Wagner’s Ring as a Communist Narrative
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-06-17 · 1:27:04 · 10,545 words
cinema-art-cultureideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscommunism-socialismreligion-theologyphilosophy-generalhistory
Žižek delivers a close reading of Wagner's Ring cycle, arguing against both historicist-antisemitic contextualization and aestheticist apologetics for Wagner. He contends that Wagner's work actually contradicts and undermines his own antisemitism, with the central heroic figures (Wotan as Wanderer, Flying Dutchman, Amfortas) being Jewish archetypes, not the villains. The talk analyzes the competing endings of Götterdämmerung (Feuerbach, Bakunin, Schopenhauer) to argue that the Ring's true conclusion is neither romantic self-destruction nor ascetic resignation but a call to collective political love (Agape), modeled on a communist couple who work for a shared cause while keeping love as a modest, private byproduct.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 15
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The critical practice of recovering the antisemitic codes contemporaries would have read into Wagnerian characters (Mime's gestures, Beckmesser's song as Jewish music parody), Žižek rejects its relevance as a guide to meaning, following a Marxist argument for the transhistorical power of great art.
Not Schopenhauerian longing for annihilation but the condition of undeadness, an ongoing suffering that prevents one from dying, which Wagner stages as the central Wagnerian predicament requiring redemption.
The Wagnerian existential condition of a figure condemned by a past crime to persist without being able to die, Wotan as Wanderer, the Flying Dutchman, Amfortas, which Žižek reads as a displaced figure of the Wandering Jew.
Wagner's own program of organic total artwork, which Žižek argues Wagner himself fails to follow in practice, the operas are more modern and ironic than the program prescribes.
as “leitmotif fetishism”
Adorno's charge that Wagner's leitmotifs are the first step toward Hollywood commodification, Žižek inverts this, arguing Adorno himself is guilty of the same fetishism of provocative aphorisms.
Schopenhauerian representation, the world of appearances that music supposedly penetrates; Žižek reverses the usual Wagnerian reading by arguing music is instead the phantasmatic envelope that covers over the comic or tragic reality of stage action.
Žižek's framing of the Ring's narrative as a series of competing answers to the question 'what makes life meaningful', natural innocence (Rhinedaughters), rule of law (Wotan), capitalist profiteering (Alberich), erotic passion (Sigmund/Sieglinde), and collective love (Brünnhilde's final act).
Benjaminian concept Žižek invokes to describe Wotan's problem: the rule of law is always grounded in a primordial crime, so the law is necessarily stained and ends in further crime.
Benjaminian concept Žižek applies to Siegfried: an innocent violence from outside the law that could theoretically clear the plate for a new beginning, but which in the Ring fails because Siegfried is a proto-fascist thug.
The structural musical motif in the Ring sung first as 'only he who renounces love's power' and later as 'holiest love's highest need', Žižek reads their conjunction as the Ring's philosophical formula: love's highest need is to renounce its own power.
The Lacanian operation Žižek identifies in the Ring's renunciation motif: true love requires renouncing love as a direct goal, making it a modest byproduct rather than the center of one's life.
Christian-political collective love, distinguished from erotic passion (Tristan) and bourgeois marriage (Meistersinger); what Žižek, following Terry Eagleton, calls 'political love' and identifies as the Ring's final answer.
Implicitly at stake in Žižek's reading of Wagnerian love as narcissistic: the beloved is merely the trigger for one's own fantasy projection, not an encounter with genuine otherness.
Invoked at the conclusion: after the Ring's cataclysm everything rests on the human crowd 'without any guarantee in God, fate or any other figure of the big Other', action must proceed without symbolic authorization.
Žižek's vision of love in a communist society as a modest private idiosyncrasy kept strictly apart from collective political work, the antithesis of the '68 slogan that sexuality is politics.
Stories he reaches for 2
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle staged Act III of Tristan so that Isolde never actually arrives; she is only Tristan's hallucination as he dies alone, Žižek argues this is truer to the opera's logic, since Wagnerian love is narcissistic fantasy, not genuine encounter with otherness.
“The Isolde who comes is just Tristan's the dying the hallucination of the dying Tristan.”
Lenin had a love affair with Inessa Armand; at her funeral he was visibly devastated but made no public spectacle, while his official wife Krupskaya gracefully withdrew. Stalin later threatened Krupskaya he would retroactively name Inessa as Lenin's official widow. Žižek takes this as the model of communist love: absolute but kept private, a byproduct of shared revolutionary work.
“It was an absolute love. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's official wife, stayed with him but gracefully seeing this is true love withdrew.”
Works invoked 22
Parsifal opera
Žižek argues Parsifal is actually a regression to paganism, Christianity reinscribed into pagan ritual, and its male-ascetic resolution (rejecting Kundry) represents a 'psychotic' existential option that fails to answer the Ring's open question.
Cited for Adorno and Horkheimer's paradox that 'Hollywood realizes Kant's theory of knowledge', used as evidence that Adorno himself succumbs to the fetishism of provocative aphorisms he attacks in Wagner.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Used to demonstrate that Wagnerian love is a missed encounter rather than blissful union; Act III is cited as the paradigm of the opera's ironic structure belied by its Schopenhauerian reputation.
Der fliegende Holländer opera
Wagner's first major opera, whose Dutchman is explicitly called by Wagner himself 'Ahasver des Ozeans', the Wandering Jew of the seas, establishing the central Wagnerian undead hero as a Jewish archetype.
Der Ring des Nibelungen opera
The central text of the entire talk; Žižek calls it the best available answer to the meaning of life and reads it as a series of existential projects culminating in collective political love as Agape.
Così fan tutte opera
Used as the contrast to Wagner: in Mozart, music is the deeper romantic truth (the men's seduction in jest reveals genuine love in the music), whereas in Wagner music functions as phantasmatic illusion covering stage reality.
Tosca opera
Kerman's reading of its finale (Puccini repeated 'E lucevan le stelle' because he didn't know what else to do) is used as a parallel for, and then distinguished from, the usual cynical reading of Wagner's Ring finale.
Die Walküre opera
Contains the only authentic erotic love in the Ring (Sigmund–Sieglinde), the first statement of the redemption motif by Sieglinde, and the scene of Wotan's ethical and political breakdown, all central to Žižek's argument.
Götterdämmerung opera
The finale is Žižek's primary object of analysis; he argues the orchestral conclusion, combining the redemption motif with Rhinedaughters, Valhalla, and Siegfried motifs, calls humanity to collective action without any guarantee.
Negative Dialectics book
Cited as one of Adorno's 'basically failures', too Wagnerian in the caricatural sense, with motifs floating in an unending paratactic melody while actually fetishizing paradoxical insights.
Aesthetic Theory book
Alongside Negative Dialectics, cited as an Adorno systematic work that fails to achieve its own ideal of organic paratactic flow.
Norma opera
Bellini's opera is cited for its ecstatic 'Moriamo insieme' (let's die together) duet as the paradigm of 19th-century romantic opera that Wagner conspicuously fails to deliver.
Das Rheingold opera
The Ring's prequel whose opening scene (Alberich mocked by Rhinedaughters, renouncing love for gold) establishes the Ring's foundational opposition, and where the renunciation motif first appears.
Proposed as the template for Žižek's hypothetical rewriting of Tristan, where the lovers plot to kill the husband, as a way of revealing the hidden logic of operatic love narratives.
Beckmesser is identified as a brutally racist parody of Jewish music; the opera represents the bourgeois-marriage solution (renounce true incestuous love for ordinary daily happiness), one of the three inadequate Kierkegaardian options.
By Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht; Žižek's main secondary source for the analysis of the Ring's competing endings and their philosophical stakes.
Il Trovatore opera
Žižek affectionately cites it as the paradigm of absurd operatic plotting (Gypsy woman throws wrong baby into fire), used to argue that opera's comedy is covered by music, a parallel to Wagner's own ironic structure.
Nabucco opera
Cited as the Verdi opera the Nazis staged under the Germanized title 'Josef Grün', illustrating ideological appropriation of foreign culture.
Wagner's earliest libretto sketch for the Ring; cited as the first of five successive versions of the ending Žižek traces through the talk.
Noten zur Literatur essay
Adorno's short essay collection is cited as his ideal form, brief, concentrated, in contrast to the failed longer systematic works.
Opera and Drama book
Joseph Kerman's study; his reading of Tosca's finale is cited approvingly.
Siegfried opera
Contains Siegfried's brutal confrontation with Alberich/Mime, which Žižek reads as a proto-Nazi skinhead attacking a foreigner, and Wotan's transformation into the Wanderer figure.
People invoked 39
Mentioned only as the supervisor of Kitcher and Schacht.
Daniel Barenboim negative
His position, Wagner's antisemitism is a private matter leaving no trace in the music, is criticized as too simplified an aestheticist compromise.
Franz Kafka positive
The figure of the Hunter Gracchus (il Cacciatore) is briefly invoked as analogous to the Wagnerian undead wound, alive but unable to die.
Lenin's lover whose death devastated him; the Stalinist suppression of her image (choosing unflattering photos) and Stalin's later threat to rehabilitate her as Lenin's official widow are used to illustrate communist love.
Udi Aloni positive
Israeli filmmaker and cultural provocateur, described as Žižek's friend, whose story of the Wagner screening in Israel opens the talk.
Adam Kirsch negative
Described ironically as 'my good friend', actually an opponent who accused Žižek of antisemitism; Žižek's rehabilitation of Wagner is framed as a response to this charge.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Credited as the first to identify the structural reading of Wagner's renunciation motif by reading its two appearances in parallel, proving Wagner was a structuralist avant la lettre.
Marguerite Duras positive
Her novels' image of lovers holding hands while looking outward toward a common cause is Žižek's model of 'modest love', love as byproduct of shared commitment rather than direct goal.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle positive
His staging of Tristan Act III where Isolde appears only as Tristan's hallucination is Žižek's 'ultra-example' of how staging can reveal the truth of an opera beyond what the libretto explicitly states.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Used as the exemplar of communist love: his affair with Inessa Armand was absolute but kept private; at her funeral he was devastated but made no public spectacle, the model of love as modest byproduct of revolutionary work.
Listed among Italian intellectuals (with D'Annunzio and Puccini) who supported Mussolini at the 1924 crisis moment.
Richard Wagner positive
Žižek repeatedly calls Wagner 'undoubtedly a disgusting person privately' while treating his Ring as the greatest available artistic answer to the meaning of life; Wagner is both antisemite and his own antisemitism's best critic.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Žižek inverts Adorno's critique of Wagner's leitmotif fetishism, arguing Adorno himself practices the same fetishism of provocative aphorisms in works like Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.
Pierre Boulez positive
Conductor of the centennial Ring with Chéreau; the Chéreau–Boulez version is Žižek's primary reference staging throughout the talk.
Richard Schacht positive
Co-author with Kitcher of Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring; their elaboration of the Ring's conclusion is Žižek's main secondary source for this talk.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked to gloss the Ring's renunciation formula as 'symbolic castration', love's highest need is to renounce its own power, and implicitly relevant to the narcissism of Wagnerian love (beloved as trigger for one's own fantasy).
Listed among Italian intellectuals who rallied to Mussolini's support in 1924.
Philip Kitcher positive
Co-author (with Richard Schacht) of Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring; Žižek follows their analysis of the Ring's oscillating endings and the meaning of the finale.
Lenin's official wife who 'gracefully withdrew' in acknowledging his love for Inessa Armand, praised by Žižek as an example of dignity in love.
Referenced as the fascist leader supported by Puccini, Pirandello, and D'Annunzio at the 1924 crisis.
Dipesh Chakrabarty negative
Mentioned in closing as the subject of the next day's lecture; Žižek intends to counteract his argument that capitalism is always culturally embedded and there is no universal capitalism.
Wagner's anarchist interlocutor whose notion of purifying radical destruction influenced one version of the Ring's ending; one of the three inadequate options the Ring ultimately moves beyond.
The soprano singing Brünnhilde in the Chéreau–Boulez Ring; Žižek mentions she is from Wales to claim a local connection for the lecture audience.
Joseph Kerman positive
His reading of Tosca's finale (Puccini didn't know what to do so he repeated the best melody) is cited as a parallel for Adorno's cynical reading of Wagner's Ring finale.
Terry Eagleton positive
Followed in using the term 'political love' for the collective Agape that Žižek identifies as the Ring's resolution.
Friedrich Engels negative
Cited for the Marxist aesthetic dictum that only vulgar artists state the message explicitly, Žižek calls this 'one of the lowest moments of Marxist aesthetics' and uses Brecht as counter-evidence.
Patrice Chéreau positive
Director of the centennial Chéreau–Boulez Ring; Žižek endorses his staging choices (though finding the Holocaust-Jew costume for Alberich slightly too vulgar) and quotes his notes on the finale approvingly.
Arthur Schopenhauer negative
The Schopenhauerian reading of Wagner, music as deeper truth, death as desired annihilation, resignation from illusory reality, is systematically rejected throughout the talk as a misreading of both Wagner and the death drive.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Cited as the greatest dramatist of the 20th century precisely because he does bombard the audience repeatedly with explicit messages, used to refute the Engels-derived dictum against explicit artistic message.
Ernst Bloch positive
Endorsed for his remark that if there were more people like Sigmund in the Valkyrie scene, German history would have turned out differently, identifying the anti-fascist moment in Wagner.
Walter Benjamin positive
Concepts of mythic violence (law grounded in crime) and divine violence (innocent violence outside the law) are applied to Wotan and Siegfried respectively.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
His three stages (aesthetic, ethical) are used to map Wagner's Ring: the Rhinedaughters as aesthetic immediacy, Wotan's leap to the ethical (rule of law), with Tristan/Meistersinger/Parsifal as three Kierkegaardian love-options.
Cited both for his political support of Mussolini and for Kerman's analysis of his compositional procedure in Tosca's finale (parallel to Adorno's cynical reading of Wagner).
One of the three philosophical positions Wagner oscillated between for the Ring's ending: gods as human projections, sexual love as supreme human value; ultimately one of the inadequate options Žižek says the Ring supersedes.
Cited for his threat to Krupskaya to retroactively name Inessa Armand as Lenin's official widow if she caused trouble, illustrating communist-era manipulation of personal history.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the argument that the real problem with Homer is not understanding its historical context but explaining why it is eternal, used to justify Žižek's rejection of historicist contextualization of Wagner.
Sigmund Freud positive
Wagner is said to have formulated the death drive as undeadness already before Freud; Freud's concept is invoked to legitimize Žižek's non-Schopenhauerian reading.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Wagner should be read like Hegel: not by extracting 'leading thoughts' and attacking them in isolation, but by reading in detail, discovering how the system works against its own program.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Žižek credits Nietzsche as the first to perform the productive decontextualization of Wagner, reading him as the miniaturist of hysterical femininity rather than Teutonic bombast, and endorses his accusation that Wagnerian heroines conceal Madame Bovary.
What it argues
Wagner's antisemitism vs. his artistic self-contradictionDeath drive and undeadness in Wagner's operatic figuresThe politics of Götterdämmerung's multiple endingsFeuerbach, Bakunin, and Schopenhauer as existential options in the RingCollective love (Agape) vs. erotic self-destruction vs. bourgeois marriageSymbolic castration and the renunciation motif as the Ring's structural keyCommunist love as private idiosyncrasy within public revolutionary commitment
Dialectical moves 8
“Wagner's work is already an undermining, an answer to his own antisemitism—he is doing not only something different but exactly the opposite in his work.”
The artist's explicit ideology is inverted by his artistic practice; the critique is internal to the work itself.
“Death drive is not the desire to disappear into nothingness—death drive is eternity. Death drive is that ongoing suffering which prevents you to die.”
The standard Schopenhauerian reading of the death drive as annihilation-wish is reversed: it is in fact the horror of indestructible persistence.
“What Adorno attacks in Wagner—the fetishism that blinds us to the structural whole—is exactly what Adorno himself does with his provocative aphoristic proverbs.”
Adorno's critique of Wagner is turned back on Adorno himself; the critic enacts the very pathology he diagnoses.
“The music is not the truth behind the stage action—the music is the fantasy illusion which covers up the misery of what goes on.”
The Schopenhauerian hierarchy (music as deeper truth, stage as mere appearance) is inverted: music is the ideological veil, not the revelation.
“Love's highest need is to renounce its own power.”
Synthesizing the Ring's two statements of the renunciation motif, Žižek argues that authentic love requires its own self-negation as a direct goal.
“It is in Götterdämmerung—not in Parsifal—that Wagner was close to Christianity, while Parsifal is a return to paganism.”
The standard Nietzschean narrative (Ring = pagan, Parsifal = Christian capitulation) is reversed: Christianity as Agape belongs to the Ring's finale, Parsifal regresses to pagan ritual.
“Only in communism will love really become what it should be—a separate radical idiosyncrasy of two people.”
Communism is not an orgy of merged sexuality-and-politics but the condition under which love can finally be genuinely private.
“Wagnerian love dialogues are basically narcissistic fake—you don't care about your partner, you just want to get immersed into your own dream.”
The Wagnerian 'great love' is not an encounter with otherness but a self-enclosed fantasy triggered by another person.
Claims 18
asserts
Wagner's work actively undermines and contradicts his own antisemitism—the central heroic figures (Wotan/Wanderer, Flying Dutchman, Amfortas) are Wandering Jew archetypes, not the caricatured minor villains.Wagner's antisemitism
asserts
The caricatured Jewish figures in Wagner (Mime, Alberich) are self-portraits of Wagner himself, not external targets.Wagner's antisemitic characterization
rejects
Historicist contextualization of Wagner's antisemitic codes is irrelevant to the work's meaning; great art survives and transcends its historical context.historicist reading of Wagner
reframes
Adorno's critique of Wagner's leitmotif fetishism as proto-Hollywood commodification actually describes Adorno's own practice of seductive aphoristic provocations.Adorno's critique of Wagner
rejects
The music in Wagner is not the deeper truth behind the stage action but a phantasmatic envelope that ironically covers over the comic or bitter reality of what actually happens.Schopenhauerian reading of Wagner's music
asserts
The Ring's true ending is neither Feuerbachian humanist love, Bakuninian revolutionary destruction, nor Schopenhauerian resignation, but a call to collective political action (Agape) without guarantee.the meaning of Götterdämmerung's finale
asserts
Wagner anticipated Freud in formulating the death drive as not the desire for annihilation but the torment of undeadness—the inability to die.death drive and Wagner's contribution to psychoanalytic theory
asserts
Hagen in Götterdämmerung is not an antisemitic Jewish caricature but a proto-fascist populist leader—Wagner foresaw the contours of modern right-wing authoritarianism.Hagen's political meaning in the Ring
asserts
Siegfried is not a Nietzschean hero but a proto-fascist thug whose brute innocence represents a failed divine violence that does not and cannot redeem the world.Siegfried's ideological meaning
asserts
The Ring's structural key is the conjunction of the renunciation motif's two appearances: love's highest need is to renounce its own power—a formula of symbolic castration.the Ring's musical-philosophical structure
asserts
The only authentic erotic love in the Ring is the self-destructive incestuous union of Sigmund and Sieglinde; the official Siegfried–Brünnhilde love is a ridiculous mismatch.erotic love in the Ring
reframes
Parsifal represents a regression to paganism, not a move toward Christianity; it is Götterdämmerung that embodies Christian Agape.the Ring–Parsifal transition and Christianity
asserts
True love must be a modest byproduct of shared collective commitment, not a direct goal—the model is the revolutionary couple (Lenin and Inessa Armand) who keep love and politics strictly apart.the proper relationship between love and politics
rejects
The '68 equation of sexuality and politics ('the sexual is political') is wrong; only in a communist collective will love become what it should be—a separate radical idiosyncrasy of two people.sexual politics and the legacy of 1968
asserts
Wagner's Ring still gives the best available answer to the question of the meaning of life: private love must be supplemented by, but kept distinct from, collective political love.the Ring's contemporary relevance
rejects
Barenboim's position—Wagner's private antisemitism leaves no trace in his music—is too simplified and unconvincing.Barenboim's aestheticist defense of Wagner
asserts
Wagner was in the Nazi era actually a loser—performed less under the Third Reich than before—while Verdi and Puccini were more popular, demolishing the myth of Wagner as the Nazi composer.Wagner and Nazism
asserts
Capitalism has a genuinely universal dimension that resists culturally embedded particularist readings such as Dipesh Chakrabarty's.universality of capitalism vs. postcolonial particularism
Quotes 12
“Death drive is not what is usually attributed to Wagner, this boring stupid Schopenhauerian notion: oh what a hell and pain life is let's just disappear into nothingness. No, death drive is eternity. Death drive is that ongoing suffering which prevents you to die.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as undeadness, not annihilation
“Wagner probably unknown to himself, whatever you can say about him, he was undoubtedly a disgusting person privately. But what comes against it is not his unique eternal greatness—his work is already an undermining, an answer to his own antisemitism.”Slavoj Žižek · artistic self-contradiction of Wagner's antisemitism
“Love's highest need is to renounce its own power. This is what Lacan calls symbolic castration.”Slavoj Žižek · renunciation motif as symbolic castration
“Perhaps I claim there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it.”Slavoj Žižek · communist revolutionary couple as the highest form of love
“Everything now rests on them without any guarantee in God, fate or any other figure of the big Other. It is up to them to act like the Holy Spirit, it is up to them to practice Agape.”Slavoj Žižek · the Ring's ending as open call to collective action without guarantee
“The music is basically staged as the fantasy illusion which goes on insists and covers up the misery of what goes on.”Slavoj Žižek · music as ideological veil, not deeper truth
“Ernst Bloch was right to remark apropos of the scene that if there were to be more people like Sigmund here then German history would have turned otherwise.”Slavoj Žižek · Sigmund's choice of love over heroic immortality as anti-fascist moment
“Only in communism love will really become what it should be, a separate radical idiosyncrasy of two people out of this.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as precondition for authentic private love
“The story is over but the true path starts here.”Slavoj Žižek · Götterdämmerung's finale as open beginning, not closure
“I look into your eyes I forget all the world. That's nightmare, that's psychosis for me.”Slavoj Žižek · erotic self-enclosure as psychotic, not romantic ideal
“Nietzsche's accusation against Wagner: Wagner thought he is talking about heroes but behind Wagnerian heroines Brünnhilde you discover Madame Bovary and these hysterical small bourgeois wives.”Slavoj Žižek · Nietzsche's deflationary reading of Wagnerian heroism
“Men are there as if on the edge of a cliff. They listen tensely to the oracle which rumbles from the depths of the earth.”Slavoj Žižek · Chéreau's description of the Ring's finale as humanity poised at the abyss
Transcript 9 turns
Slavoj Žižek
My Israeli friend Udi Aloni told me the story of an accident which I think demonstrates better than anything else the ambiguous character of Wagner's antisemitism. A couple of decades ago, he told me, he belonged to a group of radical cultural provocateurs who in order to defy the prohibition to publicly perform Wagner's music in Israel, announced in daily newspapers that they will show in their club, some kind of alternative culture club, the full video in two, three consecutive evenings of Wagner's Ring. They, of course, planned the evening as some kind of drinking party with wild dancing. But then something strange happened. When the hour of performance approached, more and more old Jews, men and women dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned solemn way of pre-Hitler Germany—you know with all proper ties and so on—appeared in the club. For them, the public performance of Wagner was not about Nazism but a reminder of the good old Weimar Germany where Wagner's operas were a crucial part of their cultural experience. So then what happened was something very strange. What was planned as a provocation, basically Wagner as a pretext of an orgy, out of respect for all these old Jews, it turned into a wonderful event where all these young wild men behaved properly and they really, you know, they were shocked, listen to this, they were shocked to discover again to what extent Wagner was part of the Jewish German culture. And based on this then I went to check some books on the history of Bayreuth where of course you learn many interesting things, the one being that Wagner was Hitler’s private idiosyncrasy. The big majority of the Nazi party was absolutely anti-Wagner because they associated Bayreuth with Wagner’s son Siegfried was a gay, so they associated Bayreuth with French decadent homosexual influence. Wagner was anathema. Even now if you look at the statistic of which operas were performed in mostly on German in German theaters and if you take years before the Nazi take over and years after, '22-'33 and '33-'43, Wagner is the loser, big loser, to percent less in Nazi Germany. You know who were the winners? Verdi and Puccini. They were truly, even since Verdi was so popular that Germans had a problem of how can such a good guy not be a German. So since Verdi comes from Northern Italy, they invented a theory that he really is a German. So I have a poster reproduced at home from I don't know when, late '30s, where it is announced, you know they Germanize the name, Giuseppe Joseph, Josef, Verdi Verde, you know it’s green. And you have Nabucco eine Oper von Josef Grün and so on. They even directly, not to mention it our beloved Puccini whom nobody suspects, but you know what was the last letter Puccini wrote before his death in '24 or '23 in Switzerland? Congratulations to Mussolini. You know that in '24 I think there was the last political crisis in Italy before Mussolini took over. The last independent socialist member of parliament was found dead after being brutally tortured and there was still minimum of decency, a kind of public outcry in Italy and there was Mussolini was under such public pressure that there was a true danger that he will have to step down and then of course as always with totalitarian leaders you can count on intellectuals to support you, you know. I mean Luigi Pirandello, D'Annunzio and Puccini, all of them came to help. So again the minimum we can say is that there was another Wagner. I had another myself strange experience with Wagner. In I participated at a conference on Wagner at Columbia University in New York. It was this typically politically correct postmodern conference where the majority of participants exceeded each other in the art of unmasking the antisemitic proto-fascist dimension of Wagner's art. Then after all this usual orgy, a member of the public asked a wonderfully naive question. So if you, if all you the participants you are saying is true, if antisemitism is not just Wagner's private idiosyncrasy but something which concerns the very core of his art, why then should we listen to Wagner at all today? I mean if all this is true, if you read critics how it’s all about laying the ground for fascism and then all this reading how I don't know all the bad guys are really figures of Jew and so on and so on, then what does this mean? Why do we perform Wagner if this is true? In other words, shouldn’t we feel guilty listening to Wagner? Isn't Wagner kind of a prohibited pleasure? The embarrassed participants with the honorable exception of one, I forgot his name, he is a well-known German Wagnerian theoretician who is absolutely anti-Wagner. His position is one should bomb Bayreuth and one should totally prohibit performances of Wagner. They replied with this confused version: no no we didn't quite mean that, Wagner nonetheless wrote wonderful music, you just have to be aware of and so on and so on. A totally unconvincing compromise, even worse than the standard aestheticist answer. Wagner as a private person had his defects but he wrote music of incomparable beauty so in his art there is no trace of antisemitism. This is the I think way too simplified Barenboim position. At this very conference Barenboim gave a talk, Daniel Barenboim, where again his line was: private deviation, absolutely no traces of it in Wagner's music. So you will ask me how do I want to pull my trick, like rehabilitate Wagner, but is it that then my good friend, I mean it ironically, Adam Kirsch in was right against me that I am antisemitic or what? No, here is my formula. First, the first thing to do is to reject the historicist readings which try to bring out the contextual true meaning of various Wagnerian characters and topics. For example, you learn and of course you can find all these cultural associations that the key figure of the last opera of the Ring, Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of Gods, Hagen, that Hagen because he is pale kind of a passive is really a masturbating Jew. That the wound of the King Amfortas, you know the wounded Fisher King in Parsifal, is really syphilis and so on and so on. So the argument is that Wagner was mobilizing historical codes known to everyone in his own time. For example, when a person stumbles in his operas, sings in cracking high tones like Beckmesser in Meistersinger or makes nervous gesture, the idea is everybody knew this was the portrait of a Jew. However, I don't mean this in any idealist way of eternal art, but I claim is this the right logic in the sense of I dispute the worth, the relevance of this kind of historicist contextualization. I am here very traditional, even Marxist. You know when Marx says apropos Odyssey, Iliad and so on that the true problem is not to see the culture out of which they grew but why they are eternal, why they charm even us today. I think the definition of great art is that it can be reinvented at every epoch again. This is why for example Shakespeare is great. You have Shakespeare the way it was done, you have romantic Shakespeare, you have classicist Shakespeare, you have modern Shakespeare and so on and so on. It survives different contexts. And here Wagner I think won triumphantly. That is to say it all started already with Nietzsche, Wagner's great critic, who was the first I think to perform such a decontextualization which works formidably precisely with Ring. Namely for Nietzsche Wagner was no longer, even when he criticizes Wagner, the poet of Teutonic mythology, of bombastic heroic grandeur, but the miniaturist Wagner, the Wagner of hystericized femininity, of delicate passages of bourgeois family decadence and so on and so on. So again I think that we should look in this sense not in Habermasian sense Wagner as an unfinished project. He proposed a certain basic musical stage and so on frame. And there is more in this frame than in its historicist contextualization. Why? Because I think, now come two of my, how to put it, mottos. First, if you look closely at this contextualization, I’m not saying we should ignore all that, it’s obvious that for example in Meistersinger Wagner in the figure of Beckmesser is making fun in a very brutally racist way of Jewish music. That that allegedly bad Beckmesser song who loses the singing contest at the end of the opera is again a very bad taste even parody of Jewish religious music. No, I’m saying something else. Two things. That probably unknown to himself, whatever you can say about Wagner, he was undoubtedly a disgusting person privately and so on. But what comes against it is not his unique eternal greatness, no I’m more precise here. I think that simply and we don't need any even any very elaborate deconstructionist complex reading and so on, that in a much simpler way even, you can establish that, pathetic as this will sound, that his work is already an undermining, an answer to his own antisemitism. That he is doing not only something different but exactly the opposite in his work. The proof. Just very in a very simplistic way then we will go in details. You have two types of persons in his work who can count as caricatures of Jews. One are these minor slightly ridiculous figures like Mime and Alberich. You know it’s kind of a small guys nervous making too many gestures who are obviously portrait of ridiculous antisemitic portraits of Jews. And in the version out of which I will show you the clips, Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez version, centennial version of Wagner's Ring, there you can even see I mean Chéreau did something which was even a little bit too vulgar for my taste. In the confrontation that you will see between Siegfried and Alberich, he even directly paints Alberich as this kind of a from the Holocaust or ghetto-ghetto impoverished Jew. There is okay, a clear argument Wagner was making bad taste bad taste antisemitic jokes. There’s only one problem here. Without any doubt, it’s clear from Wagner's letters, reactions, these caricatures of Jews are always self-caricatures of Wagner himself. He was like that, a small nervous guy jumping around and so on and so on. Even more precisely in the scene that I will show it to you later of Siegfried confronting Alberich, the way the scene is done, the words, the words are practically the words of a German skinhead racist attacking some I don't know some Turkish Gastarbeiter or foreigner. It’s like you are getting on my nerves disappear I would like to squash you and so on and so on. Now the but and I’m quite shocked how people do not notice the other part of the argument. That there is a central Jewish figure in Wagner. But my god, it’s the hero. It’s the main character. It’s the Wanderer. It’s the the central you in if you look at the zero level Wagnerian figure, it’s an undead guy because of some terrible past crime he is condemned not to die. That’s the typical Wagnerian position. That he is looking for a woman usually to be ready to sacrifice herself so that together they can die. This undead, you have this like Kafka, the Cacciatore Dr. this strange wound which doesn't cause you to die but prevents you to die. Incidentally this is why I think Wagner has was the first to formulate much more than Schopenhauer what Freud meant already before Freud what Freud meant by death drive. Death drive is not what is usually attributed to Wagner, this boring stupid Schopenhauerian notion: oh what a hell and pain life is let’s just disappear into nothingness. No, death drive is eternity. Death drive is that ongoing suffering which prevents you to die. The big Wagnerian problem is how to finally be able to die. To escape this undeadness. And as it is totally clear from the first figure, Fliegende Holländer, the Flying Dutchman, whom Wagner himself called Ahasver des Ozeans. That is to say the figure of the wandering Jew. To up to the end, okay at the very end it’s the king himself Amfortas who is the Jewish figure. Not the enemy. The enemy Klingsor, the bad magician, is sorry this will sound today even more politically incorrect but it’s clearly an Arab figure if you want to locate it. In in Ring, Wotan, Odin, the father of gods, you know after everything goes wrong he just wants to die and turns into Wanderer, literally called Wanderer. In Siegfried Wotan is no longer called Wotan but Wanderer. Again a clear figure of wandering Jew. So if you just take into account this kind of stuff you see again that you get a totally different disposition. Next thing we should do, it’s absolutely crucial, here one should be critical even to Adorno. Is how to put it, it especially important with Wagner, one should read Wagner the same way as one should read Hegel I claim. Not to do what often philosophers do, take a couple of so-called leading thoughts, you know Hegel subject mediates all objectivity, absolute idealism and so on and then attack at this line. They should be both Wagner and Hegel should be read in detail. Wagner should be listened in detail. And if you really listen what he does in his operas, you will discover that he simply doesn’t follow his program. All that stuff of Gesamtkunstwerk and so on, organic dissolution and so on. I will try to improvise a little bit about it later how this works even at the most elementary level. If people usually take Tristan, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, as two lovers disappearing into the night finally finding ultimate happiness in annihilation. But my god look at the opera. That’s exactly what doesn’t happen in Tristan. What happens is that the encounter is missed again and again. Tristan is a kind of comic reworking where one tries to die it doesn’t when one dies another one dies and so on. You know precisely what was the big scene of the 19th century this like in Norma they sing, Bellini’s Norma, Moriam insieme, let's die together ecstatically. This precisely doesn't doesn't happen in Wagner. So here is my very evil reading of Adorno. When Adorno tries to dismiss Wagner as the beginning of fetishization which like Wagner the first step towards Hollywood almost. The idea that Wagner’s leitmotifs are the points of this aha simplistic recognition which it’s the first step towards the disintegration of this ideal organic unity of music which you find in mature Beethoven. Wagner is the beginning of commercialization and so on and so on. I claim that Adorno that this attack on Wagner by Adorno, this aspect, Adorno's sorry Wagner's fetishism of leitmotifs where you have again this the beginning of Hollywood fetishism the beauty or the imposing power of leitmotifs blinds us for the for the complex structural network of a work and first step towards fetishizing elements. I think that it must have been, I spoke with some followers of Adorno who have the same suspicion, that Adorno was maybe unknowingly to himself basically criticizing himself. It’s exactly Adorno I claim who is doing this. Why? If you read Adorno you can see how although he wants if you read his I think they are basically failures it doesn’t work. The ideal Adorno are short texts like Noten zur Literatur and so on. But when he wants to do a bigger systematic work like Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, he is there too Wagnerian in this caricatural sense. It’s like an unending melody motifs float. But then Adorno had a problem, he even was aware of it from some diaries, he couldn’t resist the temptation of doing some pseudo-deep paradox. He was so fascinated by some provocative thought like you know for example like in Dialectic of Enlightenment where he says Hollywood realizes Kant's theory of knowledge and so on. This paradox which functioned I claim precisely as what he what he attacks Wagner for, this blinding or or psychoanalysis is most true is most true at its when it is excessive and so on within its exaggerations and so on and so on. I think that this was Adorno's tension. What he wanted to do was this kind of organic paratactic flow but effectively he was regressing into this kind of a fetishism of of course not leitmotifs but let’s say this kind of a provocative proverbs insights which can then be quoted and so on and so on. So again it’s absolutely crucial to give Wagner a chance I claim and to look at what he really is doing. And again we discover here some incredible things. For example let me return just briefly to this figure, it’s crucial for political reading of Wagner. I think the authentic greatness of Wagner's Ring is that what happens of course we will not have time to go into that what happens in in Twilight of Gods in I think the crucial figure there is the figure of Hagen which plays a central role already in the Nibelungen myth. Hagen as this evil plotting character who kills Siegfried the hero. The way Wagner stages and this is nicely emphasized in Chéreau-Boulez staging the way Wagner presents Hagen is not any kind of masturbating Jew or whatever but a proto-fascist populist leader. Wagner saw it already at that point. You have the weak king Gunther and the populist it’s a wonderful scene we don't have time to see for example half an hour into act two this call to men of by Hagen gathering the crowd the mob. Extreme brutality. Wagner saw it. Wagner was the first I think to discern the contours of a new of a new post-traditional post-traditional right-wing authoritarianism. So how then, let’s go on, how then to read Wagner? First I would like to start with another problem. Today, and I like this if it’s done properly, today often in the operas we have numerous attempts to stage then classical operas not only by transposing them into a different setting like I don't know Così fan tutte in today's era Mozart’s Così fan tutte but also to change some basic facts about the story. And I think that such interventions often don’t work but they often do work. I think that maybe often even they are the clue to Wagner. Sometimes you have to change the explicit story a little bit in order to get at what Wagner was aiming at without being aware. I quote this a couple of times in my books my ultra example is of course Tristan, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's version where probably you know what happens the story you know. What happens here is that in Act III it’s not that you know Tristan mortally wounded waited for Isolde, Isolde comes then they die. But it’s staged so that it appears that as if Tristan dies alone. The Isolde who comes is just Tristan's Tristan's the dying the the hallucination of the dying Tristan. And I think it works perfectly because if you listen really closely to what is maybe Wagner's greatest act the act three of Tristan you can see how this famous Liebestod, death ecstatic death of Isolde the last five minutes song is really just a culmination of of Tristan’s long minutes almost dying. It is as if the problem of Tristan is that he is waiting for Isolde to come not in order to to live but in order to be able to die. This is why he cannot die. But then the only way since she doesn’t come and I think this is a wonderful rewriting of the myth that simply Isolde for Isolde this was just a brief affair she stayed with her husband no and so Tristan had to die alone. So such a change I think has an effect of revelation. So again as I already hinted at it’s crucial with Wagner to another sorry another mistake to be avoided by Wagner is to ignore the story what goes on on the stage. Wagner himself as it was often the case was the first idiot here. It’s in a well-known anecdote when a friend a lady friend of him was watching The Flying Dutchman at Bayreuth Wagner approached her from the back and put hands over her eyes and said: forget about the stage just go into the spirit of the music listen to the music. This I claim is exactly what you should not do. I claim that that here Wagner was already pretty modern and anti-romantic basically. Because in Romanticism the music is the truth as it were. You know like characters do whatever they do but music knows more. In this sense I claim even Mozart with his irony is more romantic although Romanticism only begins a little bit with Mozart, more romantic than Wagner. Because in because in Mozart music is the truth. You have this I don't know just take Così fan tutte where you know the two couples the men are are seducing women it’s all a mockery a joke. But in music they show that love is the truth the deeper one. There is people you learn more than what was on in music. With Wagner I think it’s the opposite. We shouldn’t, the usual idea of Wagner is this how you call it Schopenhauerian idea. What happens in reality representation speech is just Vorstellung, again as Schopenhauer would have put it, representation. But the true rhythm of life the true life substance is music this ecstatic identification with music. Although Wagner himself sometimes took it like this. But I think this is not a correct reading. I think that precisely when you relate music to what goes on in the scene, you can see how the structure is as a rule in Wagner a much more modern in modern sense ironic one. It is that music is basically staged as a as the fantasy illusion which goes on insists and covers up the misery of what goes on. So for example in in Tristan it would have been much more productive I think to read Tristan as a kind of compromise petty bourgeois small love affair and the music is the myth you know like this is the this was already Nietzsche was right here, Nietzsche's accusation against Wagner. That Wagner thought he is talking about heroes but you know this famous phrase of Nietzsche of how if you look closely behind Wagnerian heroines Brünnhilde and so on you discover Madame Bovary and these hysterical small bourgeois wives. At the artistic level I think Wagner knew it. So basically you should read music in all this pathetic immersion eternal death let’s disappear in in the void of primordial abyss or whatever, you should read this as a melodramatic comment belied by belied by what goes on. What goes on is often a comedy. The model the the model of comedy in opera is for example if you know it Verdi's Trovatore. I mean it’s one of the most I love how much total bullshit you can sell as a libretto of the opera. You know what's the basic plot of Trovatore? That an old Gypsy woman wanted to revenge herself on some rich guy and wanted to throw this guy’s son into fire but she threw the wrong guy into the fire no and so on. And then you and then Il Trovatore you have this totally ridiculous ending where in the last two minutes like four five things happen this person kills another person another kills... no. And but but isn't the very ending of Wagner's Tristan almost the same? One ship comes they fight another again it’s for a brief moment you are back into ridicule. And I think again that this this is how we should treat Wagner. The music is the emotional phantasmatic envelope whose function is to render palpable palpable the bitter pill the bitter pill delivered by words and action. Women getting killed or abandoned and so on and so on. Okay now nonetheless let me do, I'm sorry it will be if it will be a little bit boring but we have to go through this. I will try to make my point with the finale of Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of Gods. It’s the most bombastic, the biggest of them all. The finale where after after Siegfried's death Brünnhilde his true love in this big it’s a Wagnerian death. You must be aware it’s even pretty short for a Wagnerian death. It’s just a minutes, you know the true Wagnerian death is minutes. It’s Tristan and so on. So as it is well known Wagner oscillated between different text works of the finale. Even in a way the final version of the opera has two endings basically. Siegfried’s death is already an ending and then Brünnhilde’s self-immolation. So as we know finding an appropriate conclusion for the Ring caused Wagner immense difficulty. His ideas for the end changed several times as his political and philosophical views evolved. The story of these changes is well known. In the first written project The Nibelung Myth as Sketch for a Drama from Siegfried and Brünnhilde rise above Siegfried’s funeral pyre to Valhalla to cleanse Wotan, father of gods, of his crime and to redeem the gods. There is here no suggestion that gods are to be destroyed or whatever, it’s simply a kind of a redemption of them all. In a new version then written a year later under the name Siegfried's Death, Brünnhilde’s final speech also stresses the cleansing effect of the hero's Siegfried's death. Quote: Here then you mighty gods, your guilt is abolished. The hero takes it upon himself. The Nibelungs’ slavery is at an end and Alberich, the chief of Nibelungs, these exploitative dwarfs, shall again be free. The ring I give to you wise sisters of the watery deeps, melt it down and keep it free from harm. End of quote. So here is still some kind of general reconciliation. Then in Wagner developed the story backwards adding a long prequel consisting of the events staged in Rheingold and Valkyrie and expanding the role of Wotan, the father of gods, who is now the central figure. In the new ending gods achieve redemption but this time they have to die. Only in their death. Brünnhilde’s final speech now reads, quote: Fade away in bliss before the deed of man. The hero you created. I proclaim to you freedom from fear through blessed redemption and in death. End of quote. Next version written a year later shows the traces of Wagner's passionate debates with Bakunin as well as of his study of Ludwig Feuerbach. In it the Bakuninian notion of Russian revolutionary anarchist of the purifying role of radical destruction is combined with two basic insights of Feuerbach. Gods are the construction of human minds and sexual love of a couple has primacy over all other human endeavors. In this Feuerbachian ending Brünnhilde proclaims the destruction of gods and their replacement by a human society ruled by love. Quote: No not gods or gold nor glittering... no not goods or gold nor glittering gods. Not house nor hall. Not splendid display. Not broken bonds of treacherous treaties nor arrogant customs adamant law. Blissful in gladness and sorrow, love alone shall endure. End of quote. In Wagner again rewrote the ending under the influence of his discovery of Schopenhauer and of his reading of Buddhist texts. This Schopenhauerian ending which focuses on resignation at the illusory nature of human existence and on self-overcoming through the negation of the will found its most explicit expression in the following new lines of Brünnhilde, quote: Were I no more to fare to Valhalla's fortress, do you know whither I fare? I depart from the home of desire, I flee forever the home of delusion. The open gates of eternal becoming I close behind me now. It’s really kind of a vulgarized Dalai Lama. To the holiest chosen land, free from desire and delusion, the goal of the world's migration, redeemed from incarnation the enlightened woman now goes. The blessed end of all things eternal, do you know how I attained it? Grieving love's profoundest suffering opened my eyes for me. I saw the world end. End of quote. Then after much deliberation Wagner decided not to set these words to music although they appear in some published version of the libretto. Why? As a rule this omission is interpreted not as a sign of Wagner's abandoning Schopenhauer but as a proof of his artistic sensibility. The idea is by the end of his composing the Ring in Wagner realized that the music not words should deliver the final message. So the idea is again he didn't want to be too explicit like why redouble the message when it’s already you know as they put it in one of the lowest moments of Marxist aesthetics Friedrich Engels that only the vulgar artists say explicitly the message. With the truly great art the message should be embedded in the situation itself. Incidentally I'm totally opposed to it. Look at Brecht, he was the greatest dramatist of the 20th century and if anything the explicit message is like bombarded repeatedly endlessly again and again. But I claim this is not the case. This is not what happens. My thesis will be that the way it is composed effectively the ending of Wagner's Ring you get another message. And here I want to rely on a wonderful book that I discovered quite by chance published recently. Two young British guys pupils of Bernard Williams, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, *Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring*. They elaborated this point, I follow them here. So let me recapitulate the problem. As to its ideological content the ending of the Twilight of Gods oscillates between three main positions designated by the names of Feuerbach, Bakunin and Schopenhauer. The reign of the ending this catastrophe should be the reign of human love. It’s a catastrophe for gods. Revolutionary destruction of the old world or Schopenhauer fake Buddhism resignation withdrawal from illusory reality. Because of these oscillations then it is not clear how are we to conceive the crowd of men and women who, as it says in the libretto, in deepest emotion witness the final destruction of the world in fire and water. Who are they? Do they really embody a new liberated society? Because as you will see at the very end of the Ring where all disappears people, ordinary people, humans remain and just stare. Who are they? The change from early revolutionary to mature Schopenhauerian Wagner is usually conceived as the shift from the humanist belief into the possibility of revolutionary change. That is to say from the belief that our reality is miserable due to contingent historical reasons to the more profound insight into how reality as such is miserable so the only redemption resides in withdrawing from reality into the abyss of the night of the world. But I claim again this doesn't happen in Ring effectively. Such a reading doesn't cover what effectively happens. So now this will be don't be afraid the longest clip. I will play you the last five minutes. And if you are allergic to Wagner it will be torture. The last five minutes of the Twilight where you have Brünnhilde doing all this Teutonic stuff and so on. Okay to evoke a little bit more sympathy just beware that Brünnhilde is sung by Gwyneth Jones who is from Wales so we are in your country here nonetheless. So how how is this? Be especially be attentive to the orchestral music which of which the last two minutes are composed. It’s such a mixture of motifs that the usual reading is a very cynical one. Even Adorno subscribes to it. It’s that Wagner simply didn't know what to do, it got all confused in him. Is it Feuerbach, is it Schopenhauer, is it Buddhism am I still... so that what he did, he escaped into the beauty of music. His idea was what does this mean? Let’s just in a purely formal way produce an effect of depth. Let’s just throw all the big motifs there and I don't know what it is but it will sound very deep if I do this no? So it is something like if you know a little bit the music of the above-mentioned Mussolini follower, you know Joseph Kerman in his *Music Opera and Drama*, he cannot stand Puccini, has a wonderful reading of the very ending of Tosca. You know the biggest hit from Tosca is this E lucevan le stelle Cavaradossi area and at the very end after she jumps down you hear with all bombastic tutti of the orchestra this melody again. And Kerman’s description is that again he didn't know what to do so he told himself let’s simply use again the most effective melody to make it an effective ending. So the idea is Wagner did the same. But not quite I claim. So now please suffer for and I hope ah perfect, suffer for five minutes and we will see. [Silence for approximately minutes as requested] That’s done on purpose by Chéreau-Boulez the silence goes for some seconds I think with the working class the only survivors just staring into into okay. So again in the orchestral part which concludes this which ends the Twilight we have again the all-encompassing motif, we will see precisely where we hear it before, of this so-called redemption through love. A motif which incidentally is heard only once at the end of the second opera of the Ring, Valkyrie. And then it is as if this moment of redemption true love encompasses provides the background for two three other motifs: Rhinedaughters which means innocent playfulness of natural world, the Valhalla fortress of gods motif, a motif which is supposed to render the dignified majesty of the rule of law, and the motif of Siegfried the free hero. The big question is what kind of love is asserted at the end by Brünnhilde. Again my thesis is it’s not sexual love, it’s not the love of a couple. In order to answer this question I think one should locate this finale into the totality of Wagner's Ring which should be read, I will do this on purpose in a very old-fashioned way, as a as a series of what we may call existential projects. And I think again I’m not kidding here, as communists we should ask this fundamental question, very stupid one: what makes life worth living? What makes life meaningful? First the first and the opera begins with it, the first choice is that of Rhinedaughters. This would be the path of some naive Westernized Taoism or what. Against corrupted civilization enjoy the playfulness of natural life. Then we have Wotan’s choice which is to put it in Kierkegaard's terms the leap from the aesthetic to the ethical. The rule of law imposed on innocent nature. From Valhalla Wotan wants to rule the world bringing peace and justice to it. The attempt fails. This was clear to Wagner because of the compromises Wotan has to commit. These compromises are more complex than it may appear. They concern not only the well-known topic of illegitimate violence that grounds the rule of law, not only the notion of the rule of law disturbing the innocence of the spontaneous natural life. Furthermore, a crucial part of Wotan’s tragedy is that he has abandoned love in the service of law. Another part is that along the way to the end of second opera Valkyrie, he relinquishes everything that is most precious to him. After sacrificing everything for the one thing that really matters to him, Wotan discovers that he thereby lost precisely this one thing. This most precious thing is embodied in Brünnhilde, Wotan’s preferred daughter. And she is not only political but also ethical breakdown is rendered in his long monologue in front of Brünnhilde in the second act of Valkyrie, the second opera. In the Ring we should also remember the source of evil is not Alberich, this bad guy who at the beginning of the Ring in Rheingold steals the gold from Rhinedaughters. No, the source of evil is not Alberich’s renouncing love. You know how Rheingold begins? Alberich the poor ugly proto-Jewish figure wants to play erotically with three Rhinedaughters who are it’s very clearly done with Wagner he was aware of this that we should look at Alberich with sympathy. He just wanted to play with girls and the girls are very cruel, mock him. And then gold is disclosed. And then the girls tell he asks the girls what is this the gold, he asks them how can I get it. The girls say only if you renounce love. He renounces love. But it’s crucial to learn that Wotan did the same. Succumbing to the lure of power, he gave preference to power over love. This is all the previous story why he lost one eye cutting off the ash tree, the wisdom and so also denaturalizing the world. So we have this simple opposition. On the one hand natural balanced order, natural innocence, the rule of law. The rule of law for Wagner is of course always stained with a primordial crime. He knew what this as Wotan’s problem is to use Benjamin mythic violence. He was aware that you are so much compromised so that the rule of law necessarily ends in crime and it is because of this that Wotan ends up as Wanderer. As this wandering Jew figure. So when things go wrong let’s not get into how Wotan breaks down, he just wants to die. And then as a last act he gets an idea of and you know when Wagner so okay we should be very well aware of what Wagner was striving with when he tried to find an ending to the Twilight of God. The point is precisely is there a way out of this deadlock? On the one hand you have practically all the existential positions here. You have Alberich which would be capitalist profiteering, money and so on. You have Wotan, the rule of law, power. You have natural innocence, innocent pre-pre-cultural, pre-industrial whatever way of life. All this it was clear to Wagner that that a neither industrial capitalism nor any kind of elevated dignified rule of law it doesn’t work. Is there a way out of this? It was also clear to him that we cannot return to any kind of natural innocence. And then now comes the beauty. The problem of Wotan, his idea is to give birth to a hero, to somehow generate a hero who will be innocent. In a way Wotan is dreaming about an innocent violence who from outside the law will be able to kill off the gods to as it were clear the plate and allow for a new beginning. But this is not again what happened. This is precisely if you want the dream of Benjaminian divine violence. Siegfried is for me Wagner's idea of divine violence. In the sense of innocent violence which ends with this obscenity of the of the violence which sustains the law and so on and so on. So what the result of this then is the birth of Sigmund, who is Wotan’s own son but Wotan raises him not as his father he sets him free. The idea is Sigmund should be the new the new hero who will bring redemption to the world through his innocence outside of civilized rule of law. And here we get the only here we then get the erotic option as another existential project. Sigmund, Sieglinde. the they are brother and sister, incestuous love which is consummated and this is the only true passionate affair in the opera. The love of Siegfried and Brünnhilde is a ridiculous mismatch, it’s clear. What happens here is now this is the first authentic ending. I claim Wagner's answer is there are two existential possibilities and I think they are quite I mean I agree with Wagner here to be very vulgar. One is passionate love couple but Wagner sees a problem, this is self-destructive. It destroys itself. But this is this here you see Wagner at his most anti-totalitarian even anti-fascist and so on. Ernst Bloch was right to remark apropos of the scene you will see now that if there were to be more people like Sigmund here then German history would have turned otherwise. What happened here is that Wotan arranges so that Sigmund loses a fight and we the Sigmund the hero father of Siegfried will die. Okay I will not go into all the complications, what is crucial here is this beautiful scene where Brünnhilde comes to Sigmund and tells him you will die. I came here to prepare you for Valhalla. Valhalla the city of gods where you after your death if you die as a hero you can lead a happy life flirting with all the the Valkyrie there and so on and so on. And then it’s this it’s a beautiful love scene where Sigmund is there with his beloved who is just laying down totally exhausted asleep Sieglinde and then Sigmund says no if I cannot take that woman with me I will not go to Valhalla. I prefer to remain mortal. This beautiful choice of a miserable mortal being is to me more than eternal joy among the gods. And then you have the comment of the shattered Brünnhilde. So little do you value everlasting bliss. Is she, this woman, this poor woman who tired and sorrowful lies limp in your leg is she everything to you? Do you think nothing less glorious? and so on and so on. Let’s again praise to God that things will work now. First you will see this is another clip, very short one. You will see here how in Valkyrie, that’s another one, this is where the first time I hope we will recognize it that redemption motif appears. It’s very beautiful just sudden outburst by by Sieglinde, the mother of Siegfried. And then we will go to that scene. [Audio of Sieglinde's redemption motif from Die Walküre plays] Okay this at least wasn't a mistake. You had here and this comes now I hope it will... yes [Audio of Brünnhilde's appearance to Siegmund plays]. She is inviting him, Sigmund to Valhalla she would say no he will say no. [Silence as the scene continues] Okay. Now we go now now as a okay. He dies, what next happens is that the of out of this incestuous union you have the son the big hero Siegfried. And now I come to my central point. The only authentic love link was this one between Sieglinde, Sigmund but again it’s self-destructive. It cannot last. And what happens with the official love affair of the opera? Brünnhilde, Siegfried. It’s obviously a total mismatch. I cannot even see how anyone who simply looks at the opera can get the idea that this is the true big love. First it’s Siegfried. Wagner does something I think wonderful which the beauty is that it goes totally against the German ideology which portrays Siegfried as this powerful Nietzschean hero and so on. Wagner portrays Siegfried as a total jerk, idiot, duped by everyone, tricked, betrayed and so on, brutal, just again I hope this will work if I do ah no. Now I learned how to okay. [Audio of the confrontation between Siegfried and Alberich plays] Yes. I’m sorry you don't get, I will simply talk in between so that we lost don't lose time, the German words. This is Siegfried and obviously the Jewish figure Alberich, no sorry it’s not Alberich it’s Alberich’s brothers but again notice the almost concentration camp features and Siegfried's brutality. Basically Siegfried’s words are here: When I watch you standing, shuffling and trembling, stupid squinting and blinking, I long to seize you by your nodding neck and make an end of your obscene blinking and so on and so on. It’s really kind of a you know like British National Party beating up I don't know a Pakistani boy or whatever. And again all this stuff so that again I cannot emphasize enough of how Wagner was aware of how this brutality... here I think that Siegfried is also faced Siegfried is a kind of a proto-figure of Nazi thug of this you know this right-wing dream of pure brutality of revolutionary power which will clean clean the plate and so on and so on. This doesn't work. So what happens then effectively at the end, what kind of love do we get after all this? The key I claim is provided by so-called renunciation motif. And here one should really it was Claude Lévi-Strauss who got this point the first. One should read Wagner in a structural way in the sense that one brings together one should read in parallel what happens when the same motif is repeated. This the so-called motif of renunciation is repeated in the opera two two times. Let’s first get it here. [Audio from Das Rheingold, renunciation motif plays] Yes. This is Rheingold, three Rhinedaughters. Now you will see the motif of renunciation. [Renunciation motif plays again] The words here were Nur wer der Minne Macht versagt. Only the one who renounces the power of love can get the gold and so on. Now comes now this is for Claude Lévi-Strauss the proof that Wagner was a structuralist. Because here you you will see [Audio from Die Walküre finale plays] yeah. This is the finale of Valkyrie where you will see the same motif but again watch for the words. [Final notes of Die Walküre play] Okay. You here the words were heiligste minne höchste not, holiest love's highest need. And this is I think the formula. The formula is to to read the two together. You know I repeat it. First the motif was sung with the words only the one who renounces the power of love, the second was holiest love highest need. My solution is love's highest need is to renounce its own power. This is what Lacan calls symbolic castration. If one is to remain faithful to one's love one should not elevate it into the direct focus of one's life, one should renounce its centrality. Love should not be posited as a direct goal. Love is an out love is an a byproduct something of an undeserved grace. The point is not that there are more important things than love. An authentic love encounter remains a kind of absolute point of reference of one's life, to put it in traditional terms what makes one's life meaningful. The hard lesson learned by Brünnhilde is that precisely as such love should not be a direct goal of one's life. True love is modest, like my old example the love of a couple in Marguerite Duras novels. While the two lovers hold hands they do not look into each other's eyes. They look together outwards into some third point their common cause. Perhaps I claim there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it. They do not love each other less than the amorous couple bent on suspending all their terrestrial link in order to burn out in unconditional passion. If anything they love each other more. And I think the finale of the Twilight is thus Wagner's critical rejection of the three options staged in Wagner's three great other non-Ring operas. I think Wagner was struggling all the time with this problem again what kind of love makes life meaningful. The Tristan solution it’s really as if we get the three Kierkegaard versions in the three operas: Tristan, Meistersinger, Parsifal. You know what happens in Tristan. Lovers burn out die disappear in passion. That is the aesthetic option love. In Meistersinger we get the daily reality of marriage. True love the incestuous one must be renounced, you must find happiness in ordinary hard work daily love and so on and so on. Parsifal is a psychotic solution, you drop the woman. The woman disappears. You simply reject reject love in kind of a in a kind of a sacred gesture. And I think that Wagner was somehow aware that none of these three versions really work. They do not cover the entire field. The choice is not either kind of a ascetic self-enclosed male brotherhood or even female brotherhood sisterhood a close
My Israeli friend Udi Aloni told me the story of an accident which I think demonstrates better than anything else the ambiguous character of Wagner's antisemitism. A couple of decades ago, he told me, he belonged to a group of radical cultural provocateurs who in order to defy the prohibition to publicly perform Wagner's music in Israel, announced in daily newspapers that they will show in their club, some kind of alternative culture club, the full video in two, three consecutive evenings of Wagner's Ring. They, of course, planned the evening as some kind of drinking party with wild dancing. But then something strange happened. When the hour of performance approached, more and more old Jews, men and women dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned solemn way of pre-Hitler Germany—you know with all proper ties and so on—appeared in the club. For them, the public performance of Wagner was not about Nazism but a reminder of the good old Weimar Germany where Wagner's operas were a crucial part of their cultural experience. So then what happened was something very strange. What was planned as a provocation, basically Wagner as a pretext of an orgy, out of respect for all these old Jews, it turned into a wonderful event where all these young wild men behaved properly and they really, you know, they were shocked, listen to this, they were shocked to discover again to what extent Wagner was part of the Jewish German culture. And based on this then I went to check some books on the history of Bayreuth where of course you learn many interesting things, the one being that Wagner was Hitler’s private idiosyncrasy. The big majority of the Nazi party was absolutely anti-Wagner because they associated Bayreuth with Wagner’s son Siegfried was a gay, so they associated Bayreuth with French decadent homosexual influence. Wagner was anathema. Even now if you look at the statistic of which operas were performed in mostly on German in German theaters and if you take years before the Nazi take over and years after, '22-'33 and '33-'43, Wagner is the loser, big loser, to percent less in Nazi Germany. You know who were the winners? Verdi and Puccini. They were truly, even since Verdi was so popular that Germans had a problem of how can such a good guy not be a German. So since Verdi comes from Northern Italy, they invented a theory that he really is a German. So I have a poster reproduced at home from I don't know when, late '30s, where it is announced, you know they Germanize the name, Giuseppe Joseph, Josef, Verdi Verde, you know it’s green. And you have Nabucco eine Oper von Josef Grün and so on. They even directly, not to mention it our beloved Puccini whom nobody suspects, but you know what was the last letter Puccini wrote before his death in '24 or '23 in Switzerland? Congratulations to Mussolini. You know that in '24 I think there was the last political crisis in Italy before Mussolini took over. The last independent socialist member of parliament was found dead after being brutally tortured and there was still minimum of decency, a kind of public outcry in Italy and there was Mussolini was under such public pressure that there was a true danger that he will have to step down and then of course as always with totalitarian leaders you can count on intellectuals to support you, you know. I mean Luigi Pirandello, D'Annunzio and Puccini, all of them came to help. So again the minimum we can say is that there was another Wagner. I had another myself strange experience with Wagner. In I participated at a conference on Wagner at Columbia University in New York. It was this typically politically correct postmodern conference where the majority of participants exceeded each other in the art of unmasking the antisemitic proto-fascist dimension of Wagner's art. Then after all this usual orgy, a member of the public asked a wonderfully naive question. So if you, if all you the participants you are saying is true, if antisemitism is not just Wagner's private idiosyncrasy but something which concerns the very core of his art, why then should we listen to Wagner at all today? I mean if all this is true, if you read critics how it’s all about laying the ground for fascism and then all this reading how I don't know all the bad guys are really figures of Jew and so on and so on, then what does this mean? Why do we perform Wagner if this is true? In other words, shouldn’t we feel guilty listening to Wagner? Isn't Wagner kind of a prohibited pleasure? The embarrassed participants with the honorable exception of one, I forgot his name, he is a well-known German Wagnerian theoretician who is absolutely anti-Wagner. His position is one should bomb Bayreuth and one should totally prohibit performances of Wagner. They replied with this confused version: no no we didn't quite mean that, Wagner nonetheless wrote wonderful music, you just have to be aware of and so on and so on. A totally unconvincing compromise, even worse than the standard aestheticist answer. Wagner as a private person had his defects but he wrote music of incomparable beauty so in his art there is no trace of antisemitism. This is the I think way too simplified Barenboim position. At this very conference Barenboim gave a talk, Daniel Barenboim, where again his line was: private deviation, absolutely no traces of it in Wagner's music. So you will ask me how do I want to pull my trick, like rehabilitate Wagner, but is it that then my good friend, I mean it ironically, Adam Kirsch in was right against me that I am antisemitic or what? No, here is my formula. First, the first thing to do is to reject the historicist readings which try to bring out the contextual true meaning of various Wagnerian characters and topics. For example, you learn and of course you can find all these cultural associations that the key figure of the last opera of the Ring, Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of Gods, Hagen, that Hagen because he is pale kind of a passive is really a masturbating Jew. That the wound of the King Amfortas, you know the wounded Fisher King in Parsifal, is really syphilis and so on and so on. So the argument is that Wagner was mobilizing historical codes known to everyone in his own time. For example, when a person stumbles in his operas, sings in cracking high tones like Beckmesser in Meistersinger or makes nervous gesture, the idea is everybody knew this was the portrait of a Jew. However, I don't mean this in any idealist way of eternal art, but I claim is this the right logic in the sense of I dispute the worth, the relevance of this kind of historicist contextualization. I am here very traditional, even Marxist. You know when Marx says apropos Odyssey, Iliad and so on that the true problem is not to see the culture out of which they grew but why they are eternal, why they charm even us today. I think the definition of great art is that it can be reinvented at every epoch again. This is why for example Shakespeare is great. You have Shakespeare the way it was done, you have romantic Shakespeare, you have classicist Shakespeare, you have modern Shakespeare and so on and so on. It survives different contexts. And here Wagner I think won triumphantly. That is to say it all started already with Nietzsche, Wagner's great critic, who was the first I think to perform such a decontextualization which works formidably precisely with Ring. Namely for Nietzsche Wagner was no longer, even when he criticizes Wagner, the poet of Teutonic mythology, of bombastic heroic grandeur, but the miniaturist Wagner, the Wagner of hystericized femininity, of delicate passages of bourgeois family decadence and so on and so on. So again I think that we should look in this sense not in Habermasian sense Wagner as an unfinished project. He proposed a certain basic musical stage and so on frame. And there is more in this frame than in its historicist contextualization. Why? Because I think, now come two of my, how to put it, mottos. First, if you look closely at this contextualization, I’m not saying we should ignore all that, it’s obvious that for example in Meistersinger Wagner in the figure of Beckmesser is making fun in a very brutally racist way of Jewish music. That that allegedly bad Beckmesser song who loses the singing contest at the end of the opera is again a very bad taste even parody of Jewish religious music. No, I’m saying something else. Two things. That probably unknown to himself, whatever you can say about Wagner, he was undoubtedly a disgusting person privately and so on. But what comes against it is not his unique eternal greatness, no I’m more precise here. I think that simply and we don't need any even any very elaborate deconstructionist complex reading and so on, that in a much simpler way even, you can establish that, pathetic as this will sound, that his work is already an undermining, an answer to his own antisemitism. That he is doing not only something different but exactly the opposite in his work. The proof. Just very in a very simplistic way then we will go in details. You have two types of persons in his work who can count as caricatures of Jews. One are these minor slightly ridiculous figures like Mime and Alberich. You know it’s kind of a small guys nervous making too many gestures who are obviously portrait of ridiculous antisemitic portraits of Jews. And in the version out of which I will show you the clips, Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez version, centennial version of Wagner's Ring, there you can even see I mean Chéreau did something which was even a little bit too vulgar for my taste. In the confrontation that you will see between Siegfried and Alberich, he even directly paints Alberich as this kind of a from the Holocaust or ghetto-ghetto impoverished Jew. There is okay, a clear argument Wagner was making bad taste bad taste antisemitic jokes. There’s only one problem here. Without any doubt, it’s clear from Wagner's letters, reactions, these caricatures of Jews are always self-caricatures of Wagner himself. He was like that, a small nervous guy jumping around and so on and so on. Even more precisely in the scene that I will show it to you later of Siegfried confronting Alberich, the way the scene is done, the words, the words are practically the words of a German skinhead racist attacking some I don't know some Turkish Gastarbeiter or foreigner. It’s like you are getting on my nerves disappear I would like to squash you and so on and so on. Now the but and I’m quite shocked how people do not notice the other part of the argument. That there is a central Jewish figure in Wagner. But my god, it’s the hero. It’s the main character. It’s the Wanderer. It’s the the central you in if you look at the zero level Wagnerian figure, it’s an undead guy because of some terrible past crime he is condemned not to die. That’s the typical Wagnerian position. That he is looking for a woman usually to be ready to sacrifice herself so that together they can die. This undead, you have this like Kafka, the Cacciatore Dr. this strange wound which doesn't cause you to die but prevents you to die. Incidentally this is why I think Wagner has was the first to formulate much more than Schopenhauer what Freud meant already before Freud what Freud meant by death drive. Death drive is not what is usually attributed to Wagner, this boring stupid Schopenhauerian notion: oh what a hell and pain life is let’s just disappear into nothingness. No, death drive is eternity. Death drive is that ongoing suffering which prevents you to die. The big Wagnerian problem is how to finally be able to die. To escape this undeadness. And as it is totally clear from the first figure, Fliegende Holländer, the Flying Dutchman, whom Wagner himself called Ahasver des Ozeans. That is to say the figure of the wandering Jew. To up to the end, okay at the very end it’s the king himself Amfortas who is the Jewish figure. Not the enemy. The enemy Klingsor, the bad magician, is sorry this will sound today even more politically incorrect but it’s clearly an Arab figure if you want to locate it. In in Ring, Wotan, Odin, the father of gods, you know after everything goes wrong he just wants to die and turns into Wanderer, literally called Wanderer. In Siegfried Wotan is no longer called Wotan but Wanderer. Again a clear figure of wandering Jew. So if you just take into account this kind of stuff you see again that you get a totally different disposition. Next thing we should do, it’s absolutely crucial, here one should be critical even to Adorno. Is how to put it, it especially important with Wagner, one should read Wagner the same way as one should read Hegel I claim. Not to do what often philosophers do, take a couple of so-called leading thoughts, you know Hegel subject mediates all objectivity, absolute idealism and so on and then attack at this line. They should be both Wagner and Hegel should be read in detail. Wagner should be listened in detail. And if you really listen what he does in his operas, you will discover that he simply doesn’t follow his program. All that stuff of Gesamtkunstwerk and so on, organic dissolution and so on. I will try to improvise a little bit about it later how this works even at the most elementary level. If people usually take Tristan, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, as two lovers disappearing into the night finally finding ultimate happiness in annihilation. But my god look at the opera. That’s exactly what doesn’t happen in Tristan. What happens is that the encounter is missed again and again. Tristan is a kind of comic reworking where one tries to die it doesn’t when one dies another one dies and so on. You know precisely what was the big scene of the 19th century this like in Norma they sing, Bellini’s Norma, Moriam insieme, let's die together ecstatically. This precisely doesn't doesn't happen in Wagner. So here is my very evil reading of Adorno. When Adorno tries to dismiss Wagner as the beginning of fetishization which like Wagner the first step towards Hollywood almost. The idea that Wagner’s leitmotifs are the points of this aha simplistic recognition which it’s the first step towards the disintegration of this ideal organic unity of music which you find in mature Beethoven. Wagner is the beginning of commercialization and so on and so on. I claim that Adorno that this attack on Wagner by Adorno, this aspect, Adorno's sorry Wagner's fetishism of leitmotifs where you have again this the beginning of Hollywood fetishism the beauty or the imposing power of leitmotifs blinds us for the for the complex structural network of a work and first step towards fetishizing elements. I think that it must have been, I spoke with some followers of Adorno who have the same suspicion, that Adorno was maybe unknowingly to himself basically criticizing himself. It’s exactly Adorno I claim who is doing this. Why? If you read Adorno you can see how although he wants if you read his I think they are basically failures it doesn’t work. The ideal Adorno are short texts like Noten zur Literatur and so on. But when he wants to do a bigger systematic work like Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, he is there too Wagnerian in this caricatural sense. It’s like an unending melody motifs float. But then Adorno had a problem, he even was aware of it from some diaries, he couldn’t resist the temptation of doing some pseudo-deep paradox. He was so fascinated by some provocative thought like you know for example like in Dialectic of Enlightenment where he says Hollywood realizes Kant's theory of knowledge and so on. This paradox which functioned I claim precisely as what he what he attacks Wagner for, this blinding or or psychoanalysis is most true is most true at its when it is excessive and so on within its exaggerations and so on and so on. I think that this was Adorno's tension. What he wanted to do was this kind of organic paratactic flow but effectively he was regressing into this kind of a fetishism of of course not leitmotifs but let’s say this kind of a provocative proverbs insights which can then be quoted and so on and so on. So again it’s absolutely crucial to give Wagner a chance I claim and to look at what he really is doing. And again we discover here some incredible things. For example let me return just briefly to this figure, it’s crucial for political reading of Wagner. I think the authentic greatness of Wagner's Ring is that what happens of course we will not have time to go into that what happens in in Twilight of Gods in I think the crucial figure there is the figure of Hagen which plays a central role already in the Nibelungen myth. Hagen as this evil plotting character who kills Siegfried the hero. The way Wagner stages and this is nicely emphasized in Chéreau-Boulez staging the way Wagner presents Hagen is not any kind of masturbating Jew or whatever but a proto-fascist populist leader. Wagner saw it already at that point. You have the weak king Gunther and the populist it’s a wonderful scene we don't have time to see for example half an hour into act two this call to men of by Hagen gathering the crowd the mob. Extreme brutality. Wagner saw it. Wagner was the first I think to discern the contours of a new of a new post-traditional post-traditional right-wing authoritarianism. So how then, let’s go on, how then to read Wagner? First I would like to start with another problem. Today, and I like this if it’s done properly, today often in the operas we have numerous attempts to stage then classical operas not only by transposing them into a different setting like I don't know Così fan tutte in today's era Mozart’s Così fan tutte but also to change some basic facts about the story. And I think that such interventions often don’t work but they often do work. I think that maybe often even they are the clue to Wagner. Sometimes you have to change the explicit story a little bit in order to get at what Wagner was aiming at without being aware. I quote this a couple of times in my books my ultra example is of course Tristan, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's version where probably you know what happens the story you know. What happens here is that in Act III it’s not that you know Tristan mortally wounded waited for Isolde, Isolde comes then they die. But it’s staged so that it appears that as if Tristan dies alone. The Isolde who comes is just Tristan's Tristan's the dying the the hallucination of the dying Tristan. And I think it works perfectly because if you listen really closely to what is maybe Wagner's greatest act the act three of Tristan you can see how this famous Liebestod, death ecstatic death of Isolde the last five minutes song is really just a culmination of of Tristan’s long minutes almost dying. It is as if the problem of Tristan is that he is waiting for Isolde to come not in order to to live but in order to be able to die. This is why he cannot die. But then the only way since she doesn’t come and I think this is a wonderful rewriting of the myth that simply Isolde for Isolde this was just a brief affair she stayed with her husband no and so Tristan had to die alone. So such a change I think has an effect of revelation. So again as I already hinted at it’s crucial with Wagner to another sorry another mistake to be avoided by Wagner is to ignore the story what goes on on the stage. Wagner himself as it was often the case was the first idiot here. It’s in a well-known anecdote when a friend a lady friend of him was watching The Flying Dutchman at Bayreuth Wagner approached her from the back and put hands over her eyes and said: forget about the stage just go into the spirit of the music listen to the music. This I claim is exactly what you should not do. I claim that that here Wagner was already pretty modern and anti-romantic basically. Because in Romanticism the music is the truth as it were. You know like characters do whatever they do but music knows more. In this sense I claim even Mozart with his irony is more romantic although Romanticism only begins a little bit with Mozart, more romantic than Wagner. Because in because in Mozart music is the truth. You have this I don't know just take Così fan tutte where you know the two couples the men are are seducing women it’s all a mockery a joke. But in music they show that love is the truth the deeper one. There is people you learn more than what was on in music. With Wagner I think it’s the opposite. We shouldn’t, the usual idea of Wagner is this how you call it Schopenhauerian idea. What happens in reality representation speech is just Vorstellung, again as Schopenhauer would have put it, representation. But the true rhythm of life the true life substance is music this ecstatic identification with music. Although Wagner himself sometimes took it like this. But I think this is not a correct reading. I think that precisely when you relate music to what goes on in the scene, you can see how the structure is as a rule in Wagner a much more modern in modern sense ironic one. It is that music is basically staged as a as the fantasy illusion which goes on insists and covers up the misery of what goes on. So for example in in Tristan it would have been much more productive I think to read Tristan as a kind of compromise petty bourgeois small love affair and the music is the myth you know like this is the this was already Nietzsche was right here, Nietzsche's accusation against Wagner. That Wagner thought he is talking about heroes but you know this famous phrase of Nietzsche of how if you look closely behind Wagnerian heroines Brünnhilde and so on you discover Madame Bovary and these hysterical small bourgeois wives. At the artistic level I think Wagner knew it. So basically you should read music in all this pathetic immersion eternal death let’s disappear in in the void of primordial abyss or whatever, you should read this as a melodramatic comment belied by belied by what goes on. What goes on is often a comedy. The model the the model of comedy in opera is for example if you know it Verdi's Trovatore. I mean it’s one of the most I love how much total bullshit you can sell as a libretto of the opera. You know what's the basic plot of Trovatore? That an old Gypsy woman wanted to revenge herself on some rich guy and wanted to throw this guy’s son into fire but she threw the wrong guy into the fire no and so on. And then you and then Il Trovatore you have this totally ridiculous ending where in the last two minutes like four five things happen this person kills another person another kills... no. And but but isn't the very ending of Wagner's Tristan almost the same? One ship comes they fight another again it’s for a brief moment you are back into ridicule. And I think again that this this is how we should treat Wagner. The music is the emotional phantasmatic envelope whose function is to render palpable palpable the bitter pill the bitter pill delivered by words and action. Women getting killed or abandoned and so on and so on. Okay now nonetheless let me do, I'm sorry it will be if it will be a little bit boring but we have to go through this. I will try to make my point with the finale of Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of Gods. It’s the most bombastic, the biggest of them all. The finale where after after Siegfried's death Brünnhilde his true love in this big it’s a Wagnerian death. You must be aware it’s even pretty short for a Wagnerian death. It’s just a minutes, you know the true Wagnerian death is minutes. It’s Tristan and so on. So as it is well known Wagner oscillated between different text works of the finale. Even in a way the final version of the opera has two endings basically. Siegfried’s death is already an ending and then Brünnhilde’s self-immolation. So as we know finding an appropriate conclusion for the Ring caused Wagner immense difficulty. His ideas for the end changed several times as his political and philosophical views evolved. The story of these changes is well known. In the first written project The Nibelung Myth as Sketch for a Drama from Siegfried and Brünnhilde rise above Siegfried’s funeral pyre to Valhalla to cleanse Wotan, father of gods, of his crime and to redeem the gods. There is here no suggestion that gods are to be destroyed or whatever, it’s simply a kind of a redemption of them all. In a new version then written a year later under the name Siegfried's Death, Brünnhilde’s final speech also stresses the cleansing effect of the hero's Siegfried's death. Quote: Here then you mighty gods, your guilt is abolished. The hero takes it upon himself. The Nibelungs’ slavery is at an end and Alberich, the chief of Nibelungs, these exploitative dwarfs, shall again be free. The ring I give to you wise sisters of the watery deeps, melt it down and keep it free from harm. End of quote. So here is still some kind of general reconciliation. Then in Wagner developed the story backwards adding a long prequel consisting of the events staged in Rheingold and Valkyrie and expanding the role of Wotan, the father of gods, who is now the central figure. In the new ending gods achieve redemption but this time they have to die. Only in their death. Brünnhilde’s final speech now reads, quote: Fade away in bliss before the deed of man. The hero you created. I proclaim to you freedom from fear through blessed redemption and in death. End of quote. Next version written a year later shows the traces of Wagner's passionate debates with Bakunin as well as of his study of Ludwig Feuerbach. In it the Bakuninian notion of Russian revolutionary anarchist of the purifying role of radical destruction is combined with two basic insights of Feuerbach. Gods are the construction of human minds and sexual love of a couple has primacy over all other human endeavors. In this Feuerbachian ending Brünnhilde proclaims the destruction of gods and their replacement by a human society ruled by love. Quote: No not gods or gold nor glittering... no not goods or gold nor glittering gods. Not house nor hall. Not splendid display. Not broken bonds of treacherous treaties nor arrogant customs adamant law. Blissful in gladness and sorrow, love alone shall endure. End of quote. In Wagner again rewrote the ending under the influence of his discovery of Schopenhauer and of his reading of Buddhist texts. This Schopenhauerian ending which focuses on resignation at the illusory nature of human existence and on self-overcoming through the negation of the will found its most explicit expression in the following new lines of Brünnhilde, quote: Were I no more to fare to Valhalla's fortress, do you know whither I fare? I depart from the home of desire, I flee forever the home of delusion. The open gates of eternal becoming I close behind me now. It’s really kind of a vulgarized Dalai Lama. To the holiest chosen land, free from desire and delusion, the goal of the world's migration, redeemed from incarnation the enlightened woman now goes. The blessed end of all things eternal, do you know how I attained it? Grieving love's profoundest suffering opened my eyes for me. I saw the world end. End of quote. Then after much deliberation Wagner decided not to set these words to music although they appear in some published version of the libretto. Why? As a rule this omission is interpreted not as a sign of Wagner's abandoning Schopenhauer but as a proof of his artistic sensibility. The idea is by the end of his composing the Ring in Wagner realized that the music not words should deliver the final message. So the idea is again he didn't want to be too explicit like why redouble the message when it’s already you know as they put it in one of the lowest moments of Marxist aesthetics Friedrich Engels that only the vulgar artists say explicitly the message. With the truly great art the message should be embedded in the situation itself. Incidentally I'm totally opposed to it. Look at Brecht, he was the greatest dramatist of the 20th century and if anything the explicit message is like bombarded repeatedly endlessly again and again. But I claim this is not the case. This is not what happens. My thesis will be that the way it is composed effectively the ending of Wagner's Ring you get another message. And here I want to rely on a wonderful book that I discovered quite by chance published recently. Two young British guys pupils of Bernard Williams, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, *Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring*. They elaborated this point, I follow them here. So let me recapitulate the problem. As to its ideological content the ending of the Twilight of Gods oscillates between three main positions designated by the names of Feuerbach, Bakunin and Schopenhauer. The reign of the ending this catastrophe should be the reign of human love. It’s a catastrophe for gods. Revolutionary destruction of the old world or Schopenhauer fake Buddhism resignation withdrawal from illusory reality. Because of these oscillations then it is not clear how are we to conceive the crowd of men and women who, as it says in the libretto, in deepest emotion witness the final destruction of the world in fire and water. Who are they? Do they really embody a new liberated society? Because as you will see at the very end of the Ring where all disappears people, ordinary people, humans remain and just stare. Who are they? The change from early revolutionary to mature Schopenhauerian Wagner is usually conceived as the shift from the humanist belief into the possibility of revolutionary change. That is to say from the belief that our reality is miserable due to contingent historical reasons to the more profound insight into how reality as such is miserable so the only redemption resides in withdrawing from reality into the abyss of the night of the world. But I claim again this doesn't happen in Ring effectively. Such a reading doesn't cover what effectively happens. So now this will be don't be afraid the longest clip. I will play you the last five minutes. And if you are allergic to Wagner it will be torture. The last five minutes of the Twilight where you have Brünnhilde doing all this Teutonic stuff and so on. Okay to evoke a little bit more sympathy just beware that Brünnhilde is sung by Gwyneth Jones who is from Wales so we are in your country here nonetheless. So how how is this? Be especially be attentive to the orchestral music which of which the last two minutes are composed. It’s such a mixture of motifs that the usual reading is a very cynical one. Even Adorno subscribes to it. It’s that Wagner simply didn't know what to do, it got all confused in him. Is it Feuerbach, is it Schopenhauer, is it Buddhism am I still... so that what he did, he escaped into the beauty of music. His idea was what does this mean? Let’s just in a purely formal way produce an effect of depth. Let’s just throw all the big motifs there and I don't know what it is but it will sound very deep if I do this no? So it is something like if you know a little bit the music of the above-mentioned Mussolini follower, you know Joseph Kerman in his *Music Opera and Drama*, he cannot stand Puccini, has a wonderful reading of the very ending of Tosca. You know the biggest hit from Tosca is this E lucevan le stelle Cavaradossi area and at the very end after she jumps down you hear with all bombastic tutti of the orchestra this melody again. And Kerman’s description is that again he didn't know what to do so he told himself let’s simply use again the most effective melody to make it an effective ending. So the idea is Wagner did the same. But not quite I claim. So now please suffer for and I hope ah perfect, suffer for five minutes and we will see. [Silence for approximately minutes as requested] That’s done on purpose by Chéreau-Boulez the silence goes for some seconds I think with the working class the only survivors just staring into into okay. So again in the orchestral part which concludes this which ends the Twilight we have again the all-encompassing motif, we will see precisely where we hear it before, of this so-called redemption through love. A motif which incidentally is heard only once at the end of the second opera of the Ring, Valkyrie. And then it is as if this moment of redemption true love encompasses provides the background for two three other motifs: Rhinedaughters which means innocent playfulness of natural world, the Valhalla fortress of gods motif, a motif which is supposed to render the dignified majesty of the rule of law, and the motif of Siegfried the free hero. The big question is what kind of love is asserted at the end by Brünnhilde. Again my thesis is it’s not sexual love, it’s not the love of a couple. In order to answer this question I think one should locate this finale into the totality of Wagner's Ring which should be read, I will do this on purpose in a very old-fashioned way, as a as a series of what we may call existential projects. And I think again I’m not kidding here, as communists we should ask this fundamental question, very stupid one: what makes life worth living? What makes life meaningful? First the first and the opera begins with it, the first choice is that of Rhinedaughters. This would be the path of some naive Westernized Taoism or what. Against corrupted civilization enjoy the playfulness of natural life. Then we have Wotan’s choice which is to put it in Kierkegaard's terms the leap from the aesthetic to the ethical. The rule of law imposed on innocent nature. From Valhalla Wotan wants to rule the world bringing peace and justice to it. The attempt fails. This was clear to Wagner because of the compromises Wotan has to commit. These compromises are more complex than it may appear. They concern not only the well-known topic of illegitimate violence that grounds the rule of law, not only the notion of the rule of law disturbing the innocence of the spontaneous natural life. Furthermore, a crucial part of Wotan’s tragedy is that he has abandoned love in the service of law. Another part is that along the way to the end of second opera Valkyrie, he relinquishes everything that is most precious to him. After sacrificing everything for the one thing that really matters to him, Wotan discovers that he thereby lost precisely this one thing. This most precious thing is embodied in Brünnhilde, Wotan’s preferred daughter. And she is not only political but also ethical breakdown is rendered in his long monologue in front of Brünnhilde in the second act of Valkyrie, the second opera. In the Ring we should also remember the source of evil is not Alberich, this bad guy who at the beginning of the Ring in Rheingold steals the gold from Rhinedaughters. No, the source of evil is not Alberich’s renouncing love. You know how Rheingold begins? Alberich the poor ugly proto-Jewish figure wants to play erotically with three Rhinedaughters who are it’s very clearly done with Wagner he was aware of this that we should look at Alberich with sympathy. He just wanted to play with girls and the girls are very cruel, mock him. And then gold is disclosed. And then the girls tell he asks the girls what is this the gold, he asks them how can I get it. The girls say only if you renounce love. He renounces love. But it’s crucial to learn that Wotan did the same. Succumbing to the lure of power, he gave preference to power over love. This is all the previous story why he lost one eye cutting off the ash tree, the wisdom and so also denaturalizing the world. So we have this simple opposition. On the one hand natural balanced order, natural innocence, the rule of law. The rule of law for Wagner is of course always stained with a primordial crime. He knew what this as Wotan’s problem is to use Benjamin mythic violence. He was aware that you are so much compromised so that the rule of law necessarily ends in crime and it is because of this that Wotan ends up as Wanderer. As this wandering Jew figure. So when things go wrong let’s not get into how Wotan breaks down, he just wants to die. And then as a last act he gets an idea of and you know when Wagner so okay we should be very well aware of what Wagner was striving with when he tried to find an ending to the Twilight of God. The point is precisely is there a way out of this deadlock? On the one hand you have practically all the existential positions here. You have Alberich which would be capitalist profiteering, money and so on. You have Wotan, the rule of law, power. You have natural innocence, innocent pre-pre-cultural, pre-industrial whatever way of life. All this it was clear to Wagner that that a neither industrial capitalism nor any kind of elevated dignified rule of law it doesn’t work. Is there a way out of this? It was also clear to him that we cannot return to any kind of natural innocence. And then now comes the beauty. The problem of Wotan, his idea is to give birth to a hero, to somehow generate a hero who will be innocent. In a way Wotan is dreaming about an innocent violence who from outside the law will be able to kill off the gods to as it were clear the plate and allow for a new beginning. But this is not again what happened. This is precisely if you want the dream of Benjaminian divine violence. Siegfried is for me Wagner's idea of divine violence. In the sense of innocent violence which ends with this obscenity of the of the violence which sustains the law and so on and so on. So what the result of this then is the birth of Sigmund, who is Wotan’s own son but Wotan raises him not as his father he sets him free. The idea is Sigmund should be the new the new hero who will bring redemption to the world through his innocence outside of civilized rule of law. And here we get the only here we then get the erotic option as another existential project. Sigmund, Sieglinde. the they are brother and sister, incestuous love which is consummated and this is the only true passionate affair in the opera. The love of Siegfried and Brünnhilde is a ridiculous mismatch, it’s clear. What happens here is now this is the first authentic ending. I claim Wagner's answer is there are two existential possibilities and I think they are quite I mean I agree with Wagner here to be very vulgar. One is passionate love couple but Wagner sees a problem, this is self-destructive. It destroys itself. But this is this here you see Wagner at his most anti-totalitarian even anti-fascist and so on. Ernst Bloch was right to remark apropos of the scene you will see now that if there were to be more people like Sigmund here then German history would have turned otherwise. What happened here is that Wotan arranges so that Sigmund loses a fight and we the Sigmund the hero father of Siegfried will die. Okay I will not go into all the complications, what is crucial here is this beautiful scene where Brünnhilde comes to Sigmund and tells him you will die. I came here to prepare you for Valhalla. Valhalla the city of gods where you after your death if you die as a hero you can lead a happy life flirting with all the the Valkyrie there and so on and so on. And then it’s this it’s a beautiful love scene where Sigmund is there with his beloved who is just laying down totally exhausted asleep Sieglinde and then Sigmund says no if I cannot take that woman with me I will not go to Valhalla. I prefer to remain mortal. This beautiful choice of a miserable mortal being is to me more than eternal joy among the gods. And then you have the comment of the shattered Brünnhilde. So little do you value everlasting bliss. Is she, this woman, this poor woman who tired and sorrowful lies limp in your leg is she everything to you? Do you think nothing less glorious? and so on and so on. Let’s again praise to God that things will work now. First you will see this is another clip, very short one. You will see here how in Valkyrie, that’s another one, this is where the first time I hope we will recognize it that redemption motif appears. It’s very beautiful just sudden outburst by by Sieglinde, the mother of Siegfried. And then we will go to that scene. [Audio of Sieglinde's redemption motif from Die Walküre plays] Okay this at least wasn't a mistake. You had here and this comes now I hope it will... yes [Audio of Brünnhilde's appearance to Siegmund plays]. She is inviting him, Sigmund to Valhalla she would say no he will say no. [Silence as the scene continues] Okay. Now we go now now as a okay. He dies, what next happens is that the of out of this incestuous union you have the son the big hero Siegfried. And now I come to my central point. The only authentic love link was this one between Sieglinde, Sigmund but again it’s self-destructive. It cannot last. And what happens with the official love affair of the opera? Brünnhilde, Siegfried. It’s obviously a total mismatch. I cannot even see how anyone who simply looks at the opera can get the idea that this is the true big love. First it’s Siegfried. Wagner does something I think wonderful which the beauty is that it goes totally against the German ideology which portrays Siegfried as this powerful Nietzschean hero and so on. Wagner portrays Siegfried as a total jerk, idiot, duped by everyone, tricked, betrayed and so on, brutal, just again I hope this will work if I do ah no. Now I learned how to okay. [Audio of the confrontation between Siegfried and Alberich plays] Yes. I’m sorry you don't get, I will simply talk in between so that we lost don't lose time, the German words. This is Siegfried and obviously the Jewish figure Alberich, no sorry it’s not Alberich it’s Alberich’s brothers but again notice the almost concentration camp features and Siegfried's brutality. Basically Siegfried’s words are here: When I watch you standing, shuffling and trembling, stupid squinting and blinking, I long to seize you by your nodding neck and make an end of your obscene blinking and so on and so on. It’s really kind of a you know like British National Party beating up I don't know a Pakistani boy or whatever. And again all this stuff so that again I cannot emphasize enough of how Wagner was aware of how this brutality... here I think that Siegfried is also faced Siegfried is a kind of a proto-figure of Nazi thug of this you know this right-wing dream of pure brutality of revolutionary power which will clean clean the plate and so on and so on. This doesn't work. So what happens then effectively at the end, what kind of love do we get after all this? The key I claim is provided by so-called renunciation motif. And here one should really it was Claude Lévi-Strauss who got this point the first. One should read Wagner in a structural way in the sense that one brings together one should read in parallel what happens when the same motif is repeated. This the so-called motif of renunciation is repeated in the opera two two times. Let’s first get it here. [Audio from Das Rheingold, renunciation motif plays] Yes. This is Rheingold, three Rhinedaughters. Now you will see the motif of renunciation. [Renunciation motif plays again] The words here were Nur wer der Minne Macht versagt. Only the one who renounces the power of love can get the gold and so on. Now comes now this is for Claude Lévi-Strauss the proof that Wagner was a structuralist. Because here you you will see [Audio from Die Walküre finale plays] yeah. This is the finale of Valkyrie where you will see the same motif but again watch for the words. [Final notes of Die Walküre play] Okay. You here the words were heiligste minne höchste not, holiest love's highest need. And this is I think the formula. The formula is to to read the two together. You know I repeat it. First the motif was sung with the words only the one who renounces the power of love, the second was holiest love highest need. My solution is love's highest need is to renounce its own power. This is what Lacan calls symbolic castration. If one is to remain faithful to one's love one should not elevate it into the direct focus of one's life, one should renounce its centrality. Love should not be posited as a direct goal. Love is an out love is an a byproduct something of an undeserved grace. The point is not that there are more important things than love. An authentic love encounter remains a kind of absolute point of reference of one's life, to put it in traditional terms what makes one's life meaningful. The hard lesson learned by Brünnhilde is that precisely as such love should not be a direct goal of one's life. True love is modest, like my old example the love of a couple in Marguerite Duras novels. While the two lovers hold hands they do not look into each other's eyes. They look together outwards into some third point their common cause. Perhaps I claim there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it. They do not love each other less than the amorous couple bent on suspending all their terrestrial link in order to burn out in unconditional passion. If anything they love each other more. And I think the finale of the Twilight is thus Wagner's critical rejection of the three options staged in Wagner's three great other non-Ring operas. I think Wagner was struggling all the time with this problem again what kind of love makes life meaningful. The Tristan solution it’s really as if we get the three Kierkegaard versions in the three operas: Tristan, Meistersinger, Parsifal. You know what happens in Tristan. Lovers burn out die disappear in passion. That is the aesthetic option love. In Meistersinger we get the daily reality of marriage. True love the incestuous one must be renounced, you must find happiness in ordinary hard work daily love and so on and so on. Parsifal is a psychotic solution, you drop the woman. The woman disappears. You simply reject reject love in kind of a in a kind of a sacred gesture. And I think that Wagner was somehow aware that none of these three versions really work. They do not cover the entire field. The choice is not either kind of a ascetic self-enclosed male brotherhood or even female brotherhood sisterhood a close
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incestuous circle neither this nor fanatical couples self-destruction but also not ordinary bourgeois life. What what Wagner got was this again this basic idea that I think it’s basically a Christian Appolinian idea that that in order for personal love to be operative it has to be somehow transformed or supplemented by what Christianity would
incestuous circle neither this nor fanatical couples self-destruction but also not ordinary bourgeois life. What what Wagner got was this again this basic idea that I think it’s basically a Christian Appolinian idea that that in order for personal love to be operative it has to be somehow transformed or supplemented by what Christianity would
Slavoj Žižek
have called Agape and what following Terry Eagleton I’m tempted to call political love, love of a collective. I think that this is what happens basically here that we get literally you remember in the last scene that you have seen just before silence we get the collective. That love is that love is that love is needed more than anything. So I think that just a concluding thought now, I think that usually Wagner's passage from Ring to Parsifal is read the way Nietzsche read it. Ring that is to say Twilight of Gods all this is supposed to be still pagan pre-Christian ethics while in Parsifal we find a Christian Wagner. I think it’s exactly the opposite. That if anything it is in the Twilight of God that Wagner was close to Christianity, not of course to any Christianity as an institution but to this basic idea of collective love. While exactly in what happens in Parsifal is a return to paganism. That Parsifal is paradoxically an opera which does something extremely obscene and again Wagner was aware of it. What happens in Parsifal is that is that Christianity is reinscribed backwards into some kind of a pagan pagan into a kind of a pagan ritual. So just to conclude to amuse you if you know the story of Parsifal, I think that in the same way that things can be done with
have called Agape and what following Terry Eagleton I’m tempted to call political love, love of a collective. I think that this is what happens basically here that we get literally you remember in the last scene that you have seen just before silence we get the collective. That love is that love is that love is needed more than anything. So I think that just a concluding thought now, I think that usually Wagner's passage from Ring to Parsifal is read the way Nietzsche read it. Ring that is to say Twilight of Gods all this is supposed to be still pagan pre-Christian ethics while in Parsifal we find a Christian Wagner. I think it’s exactly the opposite. That if anything it is in the Twilight of God that Wagner was close to Christianity, not of course to any Christianity as an institution but to this basic idea of collective love. While exactly in what happens in Parsifal is a return to paganism. That Parsifal is paradoxically an opera which does something extremely obscene and again Wagner was aware of it. What happens in Parsifal is that is that Christianity is reinscribed backwards into some kind of a pagan pagan into a kind of a pagan ritual. So just to conclude to amuse you if you know the story of Parsifal, I think that in the same way that things can be done with
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Tristan to make it more effective
Tristan to make it more effective
Slavoj Žižek
in the sense of Isolde doesn't come in the end Tristan dies alone. And again I think there is a truth in it because if you look at all Wagner's great love dialogues, they are basically and Wagner was aware of it a narcissistic fake in the sense of you don't really care about your partner you just want to get immersed into into your dream which is why in Wagnerian love affairs you never even look at your partner. Just somebody comes and you say oh for thousands of years I was waiting for you and so on and so on. The partner is just you know somebody who triggers it. Like you remember for example in the first Wagnerian true opera The Flying Dutchman. The moment the Dutchman comes even before Senta sees him she sees him she says: oh here you are I know you are here I was waiting for you. And the same the same way the other way around. It’s not it’s not an encounter with it’s not at all an encounter with otherness. So again this is why I think that effectively Tristan dies alone. It’s just his hallucination Isolde dying together with him. So you know what happens in Parsifal? Parsifal a young fool then you have the kingdom the great community the king is dying Amfortas Parsifal goes around to find solution confronts enters the Klingsor's basically whorehouse brothel where he rejects the advances of Kundry the beautiful sorceress whatever and then simply nothing happens basically. He rejects the woman thereby he is safe he returns to the king and to the Grail kingdom and takes over and becomes a new ruler. But I think that I think
in the sense of Isolde doesn't come in the end Tristan dies alone. And again I think there is a truth in it because if you look at all Wagner's great love dialogues, they are basically and Wagner was aware of it a narcissistic fake in the sense of you don't really care about your partner you just want to get immersed into into your dream which is why in Wagnerian love affairs you never even look at your partner. Just somebody comes and you say oh for thousands of years I was waiting for you and so on and so on. The partner is just you know somebody who triggers it. Like you remember for example in the first Wagnerian true opera The Flying Dutchman. The moment the Dutchman comes even before Senta sees him she sees him she says: oh here you are I know you are here I was waiting for you. And the same the same way the other way around. It’s not it’s not an encounter with it’s not at all an encounter with otherness. So again this is why I think that effectively Tristan dies alone. It’s just his hallucination Isolde dying together with him. So you know what happens in Parsifal? Parsifal a young fool then you have the kingdom the great community the king is dying Amfortas Parsifal goes around to find solution confronts enters the Klingsor's basically whorehouse brothel where he rejects the advances of Kundry the beautiful sorceress whatever and then simply nothing happens basically. He rejects the woman thereby he is safe he returns to the king and to the Grail kingdom and takes over and becomes a new ruler. But I think that I think
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that something different
that something different
Slavoj Žižek
should be maybe should be done here. I think that maybe we need
should be maybe should be done here. I think that maybe we need
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today
today
Slavoj Žižek
a New Age Parsifal where what happens is that in the act two Kundry the fatal woman does succeed in seducing Parsifal then they screw like crazy then in act three Parsifal comes to the Grail community Monsalvat together with Kundry and says enough of male chauvinism we will rule as yin yang in balance as a love couple and so on and so on this kind of this this would be the truth of Parsifal of Parsifal I claim. And also I think it would be wonderful to do what I tried to do with Antigone also with with Wagner's operas. For example my idea would be to rewrite Tristan as a version of Postman Always Rings Twice. Tristan and Isolde decide that the only way for their love to survive is obviously to kill the king Isolde's husband. So in act three they the two of them stage all the spectacle with Tristan wounded with Isolde sailing after him to trap the King Marke following them. When they have him alone there they kill him announce to Marke's people that a tragic accident happened and then Tristan takes over Tristan takes over the new the new king and so on and so on. I think that that things like this help a lot to bring things to where they should be. So again just to conclude now, my crucial point is that there is a Christ-like dimension in Brünnhilde’s death. But only in the precise sense that Christ's death marks the birth of the Holy Spirit the community of believers linked by Agape. No wonder one of Brünnhilde’s last words are Ruhe ruhe du gott, die in peace God. Her acts fulfills Wotan’s wish to freely assume his inevitable death. What remains after the Twilight is the human crowd silently observing the cataclysmic event. A crowd which in this staging is left staring into the spectators when the music ends. Everything now rests on them without any guarantee in God, fate or any other figure of the big Other. It is up to them to act like the Holy Spirit it is up to them to it is up to them to it is up to them to practice Agape. Here is a quote from Chéreau how in his notes towards his staging of Ring how he describes the end of the Ring: "The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world but the orchestra is unclear and there are several ways of interpreting the message. Doesn’t one hear it shouldn’t one hear it with mistrust and anxiety? A mistrust which would match the boundless hope which this humanity nurses and which has always been at stake silently and invisibly in the atrocious battles which have torn human beings apart throughout the Ring. The gods have lived, the values of their world must be reconstructed and reinvented. Men are there as if on the edge of a cliff. They listen tensely to the oracle which rumbles from the depths of the earth." So I think this is the greatness of this finale for me. It’s not now we know all we need is love and everything is okay. This is love as a call to act. This is the moment it ends with in a very inconclusive way the Ring. It’s just an open space for action of the collective. Action grounded the space for which was opened by Brünnhilde’s act. And again I think it’s a very very beautiful effective ending. All the previous options all these heroics of heroics of violent acts rule of rule of law capitalist profiteering they are all dispensed with all that remains is again the collective the collective presented here not in any sense of oh we are the proletarians we know we just have to do what we have to do in totally open full of anxiety constellation it’s up to us. Like you know the story is over but the true path starts here. So I think it’s quite an achievement. And again if we read more of Wagner in this way then you can see it’s not just beautiful music and so on and so on it has a very precise structure and I still think that we live in Wagner's shadow. This is for me still the reason I did this in a very naive confused way I admit today is it’s a very simple thing one wouldn’t expect maybe this from a what I’m supposed to be a kind of a postmodern cynic who tells all the obscene jokes. This here I think I find the best answer you can find about why do we live what’s the meaning of life. It’s simply that it’s nice private love and so but it’s not enough. We need this passage to collective and there is no conflict between the two but also this is why there would be another lesson here. This is why I’m totally opposed to this ridiculous pathetics of of the '68, you know sexuality and politics, like you must do something crazy in sexuality screw together an orgy or whatever, sexual is political. No, I think I think that on the contrary it is only in a utopian but not necessarily utopian a communist collective that it will be possible to really keep apart public activity and love. The model of the couple that I would like to see here is maybe I already mentioned it here now that details are becoming public slowly. There was a love affair between Lenin and Inessa Armand. And you know what wonderful thing was discovered I laughed when I read about it. That in order to to ruin the rumors about this what in Stalinist photo books, you know presenting the big figure of October Revolution and so on, they always consciously selected a photo of Inessa Armand where she is much uglier than she really was. They always like just you know not to give another... but there was and it’s you know there there she died I think in late '21 in some sanatorium in Caucasus out of total exhaustion and there are some photos these are these unpleasant photos of Lenin which nobody wants to I mean of course Stalin didn't want to show them one is that horrible one Lenin just before his death on a wheelchair with a totally mad expression but this is an even more tragic photo. I would like to use it if Verso or whoever will allow me to. They discovered now a photo of Lenin at they brought her to Moscow at Inessa Armand's funeral. She was totally ruined. It was over. It was even more than all those attacks but you know that’s the beauty he didn't make any public spectacle out of it. It’s what decent people did. It was an absolute love. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's official wife, stayed with him but gracefully seeing this is true love withdrew. And incidentally, you know that now this is how this became clear. You know when Nadezhda Krupskaya in the early '30s just before her death made some trouble to Stalin when Stalin made that famous remark "Don't talk too much otherwise we will find another wife for Lenin, you will no longer be Lenin's widow." This wasn't an empty threat. The threat was we will bring out Inessa Armand. Now we will rewrite it a little bit. But you see what I mean? I mean my point here is that for me another aspect of communist society again it is not that you know somehow sexuality and politics will be the same in the sense of the politics will be one big bang one big collective screwing or whatever. No, I think the beauty is precisely to keep this apart. You work for the cause and then again that’s for me true love modest in the shadow. We work for the cause the lady is here none of that I look into your eyes I forget all the world. That’s nightmare, that’s psychosis for me. No, we work for the cause then just briefly our hands touch or whatever and we are aware, you know we work for the cause but the truly it must be it must be a modest byproduct. In this way again you can avoid and so I think again that not only communism for me is not this universal orgy where work is fuck and fuck is work and everything is one big happy orgy. Only in communism love will love will really become what it should be, a separate radical idiosyncrasy of two people out of this. And I think that again Wagner was moving in this beautiful dimension because again the only two authentic moments in Ring are the love of Sigmund, Sieglinde and at the end this moment of self-sacrifice collectivity and so on. I don't know where you are for me still that’s the closest I can come to the meaning of life and so on. I think we may laugh at Wagner and so on but I think he did it. He wasn't as stupid as it may appear. I’m sorry it was a little bit confused I was too personal today tomorrow we go back into old cynicism political jokes and so on all that you expect. Tomorrow it’s just to give you a hint it’s a very respectful dialogue with a guy who is now getting fashionable in United States but he is not a total idiot Dipesh Chakrabarty, no? In a very friendly way I want to engage in very friendly polemics with him because he tries to prove he is basically against even openly okay why not Marx's theory of universality of capital. He plays this game of almost Hegelian with explicit reference to Heidegger that if there is a lesson of late capitalism it is that there is no universal capitalism, in each culture capitalism is embedded integrated in a specific way in this specific context like his case is India and so on and so on. And I will try to again very respectfully counteract counteract counteract this. I think that capitalism has a quite more radical universal dimension.
a New Age Parsifal where what happens is that in the act two Kundry the fatal woman does succeed in seducing Parsifal then they screw like crazy then in act three Parsifal comes to the Grail community Monsalvat together with Kundry and says enough of male chauvinism we will rule as yin yang in balance as a love couple and so on and so on this kind of this this would be the truth of Parsifal of Parsifal I claim. And also I think it would be wonderful to do what I tried to do with Antigone also with with Wagner's operas. For example my idea would be to rewrite Tristan as a version of Postman Always Rings Twice. Tristan and Isolde decide that the only way for their love to survive is obviously to kill the king Isolde's husband. So in act three they the two of them stage all the spectacle with Tristan wounded with Isolde sailing after him to trap the King Marke following them. When they have him alone there they kill him announce to Marke's people that a tragic accident happened and then Tristan takes over Tristan takes over the new the new king and so on and so on. I think that that things like this help a lot to bring things to where they should be. So again just to conclude now, my crucial point is that there is a Christ-like dimension in Brünnhilde’s death. But only in the precise sense that Christ's death marks the birth of the Holy Spirit the community of believers linked by Agape. No wonder one of Brünnhilde’s last words are Ruhe ruhe du gott, die in peace God. Her acts fulfills Wotan’s wish to freely assume his inevitable death. What remains after the Twilight is the human crowd silently observing the cataclysmic event. A crowd which in this staging is left staring into the spectators when the music ends. Everything now rests on them without any guarantee in God, fate or any other figure of the big Other. It is up to them to act like the Holy Spirit it is up to them to it is up to them to it is up to them to practice Agape. Here is a quote from Chéreau how in his notes towards his staging of Ring how he describes the end of the Ring: "The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world but the orchestra is unclear and there are several ways of interpreting the message. Doesn’t one hear it shouldn’t one hear it with mistrust and anxiety? A mistrust which would match the boundless hope which this humanity nurses and which has always been at stake silently and invisibly in the atrocious battles which have torn human beings apart throughout the Ring. The gods have lived, the values of their world must be reconstructed and reinvented. Men are there as if on the edge of a cliff. They listen tensely to the oracle which rumbles from the depths of the earth." So I think this is the greatness of this finale for me. It’s not now we know all we need is love and everything is okay. This is love as a call to act. This is the moment it ends with in a very inconclusive way the Ring. It’s just an open space for action of the collective. Action grounded the space for which was opened by Brünnhilde’s act. And again I think it’s a very very beautiful effective ending. All the previous options all these heroics of heroics of violent acts rule of rule of law capitalist profiteering they are all dispensed with all that remains is again the collective the collective presented here not in any sense of oh we are the proletarians we know we just have to do what we have to do in totally open full of anxiety constellation it’s up to us. Like you know the story is over but the true path starts here. So I think it’s quite an achievement. And again if we read more of Wagner in this way then you can see it’s not just beautiful music and so on and so on it has a very precise structure and I still think that we live in Wagner's shadow. This is for me still the reason I did this in a very naive confused way I admit today is it’s a very simple thing one wouldn’t expect maybe this from a what I’m supposed to be a kind of a postmodern cynic who tells all the obscene jokes. This here I think I find the best answer you can find about why do we live what’s the meaning of life. It’s simply that it’s nice private love and so but it’s not enough. We need this passage to collective and there is no conflict between the two but also this is why there would be another lesson here. This is why I’m totally opposed to this ridiculous pathetics of of the '68, you know sexuality and politics, like you must do something crazy in sexuality screw together an orgy or whatever, sexual is political. No, I think I think that on the contrary it is only in a utopian but not necessarily utopian a communist collective that it will be possible to really keep apart public activity and love. The model of the couple that I would like to see here is maybe I already mentioned it here now that details are becoming public slowly. There was a love affair between Lenin and Inessa Armand. And you know what wonderful thing was discovered I laughed when I read about it. That in order to to ruin the rumors about this what in Stalinist photo books, you know presenting the big figure of October Revolution and so on, they always consciously selected a photo of Inessa Armand where she is much uglier than she really was. They always like just you know not to give another... but there was and it’s you know there there she died I think in late '21 in some sanatorium in Caucasus out of total exhaustion and there are some photos these are these unpleasant photos of Lenin which nobody wants to I mean of course Stalin didn't want to show them one is that horrible one Lenin just before his death on a wheelchair with a totally mad expression but this is an even more tragic photo. I would like to use it if Verso or whoever will allow me to. They discovered now a photo of Lenin at they brought her to Moscow at Inessa Armand's funeral. She was totally ruined. It was over. It was even more than all those attacks but you know that’s the beauty he didn't make any public spectacle out of it. It’s what decent people did. It was an absolute love. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's official wife, stayed with him but gracefully seeing this is true love withdrew. And incidentally, you know that now this is how this became clear. You know when Nadezhda Krupskaya in the early '30s just before her death made some trouble to Stalin when Stalin made that famous remark "Don't talk too much otherwise we will find another wife for Lenin, you will no longer be Lenin's widow." This wasn't an empty threat. The threat was we will bring out Inessa Armand. Now we will rewrite it a little bit. But you see what I mean? I mean my point here is that for me another aspect of communist society again it is not that you know somehow sexuality and politics will be the same in the sense of the politics will be one big bang one big collective screwing or whatever. No, I think the beauty is precisely to keep this apart. You work for the cause and then again that’s for me true love modest in the shadow. We work for the cause the lady is here none of that I look into your eyes I forget all the world. That’s nightmare, that’s psychosis for me. No, we work for the cause then just briefly our hands touch or whatever and we are aware, you know we work for the cause but the truly it must be it must be a modest byproduct. In this way again you can avoid and so I think again that not only communism for me is not this universal orgy where work is fuck and fuck is work and everything is one big happy orgy. Only in communism love will love will really become what it should be, a separate radical idiosyncrasy of two people out of this. And I think that again Wagner was moving in this beautiful dimension because again the only two authentic moments in Ring are the love of Sigmund, Sieglinde and at the end this moment of self-sacrifice collectivity and so on. I don't know where you are for me still that’s the closest I can come to the meaning of life and so on. I think we may laugh at Wagner and so on but I think he did it. He wasn't as stupid as it may appear. I’m sorry it was a little bit confused I was too personal today tomorrow we go back into old cynicism political jokes and so on all that you expect. Tomorrow it’s just to give you a hint it’s a very respectful dialogue with a guy who is now getting fashionable in United States but he is not a total idiot Dipesh Chakrabarty, no? In a very friendly way I want to engage in very friendly polemics with him because he tries to prove he is basically against even openly okay why not Marx's theory of universality of capital. He plays this game of almost Hegelian with explicit reference to Heidegger that if there is a lesson of late capitalism it is that there is no universal capitalism, in each culture capitalism is embedded integrated in a specific way in this specific context like his case is India and so on and so on. And I will try to again very respectfully counteract counteract counteract this. I think that capitalism has a quite more radical universal dimension.