which is a history of the Vikings.

And he points out that, like,

basically, the Votan or the Odin that we do have through the Edad is a kind of a Zeus figure.

And people can't tell whether that's because the people who wrote down these stories first were Christian and therefore probably knew of the Greek myths, right?

They're like, oh, it's kind of that, right?

Like, it's possible that that's that those two really share a kind of a common DNA, or it's just that the person writing is like, oh, yeah, I get it.

It's basically Zeus, right?

But Wagner definitely picked up on this, and he probably thought, like, yeah, this this is kind of the kind of mythic core I'm drilling down on here.

So Wotan is getting ready to basically move into his swanky new headquarters in Valhalla, but he has, fun fact, failed to pay the contractors, who are two giants, yeah, named Fafner and Fazoid.

Even gods are not paying his bills.

This is Wagner's imagination.

He can't imagine anybody paying his bills on time.

Yes, right.

Like, well, you joke, but like, you're putting your finger on something.

Wotan is very clearly a self-portrait, right?

Like the guy who's like, oh, yeah, I know, I said I was good for it.

I'm just going to go to the boat and go to Paris, right?

Like, this is Votan.

This is what Votan tries to do.

But in Wagner's defense, he does something very interesting with the character because the other thing about Votan or Odin is that he's the keeper of oaths and treaties, which is, of course, super inconvenient if you're trying to get out of an oath or treaty.

He's carrying this big spear that has engraved on it all the world's treaties and oaths.

He's the guarantor of oaths.

Basically, if if you're trying to wiggle out of it, out of a deal, Votan is supposed to be the one to basically set you straight, which makes it really fucking awkward if Votan himself is trying to wiggle out of a deal.

So you can't really.

So that's the problem.

Then the god Loka, Loki, arrives, basically doing what he would do in the Marvel cinematic universe.

He stirs shit up.

He's like an impish, chaos, playful.

Yeah, he's a Mercury kind of, yeah, he's a Hermes figure, right?

Like the messenger god, is a trickster god, you know, basically exactly how you know him from various Marvel shows and movies.

You know, he sort of shows up.

He's he's kind of insolent and he's got his own agenda going that will sort of only be gradually either be revealed or become even clear to him.

It's not even clear that he knows exactly what he wants to do.

So the problem is Wotan has promised in that contract, Wotan had traded away.

his sister-in-law, Fricka, as payment.

Fricka herself is like, what the fuck?

Frica's sister, Wotan's long-suffering wife, is like, what the fuck?

Yeah.

Cool man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so Wotan is like, well, I got to get out of this.

And so he sends Loga out, apparently, to kind of figure out, is there anything out there that is worth more than love?

Right.

Love apparently being like the possession of a woman here.

You know, like, let's not think too hard about this, but like, like, they're talking about, yeah, bartering sexual violence, basically.

But right, it's like, as patriarch, I'm going to generously give another man the freedom to rape some of the women who I esteem as my property.

Yeah.

And this is how men make friends.

Yes.

To be fair, Wagner is not presenting this.

This is something that a lot of his right-wing fans sort of fail to notice, like is not offering this up for our approval.

You're supposed to think, oh, oh, boy, you fucked up.

What the hell?

Right.

Like, Votan is a, is a self-portrait, but a very self-critical one.

Like Kendrick Lamar.

Yes.

Like, like, look at all the ways that I'm a piece of of shit.

Yeah.

So Loga has been trying to figure out, right?

Like, is there anything in the world that could substitute for love?

Right.

And the only thing that he's come across where the only instance that he's come across where someone placed something above love is, of course, Al-Badaish and the golden treasure.

He's like, there's a dude, and he liked the gold more than he liked ever being able to love again.

And so at that point, everyone kind of goes full Lord of the Rings on this golden treasure, deciding that it's theirs, it's they're precious, and we want it, it you know so this is something they agree with the dwarf right they're like this is must be more important than gold yes yes

more important than love yeah and so the giants are like yeah we take that we're gonna take the lady until we get the gold but like yeah we'll take the gold there are other complications that i'm not gonna get into but basically that's the problem here right now what do we make of the political allegory of this is always kind of fascinating to me.

It's like it's one of my favorite scenes, I should say, in the entire opera, because there's just a lot going on.

And the ideas are pretty interesting, I think.

One thing is that like, it's so easy to see what Wagner could have done, right?

Like Wotan is like the wise head of the gods, right?

Like an Anthony Hopkins type, if you will, kind of modeling a more authentic relationship to the world.

And to some extent, he sometimes is that.

But like, when we first meet him, he's basically, I'm sorry, he's Donald Trump, right?

He's over-leveraged himself.

He's trying to get wiggle out of a deal.

Trying to get out of a real estate deal.

Yeah.

Treating women as tradable commodities to degrade.

Yeah.

Real fucking weird about his family, right?

Like, this is like, you know,

this is there's a real kind of interesting,

like, when we first meet Wotan, he's a bourgeois.

He's a, he's a bourgeois speculator that basically has this like, yeah, leveraged the farm for the factory and like probably shouldn't have, right?

Like, he's made bad investments.

He's, he's, he's not reckoned with the unionization of Valhalla labor or whatever, right?

Like, it's really, really interesting what Wagner does here.

Like, you meet basically the father of the gods, and you think, oh, wow, this is going to be

the fount of authenticity.

And it's anything but.

It's this guy who is kind of a schemer.

He's kind of a con artist himself, right?

And again, like, some of that is just Wagner's self-portrait.

Like, he's flattering himself by putting himself in the shoes of father of the gods, but it's not a very good portrait.

It's very, it's, it's, it's really a portrait portrait of the artist as a

as a gonzo capitalist, basically.

Anyway, so Loga and Wotan descend into Nibelheim, where Alberich has used the Rheingold to basically enslave his fellow Nibelungs.

And here we have a first clip, thanks to rules around public domain.

The Nibelungs are the other dwarves.

It's a race, a race of dwarves.

It's a race of dwarves.

And basically, when we arrive at Nibelheim, they're all being really kind of worked hard by Alberich.

As they're, and folks can hear this in the clip, as Loga and Wotan descend, they can hear the clatter of

the hammers and anvils of the Nibelungs down there.

It's as as industrial as classical music in the 19th century is ever allowed to sound.

The orchestra kind of cuts out for a while and there's just people on the stage just kind of hammering, right?

It's supposed to sound like a factory.

So it's not subtle in the way that like you get that the first thing this guy does when he forswears love, and like human fellow feeling is to like turn people into the proletariat, right and exploit their labor yeah he invests in industry yeah he's going straight into labor exploitation because he can't relate to people in other ways anymore you know it's just pure pure bullying and value extraction at that point that's what capitalism will do to you man once you're a member of the capitalist class although i do think that this i i have a suspicion that the political meaning behind all this is going to be maybe not straightforwardly anti-capitalist in the way that we might want it to be.

Yeah, so this is the interesting thing.

So right after we cut off on the clip, we also meet the first member of the proletariat.

And Mima is basically his Ibari's brother, basically, I think.

And he's this hairy creature who's just kind of squealing around, kind of comical and just absolutely fucking useless.

And Mima is interesting.

He'll show up again in the third opera in the sequence.

But he matters because on the one hand, he's the first kind of proletarianized figure we meet.

He's also one of the figures that is really straightforwardly comic and is always funniest when he's getting mistreated and tortured.

Basically, like his brother kicks him and beats him up and like he goes, no, no, no, right?

Like

it's played for laughs, right?

It's kind of funny.

Siegfried will do the same thing to him, will just kick his ass constantly.

And that's also supposed to be funny.

There's a wonderful passage in Adorno's Adorno's book on Wagner where he sort of points out that Wagner can't do funny.

It always just comes off mean.

And like, so like this creature that like should get our sympathy actually is like the subject of sadism and a kind of comic sadism

right away.

But this reminds me of what we were talking about earlier when we talked about Wagner's assessment of opera and the art of his time, right?

He's got this sort of multi-directional contempt, right?

He hates the capitalist class and is allegorizing them as evil in his opera.

But then he's also

parodying or trying to draw comedy from the humiliation of this working class proletarianized figure, right?

So he's got contempt both for the capitalist class and for the working class.

And it sounds like the working class contempt or contempt of the working class is rendered in these very vivid terms.

Yes.

And like sort of extensively detailed.

Yes.

And unlike his revulsion about the capitalists, the revulsion or the contempt for Mime is basically physical.

He's disgusted by this guy.

And characters will keep remarking on how disgusting he is.

Basically, Siegfried is basically like, like at the beginning of the opera, Siegfried basically, Mime has raised Siegfried as his son.

And Siegfried's like, that can't be because I find you disgusting, right?

Like you're a sniveling little dwarf and I'm a fucking he-man.

Like, like, you are not my father, right?

Which happens to be true because Wagner nature is always right.

But, like, still, like, the idea is like, everyone is just like being an asshole asshole to this guy.

And it's because they're physically repulsed by him.

And this is where it's maybe also important to point out that, and this is something that I take from Mark Weiner's book, Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, this kind of bodily repulsion that goes along with like the voice being squeaky, the affect being kind of sweaty, the diction being kind of weirdly ingratiating, etc.

Like that is how Wagner in an essay we're going to talk about next time, Judaism and Music, basically characterizes Jewish people, right?

Like Mima is a pretty classic, is one of the classic figures that people point to, like, that's an anti-Semitic caricature.

So again, the first proletarian we meet who Wagner should feel a great deal of solidarity with, given his alleged politics, is an anti-Semitic caricature, right?

That's interesting to me because when I was...

first listening to you go through this, I thought, okay, well, we're going to get to Wagner's anti-Semitism as being, you know, the socialism of fools model, right?

Where Jews are made as a stand-in for capital, right?

And resented on those terms.

But what you're saying is that one of the most vivid anti-Semitic characters is actually a proletarian.

Yeah, at least in this version, in this first opera, he'll be less so.

He's basically a blacksmith kind of flying under his own flag when we meet him again in Siegfried.

But yes, I mean, in some way, Alba Reich and Mime, who are kind of the antipodes here, right?

The capitalist and the proletarian, are both kind of implicitly anti-Semitic caricatures.

That is to say, both the person who sacrifices love for

speculation, basically, that's fairly clearly coded.

But so is this other person, right, who is their victim.

And that's, I think, that gives you kind of a sense of why people keep coming back to this opera and kind of try to unravel its sort of various layers because, like, that's pretty freaking weird.

I'll say more about that later.

But the main point, I I think would be that Wagner Kiely has some very conflicting feelings about capitalism, about the working class.

And the way I think of it is simply that when he runs up against kind of cognitive dissonance, he goes for the anti-Semitism, right?

It's not that he has some kind of thoroughgoing, internally coherent view of what

Jewish people are like.

And that's what the basis of his anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is the reflex he runs to when the contradiction he's trying to kind of

parcel out and figure out in his operas can't work.

Right.

He's like, oh, this is a contemptible figure and you should feel bad, feel horrible that this person is even there and you should hate him.

Right.

Like he's basically, every time he kind of hits an impasse, like you can sort of see him like reaching for the dial that says anti-Semitism.

Yeah, so this is my failure, right?

Because I'm looking for a sort of coherent rule or logic.

of the bigotry.

And that's not really how it operates.

It's more something that he uses almost like caulk to fill in these patches in his worldview.

Exactly.

And that'll get worse with age.

We'll talk about that in our second day, so to speak.

It gets worse and worse because he just starts grafting more and more ideas onto this scaffold that he's created.

And

so you get these moments more and more where he basically has to run towards racism, basically, in order to reconcile things, including gender and sexuality.

That's pretty important too.

Anyway, let me finish the opera, just so that folks know that we at least cover one out of the four.

so basically loge and wotan trick ibalich into giving up the gold and the ring doesn't really matter that much how they do that they drag the dwarf back up to valhalla and are like give us all your and he gives them all their shit his shit but then he's like you know you guys are such assholes i'm gonna curse this gold and they curse this ring everyone who owns this ring is going to jealously guard it and everyone who doesn't have it will jealously want to own it right and sort of not five minutes later, in 150-minute opera, Votan hands over the ring to one of the giants and the other kills the other giant.

It's like, I want this ring.

So Votan's like, oh shit, this curse might be for real.

And so he wants the ring back, obviously, because, you know, curse, but he realizes you'll have to be strategic about it.

So the next two operas will basically, or next three operas really, will be his scheme.

to figure out how to get the ring back without falling victim to his curse, right?

And spoiler alert, it works out exactly as well as all his other schemes do because he's just like a fucking great planner.

And the final opera is right called Twilight of the Gods.

So, you know, spoiler alert, it does not go well for him, but like, that's the story.

Like, basically, he's trying to have his cake and eat it too.

It's kind of an Odysseus motif, right?

You're tied to the mask.

You want to hear the sirens sing, but you don't want to fall for them, right?

Like, how do I get to do both of these things?

How can I cheat the system of curses and of laws and of treaties that I myself embody, right?

Like, how can I make sure this doesn't actually apply to me?

And it fails spectacularly,

anyway.

So, in the end, giants have fucked off, everything is okay, and the gods enter into their swanky, new, remodeled home.

We'll have a quick clip there.

So, this is the entry of the gods into Valhalla, And while that's happening, the Rhine maidens mourn the lost gold, right?

They are basically like, it always sparkled so nice, you know, we loved it for itself.

Basically, this is not, we're not thinking of it as a value.

It's just part of nature for us.

And Loga sort of sneers at them to just, quote, sun yourselves in the gods' newfound glory, right?

He's like, we turned it into a fucking Bentley.

Why don't you enjoy that?

You know?

Yeah, relax.

Yeah.

Yeah, relax.

We turned it into our swag, right?

He's almost certainly being facetious at that that moment because he's already indicated in a kind of aside, you know, aspectatores, like something that the other people on the stage can't tell, again, hear, but we're informed that he's giving some very serious thought to burning the whole fucking thing to the ground.

He's basically, I'm going to play along with this, but these people are idiots and they will destroy themselves and I intend to help them.

And as the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus mentions, as they're, and you can hear that a little bit in the clip we played, as the kind of very triumphal motif of them going into Valhalla plays, the strings are playing this kind of fire motif.

So the opera is already kind of telling us like,

FYI, you can, if you know how to listen, you already know how this turns out in fire.

The world will end in fire, not in ice.

This is

really, to me, an allegory about why you should never remodel your house.

Exactly.

The contractors will just take an arm and a leg, and then eventually your magic ring.

Yeah.

You got to deal with the bank.

It's a whole thing.

Yeah.

It's a whole thing.

Yeah.

So, I mean, like, in terms of the politics here, I think it's really worth thinking about the fact that, like, the gods are very clearly not the good guys, right?

Like, Votan is in a certain way the tragic hero, but really, like, his tragic flaw is like all of them, basically.

Like, it's like, if it wasn't for the philandering and for the terrible financial decisions and for the fact that you think you're smarter than everyone else and keep fucking yourself up in your own ruses, basically, like, it's not a classical kind of Greek hamarteau this is this really this person is just like has some basic character flaws that that will undo them right he's not some ancient wise deity he's basically a financier who overleveraged himself right the Rhine maidens as I mentioned love the gold for itself for its place in the cosmos for the way it fits into nature and Votan is you know like always up with the scheme he's always got something up his sleeve so that's fine good that is one of these four options one of the four yeah yes or as i call it in our podcast the pre-day um

i think we'll try and telescope the other three into one episode but i do think it's good to kind of really go through them bit by bit just because like you know those of us who really like these operas and we like this guy in spite of him being just this absolute asshole frankly like i hope i've kind of been able to demonstrate to you why why i think this is worth returning to because like like a couple of times i feel like you kind of thought you knew where things were going And then, like, there's a rug pull.

It kind of Wagner's got more going on.

It's a, it's always interesting when the racism is more complicated and esoteric than you were originally anticipating.

So, aha, a racism I haven't seen before.

Yes.

And I feel also maybe highlighting the more interesting aspects of that racism in Wagner.

The problem is, as we go forward in his biography, he's now going to read Atur de Gobineau.

I don't know if he rings a bell for you, The Origin of Inequality Among the Races.

Oh, of course.

Yeah, this is a title.

Wow, so promising.

Yeah.

Basically, in the Wagner biopic, this would be where he's like in a biker bar and someone's like, yo, have you read the Turner Diaries?

And Rick Harris's like, no, I have not.

You know, now I want to, right?

Like, basically, he's about to enter into some far gnarlier territory.

It's that fateful moment when somebody handed Andrew Sullivan a copy of the bell jar.

Bell Curve.

I'm sorry, the copy of the bell curve.

Oh, my God.

What if Andrew Sullivan got really into like sad girl?

I'm imagining a world where Andrew Sullivan like grabbed the wrong book and

romanticizes mental illness and has one of these

female adolescents.

Beautiful.

This is perfect.

I love the idea of Andrew Sullivan as confessional poet.

He's like a Tumblr girl.

The world looks such a better place.

Oh my God.

No, this is the fateful moment when somebody hands Andrew Sullivan a copy of the bell curve and then lightning strikes in the distance and you hear the clap of thunder.

Exactly.

And the storm begins.

And that's another reason, frankly, why Wagner is worth talking about in a little bit more detail, maybe not as a composer, but as just an exponent of his generation.

Because as we'll talk about in our second half of the episode, there's a reason why he goes for racism.

It is, and it is exactly why he goes to anti-Semitism in the Ring of the Nibelones.

It allows him to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time, right?

This is someone who doesn't really stray from his revolutionary commitments that much but then also becomes a huge sellout and it turns out that's hard to do right those are two contradictory things and it is really noticeable that like the thing that comes to his aid

is basically a racist imaginary i would say and so that's i think where we'll we'll leave it and we'll we'll head back into Nibelheim and back into Valhalla and well, we'll start on a on a bare rug where two siblings are fucking next time.

So like for something totally different, but like, that's that's where we're heading next.

And I hope that listeners are okay with this

rather epic treatment of a rather epic opera tetralogy.

Join us next time, where you will be seated on a cushionless seat, and you will not be allowed to look at your neighbor, and it will just be you and our description of the ring cycle.

That's right, and you're going to love it.

Yes,

I'm on the bear rug with the right.

Bed with a right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Cortillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.