At the end of June, Opera North brings its acclaimed production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle to London’s Southbank Centre. It is the near-climax of an ambitious five-year project that saw the whole Cycle toured round the UK. To mark this rare and highly anticipated performance, philosopher Roger Scruton reflects on the revolutionary ideas about power and love that drove Wagner to compose one of the most astonishing music dramas in the western canon.
Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he began in 1848 and on which he worked over the next two decades, is a comprehensive re-working of Old Norse myths, as recounted in the Icelandic Eddas. In Wagner’s story, the Viking gods are situated in a German landscape, along with Siegfried, hero of the German medieval epic Nibelungenlied. The Ring Cycle is about the gods, but the gods as conceived by a modern artist, whose concern is to create a myth that will comprehend all the principles—moral, political and spiritual—by which the modern world is governed. It is a story of the gods for people who have no gods to believe in.
World without end: a production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the last opera in the Ring Cycle, at the China National Opera House in Beijing in 2015
© JIN LIANGKUAI/XINHUA/ALAMY LIVE NEWS
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