SOURCE: O'Sullivan, Thomas D. “The Perfect Wagnerite: Shaw's Reading of the Ring.” English Literature in Transition (1880-1920) 30, no. 1 (1987): 39-47.

[In the following essay, O'Sullivan critiques George Bernard Shaw's interpretation of Wagner's Ring as a political allegory.]

George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite¹ is generally recognized as a lucid, witty, and informative introduction to Richard Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. Shaw's allegorical exegesis of the Ring has often been characterized as unbalanced, however, because of its heavy emphasis on political economy. Robert Donington, for example, describes The Perfect Wagnerite as “a one-sided study which does full justice to the economic issues but to very little else.”² John DiGaetani, admitting that Shaw's “view of the Ring … is very well defended and still valid,” says that “he does, however, ignore other possible interpretations of the tetralogy.”³ And Paul A. Hummert characterizes The Perfect Wagnerite as “Das Kapital tempered by Shaw's Fabianism and set to the tune of Wagner's cycle The Ring of the Nibelung.”⁴ Although Shaw's interpretation does have defects—particularly with respect to the significance of the character of Siegfried and the validity of the love theme—I would suggest that evaluations such as these are less than fair.

Shaw certainly does direct the attention of his readers to the economic and political implications of the Ring. Between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, Europe of course saw profound social, economic, and political changes. The center of power moved from throne and altar to boardroom and bank. Many artists and thinkers realized the importance of this tremendous revolution, and tried to come to grips with it in their work. Marx and Engels described and criticized it in their economic, political, and historical writings, as did Balzac in the Comédie Humaine. Shaw argues that Wagner, in the Ring, did the same. In interpreting the Ring as an anticapitalist allegory, he makes no secret of his own sympathy with the sentiments he professes to discover there. In the preface to the second edition, he remarks wryly that some readers felt he had written The Perfect Wagnerite “in a paroxysm of senseless perversity” (xvii).

Now, when a man is exiled from his fatherland for a decade because of his participation in an abortive revolution, and he writes a series of dramatic works centering around a protracted, often violent contest for power over the world—a power embodied in gold—it is scarcely perverse to suggest that his works are intended, at least in part, to convey a message about political economy. Although Shaw often liked to pose as a propounder of astonishing paradoxes, his allegorical reading of the Ring is firmly grounded in an understanding of Wagner's life and opinions, in a careful study of the text, and in plain common sense.

Shaw cannot be accused of offering an interpretation of the Ring that seeks to reduce it to a mere mechanical allegory. He points out that “an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty. … 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” (28). If Shaw seems to say less about the sublime emotions of characters like Wotan, Brünnhilde, Siegmund, and Sieglinde than he does about the entrepreneurial greed of Alberich and the industrial enslavement of the Nibelungs, it is mostly because the former are sufficiently obvious to anyone able to understand the words and listen to the music, while the significance of the latter was often overlooked by his contemporaries.

In most countries, the audience at the opera house has tended disproportionately to be drawn from the middle and upper classes. The cultural life of modern England in particular has been deeply divided by distinctions of class and caste—far more so than that, for example, of modern Germany. This inevitably led to a one-sided neglect of Wagner's social and economic themes among members of his English audience. In Victorian and Edwardian England, most discussion of Wagner that went beyond the merely musicological tended to focus either (among the earnest) on the philosophical and religious aspects of his work, especially Parsifal and some of the prose essays, or (among the “decadent”) on Wagner's bold treatment of sexual themes, especially in Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde; discussion of Wagner as an artist who embodied radical political and economic ideas in his work was rather slim.⁵ Shaw's socialist exegesis of the Ring was surely designed to shock English Wagnerians into perceiving intentions of Wagner that many of them found uncongenial. In his preface to the first edition, he says that he is explaining the Ring in terms of those of Wagner's “ideas which are most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's equipment” (xx).

Even so, Shaw treats the Ring as an allegory not only of economic competition, but also of social psychology. He says that “the dwarfs, giants, and gods are dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer States and Churches” (29). Whether one accepts or rejects this typology of the human race, one must concede that Shaw is far from reducing the Ring to the status of a political pamphlet that takes four nights to sing. The work, as Shaw sees it, is an allegory of the whole evolution of human society from beginning to end, and of the roles that different types of human personalities, as well as different economic classes, play in that evolution. In Das Rheingold especially, he sees “the whole tragedy of human history” (25). Having defended Shaw against some of his detractors, I shall now discuss what, in my opinion, is the principal flaw of his Ring criticism in The Perfect Wagnerite. Shaw holds that when Siegfried passes through the fire in Siegfried, Act III, and awakens Brünnhilde from her enchanted sleep, the Ring ceases to be music drama: “The rest of what you are going to see is opera, and nothing but opera” (54). What does this mean? The distinction between opera and music drama belongs more to jargon than to the common language, and it is regrettable both because it often seems to give a pejorative connotation to the word “opera” and because it tends to separate Wagner artificially from his predecessors like Beethoven and Weber. Nevertheless, the distinction has entered permanently into the mainstream of Wagner criticism and, as it plays an important part in Shaw's critique, it can scarcely be avoided here.

Carl Dahlhaus has provided an excellent explanation of the different meanings normally attached in the literature on Wagner to these two terms:

Music in opera, broadly speaking, is affirmative and linked to the moment, the immediate present. It does not explain or connect … it succeeds in giving the appearance of necessity to what is unmotivated, and credibility to what is absurd and inconsequential. … By contrast, in music drama, one of the essential ingredients of which is leitmotivic technique, threads are incessantly knitted together and connections established. Everything that happens recalls something earlier, to which it is linked by either causation or analogy.⁶

Shaw himself says that “the real difference” between the Ring and “the old-fashioned operas” lies in the former's repetition of themes as a dramatic rather than a formal device (112). Nevertheless, in his classification of Die Götterdämmerung (and the ending of Siegfried) as opera rather than music drama, he seems to use the content of the dramatic text, rather than the method by which that text is set to music, as his chief criterion. Although he does argue—perhaps a bit half-heartedly—that the musical technique of Die Götterdämmerung is in some sense primitive and careless in comparison with that of the other Ring operas (54-55, 76, 84-85),⁷ what he emphasizes again and again is differences in the text: “this Siegfried is not the Siegfried of the previous drama” (75); “Brynhild is not … the Brynhild of The Valkyrie” (77).

It must be conceded that Die Götterdämmerung is quite different from the other three Ring operas, and that its plot and many of its musical set pieces give it a closer resemblance to conventional nineteenth century grand operas. In fact, each of the Ring dramas has a character of its own. Siegfried, for example, being in many respects a comedy, has a completely different tone from Die Walküre. The real question is, does the different character of Die Götterdämmerung signify a collapse of Wagner's artistic design? In the original version of The Perfect Wagnerite, published in 1898, Shaw accounted for the difference simply by the fact that Wagner wrote the poem of Die Götterdämmerung first and worked backward, only working out the “clear allegorical design” (56) of the Ring as he wrote the poems of the first three dramas. In 1907 Shaw “was struck by the inadequacy of” this “merely negative explanation” (xiii), and wrote a new chapter for the German translation of his book. It appeared in the third English edition, in 1913, under the title “Why He Changed His Mind.”

In this afterthought, Shaw argues that the political changes in Europe between the revolutions of 1848 and the 1870's had led Wagner to alter his conception. “Siegfried,” he says, “did not arrive and Bismarck did” (87). In fact, Shaw overstates his case. Although the music of Die Götterdämmerung was composed between October 1869 and November 1874, the poem had been written by December 1852. The poem was based on an earlier text—never set to music—called “Siegfrieds Tod,” which Wagner wrote in the fall of 1848. For the most part, “Siegfrieds Tod” resembles Die Götterdämmerung rather closely, although the ending differs markedly: in both dramatic poems, Siegfried's death results in the end of the Ring curse; in the former, however, this eliminates the threat to the dominion of the gods, and Brünnhilde carries the spirit of Siegfried to Wotan's realm; in the latter, there is no overt suggestion of personal immortality, and Valhalla is swallowed up in the conflagration that arises from Siegfried's pyre.

The change in the ending of “Siegfrieds Tod” could be interpreted, or misinterpreted, as a change from optimism to pessimism. The change was not made in the 1870's, however, and Ernest Newman offers evidence that it emerged in Wagner's thinking as early as 1851.⁸ This does not necessarily demolish Shaw's fundamental thesis, for by 1851 the failure of the revolutionary movements of 1848 had become apparent. Bismarck did not arrive in 1851—but Louis Napoleon did.

In any case, Shaw's emphasis on the failure of the revolutionaries of 1848 takes us to the heart of his fully-developed exegesis of the Ring, which turns on the function of Siegfried within the allegory. Shaw identifies Siegfried in two different ways, which he appears to consider the same. On the one hand, he says that Siegfried is “a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin” (44). On the other, he identifies Siegfried with Bakunin himself, calling him “Siegfried Bakoonin” (44 ff.) and “the young Bakoonin” (51). He argues that Wagner changed his conception because “Bakoonin broke up, not Valhalla, but The International. … The Siegfrieds of 1848 were hopeless political failures, whereas the Wotans and Alberics and Loki were conspicuous political successes” (87).

It may seem odd that the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the great enemy of the state, of religion, and of Karl Marx, should play a significant part in Ring exegesis. Wagner knew Bakunin in Dresden in 1849, around the time that the first began working on the project which ultimately became the Ring. Since it is Wagner's conception that concerns us, it is the Bakunin who existed in Wagner's own memory and imagination—not the “historical” Bakunin⁹—who is of interest to us here. Wagner in fact describes the notorious revolutionist in his memoirs, Mein Leben. His description does suggest certain points of similarity between his idea of Bakunin and his idea of Siegfried. Wagner writes: “Everything about him [Bakunin] was on a colossal scale, and he had a strength suggestive of primitive exuberance.”¹⁰ In his personal character, moreover, Bakunin was without self-restraint, and believed “that the sole pleasure in life worthy of a human being was love.”¹¹

However, the differences between Bakunin and Siegfried are at least as striking as the similarities. Wagner says that Bakunin was “more profoundly dominated … by abstract theory than by personal feelings.”¹² Surely, Siegfried is a character who never has an abstract idea in his head. Moreover, as a self-conscious anarchist revolutionary, Bakunin was a man chiefly interested in destroying the existing order of things, an ideologically-committed man who wrote and schemed in hopes of changing the world. Siegfried destroys the existing order, to be sure, when he cuts through Wotan's spear, but he does so from no ideological motive. Wotan is quite simply an obstacle in his path, and he puts him out of the way without reflection. The difference between Siegfried and Bakunin becomes clearest, perhaps, in this recollection from Wagner's Mein Leben: “Bakunin … offered the consolatory thought that the builders of the new world would turn up of their own accord; we, on the other hand, would have to worry only about where to find the power to destroy.”¹³

If there was ever a character who turned up of his own accord, it is Siegfried. His affairs are discussed at considerable length, to be sure, shortly after his conception, in the third act of Die Walküre, and it is not fanciful to trace his prehistory in the score all the way back to the appearance of the “Sword” motive in the last scene of Das Rheingold.¹⁴ In the design of Wagner's Ring, however, Siegfried's most important characteristic is his essential independence and spontaneity. He is conceived in violation of the most deeply-held taboo, he grows to manhood without any help from the gods, and he forges his own sword when Mime fails to do it for him. In this he resembles Bakunin's ideal; he is one of the builders—or at least one of the inhabitants—of the new world. But he does not resemble Bakunin himself, the conscious, ideologically-motivated destroyer of institutions. The conflation in Shaw's mind of Bakunin with Bakunin's ideal leads him astray in his explanation of the character of Siegfried.

Shaw was a rather unorthodox socialist in his conscious espousal of the idea of the superman. When he speaks of the three “orders of men” represented by “the dwarfs, giants, and gods,” he adds that “History shows us only one order higher than the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes” (29). He is certainly correct when he writes about Wagner's conception of Siegfried as the hero: “a type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and order which accompany them” (57). Where I think Shaw goes wrong is in his idea of the function of the hero.

Shaw's essentially utilitarian mind conceives evolution in teleological terms. He discussed his view of evolution most brilliantly in the preface (“The Infidel Half Century”) and postscript to Back to Methuselah, and he summed it up very succinctly in a letter to Tolstoy in 1910: “there is a creative force constantly struggling to evolve an executive organ of godlike knowledge and power.”¹⁵ For Shaw, then, the course of evolution tends toward a goal. Shaw recognizes the hero as the highest stage of evolution, and he sees the Ring allegory—as Wagner supposedly designed it before he “changed his mind”—as dramatizing this same idea. Shaw sees the hero as useful:

The majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address ourselves … to the task of producing trustworthy human material for society. … The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law and order … and establishing in their place the unfettered action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes, and producing order instead of confusion thereby because it likes to do what is necessary for the good of the race.

(60)

This hero is supposedly Siegfried, and it is only natural that Shaw is dismayed by what Siegfried in fact does. He certainly does not produce order. He wins Brünnhilde for himself, and then (under the influence of a magic potion) goes back in disguise and wins her for somebody else, unleashing so much disorder and confusion that he is killed, and the world comes tumbling down. Surely, this does not happen because of the failure of the revolutionary ideals of 1848. The explanation lies instead in Wagner's conception of the hero, which is quite different from Shaw's.

For Wagner, the hero is not useful. Siegfried's life is an end in itself, or rather it finds its highest purpose (briefly) in love, and love is an end in itself. This notion outraged Shaw, who says that “at the point where The Ring changes from music drama into opera … the philosophy degenerates into the prescription of a romantic nostrum for all human ills” (63), namely “Love as the remedy for all evils” (64). This is not the place for a full-scale discussion of sexual love in Shaw.¹⁶ It is enough to say that Eric Bentley was right when he observed that, though Shaw's plays frequently deal with sexual themes, “the torridity of sexual romance. … is explicitly rejected.”¹⁷ Wagner takes this “torridity” for granted. Rejecting it explicitly fails to solve the problems of Tannhäuser or Klingsor, for example, and even when it leads Tristan and Siegfried to destruction the world is well lost. In Parsifal sublimation—not rejection—is the ideal, but in the Ring sexual romance is the only thoroughly wholesome and creative force in a doomed world. It is “explicitly rejected” by Alberich, to be sure, but that rejection is the principal equivalent in the Ring myth to Original Sin.

Shaw is doubtless correct in believing that in the Ring Wagner presents love as, in a sense, the remedy of all evils. He is wrong, however, when he declares that the possibility of a fortunate outcome will arise only when “Siegfried learns Alberic's trade and shoulders Alberic's burden” (91)—that is, in suggesting that only a nonromantic and “optimistic” Ring allegory could be cogent and consistent, and in seeing what he calls “the love panacea” (67) as either a carryover from an early, undeveloped conception of the Ring or as a makeshift second-best outcome for a failed Bakunin. The Ring is a political allegory, but it is more than that. Wagner seeks to reconcile the affirmation of the value of life with the recognition of the inevitability of death. Siegfried is not Bakunin, but a liberated human being who lives, and loves, and therefore can die without regret. The world is of course a scene of wickedness and confusion, and it must come to an end, but all its evolution has been worthwhile—has been made worthwhile by the attainment of human freedom and the realization of personal feeling. One may accept this theme as a credo or reject it as a romantic delusion, but it is surely a universal theme, and it seems a pity that Shaw's fascination with progress, evolution, and the superman should have blinded him to it.

Notes

1. George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Nibelung's Ring (New York: Dover, 1967). References to this work refer to this edition—which is a republication of the 4th ed. (London: Constable, 1923)—and appear parenthetically in the text.

2. Robert Donington, Wagner's Ring and Its Symbols, 3rd ed. (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1974): 52.

3. John Louis DiGaetani, Penetrating Wagner's Ring (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1978): 451. But Shaw does discuss the Schopenhauerian explanation of the Ring, though he rejects it.

4. Paul A. Hummert, Bernard Shaw's Marxian Romance (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1973): 80. But Shaw surely does not impose upon the Ring any political tendency alien to Wagner's intentions.

5. See the discussion by Anne Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1979).

6. Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979): 26-27.

7. It is interesting that Eduard Hanslick considered Die Götterdämmerung “the most successful, dramatically, of the cycle” but thought that its music was “noticeably inferior,” “oppressed by a singular exhaustion and fatigue;” he apparently believed that Wagner's powers of invention were overtaxed by the scale of the tetralogy, and complained: “the action in Götterdämmerung is distinct from the other three dramas, while the music, on the whole, is the same” (Eduard Hanslick, Vienna's Golden Years of Music 1850-1900, ed. and trans. Henry Pleasants III [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950]: 166). Shaw, writing as Corno di Bassetto in 1896, had made the point about the change from music drama to opera, but without the slightest suggestion of disappointment: “The Dusk of the Gods brought the sensation of the tetralogy to a climax. … Die Götterdämmerung, like the end of Siegfried, is opera. … I should hesitate to call Das Rheingold an opera, since it deliberately excludes all operatic features, whereas Die Götterdämmerung excludes nothing, the composer like a true past-master of his art availing himself of all forms and methods with entire freedom. …” (Bernard Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence [New York: Hill and Wang, 1961]: 246-47).

8. Ernest Newman, The Wagner Operas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968): 416-17.

9. It seems unlikely that any consensus on Bakunin's psychology or philosophy will ever emerge. Aileen Kelly, in a controversial study, has identified the demand that the revolution should be “wholly spontaneous, a pure expression of instinct untainted by theory” as “the essence of ‘Bakuninism’” (Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982]: 207).

10. Richard Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray, ed. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 385.

11. Ibid.: 388.

12. Ibid.: 385.

13. Ibid.: 386-87.

14. This is the motive, as Donington (114) says, “which we shall later associate with the magic sword left by Wotan for Siegmund, after which it passes to Siegfried. The motive also suggests the heroic character fitted to the use of the sword.”

15. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898-1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Viking, 1985): 901.

16. Arnold Silver offers an interesting analysis of the relationship between Shaw's psychological development and his literary work in Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982). Silver's book amply documents Shaw's ambivalent, often puritanical, views about sex. His discussion (131-42) of Shaw's marriage to Charlotte Payne-Townshend, which took place in 1898, the year of The Perfect Wagnerite, is particularly provocative. Discussing the (literal) disappearance of the character Maya in Shaw's late play The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Silver writes: “In thus making certain that the beautiful girl is killed, Shaw attacks with a new deadliness … his old enemies romantic love and sexual desire …” (32).

17. Eric Bentley, “The Making of a Dramatist (1892-1903),” G. B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. J. Kaufmann (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 68.