In Bed With The Right - Episode 22： Richard Wagner： Act I

00:00:00.240 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dahn.

00:00:03.500 And I'm Moira Donaghan.

00:00:05.860 And whether we like it or not, we are in Bend with the Right.

00:00:10.720 We actually have a couple of announcements today.

00:00:13.600 And the first is that we are doing a live show.

00:00:17.180 That's right, folks, a live taping of your favorite podcast in Bend with the Right.

00:00:21.220 That's May 21st at 4 p.m. here at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

00:00:28.760 Tickets will be free, but you do need to register.

00:00:31.080 And we're going to be talking to the inimitable Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About, 1.00

00:00:37.780 about a little lady named Anita Bryant.

00:00:40.440 So for those of you who don't know who Anita Bryant is,

00:00:43.080 she is sort of the OG anti-gay crusader, you know, save our children.

00:00:47.700 You know, the stuff that people can do about trans people today.

00:00:51.060 She pioneered all the way back in the deep 70s,

00:00:54.360 which is a weird time in many ways, this one included.

00:00:57.440 and we'll be talking to Sarah about her.

00:00:59.940 We're both now reading Anita Bryant's book.

00:01:02.020 One of Anita Bryant's many books.

00:01:03.620 We're reading the Anita Bryant story.

00:01:05.860 She's a couple, yeah.

00:01:07.280 You have the actual thing.

00:01:08.520 I've been reading it on the internet archive.

00:01:10.680 I have an actual book with her angry face on it.

00:01:14.600 It's hilarious.

00:01:15.780 And Sarah Marshall is a really wonderful writer

00:01:18.680 and a podcast pioneer.

00:01:20.820 The kind of person who made me want to do a podcast

00:01:23.420 because I love listening to her so much

00:01:25.260 and had that like classic parasocial fantasy

00:01:27.460 that she was always talking to me

00:01:29.220 when I listened to her episodes.

00:01:31.200 And now she actually will be talking to me.

00:01:33.340 Now she's gonna.

00:01:34.140 It's a dream come true.

00:01:35.540 Yeah, we're very excited.

00:01:36.620 So it's a full crossover live spectacular.

00:01:40.000 There's a famous picture

00:01:40.880 where Anita Bryant got pied in the face. 1.00

00:01:43.140 Do not pie us in the face. 1.00

00:01:44.280 We have only like one set of mics.

00:01:46.260 But still, we're excited for this.

00:01:48.180 And then we have one more announcement.

00:01:50.200 What's that? 0.93

00:01:51.220 So Katie Lau, who longtime listeners

00:01:53.900 or listeners of our show all the way through

00:01:56.580 will remember as the composer of our amazing theme music

00:01:59.780 is joining the podcast as a producer.

00:02:02.100 As a little bit of background,

00:02:03.420 Megan Kalfas, who was our producer,

00:02:05.400 moved on to a different project.

00:02:07.180 And then for the last few weeks,

00:02:08.860 and you may have noticed this,

00:02:10.480 if certain edits sounded a little rough,

00:02:12.760 we had a complete burnout edited for us,

00:02:15.680 namely myself.

00:02:16.980 And I'm very excited that Katie,

00:02:18.920 who is a absolute pro,

00:02:20.980 will now take over and make us sound as good as we used to.

00:02:24.900 And so very excited for that.

00:02:26.980 Thank you, Katie Lau.

00:02:27.900 We're so happy to have you join the podcast.

00:02:29.800 Yeah, welcome to the family.

00:02:31.460 So I guess, you know, that brings us to the main thrust of our episode.

00:02:36.780 Adrian, what are we talking about today?

00:02:38.460 So yeah, weirdly enough, for Katie's first episode with us,

00:02:42.160 we're not going to use her amazing theme music

00:02:44.800 for the simple reason that this is a music episode.

00:02:47.640 Well, it is a episode about a musician, about a composer,

00:02:50.980 that uses all the music

00:02:52.520 that we could find

00:02:53.200 in the public domain

00:02:54.140 because we do not want to get sued.

00:02:55.920 Do not sue us.

00:02:57.280 If Universal Music is hearing any of this,

00:02:59.300 like all this is allegedly public domain.

00:03:02.180 Yeah, it's like the New York Times,

00:03:03.280 all the news that's fit to print.

00:03:04.580 And this episode is all the music

00:03:06.340 by this composer

00:03:07.060 that is fit to not get a suit.

00:03:09.640 Exactly.

00:03:10.400 So Maura, what do you know

00:03:11.440 about Richard Wagner?

00:03:12.780 Any of it good?

00:03:14.580 I'm going to be real with you.

00:03:16.000 None of it's good.

00:03:17.340 Right.

00:03:17.680 Okay.

00:03:17.960 Yeah, that's fair.

00:03:19.080 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:19.480 I know very little about classical music. 0.94

00:03:22.500 My wife is a big classical music nerd.

00:03:24.760 And when we were on a long road trip recently,

00:03:27.360 she was giving me an education playing all of these different pieces

00:03:31.080 by all these different composers.

00:03:33.840 You know, she likes Bach.

00:03:35.440 I'm supposed to like Bach.

00:03:36.600 She likes Beethoven.

00:03:37.360 I've been instructed to like Beethoven.

00:03:39.020 She likes Mahler. 1.00

00:03:39.820 I think Mahler fucking sucks. 1.00

00:03:41.700 What? 1.00

00:03:42.440 I fucking hate Mahler. 1.00

00:03:43.620 Oh my God, he's the best. 0.99

00:03:45.940 And then I said something,

00:03:47.620 well, what about Wagner?

00:03:48.700 and she goes,

00:03:49.960 we're not going to be listening to Wagner.

00:03:52.100 And that was the end of the conversation.

00:03:54.340 Like the tape was thrown out of the moving car.

00:03:57.880 I mean, it's a common sentiment.

00:04:00.900 I don't think she's alone in this.

00:04:02.680 There are people who really go all in on Wagner

00:04:04.980 and there are those who listen to him

00:04:08.960 for very obvious reasons.

00:04:10.180 And I, you know,

00:04:11.700 as someone who I wouldn't say I'm a Wagner fan,

00:04:13.580 but I have seen The Ring of the Nibelung

00:04:15.340 something like five or six times live,

00:04:17.840 like every one of those four operas.

00:04:20.340 I have paid my dues and then some,

00:04:22.000 actually it's more than five or six,

00:04:23.260 it's probably 10 or 12.

00:04:24.320 We should maybe remind listeners that Adrian,

00:04:26.920 who does not have an accent at all,

00:04:28.740 did in fact grow up in Germany.

00:04:30.380 Yeah.

00:04:30.740 And being taken to see the ring at the Nouveau Long

00:04:33.120 is what they do in German kindergarten

00:04:35.360 and for Christmas holidays. 0.51

00:04:37.540 Yeah, it's like the nutcracker.

00:04:39.260 It's like five hours long and there are giants in it.

00:04:42.280 But like, yeah, it's like,

00:04:43.540 it's like, oh, this is nice.

00:04:44.780 Hot chocolate, anyone?

00:04:46.400 But even so, like, I don't think I'd begrudge anyone

00:04:48.840 if they're like, nope, not my cup of tea at all.

00:04:51.740 So TLDR for this episode, Wagner was not a great guy.

00:04:55.200 But as bad a guy as he was, he had the worst fans, right?

00:04:59.280 That's the problem, right?

00:05:00.200 Like, part of why Kat was probably a little reluctant

00:05:03.000 to blair Wagner in her car or in your car

00:05:06.180 has little to do with the man himself

00:05:08.300 and more with the fact that, like,

00:05:10.100 you cannot gather a more monstrous fan club

00:05:13.180 anywhere in human history

00:05:14.600 than for Richard Wagner.

00:05:16.420 And I think that cuts all the way through it.

00:05:18.320 I don't think she'd mind me mentioning this,

00:05:19.960 but my aunt, big Wagnerian herself,

00:05:23.900 somehow got tickets to the Bayreuth Festival,

00:05:26.300 which is the big Wagner Festival

00:05:27.460 that happens in the summer in the city of Bayreuth.

00:05:30.000 At his home, right?

00:05:31.300 Well, yeah, he built his villa there

00:05:33.160 and he built his own theater.

00:05:34.440 It's his own theater.

00:05:35.620 And she was like, oh, it's hard to get tickets.

00:05:38.940 They're not very expensive.

00:05:40.140 They're keeping them deliberately cheap,

00:05:41.620 but they're limited, right?

00:05:43.140 So they won't allow scalping,

00:05:44.360 but they are hard to get.

00:05:45.440 Normally you put yourself on a list

00:05:46.580 and eventually you get them.

00:05:47.900 Like Shakespeare in the Park.

00:05:49.080 Yeah, exactly.

00:05:49.720 And she eventually got some

00:05:51.120 through some weird group

00:05:52.360 that she didn't know very much about.

00:05:54.100 And they were like,

00:05:54.700 oh, we also have a bus going to Bayreuth

00:05:57.020 and we'll have some nice talks

00:05:59.420 like to prepare you for the opera.

00:06:00.960 And she said, that's fine.

00:06:01.680 I'll do that.

00:06:02.680 And apparently she claims that like

00:06:04.620 an hour entry, she's like,

00:06:05.720 oh, it's this kind of group

00:06:07.520 and got out.

00:06:08.600 And I was like, I'll just take the train. 1.00

00:06:10.040 This is, these people are fucking creeps. 0.99

00:06:12.400 That's like still, right? 1.00

00:06:13.440 So your aunt wound up on the Nazi bus to Wagner is what you're saying. 0.98

00:06:17.860 Yeah, exactly.

00:06:18.620 Yeah.

00:06:18.800 In a twist that is truly shocking only to those who have not paid attention to them.

00:06:24.060 I don't know if she, I don't think she was shocked.

00:06:25.620 I think she just, she was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for a free ride

00:06:29.900 and then was like, nope, I'm out.

00:06:32.180 And yeah.

00:06:33.280 And so this problem is well documented.

00:06:36.280 And I will say that I don't begrudge any listener if they're like,

00:06:39.560 this is not making me want to check this guy out.

00:06:41.560 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.

00:06:50.620 So we're not going to be listening to a lot of music.

00:06:53.320 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.

00:07:00.200 But that's obviously not what we're interested in here.

00:07:02.620 We're interested in his political impact, which is really considerable compared to like, even someone like Beethoven, even someone like Mozart, right?

00:07:09.780 like, and it's not by accident. He wanted to be politically effective and he was. And what is

00:07:16.940 that saying? Those whom the gods wish to punish, do they grant their desires? Like he probably

00:07:22.120 wishes that he was just like remembered as a composer at this point. But I think that that's

00:07:26.900 pretty important. We're not going to be talking about Wagner, the composer as such. We're going

00:07:30.880 to be talking about him as a kind of figure of philosophy of politics, et cetera, et cetera.

00:07:36.960 So, top line for listeners following along at home.

00:07:40.700 Richard Wagner, 19th century German composer,

00:07:44.140 primarily of opera.

00:07:46.160 Very deliberate and pointed political commentary

00:07:50.320 in his work and in his writing.

00:07:52.380 Well, more so in his writing.

00:07:54.240 Like, you could look at the operas and miss it.

00:07:56.720 Once you know what you're looking for,

00:07:58.300 it's hard to miss, but you could, right?

00:08:00.460 You could sit through Tristan and Isolde, for instance,

00:08:02.540 which is just two people falling in love

00:08:04.060 and then dying together.

00:08:04.980 and think this is not a particularly political work.

00:08:08.840 But Wagner was always there with an essay to be like,

00:08:11.660 by the way, this is what I meant.

00:08:13.340 And half the time that turned out okay.

00:08:14.940 And half the time it's like,

00:08:15.760 oh, what if he had not hit send on that?

00:08:18.420 And then because of this political writing

00:08:20.340 and its residences in his work,

00:08:22.800 he has become a figure of great imagination,

00:08:25.500 particularly in the German right.

00:08:27.840 Yeah.

00:08:28.240 The German right, that wonderful,

00:08:30.300 classically wonderful place to be.

00:08:32.440 I feel like basically everybody knows

00:08:33.760 what the German rite is about.

00:08:35.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:36.400 They've become pretty famous.

00:08:37.580 They've become household names, as it were.

00:08:39.880 So it's important to note,

00:08:41.420 you say he's a composer and that's exactly right,

00:08:43.340 but he wouldn't have just regarded himself as a composer.

00:08:46.720 He thought of himself as a theater director,

00:08:49.080 a poet, a conductor, a music theorist,

00:08:52.080 and even a philosopher.

00:08:53.520 And while he was a bit of an amateur

00:08:56.380 at a lot of this stuff,

00:08:57.920 his contributions in these various fields

00:08:59.720 were taken pretty seriously at the time.

00:09:01.280 So people did kind of read him also as a philosopher, right?

00:09:04.440 Like there are other composers who write theoretical treatises and like colleagues will read it.

00:09:09.780 But Wagner, people took serious his theories.

00:09:14.240 I mean, to just give an example that people are probably familiar with is the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Total Work of Art, right?

00:09:19.400 Like that's been influential in the history of aesthetics, right?

00:09:22.620 So like this idea that like you're integrating different aspects of the theatrical production in certain ways.

00:09:28.400 That's something that, you know, Hollywood got interested in.

00:09:31.180 And that's something that theater people got interested in.

00:09:33.960 That's something that other composers drew on, et cetera, et cetera.

00:09:37.680 And that's not necessarily just like a compositional thing.

00:09:40.560 He had a whole, he had treatises where he explained why he thought this was so important.

00:09:44.260 And we'll talk about that.

00:09:45.600 But like, yeah, so he basically, he had this outsized influence, right?

00:09:49.300 We already talked about how Nietzsche and Vining are both kind of like radicalized by

00:09:53.620 their contact with this guy.

00:09:55.320 And that's part of his ambition.

00:09:57.880 He didn't just want to be a composer

00:10:00.140 in the sense that like the generation right before him

00:10:03.560 had been composers, right?

00:10:05.440 So Wagner was born in 1813 in Leipzig

00:10:08.500 in what is today Eastern Germany.

00:10:11.260 And if you think about the generation before that,

00:10:13.740 so that's your Beethoven's, that's your Mozart's.

00:10:16.960 It's not quite the generation prior,

00:10:18.720 but like they've just all kind of died.

00:10:21.140 And these people largely still were professionals,

00:10:26.620 professional music writers,

00:10:29.160 often more or less in the employ of wealthy families,

00:10:33.380 usually noble families, right?

00:10:35.100 And Wagner is part of the generation

00:10:37.080 that breaks away from that and says,

00:10:38.400 no, we're actually equal contributors

00:10:40.960 to kind of social life, right?

00:10:43.180 I'm not your employee.

00:10:44.640 I don't work for you.

00:10:46.460 I work for myself, right?

00:10:47.460 Like his first job is at a Hoftheater,

00:10:49.780 so at a court theater.

00:10:51.320 And what does he say?

00:10:52.640 I got to build my own theater, man.

00:10:53.940 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 your noble patron is like, I don't like the oboe. Make it a clarinet concerto. So you make it a fucking clarinet concerto. That's not what Wagner is doing. He's like, everything here is because I wanted it this way. This is my entrepreneurial vision, my artistic vision.

00:11:17.080 So he dramatically left the New York Times to relaunch his own substack. Is that what you're telling me?

00:11:22.880 Exactly.

00:11:23.640 He's not going to work for the institutions.

00:11:25.240 He's going to be his own free-thinking, free-reeling man.

00:11:28.420 He's heterodox.

00:11:31.080 Yes. 0.59

00:11:32.500 And it turned out well for him too.

00:11:34.540 No grift there at all.

00:11:37.060 But what you're saying is he understands his artistic integrity and independence as a matter of his self-respect, right?

00:11:43.240 It's very, very important to him to be unmediated between his vision and its expression.

00:11:49.680 Yeah. And this is something where we can already kind of flag something for folks.

00:11:54.300 So full disclosure, a large part of this episode will be a plot summary of The Ring of the

00:11:59.120 Nibelungs. But listen for this, right? Like if you think about like Wagner sees this model of

00:12:04.620 the composer and says, this is inorganic. It's as you say, it's inauthentic, right? It's not

00:12:09.460 creatively true. But of course you can go two ways there. You can either say, oh, this is a

00:12:15.060 person who wants to go back to some kind of pre-modern mode where the artist is sort of in an

00:12:20.040 unalienated relationship to the people. And Wagner thought that way. The other way you can look at

00:12:26.180 that, of course, and you already mentioned the sub stack, is to say, oh, this man is going into

00:12:30.100 business for himself, right? And that's what the Bayreuth Opera Festival was also. It's a family

00:12:35.240 company that basically is running the shop, right? Like he's on the one hand kind of presenting

00:12:42.540 himself as this, almost this bard figure, right? Like I'm, I'm not just a contractor for these 1.00

00:12:48.520 rich assholes, but he's also kind of presenting himself as a self-made entrepreneur, right? 0.98

00:12:54.580 And so this question of like, to what extent that whole project, crazy as it is, and this is very, 1.00

00:12:59.960 very unusual, very few composers in history have been like, fuck it, I'm building my own theater, 0.95

00:13:04.700 right? Whether or not that's forward looking or backward looking, whether that's anti-capitalist 0.94

00:13:08.980 they're capitalists, like this is going to be a big, big question. And it's a big, big theme

00:13:12.660 because capitalism turns up in his music everywhere, right? Or in his opera plots

00:13:16.880 everywhere. And so the fact that he's in this very weird space where you can look at him either way,

00:13:22.680 right? Be like, oh, this is totally pre-capitalistic or like, nope, it's a corporation.

00:13:26.700 He invented a, you know, a family corporation. A profit-making, profit-motorated enterprise

00:13:33.420 that trades in fantasies of a pre-commercial

00:13:38.220 and pre-capitalistic past.

00:13:41.420 Like, gee, I've never heard of that before.

00:13:43.360 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:44.720 He was the OG trad wife. 0.86

00:13:46.780 Yeah, or even just, you know, hobby lobby. 0.93

00:13:49.080 Oh, yeah.

00:13:49.540 But like, okay, so this is his ideological sort of birth

00:13:52.720 or his career birth maybe

00:13:53.960 as he leaves the established channels

00:13:56.220 for people who write music in his age.

00:14:00.360 You know, this sort of patronage system.

00:14:02.100 And it's either collapsing already on the way out.

00:14:05.740 It's not for him anyway.

00:14:07.300 And he makes his bold stand to start his own enterprise.

00:14:11.920 And when does he do that?

00:14:13.480 Well, that's going to start in the 1850s and 60s.

00:14:15.900 So that's much later in his life.

00:14:18.140 And I should say that there are also a lot of other people who try this, right?

00:14:21.160 Like the other way to do this is through music publishing, right?

00:14:23.860 Other contemporaries of his are just like, buy my music.

00:14:26.660 That's how I'm going to make my money, right?

00:14:28.060 So he's just unusual in the way that it's both forward-looking and backward-looking.

00:14:31.520 because if you basically rely on cheap print

00:14:34.220 to make your money, right?

00:14:36.600 You're kind of embracing the modern

00:14:38.000 and he's sort of in this weird middle ground.

00:14:40.680 I mean, as we already mentioned in each episode,

00:14:42.340 of course, the Bayreuth Theater

00:14:43.560 then also gets paid for by a king,

00:14:46.340 which like, again, like,

00:14:47.380 it's not the most like modern thing you can think of.

00:14:49.600 It's like, can I have fairytale king?

00:14:50.900 Please make me a theater. 1.00

00:14:52.920 Fuck, is this a fairytale or something? 1.00

00:14:54.720 You know, anyway, so he's born in 1813. 1.00

00:14:58.020 He studies in Leipzig

00:14:59.440 and has his first kind of jobs there.

00:15:01.860 He takes his first real job at an opera house

00:15:04.760 kind of programming and conducting in Riga,

00:15:08.920 which is today in Latvia.

00:15:10.400 So first thing to note about him,

00:15:12.260 and this is something that a lot of people

00:15:14.000 write about him do note,

00:15:15.540 is the other thing about someone who like,

00:15:17.720 is like, I'm going to start my own theater.

00:15:19.600 Your majesty, can you please invest in this? 1.00

00:15:21.820 It's kind of con artist shit, right? 0.99

00:15:23.580 And like, he had something of the flim-flam man 1.00

00:15:26.080 about him.

00:15:27.420 Like, apparently he had like an outrageous number of shoes.

00:15:30.220 He was like really bad with money.

00:15:32.680 And a lot of these moves early in his life

00:15:35.300 are really about debtors.

00:15:36.900 Yeah.

00:15:37.440 The German speaking world at that time

00:15:39.100 is extremely fragmented politically,

00:15:40.760 meaning if you can make it across a border,

00:15:42.860 it can be extremely painful to like try to retrieve debt.

00:15:47.560 Money, yeah.

00:15:48.280 And so, and this is why he keeps moving basically.

00:15:51.120 But okay, so you're also touching on something

00:15:52.880 that I thought was a little bit surprising to me

00:15:55.820 because, you know, now I think of classical music

00:15:57.380 as a very rarefied world

00:15:58.680 that people don't really get into

00:16:01.440 unless they're born from the elite.

00:16:02.800 You're talking about him writing letters to kings

00:16:05.480 asking for money and them, in fact, giving him money.

00:16:08.720 But he's not actually from particularly elite origins, right?

00:16:13.000 He's from a fairly humble background.

00:16:15.040 Yeah, he is born into a middle-class family.

00:16:17.380 His dad dies within, I forget, weeks of him being born.

00:16:21.520 He has a lot of family in theater and music.

00:16:24.880 And yeah, classical music at the time was at best

00:16:27.320 a way towards respectability

00:16:30.600 from something less than that, right?

00:16:33.640 Like classical music was a form of social climbing.

00:16:36.500 Yes, it puts you in touch with, you know,

00:16:39.160 counts and kings, et cetera, et cetera,

00:16:41.060 because they all liked that stuff.

00:16:42.720 But a lot of them came out of a kind of performance

00:16:45.640 world of the 18th century,

00:16:47.480 which frankly was like,

00:16:48.960 to be in a theater troupe in the 18th century

00:16:51.340 was like pretty, right?

00:16:52.780 Like it was being like a slightly

00:16:54.120 artistically more ambitious carny.

00:16:56.760 It's not a very good living. 1.00

00:16:58.340 You're extremely dependent on the forbearance of these rich assholes. 0.99

00:17:02.780 It's a living, but it's not like an amazing one. 0.99

00:17:04.960 And yeah, Wagner had money problems, I think, throughout his life, basically.

00:17:09.380 Maybe not at the very end, but it sort of followed him around for most of his career.

00:17:14.460 Now, some of that was because his appetites just grew and grew.

00:17:17.460 But also, just the composer's life was not lavish at the time.

00:17:21.600 And very few of them really came from money or privilege.

00:17:26.180 And we might mention that he first goes to Riga.

00:17:29.920 He has to flee there because of his debts.

00:17:31.980 He ends up in Paris.

00:17:33.400 Paris is at the time sort of the center for opera making.

00:17:37.700 The Grands Operats are super popular.

00:17:40.460 It's sort of the moment when special effects really are brought into opera, right?

00:17:44.080 This is when they use steam and, you know, gas lamps, et cetera, et cetera.

00:17:48.120 Really cool sort of sound effects and light effects.

00:17:52.180 And he takes a lot of that on, but he finds it all a little bit inauthentic.

00:17:56.180 right like these like this is very stagey and a little bit sort of cheap these newfangled

00:18:02.640 technological innovations are ruining the form we need to go back to basics i'm sorry i'm just

00:18:06.920 thinking of him as like a gen x cancel culture grifter right yeah he's got a sub stack he's like

00:18:12.700 mad at the kids these days with their tiktoks and only listens to music on vinyl you know

00:18:18.580 There's something about the tenor and the like cantankerousness of his conservatism

00:18:25.840 that feels very familiar today.

00:18:28.020 Yes, except this is the interesting thing.

00:18:30.300 And this is where we might not call him a straightforward conservative.

00:18:34.180 He's on the one hand, yes, he thinks that some of these newfangled things are a problem.

00:18:37.780 But he also thinks that that's just because they're used wrong.

00:18:41.140 What they really should do is create sort of a second immediacy, right? 0.96

00:18:44.720 He says, through all this bullshit, you can actually get somewhere very real, right? 0.88

00:18:49.180 People could have a quasi-epiphanic, quasi-religious experience in an opera house. 0.98

00:18:54.400 It's just, if you just kind of use wind machines, like you're not going to get that.

00:18:58.540 But like, you could use steam in interesting ways.

00:19:01.820 You could use acoustics in really cool ways.

00:19:05.560 But what you're doing just happens to be cheap.

00:19:08.020 So he is both kind of a modernist and kind of a traditionalist.

00:19:13.620 And if you're thinking,

00:19:14.600 huh, what is someone

00:19:15.560 who has nothing against technology

00:19:17.400 but wants to use it to like

00:19:18.680 restore the immediacy of,

00:19:21.540 you know, the people?

00:19:22.880 It's like, uh-oh,

00:19:23.700 like you're entering into a real danger zone.

00:19:25.520 That's a bad quadrant to be in.

00:19:27.300 Viren will not end up there quite yet,

00:19:29.480 but you can sort of,

00:19:30.280 you're detecting the early rumblings

00:19:31.860 of like the fact that the Nazis

00:19:33.520 were not totally wrong to be like,

00:19:35.000 oh, this guy speaks our language.

00:19:36.180 Like in this way, yes, he does.

00:19:37.980 I think that's fair to say.

00:19:39.500 But the first political turn

00:19:40.720 we get from him in Paris

00:19:41.900 is that he who had been kind of sort of a baseline,

00:19:44.940 I think conservative or moderate,

00:19:47.080 gets really into this idea of revolution.

00:19:50.060 He really gets into this idea of democracy

00:19:51.660 and becomes very, very infatuated

00:19:54.060 with the French revolutions of the 1830s, basically.

00:19:56.580 Update us on these other revolutions.

00:19:58.980 This is not the famous French Revolution.

00:20:00.820 This is the latter French Revolution.

00:20:02.340 Exactly.

00:20:02.800 And of course, Wagner born during the Wars of Liberation,

00:20:06.260 during which, you know,

00:20:07.280 the Germans kind of had to throw Napoleon out of Germany.

00:20:10.640 you weren't going to find a lot of people who were like,

00:20:12.480 oh yeah, the French Revolution was a cool thing, right?

00:20:14.700 So he very much was socialized into a world

00:20:16.480 where like people tended to regard the French Revolution

00:20:18.520 as something that, you know,

00:20:20.720 might've had some good ideas,

00:20:21.720 but also killed uncle so-and-so in Russia or, you know.

00:20:25.180 No, it's, I think we can all relate

00:20:26.660 to those who hate the French.

00:20:27.980 I think that's a very standard, standard sentiment.

00:20:31.140 A lot of people don't like the French.

00:20:32.640 I won't endorse this. 1.00

00:20:33.940 They're so strange.

00:20:36.020 I'll say that until the next Parisian waiter is rude to me.

00:20:38.440 I'm like, all right, last time I've stood up for you all.

00:20:42.500 But exactly, so by the 1830s,

00:20:44.860 France is sort of once again rocked

00:20:47.100 by these kind of quasi-revolutionary

00:20:49.500 and then eventually full-on revolutions

00:20:51.460 that culminate in the 1848 revolution.

00:20:54.860 And Wagner is there for a lot of the foreshocks.

00:20:56.840 There are all these precursors to it

00:20:58.780 and he fully understands what they are.

00:21:00.100 Everyone understood at the time what they are.

00:21:01.860 If people want to read more about these,

00:21:03.400 I would recommend Chris Clark's new book about 1848.

00:21:07.240 He goes through that in some detail.

00:21:08.960 It's very, very good.

00:21:10.040 If you're a podcast person,

00:21:11.080 Mike Duncan has covered the first half

00:21:14.220 of the 19th century in France,

00:21:16.080 like very, very thoroughly.

00:21:17.340 That's right.

00:21:17.860 That's right.

00:21:18.180 Always a charmer.

00:21:19.580 Yeah.

00:21:19.860 And so in his autobiography,

00:21:21.720 Wagner points out that like, yeah,

00:21:23.000 he did really undergo a conversion in Paris.

00:21:26.300 And I'll quote him here.

00:21:27.360 I now fully took the side of the revolution,

00:21:29.680 which presented itself to me

00:21:31.000 in the form of a courageous

00:21:32.400 and victorious popular struggle,

00:21:34.740 free from all the stains

00:21:36.060 of the terrible excesses

00:21:37.240 of the first French Revolution.

00:21:39.060 So let's keep that in mind, I think.

00:21:42.120 Like this is someone whose politics

00:21:44.100 are actually fairly radical

00:21:45.540 for the 1830s and 40s.

00:21:48.480 And so is his course of reading,

00:21:49.700 I should mention.

00:21:50.260 In the 1830s, in late 1830s in Paris,

00:21:53.220 he's reading Ludwig Feuerbach's

00:21:54.820 The Essence of Christianity

00:21:55.720 and Pierre-Joseph Poudon's 0.92

00:21:58.080 What is Property, right?

00:21:59.640 Famously, property is theft.

00:22:01.880 Keep that in mind for the stuff later, right?

00:22:04.520 So this is edgelord leftism, right?

00:22:06.540 Basically, like this is the, you know,

00:22:08.140 these are the young Hegelians.

00:22:09.360 These are the early anarchists.

00:22:11.260 This is no longer sort of polite discourse.

00:22:13.280 He's going through a punk phase, let's say.

00:22:15.680 At the same time, he doesn't really manage

00:22:18.400 to connect with Paris artistically.

00:22:21.600 It's not about the fact that he's German.

00:22:23.040 There are a lot of German composers and authors

00:22:25.620 who are doing very, very well there.

00:22:27.500 For instance, he gets to meet Heine Heine,

00:22:29.460 a famous poet who he admires greatly at the time.

00:22:33.920 Note the present tense.

00:22:35.520 He meets Giacomo Maiabea,

00:22:37.400 another great composer of operas

00:22:39.820 who's extremely successful in Paris.

00:22:42.760 And in the slightest bit of foreshadowing,

00:22:46.520 a lot of the people he meets there 0.98

00:22:47.980 who are successful in Paris are Jewish,

00:22:50.340 Jewish-Germans.

00:22:51.080 So just putting that out there,

00:22:53.140 make of that what you will.

00:22:54.580 This might come back later,

00:22:55.800 might become important,

00:22:56.700 but his kind of relationship to Jewish artists

00:23:00.200 is basically fraught from pretty early on.

00:23:03.540 but not in the sense that he's like fully anti,

00:23:06.400 but that he also like is extremely indebted to them

00:23:08.780 and then kind of won't acknowledge that fact.

00:23:11.700 So it's the anxiety of influence

00:23:13.660 and perhaps also some professional envy.

00:23:15.780 Is that what I'm detecting?

00:23:16.840 Okay.

00:23:17.020 Absolutely.

00:23:17.700 Right.

00:23:18.380 And so then he relocates to Dresden.

00:23:20.960 So that's in Saxony, southeastern Germany.

00:23:23.560 And there he has his first successes as an opera composer.

00:23:27.620 His first opera is, well, he's written two

00:23:29.720 that basically are only performed as Curios today.

00:23:32.460 and then his first opera

00:23:33.480 that sort of starts sounding

00:23:34.620 like Wagner is Rienzi in 1842.

00:23:37.300 Then you get the Flying Dutchman,

00:23:38.760 which is the first that gets sort of,

00:23:41.520 that we would today,

00:23:42.860 that, you know,

00:23:43.200 the San Francisco opera might put on.

00:23:45.040 Usually people don't put on Rienzi.

00:23:47.600 That's in 1843.

00:23:49.320 Then Tannhäuser in 1846.

00:23:52.020 Then he starts an opera called Lohengrin

00:23:54.400 that sort of is also very frequently performed.

00:23:57.480 And then we get to 1848.

00:23:59.220 And that's sort of when we get

00:24:00.040 the first break in this biography

00:24:01.580 and where we might leave him for a second

00:24:03.800 because he does three important things in 1848.

00:24:07.280 He becomes an active participant

00:24:09.340 in the revolutions of that year.

00:24:11.200 It's very interesting that the revolution

00:24:13.220 sort of starts in Paris

00:24:14.280 and then travels by the speed of mail coach,

00:24:17.760 basically across the European continent, right?

00:24:20.320 The kingdom of the two Naples, Austria,

00:24:23.000 and then to Berlin and to Dresden, et cetera, et cetera.

00:24:25.500 And so when it arrives in Dresden,

00:24:27.620 Wagner is in the mix, he's in it.

00:24:29.860 He gets all wrapped up in it.

00:24:32.160 As we mentioned, he had this kind of rabble-rousing inclination already.

00:24:36.300 He was a pretty fervent anti-capitalist. 0.99

00:24:39.220 He was like, let's fucking do this. 0.99

00:24:40.860 That's the first thing he does. 0.98

00:24:42.400 The second thing he does is, and this is maybe more significant,

00:24:45.200 he also writes about this, which is a problem if you're not going to win the revolution, right?

00:24:50.860 And that's exactly what ends up happening.

00:24:52.440 This is why he has to flee.

00:24:53.840 And this is why we have him in Switzerland, right?

00:24:56.720 In our Nietzsche episode.

00:24:57.740 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.

00:25:07.820 Yeah, yeah. I mean, he might have also been in debt, to be quite frank.

00:25:10.440 But he's usually running away from creditors. And right now he's running away from a restored regime.

00:25:17.000 Exactly. And he's just put some things in writing that you cannot really take back.

00:25:20.760 And they're not very, and no one's very chill about this, right?

00:25:25.240 There's a huge, what we use today, call a brain drain in the German-speaking world after 1848, right?

00:25:31.120 A lot of people around sort of the Marx circle kind of relocate to France and to the UK.

00:25:38.460 Wagner goes to Switzerland, which likewise has pretty loose laws around freedom of expression. 0.52

00:25:44.640 But of course, a lot of people leave for the United States in 1848, the so-called 48ers, right?

00:25:50.000 who a lot of them settle in Milwaukee and Chicago

00:25:53.020 and some settle even in San Francisco.

00:25:55.340 I believe, you know,

00:25:56.240 have you ever had Corbel Champagne?

00:25:58.260 I think I have, yeah.

00:25:59.540 It's a local, it's a California vineyard

00:26:01.800 and I believe they came over from Prague after 1848.

00:26:05.180 Wow.

00:26:05.680 I think the kindergarten came,

00:26:07.160 that's why that's a German word,

00:26:08.520 that came in through the 48ers

00:26:10.080 because these were, you know,

00:26:11.320 these were intellectuals, artists, students, basically.

00:26:14.400 Not because like the entire 48 revolution was that,

00:26:16.840 that's sometimes a misapprehension,

00:26:18.680 it's because they could flee.

00:26:20.000 Yeah, a little bit more money to get out there.

00:26:23.520 But anyway, so let me cite briefly

00:26:24.940 from his revolutionary writings,

00:26:27.180 just because it's kind of helpful to think about.

00:26:30.100 So first of, for him,

00:26:32.220 and this is very much in the mode of Feuerbach,

00:26:34.640 his critique of the politics of his age

00:26:37.380 is routed through a critique of religion, right? 0.84

00:26:40.720 This is a theory of Christianity and why it's bad,

00:26:43.760 but it's really also a theory

00:26:46.100 as to why aristocracy is bad

00:26:48.360 and why capitalism is bad, right?

00:26:50.360 So let me just read this. 0.99

00:26:52.500 If Christianity really wanted to create a world of art 0.91

00:26:55.500 that corresponded to its faith, 0.99

00:26:57.860 it could not represent the sensual beauty of the world, 0.99

00:27:00.620 which for Christians is a manifestation of the devil, right? 1.00

00:27:04.240 So he says, really, the artwork of the future

00:27:07.320 has to leave Christianity behind

00:27:09.240 because it is about sensual reconciliation.

00:27:12.480 It's about being one with the world. 0.56

00:27:13.820 And Christianity is all about an alienation from this world 0.91

00:27:17.380 because this world is a fallen world 1.00

00:27:19.440 and we should leave it behind as quickly as possible.

00:27:21.440 He says, yeah, there may have been a time

00:27:23.080 when you could make great Christian art. 0.99

00:27:24.320 You can't make great Christian art now, right?

00:27:27.180 And then he says, like, basically the art of his time

00:27:30.580 is just fallen in all these various ways.

00:27:33.220 Now I'll quote him again here.

00:27:35.240 So this art's real essence is industry.

00:27:37.620 Its moral purpose is to make money.

00:27:39.640 Its aesthetic pretense is to entertain the board.

00:27:42.900 Our art draws his lifeblood

00:27:45.100 from the heart of our modern society,

00:27:46.560 from the center of its endless circulation of capital,

00:27:49.220 from large-scale monetary speculation.

00:27:51.600 It borrows a heartless grace from the lifeless,

00:27:53.860 remains a mere medieval chivalrous convention. 0.96

00:27:57.400 And from there, with apparent Christianity,

00:27:59.820 not disdaining the poor's share, 0.98

00:28:01.680 descends to the depths of the proletariat,

00:28:04.000 unnerving, demoralizing, dehumanizing everywhere.

00:28:08.080 So what do you note about this passage?

00:28:11.600 I mean, it's both condescending towards the audience

00:28:15.960 in a way that I find kind of snobby

00:28:17.720 and also rejecting what seems to be capitalist motivations, right?

00:28:25.080 So it's pointing the accusing finger both up and down

00:28:29.120 on the class hierarchy, right?

00:28:31.200 It's like these striving, greedy, capitalist artists are condemnable 1.00

00:28:35.600 and their stupid, slop-eating, proletarian fans are also contemptible. 1.00

00:28:42.600 You know, it's kind of universally angry. 1.00

00:28:45.040 Yeah. So I think that's very, very important here. And I think I 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 bullshit for falling for this stuff, right?

00:29:04.940 And that's, of course, like, you know, 0.99

00:29:06.300 Wagner will in some ways cast himself as a populist

00:29:09.500 and say, like, you know,

00:29:10.260 I'm trying to return art to the people.

00:29:13.240 But then again, like, 0.72

00:29:14.560 these are five and a half hour operas.

00:29:16.100 Like, how populist can you really be, right?

00:29:18.520 Like, he never quite resolves this.

00:29:20.560 And in his better operas, I should say,

00:29:21.880 he even reflects on the fact that that's not,

00:29:24.180 it's a little hard to reconcile these two things. 0.97

00:29:25.920 Damn, you mean to tell me that somebody 0.98

00:29:27.920 who claims to be serving the people 0.99

00:29:31.800 with his work and intellectual contributions

00:29:33.740 is actually in many ways

00:29:35.780 only reifying the interests of the elites.

00:29:38.780 That's crazy talk.

00:29:40.440 It's a shocker.

00:29:41.580 It's a shocker.

00:29:42.500 You heard it here first, people.

00:29:44.880 But I mean, but the point is still like,

00:29:47.040 this could be, I mean,

00:29:48.640 this isn't straight up Adorno,

00:29:50.120 but this could be like Adorno and Horkheimer

00:29:51.920 on the culture industry, right?

00:29:53.060 Like the idea that like

00:29:54.060 it replaces with Hollywood movies

00:29:55.660 and like you could have printed this,

00:29:57.220 like this could have been

00:29:57.780 Dwight McDonald writing this, right?

00:29:59.400 Like mid-cult is basically this, right?

00:30:02.400 And I think that's important.

00:30:04.260 The third thing, though, is like,

00:30:06.300 he's fairly specific about like

00:30:08.220 the transactional nature of capitalism.

00:30:11.280 And like, he's got some very real things in mind here, right?

00:30:14.100 Like an opera, mind you, is a big business

00:30:16.120 in the sense, not necessarily in that it makes a lot of money,

00:30:18.940 but that it like involves a lot of people,

00:30:21.000 many of whom do not draw a very high salary, right?

00:30:23.100 Like it's the most commercial of all the art forms

00:30:26.040 in a certain way.

00:30:26.660 Because like, you know, you can put on a symphony

00:30:28.420 with like four stagehands,

00:30:29.660 like an opera is a big business.

00:30:32.160 It's just like, it's a big concern.

00:30:33.380 a going concern. But the other thing to note here is that he's definitely thinking a lot

00:30:39.300 about monetary speculation and the endless circulation of capital. That again, I would

00:30:44.120 like you to sense the slightest sense of foreboding, right? There does appear to be,

00:30:49.340 all capitalism does appear to be bad, but some capitalism seems to be much, much worse than

00:30:55.060 others. Gotcha. Yeah. I feel like I know where this is going. Yes, yes. The three brackets are

00:31:00.300 coming out, are starting to make their first faint appearance, right? So that's the second

00:31:04.660 thing he does. He writes these texts, which are pretty unmistakable in their politics,

00:31:09.460 which will make kind of work in what's then the German Confederation impossible. But the final

00:31:15.760 thing he does is he begins a draft of a prose sketch called The Nibelums, which would over

00:31:21.920 the next 20 odd years evolve into the work that he's probably best known for today, The Ring of

00:31:27.300 the Nibelungs. And I would now suggest that we leave Richard Wagner here just for a little bit

00:31:33.700 and really talk about that opera in detail. Just because I think you can show a lot of the

00:31:39.180 weird ambivalences in Wagner's persona and his artwork and in his outlook that sort of

00:31:44.400 transmitted itself to so many people in the late 19th, early 20th century through these four operas.

00:31:51.660 So The Ring of the Knee Belongs is a quartet of operas.

00:31:55.840 They're meant to be performed in sequence.

00:31:57.480 If you see them the way they're supposed to happen,

00:32:00.660 it's supposed to be four days.

00:32:02.100 You go to the opera every single night, basically.

00:32:05.140 And technically, they're not four days.

00:32:07.640 It's three days and a pre-day.

00:32:09.840 So like there's a short pre-day and then there's, yeah.

00:32:12.060 It's like Marvel fandom. 0.98

00:32:13.160 Like who the fuck knows why? 0.99

00:32:14.600 But like, yes. 0.99

00:32:15.360 Are they densely inter-referential?

00:32:17.900 Do you really need to have scene one

00:32:19.480 to understand the next one in the sequence.

00:32:21.320 Yes.

00:32:21.600 Okay.

00:32:22.380 Yes. 1.00

00:32:23.360 They're musically highly interwoven. 0.99

00:32:25.800 They follow each other's plot exactly. 0.96

00:32:28.700 And you're supposed to be able to devote four days to this,

00:32:31.800 which is already kind of like,

00:32:33.760 you can see why people think of this

00:32:35.580 as both hyper-capitalist.

00:32:37.800 Like, hey, I need to sell you four tickets for four nights.

00:32:40.660 No, you got to take them all.

00:32:42.180 Sorry.

00:32:42.860 Right?

00:32:43.720 Pretty convenient.

00:32:44.400 On the other hand,

00:32:45.640 it's a pretty bold move

00:32:48.400 for someone hawking a product to be like,

00:32:50.400 I'm sorry, you have to take the better part

00:32:52.140 of a work week off to appreciate this thing, right?

00:32:54.760 Like this is not, you know, quibby, right?

00:32:57.380 Like this is a, this will fuck up your week 0.74

00:33:00.080 in a major way.

00:33:01.240 And that's his idea, right?

00:33:02.540 Like he's like, this is not transactional.

00:33:04.200 You should be here because you want to be.

00:33:06.320 You're not here to see and be seen.

00:33:08.220 We'll talk about that a little bit more later.

00:33:10.000 You're not here because everyone's doing it.

00:33:12.320 You're here because you want to be, right?

00:33:14.280 Like either you're the kind of person,

00:33:16.120 and this is exactly where Kat might agree with him, 1.00

00:33:19.220 either the kind of person who loves this shit 0.99

00:33:21.140 and is there for all five and a half hours of it, 1.00

00:33:23.520 or the person's like, 0.90

00:33:24.660 just fucking miss me with the whole thing. 0.97

00:33:25.980 And he's like, that's fine, right? 0.94

00:33:28.060 Like, I don't want to be there for everyone. 0.75

00:33:29.860 This is really, I want the nutters. 0.98

00:33:31.560 I want the crazy ones out there, you know? 0.95

00:33:33.320 It demands a lot of its audience, right? 0.74

00:33:35.620 In terms of its investments and money and time.

00:33:37.900 And it makes sure to not give them anything back

00:33:40.220 except for the art itself.

00:33:41.620 Exactly.

00:33:42.020 Right?

00:33:42.300 None of the, you know,

00:33:43.440 I'm sure what Wagner would describe

00:33:45.360 is sort of like the corrupting,

00:33:48.240 like non-affective economy

00:33:50.600 that can happen around artwork,

00:33:53.580 like looking cool

00:33:54.760 and using it as a modes

00:33:56.860 of conspicuous consumption.

00:33:58.320 That's kind of,

00:33:59.180 that's organized out

00:34:00.420 of the viewing experience.

00:34:02.600 Which is all that opera was,

00:34:05.080 frankly, at the time.

00:34:05.980 And like he calls that out

00:34:07.260 and I don't think he's entirely wrong

00:34:08.760 about that, right?

00:34:09.540 So just to give you

00:34:10.200 a very simple example,

00:34:11.080 in Bayreuth,

00:34:11.740 they dim the lights all the way, right?

00:34:14.100 In most opera houses, that was not done

00:34:16.780 because people wanted to look at each other

00:34:18.440 while they were watching the opera.

00:34:20.540 And a lot of the court operas had big boxes

00:34:23.620 and they were arranged in a horseshoe shape.

00:34:27.060 Meaning if you looked straight ahead,

00:34:28.820 you just saw another person.

00:34:30.440 Bayreuth is laid out in such a way

00:34:31.520 that everyone has a pretty good view of the stage.

00:34:33.440 There are no better and worse.

00:34:34.420 There are no boxes.

00:34:35.240 So there's no VIP anything.

00:34:36.740 Like you're sitting in the rows with everyone else.

00:34:39.800 The seats are uncomfortable

00:34:41.380 because like he decided that the cushions

00:34:43.640 were killing the acoustics.

00:34:45.380 And so like, you don't have to sit on board

00:34:47.100 for four and a half hours, five and a half hours,

00:34:49.600 or at least you did in the 19th century.

00:34:51.900 And yeah, and so basically the idea really is 0.99

00:34:54.260 this isn't for the other shit, right? 0.99

00:34:56.900 And the other thing, of course, 0.99

00:34:58.480 is that like you weren't really supposed

00:35:01.000 to be talking during any of it.

00:35:03.180 And he has this wonderful description

00:35:04.820 of Italian opera houses at the time

00:35:06.600 where he's like, people just kind of come and go.

00:35:08.680 they chat each other up

00:35:11.340 they go and get another hot dog

00:35:13.300 whatever it's like a baseball game basically

00:35:14.880 and he's like that's fine

00:35:16.840 but that's a carnival that's not an opera

00:35:18.440 this really needs to be like you come here

00:35:20.420 and it's really going to be a little bit more like church

00:35:22.120 like you're going to be absorbed

00:35:23.140 you're going to be in your seat etc etc

00:35:25.020 funnily enough though

00:35:26.560 he kind of ran afoul of this himself

00:35:28.800 there's a very famous example

00:35:30.900 where it's often supposed that

00:35:33.080 Wagner sort of banned the idea

00:35:35.040 that you should clap between numbers in opera

00:35:37.280 which is no longer done really

00:35:38.880 you're not supposed to do that

00:35:40.220 it's often thought that Wagner

00:35:41.820 kind of outlawed that

00:35:42.760 but it seems like his audience

00:35:44.360 kind of did that

00:35:45.240 there's a famous incident

00:35:46.660 where during a premiere

00:35:48.160 I think during the Rheingold

00:35:49.140 he claps after a particularly good

00:35:52.140 aria was over that he thought

00:35:53.700 had gone particularly well

00:35:54.920 and he gets shushed by his own audience

00:35:57.560 right like but that's new right

00:35:58.960 so like basically we've gotten to a point

00:36:00.600 where people were like

00:36:01.700 no it's you and the music

00:36:03.760 and no one nothing else

00:36:05.060 the other stuff is for

00:36:06.180 when you pick up your baguette at intermission.

00:36:09.160 It's not for while you're there

00:36:11.160 communing with the artwork.

00:36:13.140 So there's an attempt to really purify the form

00:36:17.220 and restore it to a place of primacy, right?

00:36:20.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:36:21.240 So he's also got this like reverence for the form itself

00:36:23.900 that seems like it's achieved almost a mythic status.

00:36:26.500 Yeah, and he's thinking of this

00:36:27.560 like in terms of the ancient Greeks.

00:36:28.840 He wants to reconstitute the Greek theater.

00:36:30.440 He's like, that was a ritual.

00:36:31.540 These people did not just go there to be entertained.

00:36:33.960 That was a ritual.

00:36:35.220 It told them something important about their world,

00:36:37.260 about their lives,

00:36:38.220 and the Gesamtkunstwerk is supposed to do something

00:36:40.820 kind of similar.

00:36:41.600 It's not a fantasy world, right?

00:36:42.900 It's not like he didn't think that it had nothing to say

00:36:45.540 about the modern world.

00:36:46.520 He understood that it was an antipode to the modern world,

00:36:48.860 but he thought what it does is it taps you into

00:36:52.500 something bigger about this world than like, 0.59

00:36:55.740 hey, can you believe what Blah Blah was wearing

00:36:57.520 at the opera last night, right? 0.96

00:36:58.700 Like that's what he didn't want.

00:37:00.660 And there's a very nice phrase that said about Wagner,

00:37:04.520 but I think about, it might be a Georg Lukács line,

00:37:07.640 about romanticism of alienation. 1.00

00:37:09.980 And Wagner is like fucking mainlining that shit. 0.99

00:37:12.940 This is the idea that like any two terms 1.00

00:37:15.380 that are opposed in like modern capitalist society

00:37:18.920 were once unified, right?

00:37:21.600 And wouldn't it be great

00:37:23.100 if we could bring them back together?

00:37:24.540 They're now alienated from each other, right?

00:37:26.460 The audience and the art,

00:37:29.920 you know, the inside and the outside, right?

00:37:31.680 Like all these things that have become

00:37:33.280 kind of interlaced.

00:37:35.360 And the total work of art

00:37:36.900 is supposed to be doing away

00:37:38.120 with these kind of wanton divisions

00:37:41.000 that modernity and capitalism have imposed.

00:37:43.700 Why don't you give us,

00:37:45.420 for listeners like me

00:37:46.680 who don't really know a ton

00:37:48.080 about the ring cycle,

00:37:50.140 why don't you give us a plot, right?

00:37:51.320 Because my sense of Wagner's ring cycle

00:37:54.520 is that it's derived

00:37:56.440 in kind of a distant way

00:37:59.720 from the sort of Norse myth

00:38:02.120 that now animates a lot of like heavy metal music

00:38:05.260 and like the nerdier kinds of American white supremacy, right? 0.80

00:38:09.620 It's pre-Christian. 0.81

00:38:11.820 It's very involved.

00:38:13.920 It's very sort of epic style.

00:38:16.260 But I don't know much about the actual characters and plot.

00:38:19.040 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:19.700 Well, I'm glad you asked.

00:38:21.020 Buckle up.

00:38:22.040 And I mean, people who've seen the Thor movies

00:38:23.620 will recognize some people too.

00:38:25.340 Right down to the villain slash hero

00:38:27.480 who keeps everything in motion

00:38:29.580 will be very, very familiar to subscribers of Disney+.

00:38:32.840 So I should say that the plot is basically Wagner's creation,

00:38:36.800 but he's drawing in a kind of pastiche-y way

00:38:39.200 on all these ancient,

00:38:41.020 what he thinks of as Germanic legends,

00:38:42.640 but as you're saying, they're Norse myths, really.

00:38:45.180 He's just kind of like saying, oh, close enough, right?

00:38:47.660 In that way that like the Nazis kind of later would, right? 0.99

00:38:50.780 He's like, oh, it's all kind of Aryan, right?

00:38:52.540 Whatever, he doesn't use that word yet. 0.92

00:38:54.080 Like this is the kind of white we like is what it is. 0.67

00:38:56.560 He's like, this is an aspirational kind of whiteness 0.71

00:38:58.640 for my esoteric 19th century world view. 0.58

00:39:01.680 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:39:02.640 Fun fact, I believe the term Aryan

00:39:04.500 was popularized by his son-in-law.

00:39:06.520 So just, it's all in the family.

00:39:08.500 It's all in the family.

00:39:09.440 Anyway, so he's drawing on,

00:39:11.940 do you know the Edda,

00:39:14.480 the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson?

00:39:17.060 This is a 13th century Icelandic collection

00:39:20.860 of Norse myths.

00:39:22.300 It's sort of, if you're watching a Thor movie,

00:39:24.260 a lot of that stuff comes from there.

00:39:26.040 The Poetic Edda, especially the Voluspa,

00:39:28.280 I hope I'm saying that right. 1.00

00:39:29.620 If I have any Norsemen in the audience, please. 1.00

00:39:32.780 All our Viking listeners are going to be so mad

00:39:34.860 at your mispronunciation. 1.00

00:39:36.240 What the fuck? 1.00

00:39:36.860 We're coming. 1.00

00:39:37.520 We're coming.

00:39:38.480 We come from the land of the ice and snow.

00:39:41.680 And he's drawing on the Nibelungenlied,

00:39:43.480 which is an epic poem written in Middle High German

00:39:46.460 around 1200,

00:39:47.860 but that's drawing on much older motifs.

00:39:50.260 And he mashes this together basically

00:39:52.160 with a whole bunch of other stuff.

00:39:54.220 He's pretty convinced that like

00:39:55.700 these myths don't really matter by themselves.

00:39:58.540 They matter as like the core.

00:40:00.460 He's almost doing a little bit of structural analysis.

00:40:02.180 He's saying like, what's the core of the story?

00:40:04.560 And he kind of tries to drill down on that.

00:40:06.660 Another thing that he thought he needed to do

00:40:08.820 in order to kind of modernize opera 0.51

00:40:11.840 was to get rid of like dumb plot contrivances.

00:40:14.540 So he's like, you know, it's never like blah, blah,

00:40:16.380 overhears someone else talking and then like,

00:40:18.320 oh, he's no longer in love with me. 1.00

00:40:19.720 Like, he's like, fuck all that. 1.00

00:40:20.740 No, no. 1.00

00:40:21.380 Like, what's the core thing, right?

00:40:23.700 Two people want to be together.

00:40:24.820 They cannot be together because of the law.

00:40:27.780 The end, right? 1.00

00:40:28.380 Like, we don't need the other shit. 0.99

00:40:29.900 Like, let's just, you know, let's cut to the core of this, of the myth, right? 0.98

00:40:33.940 Which is another form that he thought, like, another way of kind of rescinding an earlier alienation in some ways.

00:40:40.460 Anyway, so we start with Das Reingold, The Pre-Day.

00:40:44.280 So this is the first of the four operas.

00:40:46.440 Yes.

00:40:47.080 Coming in at a measly two and a half hours.

00:40:49.660 That is one of the shorter Marvel movie lengths, you know, if we're still going by the Marvel movies.

00:40:54.800 And it's definitely one of the shorter Wagner operas too.

00:40:57.700 Yes.

00:40:58.220 You could, you know, watch a Dune movie in this time.

00:41:01.260 So we open on the bottom of the Rhine River.

00:41:04.300 There are three Rhine maidens playing in the water

00:41:07.460 and a Nibelung, a dwarf, appears named Alberich.

00:41:11.880 They kind of tease him and they, well, 0.90

00:41:14.360 basically sexually humiliate him. 0.97

00:41:16.540 They're like, we are three hot Rhine maidens. 0.98

00:41:19.520 I imagine they're kind of mermaid-like, sireny, sexy.

00:41:22.460 Yes. 0.97

00:41:22.780 And he's a dwarf. 1.00

00:41:24.280 And they're like, fuck you, we're hot and you're a dwarf. 1.00

00:41:27.460 Yeah, you're not. 1.00

00:41:28.660 Exactly, yeah.

00:41:29.380 And as always, that turns out really well.

00:41:32.360 Basically, the sun comes up and it turns out

00:41:34.660 that the three are guarding the Rheingold of the title,

00:41:37.300 which is this magical gold treasure

00:41:39.500 that, as they very helpfully inform Iberich,

00:41:43.460 can be fashioned into a ring

00:41:44.700 that basically lets you rule the world.

00:41:46.620 I feel like I've heard some version of this before

00:41:49.680 and that didn't wind up great either.

00:41:52.160 One ring to rule them all, you know?

00:41:54.540 No, no.

00:41:55.380 I just feel like this is a bad idea

00:41:57.340 and it's been covered as a bad idea.

00:41:58.760 I know, right?

00:41:59.900 I've often actually kind of marveled at like,

00:42:02.140 it's like, what would happen if they're just like,

00:42:04.140 shut up? 1.00

00:42:05.080 Like, why are you telling them about this stupid gold? 1.00

00:42:07.480 Like, oh, it's nothing, let's keep swimming, you know? 1.00

00:42:09.780 I do think the idea is that they inform him

00:42:11.940 that basically in order to get it,

00:42:14.640 you'd have to forswear love.

00:42:16.340 And I think part of why Wagner presents it that way,

00:42:18.600 he wants us to realize that like for the Rhinemaidens, 0.95

00:42:21.760 the idea that someone would do such a thing 0.83

00:42:23.300 is pretty absurd, right?

00:42:25.060 They're like,

00:42:25.820 this is just not a thing that a being can do, right?

00:42:28.800 It would be absolutely unnatural 0.99

00:42:30.340 to forego eros, right?

00:42:33.420 That's the way this world operates.

00:42:35.000 There's going to be a second moment in the opera

00:42:36.380 where likewise, they're like, 0.99

00:42:37.800 who the fuck would do such a thing? 0.99

00:42:39.480 I didn't know this was even in the cards, right? 0.99

00:42:41.460 And then there's somebody who has a different,

00:42:43.220 perhaps more disciplined and worthy worldview.

00:42:45.700 Exactly.

00:42:46.300 That can stand in contrast.

00:42:47.520 Yes, who does not care about love,

00:42:49.200 but cares about gold.

00:42:50.760 He loves only gold. 1.00

00:42:52.140 This is some incel shit, though, 1.00

00:42:53.620 I gotta say. 1.00

00:42:54.660 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:42:55.080 The hot girls sexually humiliate 1.00

00:42:57.660 an unattractive but worthy man 1.00

00:43:00.620 and then they live to pay the price.

00:43:03.560 Exactly.

00:43:04.380 So in what can only be described

00:43:05.920 as a Shyamalan twist,

00:43:08.380 Eiberich does exactly that.

00:43:09.860 He's like, I for sure love 0.99

00:43:10.740 and fucks off with the gold. 0.99

00:43:11.960 And they're like, what? 0.99

00:43:13.340 Anyway, that's what happened.

00:43:15.220 And I think we're already,

00:43:16.240 you're already kind of getting

00:43:17.200 in the spirit of the political allegory here, right?

00:43:19.280 Like there's something here

00:43:19.940 about frustrated masculinity.

00:43:21.680 There's something here

00:43:22.140 about frustrated desire

00:43:23.860 and about desire

00:43:25.560 that sort of turns

00:43:26.400 into something else, right?

00:43:27.640 That gets sublimated

00:43:28.880 and gets turned

00:43:30.340 into something ugly, right?

00:43:31.860 The ability to kind of

00:43:33.260 not feel solidarity

00:43:35.640 with other creatures

00:43:37.020 in that cosmos, basically,

00:43:39.580 which is what love, I think,

00:43:40.680 means to the Rhinemaidens.

00:43:42.140 They're not saying like,

00:43:43.460 they're not talking about

00:43:44.060 sex necessarily, right?

00:43:45.660 Like, is the precondition

00:43:47.100 for a mode of value generation

00:43:50.820 that is not subtly coded as capitalistic.

00:43:55.380 This is an allegory of the genesis of capitalism,

00:43:58.820 I would say, right?

00:44:00.260 The thing that they cannot even imagine,

00:44:02.480 that you exploit nature in this way. 1.00

00:44:05.740 He's like, yeah, fuck it, I'll do it. 1.00

00:44:07.520 I'll open up that uranium mine. 1.00

00:44:09.420 Let's do this.

00:44:10.680 There's an eco parable here too. 0.99

00:44:12.880 Anyway, he fucks off with the gold. 0.98

00:44:14.620 Now we're heading to Valhalla, 0.97

00:44:17.100 Well, the area immediately outside of Valhalla where Wotan, so this is Odin for those of you who are conversant in Marvel, ruler of the gods is hanging out with his clan.

00:44:29.700 And so, yeah, he's kind of a Zeus figure in this.

00:44:33.600 Yeah, he lives on top of a mountain, right, that were Valhalla's.

00:44:37.040 Yeah.

00:44:37.300 And he's got like a patriarchal authority thing going on.

00:44:41.860 Huge horndog. 0.95

00:44:42.700 Yeah, he's got a lot of children and sort of sexual appetites that attest to his power and status. 0.98

00:44:49.740 Yeah.

00:44:50.080 And some of his children are kind of magic.

00:44:52.500 Yeah.

00:44:52.960 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.

00:45:01.180 And he points out that basically the Wotan or the Odin that we do have through the Edad is a kind of a Zeus figure.

00:45:09.800 And people can't tell whether that's because the people who wrote down these stories first

00:45:13.960 were Christian and therefore probably knew of the Greek myths, right?

00:45:17.500 They're like, oh, it's kind of that, right?

00:45:19.000 Like, it's possible that those two really share a kind of a common DNA or it's just

00:45:23.860 that the person writing is like, oh yeah, I get it.

00:45:25.340 It's basically Zeus, right?

00:45:26.800 But Wagner definitely picked up on this and he probably thought like, yeah, this is kind

00:45:31.060 of the kind of mythic core I'm drilling down on here.

00:45:34.200 So Wotan is getting ready to basically move into his swanky new headquarters in Valhalla.

00:45:39.240 But he has, fun fact, failed to pay the contractors

00:45:42.920 who are two giants, yeah, named Fafner and Fazold.

00:45:47.320 Even gods are not paying his bills.

00:45:49.520 This is Wagner's imagination.

00:45:51.240 He can't imagine anybody paying his bills all the time.

00:45:53.940 Yes, right.

00:45:54.800 Like, well, you joke, but like,

00:45:56.920 you're putting your finger on something.

00:45:58.320 Wotan is very clearly a self-portrait, right?

00:46:00.620 Like the guy who's like, 0.98

00:46:02.120 oh, yeah, I know I said I was good for it.

00:46:04.000 I'm just going to go to the boat and go to Paris, right?

00:46:06.860 Like, this is Wotan.

00:46:08.440 This is what Wotan tries to do, but in Wagner's defense, he does something very interesting

00:46:13.000 with the character because the other thing about Wotan or Odin is that he's the keeper

00:46:16.880 of oaths and treaties, which is, of course, super inconvenient if you're trying to get

00:46:22.260 out of an oath or treaty.

00:46:23.480 He's carrying this big spear that has engraved on it all the world's treaties and oaths.

00:46:27.400 He's the guarantor of oaths. 0.95

00:46:29.220 Basically, if you're trying to wiggle out of it, out of a deal, Wotan is supposed to

00:46:34.580 be the one to basically set you straight, which makes it really fucking awkward if

00:46:38.520 Wotan himself was trying to wiggle out of a deal.

00:46:40.800 So he can't really.

00:46:42.380 So that's the problem.

00:46:43.600 Then the god Loki arrives, basically doing what he would do in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 0.99

00:46:49.960 He stirs shit up. 0.98

00:46:51.060 He's like an impish chaos playful. 0.99

00:46:53.480 Yeah, he's a Mercury kind of, yeah, he's a Hermes figure, right?

00:46:57.440 Like the messenger god is a trickster god, you know, basically exactly how you know him

00:47:02.620 from various Marvel shows and movies.

00:47:06.320 You know, he sort of shows up,

00:47:07.660 he's kind of insolent

00:47:08.720 and he's got his own agenda going

00:47:11.060 that will sort of only be gradually

00:47:13.280 either be revealed

00:47:14.340 or become even clear to him.

00:47:16.120 It's not even clear that he knows

00:47:17.320 exactly what he wants to do.

00:47:19.120 So the problem is Wotan has promised

00:47:20.960 in that contract,

00:47:22.560 Wotan had traded away his sister-in-law,

00:47:25.300 Flicka, as payment. 1.00

00:47:27.240 Flicka herself is like, what the fuck? 0.99

00:47:29.080 Flicka's sister, Wotan's long-suffering wife, 1.00

00:47:31.400 is like, what the fuck? 1.00

00:47:32.700 Not cool, man. 1.00

00:47:33.740 Yeah, yeah. 0.60

00:47:35.160 And so Wotan is like, 0.96

00:47:36.920 well, I got to get out of this.

00:47:38.540 And so he sends Loga out,

00:47:40.160 apparently, to kind of figure out,

00:47:42.040 is there anything out there

00:47:43.240 that is worth more than love, right?

00:47:45.460 Love apparently being like 0.99

00:47:46.620 the possession of a woman here, you know? 1.00

00:47:48.740 Like, let's not think too hard about this,

00:47:50.420 but like, they're talking about, yeah,

00:47:52.960 bartering sexual violence, basically, but...

00:47:55.380 Right, it's like, as patriarch,

00:47:56.860 I'm going to generously give another man 1.00

00:48:00.100 the freedom to rape 1.00

00:48:02.000 some of the women 1.00

00:48:02.780 who I esteem as my property. 1.00

00:48:04.800 Yeah.

00:48:05.460 And this is how men make friends.

00:48:07.460 Yes.

00:48:08.620 To be fair,

00:48:09.720 Wagner is not presenting this.

00:48:11.580 This is something

00:48:12.060 that a lot of his right-wing fans

00:48:14.520 sort of fail to notice.

00:48:15.740 Like, is not offering this up

00:48:17.020 for our approval.

00:48:18.120 You're supposed to think, 1.00

00:48:18.840 oh, boy, you fucked up. 1.00

00:48:20.600 What the hell? 1.00

00:48:21.540 Right?

00:48:22.140 Like, Wotan is a self-portrait,

00:48:24.240 but a very self-critical one.

00:48:25.760 Like Kendrick Lamar.

00:48:27.460 Yes.

00:48:27.700 Like, look at all the ways 1.00

00:48:29.260 that I'm a piece of shit. 1.00

00:48:30.500 Yeah. 1.00

00:48:31.440 So Logo has been trying

00:48:32.380 to figure out, right?

00:48:33.200 Like, is there anything

00:48:34.260 in the world

00:48:34.680 that could substitute

00:48:35.440 for love, right?

00:48:36.960 And the only thing

00:48:38.000 that he's come across

00:48:38.900 where the only instance

00:48:39.900 that he's come across

00:48:40.640 where someone placed

00:48:42.180 something above love

00:48:43.280 is, of course, 0.94

00:48:44.000 Al-Barreich

00:48:44.460 and the golden treasure.

00:48:45.820 He's like, there's a dude

00:48:46.660 and he liked the gold

00:48:48.760 more than he liked

00:48:49.620 ever being able

00:48:50.700 to love again.

00:48:52.220 And so at that point,

00:48:52.960 everyone kind of goes

00:48:53.700 full Lord of the Rings

00:48:54.480 on this golden treasure

00:48:55.320 deciding that it's theirs,

00:48:57.340 it's precious

00:48:58.180 and we wants it, you know? 0.99

00:49:00.740 So this is something they agree with the dwarf, right?

00:49:03.340 They're like, this is, must be more important than gold.

00:49:06.540 Yes, yes, exactly.

00:49:07.260 More important than love.

00:49:08.400 Yeah.

00:49:08.780 And so the giants are like, yeah, we take that.

00:49:11.040 We're going to take the lady until we get the gold.

00:49:13.220 But like, yeah, we'll take the gold.

00:49:14.800 There are other complications that I'm not going to get into,

00:49:16.540 but basically that's the problem here, right?

00:49:19.820 Now, what do we make of the political allegory of this?

00:49:22.360 It's always kind of fascinating to me.

00:49:24.700 It's like, it's one of my favorite scenes,

00:49:26.060 I should say in the entire opera,

00:49:27.100 because there's just a lot going on

00:49:29.020 and the ideas are pretty interesting, I think.

00:49:32.480 One thing is that like,

00:49:33.880 it's so easy to see what Wagner could have done, right?

00:49:37.200 Like Wotan is like the wise head of the gods, right?

00:49:41.920 Like an Anthony Hopkins type, if you will,

00:49:44.500 kind of modeling a more authentic relationship

00:49:48.640 to the world.

00:49:50.000 And to some extent, he sometimes is that.

00:49:52.360 But like when we first meet him,

00:49:53.860 he's basically, I'm sorry, he's Donald Trump, right?

00:49:56.840 He's over-leveraged himself.

00:49:58.660 He's trying to wiggle out of a deal.

00:50:00.040 Trying to get out of a real estate deal.

00:50:02.620 Yeah. 1.00

00:50:03.080 Treating women as tradable commodities to the great. 0.95

00:50:06.540 Yeah. 0.99

00:50:06.860 Real fucking weird about his family, right? 0.99

00:50:08.640 Like this is like, you know, 0.98

00:50:09.820 there's a real kind of interesting,

00:50:13.000 like when we first meet Wotan,

00:50:14.980 he's a bourgeois.

00:50:16.020 He's a bourgeois speculator

00:50:17.740 that basically has this like,

00:50:20.420 yeah, leveraged the farm for the factory

00:50:22.420 and like probably shouldn't have, right?

00:50:24.180 Like he's made bad investments.

00:50:25.680 He's not reckoned with the unionization of Valhalla labor or whatever, right?

00:50:30.880 Like it's really, really interesting what Wagner does here.

00:50:33.820 Like you meet basically the father of the gods and you think like, oh, wow, this is

00:50:37.980 going to be like the founder of authenticity.

00:50:40.980 And it's anything but.

00:50:41.920 It's this guy who is kind of a schemer.

00:50:44.780 He's kind of a con artist himself, right?

00:50:48.780 And again, like some of that is just Wagner's self-portrait.

00:50:51.640 Like he's flattering himself by putting himself in the shoes of father of the gods.

00:50:55.680 But it's not a very good portrait.

00:50:58.160 It's really a portrait of the artist

00:51:00.700 as a Gonzo capitalist, basically.

00:51:05.320 Anyway, so Loge and Wotan descend into Nibelheim,

00:51:08.640 where Albrecht has used the Rheingold

00:51:11.060 to basically enslave his fellow Nibelons. 0.64

00:51:13.620 And here we have a first clip, 0.99

00:51:15.380 thanks to rules around public domain. 1.00

00:51:25.680 The Nibelungs are the other dwarves. 1.00

00:51:38.460 It's a race of dwarves. 1.00

00:51:40.180 Yeah, it's a race of dwarves.

00:51:41.300 And basically when we arrive in Nibelheim,

00:51:43.620 they're all being really kind of worked hard by Albrecht.

00:51:48.540 As they're, and folks can hear this in the clip,

00:51:51.460 as Loge and Wotan descend,

00:51:53.180 And they can hear the clatter of the hammers and anvils of the Nebel Lungs down there.

00:51:59.600 It's as industrial as classical music in the 19th century is ever allowed to sound.

00:52:10.560 The orchestra kind of cuts out for a while and there's just people on the stage just kind of hammering, right?

00:52:16.060 It's supposed to sound like a factory.

00:52:17.820 So it's not subtle in the way that like you get

00:52:21.480 that the first thing this guy does

00:52:23.400 when he forswears love and like human fellow feeling

00:52:26.760 is to like turn people into the proletariat, right?

00:52:30.580 And exploit their labor.

00:52:31.820 Yeah, he invests in industry.

00:52:33.500 Yeah, he's going straight into labor exploitation

00:52:35.260 because he can't relate to people in other ways anymore.

00:52:39.880 You know, it's just pure, pure bullying

00:52:42.560 and value extraction at that point.

00:52:45.460 That's what capitalism will do to you, man.

00:52:47.600 Once you're a member of the capitalist class,

00:52:50.440 although I do think that this,

00:52:51.760 I have a suspicion that the political meaning behind all this

00:52:55.820 is going to be maybe not straightforwardly anti-capitalist

00:52:59.280 in the way that we might want it to be.

00:53:01.460 Yeah, so this is the interesting thing.

00:53:02.980 So right after we cut off on the clip,

00:53:06.340 we also meet the first member of the proletariat. 0.93

00:53:10.520 And Nima is basically his, 0.73

00:53:13.320 Iberi's brother, basically, I think. 1.00

00:53:14.820 And he's this hairy creature 0.99

00:53:17.820 who's just kind of squealing around,

00:53:20.340 kind of comical 1.00

00:53:21.200 and just absolutely fucking useless. 0.98

00:53:25.720 And Mima is interesting. 0.99

00:53:27.240 He'll show up again in the third opera

00:53:29.360 in the sequence.

00:53:31.140 But he matters because on the one hand,

00:53:34.320 he's the first kind of

00:53:35.340 proletarianized figure we meet.

00:53:37.540 He's also one of the figures

00:53:39.460 that is really straightforwardly comic

00:53:41.940 and is always funniest

00:53:43.080 when he's getting mistreated and tortured, right? 0.81

00:53:46.280 Basically like his brother kicks him

00:53:47.820 and like beats him up

00:53:48.720 and like he goes, no, no, no, right?

00:53:51.100 Like it's kind of, it's played for laughs, right?

00:53:53.040 It's kind of funny.

00:53:54.240 Siegfried will do the same thing to him. 1.00

00:53:55.540 We'll just kick his ass constantly. 1.00

00:53:56.640 And that's also supposed to be funny. 1.00

00:53:58.060 There's a wonderful passage

00:53:59.360 in Adorno's book on Wagner

00:54:00.860 where he sort of points out

00:54:01.640 that Wagner can't do funny.

00:54:03.140 It always just comes off mean.

00:54:05.140 And like, so like this creature

00:54:06.760 that like should get our sympathy

00:54:08.240 actually is like the subject of sadism

00:54:10.960 and a kind of comic sadism.

00:54:12.380 right away. But this reminds me of what we were talking about earlier when we talked about

00:54:17.980 Wagner's assessment of opera and the art of his time, right? He's got this sort of

00:54:22.020 multi-directional contempt, right? He hates the capitalist class and is allegorizing them as evil

00:54:28.400 in his opera. But then he's also parodying or trying to draw comedy from the humiliation of

00:54:36.620 this working class proletarianized figure, right? So he's got contempt both for the capitalist class 0.78

00:54:42.100 and for the working class.

00:54:43.760 And it sounds like the working class contempt

00:54:45.520 or contempt of the working class

00:54:46.900 is rendered in these very vivid terms.

00:54:49.700 Yes.

00:54:50.180 And like sort of extensively detailed.

00:54:52.820 Yes.

00:54:53.360 And unlike his revulsion about the capitalists,

00:54:57.760 the revulsion or the contempt for Mime

00:55:01.160 is basically physical.

00:55:03.640 He's disgusted by this guy.

00:55:05.320 And characters will keep remarking 0.98

00:55:07.240 on how disgusting he is.

00:55:08.540 Basically, Siegfried is basically like, 0.53

00:55:10.000 like at the beginning of the opera,

00:55:10.960 Siegfried basically Mima has raised Siegfried as his son and Siegfried's like that can't be because 1.00

00:55:15.940 I find you disgusting right like you're you're a sniveling little dwarf and I'm a fucking he-man 0.99

00:55:20.320 like like you are not my father right which is happens to be true because Wagner nature is 1.00

00:55:26.060 always right but like still like the idea is like everyone is just like being an asshole to this guy 0.96

00:55:30.700 and it's because they're physically repulsed by him and this is where it's maybe also important

00:55:36.040 to point out that, and this is something that I take from Mark Weiner's book, Wagner and the

00:55:40.880 antisemitic imagination, this kind of bodily repulsion that goes along with like the voice

00:55:46.620 being squeaky, the affect being kind of sweaty, the diction being kind of weirdly ingratiating,

00:55:54.860 et cetera. Like that is how Wagner in an essay we're going to talk about next time, Judaism and

00:56:00.300 music basically characterizes Jewish people, right? Like Mima is a pretty classic, is one of

00:56:06.000 the classic figures that people point to like that's an antisemitic caricature. So again,

00:56:10.640 the first proletarian we meet who Wagner should feel a great deal of solidarity with given his

00:56:16.340 alleged politics is an antisemitic caricature, right? That's interesting to me because when I

00:56:21.780 was first listening to you go through this, I thought, okay, well, we're going to get to

00:56:26.560 Wagner's anti-Semitism as being, you know, the socialism of fools model, right? Where

00:56:32.920 Jews are made as a stand-in for the capital, right? And resented on those terms. But what

00:56:38.620 you're saying is that one of the most vivid anti-Semitic characters is actually a proletarian.

00:56:42.920 Yeah, at least in this version, in this first opera, he'll be less so. He's basically a black 0.99

00:56:48.780 smith kind of flying under his own flag when we meet him again in Siegfried. But yes, I mean,

00:56:54.360 in some way alberich and mime who are kind of the antipodes here right the capitalist and the

00:57:00.600 proletarian are both kind of implicitly anti-semitic caricatures that is to say both the person who

00:57:06.360 sacrifices love for speculation basically that's fairly clearly coded but so is this other person

00:57:14.640 right who is their victim that's that's i think that that gives you kind of a sense of why people

00:57:19.780 keep coming back to this opera

00:57:21.140 and kind of try to unravel

00:57:23.400 its sort of various layers

00:57:24.800 because like that's pretty freaking weird.

00:57:27.780 I'll say more about that later.

00:57:28.980 But the main point I think would be

00:57:30.500 that Wagner clearly has

00:57:31.980 some very conflicting feelings

00:57:33.080 about capitalism,

00:57:34.420 about the working class.

00:57:35.700 And the way I think of it

00:57:37.060 is simply that

00:57:37.740 when he runs up against

00:57:39.480 kind of cognitive dissonance,

00:57:41.440 he goes for the anti-Semitism, right?

00:57:43.500 It's not that he has

00:57:44.460 some kind of thorough going

00:57:46.060 internally coherent view

00:57:48.360 of what, you know,

00:57:50.360 Jewish people are like

00:57:51.040 and that's what the basis 0.66

00:57:51.740 of his anti-Semitism.

00:57:53.140 Anti-Semitism is the reflex

00:57:54.240 he runs to when the contradiction

00:57:55.780 he's trying to kind of

00:57:56.900 parcel out and figure out

00:57:59.600 in his operas can't work.

00:58:01.300 Right.

00:58:01.600 He's like, oh,

00:58:02.120 this is a contemptible figure

00:58:03.180 and you should feel bad,

00:58:04.180 feel horrible

00:58:04.920 that this person is even there 0.98

00:58:06.340 and you should hate him.

00:58:07.640 Right?

00:58:07.820 Like he's basically,

00:58:08.980 every time he kind of hits an impasse,

00:58:10.540 like you can sort of see him

00:58:11.940 like reaching for the dial

00:58:12.980 that says anti-Semitism.

00:58:14.420 Yeah.

00:58:14.640 So this is my failure, right?

00:58:15.860 Because I'm looking for

00:58:16.980 a sort of coherent rule or logic of the bigotry.

00:58:22.160 And that's not really how it operates.

00:58:23.880 It's more something that he uses 0.53

00:58:26.020 almost like cock to fill in these patches 0.99

00:58:28.520 in his worldview. 0.99

00:58:29.640 Exactly.

00:58:30.380 And that'll get worse with age.

00:58:31.920 We'll talk about that in our second day, so to speak.

00:58:34.400 It gets worse and worse

00:58:35.260 because he just starts grafting more and more ideas

00:58:37.940 onto this scaffold that he's created.

00:58:40.720 And so you get these moments more and more

00:58:43.660 where he basically has to run towards racism,

00:58:47.340 basically, in order to reconcile things,

00:58:49.960 including gender and sexuality.

00:58:52.080 That's pretty important too.

00:58:54.060 Anyway, let me finish the opera

00:58:55.480 just so that folks know

00:58:57.160 that we at least cover one out of the four.

00:59:00.160 So basically, Loge and Wotan trick Albrecht

00:59:03.860 into giving up the gold and the ring.

00:59:06.280 Doesn't really matter that much how they do that.

00:59:08.460 They drag the dwarf back up to Valhalla 1.00

00:59:11.360 and are like, give us all your shit. 1.00

00:59:12.780 and he gives them all their shit. 1.00

00:59:15.400 But then he's like, you know, 1.00

00:59:16.880 you guys are such assholes. 1.00

00:59:18.160 I'm going to curse this gold. 1.00

00:59:19.640 And they curse this ring.

00:59:20.800 Everyone who owns this ring

00:59:22.560 is going to jealously guard it.

00:59:23.800 And everyone who doesn't have it

00:59:25.800 will jealously want to own it, right?

00:59:28.380 And sort of not five minutes later

00:59:30.080 in, you know, 150 minute opera,

00:59:32.800 Wotan hands over the ring to one of the giants

00:59:35.180 and the other kills the other giant.

00:59:36.940 He's like, I want this ring. 1.00

00:59:38.220 So Wotan's like, oh shit, 0.99

00:59:39.640 this curse might be for real. 0.99

00:59:40.720 and so he wants the ring back

00:59:42.840 obviously because you know curse

00:59:45.060 but he realizes he'll have to be strategic

00:59:46.960 about it so the next two

00:59:48.880 operas will basically or next three operas

00:59:50.920 really will be his

00:59:52.260 scheme to figure out how to get the

00:59:54.940 ring back without falling victim to his curse

00:59:57.040 right and

00:59:58.360 spoiler alert it works out exactly

01:00:00.980 as well as all his other schemes do because he's 0.99

01:00:02.960 just like a fucking great planner 0.98

01:00:04.600 and the final opera is right called 0.99

01:00:06.760 Twilight of the Gods so you know

01:00:08.560 spoiler alert it does not go well for him but like that's the story like basically he's trying

01:00:13.860 to have his cake and eat it too it's kind of an Odysseus motif right you're tied to the mask you

01:00:17.500 want to hear the sirens sing but you don't want to fall for them right like how do I get to do

01:00:24.740 both of these things how can I cheat the system of curses and of laws and of treaties that I myself

01:00:32.500 embody right like how can I make sure this doesn't actually apply to me and it fails spectacularly

01:00:37.900 anyway so in the end 0.96

01:00:40.900 giants have fucked off 0.99

01:00:42.460 everything is okay 1.00

01:00:43.640 and the gods enter into their swanky

01:00:46.160 new remodeled home 1.00

01:00:47.220 we'll have a quick clip there

01:01:07.900 So this is the entry of the gods into Valhalla.

01:01:30.240 And while that's happening,

01:01:32.020 the Rhinemaidens mourn the lost gold, right?

01:01:35.160 They're basically like, it always sparkles so nice,

01:01:37.380 you know we loved it for itself basically this is not we're not thinking of it as a value it's

01:01:42.900 just part of nature for us and loge sort of sneers at them to just quote sun yourselves in the god's 0.66

01:01:48.900 newfound glory right he's like we turned into a fucking bentley why didn't you enjoy that you 0.58

01:01:52.980 know yeah relax yeah yeah relax we we turned it into into our swag right he's almost certainly 0.96

01:01:59.060 being facetious at that moment because he's already indicated in a kind of a side you know

01:02:03.380 as spectatores, like something that the other people on the stage can't hear, but we're informed. 0.99

01:02:09.540 But he's giving some very serious thought to burning the whole fucking thing to the ground. 1.00

01:02:13.720 He's basically like, I'm going to play along with this, but these people are idiots and 1.00

01:02:16.960 they will destroy themselves. And I intend to help them. And as the musicologist Carl 1.00

01:02:23.140 Dalhaus mentions, as they're, and you can hear that a little bit in the clip we played,

01:02:27.380 as the kind of very triumphal motif

01:02:30.420 of them going into Valhalla plays,

01:02:33.020 the strings are playing this kind of fire motif.

01:02:35.840 So the opera is already kind of telling us like,

01:02:39.060 FYI, if you know how to listen,

01:02:41.120 you already know how this turns out in fire.

01:02:43.160 The world will end in fire, not in ice.

01:02:46.040 This is really to me an allegory

01:02:49.120 about why you should never remodel your house.

01:02:52.480 Exactly.

01:02:53.360 The contractors will just take an arm and a leg 0.52

01:02:55.120 and then eventually your magic ring.

01:02:57.380 Yeah.

01:02:57.820 And you got to deal with the bank.

01:02:59.180 It's a whole thing.

01:02:59.960 Yeah.

01:03:00.100 It's a whole thing.

01:03:00.860 Yeah.

01:03:01.740 So, I mean, like in terms of the politics here,

01:03:04.060 I think it's really worth thinking about the fact that like the gods are very clearly not the good guys.

01:03:08.940 Right.

01:03:09.600 Like Wotan is in a certain way the tragic hero.

01:03:12.780 But really like his tragic flaw is like all of them, basically.

01:03:17.280 Like if it wasn't for the philandering and for the terrible financial decisions

01:03:20.980 and for the fact that you think you're smarter than everyone else 0.99

01:03:24.060 and keep fucking yourself up in your own ruses, basically. 0.97

01:03:26.720 like it's not a classical kind of greek hamartia this is this is really this person is just like 0.98

01:03:34.040 as some basic character flaws that that will undo them right he's not some ancient wise deity he's

01:03:40.480 basically a financier who over leveraged himself right the right maidens as i mentioned love the

01:03:46.000 gold for itself for its place in the cosmos for the way it fits into nature and wotan is you know

01:03:52.620 like always up with the scheme.

01:03:54.300 He's always got something up his sleeve.

01:03:56.700 So that's Reingold.

01:03:57.660 That is one of these four operas.

01:04:00.000 One of the four, yes.

01:04:01.920 Or as I call it in our podcast,

01:04:04.080 the pre-day.

01:04:06.160 I think we'll try and telescope

01:04:07.620 the other three into one episode,

01:04:09.680 but I do think it's good to kind of

01:04:10.920 really go through them bit by bit.

01:04:13.120 Just because like, you know,

01:04:14.400 those of us who really like these operas

01:04:16.160 and we like this guy in spite of him 1.00

01:04:18.440 being just this absolute asshole, frankly. 0.99

01:04:21.720 Like, I hope I've kind of been able to demonstrate to you 0.99

01:04:23.740 why I think this is worth returning to.

01:04:26.380 Because like, a couple of times,

01:04:27.920 I feel like you kind of thought

01:04:29.020 you knew where things were going. 0.96

01:04:30.160 And then like, there's a rug pull.

01:04:31.520 It kind of, Wagner's got more going on.

01:04:34.380 It's always interesting when the racism

01:04:37.080 is more complicated and esoteric

01:04:39.440 than you were originally anticipating.

01:04:41.940 Aha, a racism I haven't seen before.

01:04:45.260 Yes, yes.

01:04:45.720 And I've been also maybe highlighting

01:04:47.560 the more interesting aspects of that racism in Wagner.

01:04:50.280 The problem is, as we go forward in his biography, he's now going to read Artur de Gobineau.

01:04:55.680 I don't know if he rings a bell for you. 0.67

01:04:57.980 The Origin of Inequality Among the Races. 1.00

01:05:00.260 Oh, great title. 1.00

01:05:01.400 Wow, so promising. 0.95

01:05:03.380 Basically, in the Wagner biopic, this would be where he's like in a biker barn. 1.00

01:05:07.120 So he's like, have you read the Turner Diaries?

01:05:08.920 And Ricard is like, no, I have not.

01:05:11.520 You know, now I want to, right?

01:05:12.900 Like basically, he's about to enter into some far gnarlier territory.

01:05:18.380 It's that fateful moment when somebody handed Andrew Sullivan a copy of The Bell Jar.

01:05:23.060 Bell Curve.

01:05:23.880 I'm sorry.

01:05:24.500 The copy of The Bell Curve.

01:05:25.680 Oh my God.

01:05:26.160 What if Andrew Sullivan got really into like Sad Girl?

01:05:29.920 I'm imagining a world where Andrew Sullivan like grabbed the wrong book and bought the

01:05:34.400 books.

01:05:34.520 And he's able to fantasize his mental illness and has one of these like tragic female adolescence. 0.74

01:05:39.400 It's beautiful. 0.99

01:05:39.840 This is perfect.

01:05:40.580 I love the idea of Andrew Sullivan as confessional poet.

01:05:45.640 He's like a Tumblr girl.

01:05:47.240 The world would be such a better place. Oh my God. 1.00

01:05:50.980 No, this is the fateful moment when somebody hands Andrew Sullivan a copy of The Bell Curve

01:05:57.260 and then lightning strikes in the distance and you hear the clap of thunder.

01:06:02.340 And the storm begins.

01:06:03.700 And that's another reason, frankly, why Wagner is worth talking about in a little bit more detail,

01:06:07.640 maybe not as a composer, but as just an exponent of his generation.

01:06:11.160 Because as we'll talk about in our second half of the episode,

01:06:14.860 there's a reason why he goes for racism. 0.67

01:06:16.680 And it is exactly why he goes to anti-Semitism in The Ring of the Nibelones.

01:06:21.220 It allows him to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time, right?

01:06:26.380 This is someone who doesn't really stray from his revolutionary commitments that much,

01:06:31.660 but then also becomes a huge sellout.

01:06:34.380 And it turns out that's hard to do, right?

01:06:36.860 Those are two contradictory things.

01:06:38.640 And it is really noticeable that the thing that comes to his aid is basically a racist

01:06:44.480 imaginary, I would say.

01:06:45.760 And so that's, I think, where we'll leave it

01:06:48.240 and we'll head back into Nibelheim

01:06:51.320 and back into Valhalla.

01:06:53.040 And well, we'll start on a bear rug 0.99

01:06:55.480 where two siblings are fucking next time. 0.99

01:06:58.120 So like for something totally different, 0.99

01:07:00.340 but like that's where we're heading next.

01:07:02.280 And I hope that listeners are okay

01:07:04.140 with this rather epic treatment

01:07:06.840 of a rather epic opera tetralogy.

01:07:09.420 Join us next time

01:07:10.920 where you will be seated on a cushionless seat

01:07:13.260 and you will not be allowed to look at your neighbor

01:07:15.440 and it will just be you

01:07:17.060 and our description of the ring cycle.

01:07:19.900 That's right.

01:07:20.440 And you're going to love it.

01:07:22.040 Yes.

01:07:23.360 I'm the bear rug with the right.

01:07:31.080 In bed with the right,

01:07:32.080 we'd like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute

01:07:33.900 for Gender Research for generous support.

01:07:36.120 Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

01:07:38.540 Our producer is Katie Lau.

01:07:45.440 Thank you.

In Bed With The Right - May 14, 2024

Episode 22： Richard Wagner： Act I

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