Yet by opting for the high road, the Ring could confront certain problems of its time more directly than could the domestically centered novel. I think of Wagner's concern with the nature of power. above all the relation of power to economic greed. The whole complex drama that transpires between Wotan and the Nibelungs, or between Siegfried and the Gibichungs, points to some central concerns of the time that the novel, to the extent that it concentrated on figures lower on the social scale than those in opera, was forced to approach in a different way. However much we may feel that George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite, exaggerated the socioeconomic meaning of the Ring, we must also grant that relatively early within the history of Wagnerian reception Shaw pointed to a central area of significance from which academic commentators even to this day have largely shied away. Similarly, however strong feelings many may have against directors who change the decor and the stage directions specified by a composer, Patrice Chereau's attempt to locate the Ring in the nineteenth-century, central-European social milieu in which it was composed can be taken as an act of contemporary literary criticism that attempts to read a work of art against the world out of which it came. Indeed the considerable gap between the heroic dimensions of the Ring and the often unpleasant facts it lays bare about money, sex, and power is itself part of the fascination that radiates from the work and that also locates the Ring squarely in a world that often covered up its seamier aspects with the most sublime gestures.
Besides the larger statements one can make about the relation of the Ring to the social and economic world of Wagner's time, one can also chart some specific areas that point to the events of his time. Indeed, the changes he made in the ending to the Ring are themselves indicators of his changing views of the world--or, to put it in somewhat more precise terms, of changes in the world that also brought about changes in the way that an artist such as Wagner viewed this world. The 1848 scenario and the first version of Siegfrieds Tod end on a note quite consonant with the revolutionary politics that Wagner practiced during that politically fateful year. After Brunnhilde's death and the return of the ring, the lower order of Nibelungs are liberated from their bondage in much the same way that the revolutionists of the time sought to liberate the equivalent lower orders of their own time. Indeed, the whole ending celebrates a triumph, for Valhalla in these early versions remains intact and will in fact receive the freshly immolated ex-Valkyrie and her recently murdered consort Siegfried. According to the final stage direction, Siegfried and Brunnhilde are seen moving together through a glowing sky, an optimistic, romantically triumphant ending that has far less in common with the way Wagner ultimately resolved his tetralogy than it does with the ending of (dare one say it?) La fanciulla del west.
By the time Wagner published his text in 1853, the revolutionary ardor of 1848 had long since passed, and Napoleon III was firmly ensconced as French emperor. Now the ending of the Ring takes a different turn: instead of a liberation of the masses and a transformation of Valhalla, the latter is destroyed, and Wotan and the gods all go to their doom. The framework in which we see the events moves from the level of politics to that of personal ethics. Brunnhilde, just before her death, celebrates the coming triumph of love and the breaking of those institutions that impede this triumph. If Wagner is still a revolutionist at this point, he remains so purely through the hope that the ending expresses for a new order of personal relations.
Yet even this ending was not to be the last word. In the following year Georg Herwegh, Wagner's fellow refugee in Zurich, introduced him to the writings of Schopenhauer, and as a result the composer found a rationale for his postrevolutionary feelings of disillusion (one could also argue that Schopenhauer could have provided a rationale for the disillusion already quite evident in Wagner's operas of the 1840s). The triumph of love that Brunnhilde proclaimed in the printed text--combined as it was with a confident prediction that what Wagner called the "iron rule of hypocritical custom" would soon reach its end--now, in fact, gives way, in words added in 1856, to the quietism and resignation that Wagner discerned in Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, a book that was published 37 years before but, as it turned out, was just the right tonic for the composer at this disillusioned moment of history. Brunnhilde now speaks of "trauernde Liebe" (mourning love) and "tiefstes Leiden" (deepest suffering)--though, at Cosima's behest, Wagner never set these added words but decided instead to let the orchestral passages that conclude Gotterdammerung do whatever new ideological work was needed.
I mention these changes to stress how firmly the Ring, despite its seemingly distant setting, was embedded in the world of its time. Yet I do not mean to say that the Ring simply "reflects" the historical forces surrounding it. Classic works do not "reflect" history so much as they make history--not necessarily political history (though they play their role in this too), but what We have come to call the history of culture, and above all that branch of it that some call the history of consciousness. The things that great works such as the Ring teach us are not necessarily what past times were really like or how particular events in the real world motivate the events we see rendered in art. Rather, art provides us with a framework for rethinking the times in which they were created, or deciding what is peculiar and unique to these times in contrast with other times, and above all for connecting things that, to the inhabitants of these earlier times, must have seemed to belong to alien orders.
The Ring, like many of the great novels of the time, has helped define the mid-nineteenth century for us; perhaps one might even say it has helped create a mid-nineteenth century for us. To put it another way, the Ring provides us with a focal point through which we can bring together and make mutual sense out of some quite diverse nineteenth-century events and problems--for example, we may cite again some of the phenomenal discussed earlier in this chapter, the enthusiasm for what people took to be the early medieval Germanic world, or the difficulties encountered by artists in renewing the epic tradition, or the fascination with origins and the need to make tight cause-and-effect narrative connections, or the preoccupation with incest and adultery as modes of transgression, or an artist's need to rethink the ending of his work as he rethinks his attitude toward the historical events taking place around him.
The old notion that art reflects history grants too passive a role to the work of art, at least to a seminal work such as the Ring. Moreover, the historicity I have sought to locate in the Ring lies not simply in the nineteenth century image that it conjures up but in the meanings it has accumulated through more than a century of interpretation both on the stage and in the study. When I attend a Ring cycle I hear both the voice of an otherwise lost nineteenth-century world as well as the long succession of later significations that have stamped themselves upon it--for example, Nietzsche's condemnation of Wagner as "der Kunstler der decadence" (the artist of decadence) for allowing Schopenhauer's pessimism to compromise the ending of Gotterdammerung, or Adorno's reading of Alberich and Mime as caricatures of Jews; or Hitler's statement in his notebooks, "Young Siegfried, well known from my time at the Linz Opera; Wagner's piece showed me for the first time what blood-myth [Blutmythos] is"; or Wieland Wagner's suppression of the traditionally Germanic visual effects in his Bayreuth Ring after World War II; or Chereau's presentation of the Rhine maidens as whores prancing about a hydroelectric dam. Even while thinking myself spellbound at a Ring performance I confess that I do not erase the photo-images in my memory of Hitler paying his respects to Wagner's descendants at their shrine in Bayreuth. Through an examination of the Ring's many entanglements past and present all these strikingly diverse matters can assume connections with one another--can, in fact, build up a larger image to which we then attach the name history.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)