A long time ago, a friend of mine asked me how to get into opera. It’s a common question, one that I don’t quite think is answered by reading up on music history or what a recitative is, though that couldn’t hurt. The reality is, to contemporary viewers more used to the mass cultural phenomenon that is the Broadway musical, the intimacy of spoken-word theater, the pacing of television or the closeness of film, opera seems, to put it bluntly, weird and a little slow.
In person, you sit in a giant opera house watching from the nosebleeds because you’re too broke to sit anywhere else, unable see any of the subtle body language that film and television rely on to do non-verbal storytelling. The music can often feel repetitive because it serves a formal, structural and functional purpose contemporary audiences have since lost contact with. We don’t need them to repeat that crucial line over and over again because we have subtitles now. (And couldn’t they be using that time to do more plot? Deepen the characters a bit?) The aria, severed immediately from the rest of the four hour or so production by the recording industry and the sheet music industry before it, is one of the last mass-culturally recognizable vestiges of the form, familiar to us from our grandparents’ records of classic Verdi chestnuts sung by Luciano Pavarotti. These are now beloved denizens of the dollar record bin.
For those of my generation and younger, getting into the opera is a process most commonly undertaken as an adult. As the largest opera-going generation dies out — a generation for which a cultural education was still considered a public good from the union hall to the classroom — and as the whole enterprise is made diabolically unaffordable with tickets going for at least a hundred bucks a pop, this is only going to become more true. Opera isn’t taught as a part of most public school music curricula, because, well, it’s hard to teach. I’ve been to many symphony concerts attended by very well-behaved children who, even in the iPad age, are more than capable of sitting respectfully and listening — mesmerized, as children tend to be, by all that sound and motion. But the opera is a bigger task. It’s hard to ask kids to sit for four hours, especially if they can’t read the subtitles yet. And frankly, most of the themes in opera are not really for children. I just caught Marriage of Figaro at the Lyric this weekend and I’m sorry, as funny as that opera is, a count wanting to abuse his power to fuck his wife’s maid is not something I want to explain to a seven year old.
Sometimes I’m asked how I got into the opera, which, after years of being patronized to by classical music world, I take as a slight. Being from humble roots in the middle of nowhere, I was raised in a musical household because my grandfather, a gigging classical musician himself, raised my father in a musical household. I began playing the violin at four years old, taking lessons from a woman who lived in a trailer park at the end of my street. My mother brought me to the symphony every few years when she could afford it. When I got older, I ushered at the satellite concerts the North Carolina Symphony played for the retirement communities in Moore County so that I could watch them play for free. Maybe one day I’ll write more about this life of mine, the life I spent 20 years in before becoming a writer, but now is not the time.
However, I didn’t get into the opera until high school. Despite enjoying the other forms of classical music, the opera, for me, was kind of like beer. One day you’re like, “Why are people into this?” and then the next, you’re shitfaced. When I was sixteen, I woke up, heard Maria Callas sing “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila on the radio and that was it. I was like, oh my God, I feel like I’m going to die. Even so, I wouldn’t see an opera in the flesh until I was already in music school.
The last two years of my ill-fated training as a composer, I spent a great deal of time devoted to the study of opera, ultimately producing a senior thesis on madness as theme and compositional element during postmodernism. I ran sound for the opera while working in the recording studio and became the pet engineer of the vocal department which was entirely different in every regard from string world, where I came up. The opera is glorious. It is indulgent, it is powerful, it is unbelievably difficult to pull off, and also, not to be too forward, it is steeped in a trenchant and intoxicating eroticism. For three indelible years, I was in it, man. Singers liked me and I liked them. They allowed me into their lives and art, relied on me to document it for posterity and let me practice my own art as a technician. I haven’t made good on all that living yet, so let me try to now.
If you want to get into opera, this is what I told my friend: the key is to accept the stakes. By that I mean, the narrative constructs of opera are not as obsessively detailed as in other art forms. In opera, the music, instead of the text, does the lion’s share of communicating emotions, emotions distilled neatly into their little slots of aria and recitative, and the earlier the opera the more regimented these distillations are. In general, rarely is the libretto better than or even as good as the music. Often it is, unfortunately, bad. (Cilea’s meandering Adriana Lecouvreur comes to mind.) For some neophytes more used to other art forms, this is a hard pill to swallow. Swallow it anyway.
You, the opera listener, will be presented with a narrative situation (and sometimes it is a fucking absurd situation) that you will have to accept at face value. You can’t brush it off and be like, well that’s unrealistic. You have to, sometimes independent of what is being sung, consider the all the implications of that situation without them being explicitly told or shown to you, which is why opera pays dividends in terms of rewatch or relisten value — you’ll always miss something. To use Figaro as an example again, the situation is pretty explicit – Susanna and Figaro are going to get married. Their employer wants to sleep with the former and depose the latter. But the implications, despite the humor, are not very funny. The stakes are high. The height of the stakes glues the narrative together and makes the humor come as a relief.
In opera, especially in operas up through the Classical era, things happen very fast. In Henry Purcell’s hour and a half-long baroque masterpiece Dido and Aeneas, the titular characters are introduced. Then they fall, simply, abruptly and almost (to modern sensibilities) jarringly, in love. But for the rest of the opera to be effective from an emotional perspective, especially the devastating aria it’s most famous for – “When I am laid in earth” – you have to just buck it up, listen to the music, and accept that yes, they are really in love with all that implies. The “plot” laid out in the libretto is not very detailed or close. Does that make the love less real? No, it doesn’t. As a general rule, if you see a plot hole or alight upon an easier solution than the one the characters have chosen, and there are innumerable cases where such alternatives appear obvious, no you didn’t. The work has a self-contained logic, which must be accepted as is. Only then does it become real.
Most importantly, the opera hates irony. You have to earn your right to being ironic about the opera by believing in it first.
The key to this believing, and by extension, the proverbial spark lies in finding an opera that hits home in the first place. This takes a lot of trial and error. And even so, sometimes, in some mystical way, one is just not ready for a work to affect them until, perhaps, they do a little more living first. Desperately sad works like Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth and Verdi’s Aida had me in a vice grip as a teenager. In music school, I was a high modernist obsessed with Berg’s Wozzeck and later the avant garde of the 1980s. But now? As it will inevitably happen if you let it happen, it’s Richard Wagner, and nothing but. It may have taken me a lifetime to get to this point, but if you’re looking for somewhere to start, you may as well start here. The scale is closer to television. Most of the themes will already be familiar because their cultural influence has spanned 150 years. And after all, it is somewhat intuitive to let the great canary in the coal mine of musical modernity guide the hand of you, the cultural being for whom modernism forms an inevitable undercurrent of aesthetic understanding.
The leitmotifs also help a lot.
Getting too into Wagner is, of course, deeply embarrassing. But that’s the thing about the man, the undisputed visionary, the virulent and vile antisemite — he is the original “land of contrasts.” For most of my life, I didn’t want to deal with Wagner for this very reason. (The other reason is that we unfortunately share a last name.) Neither, it seemed, did anyone else. When I was in music school in the 2010s, Wagner had never been less popular. Nobody played Wagner. We didn’t do any of his music, not even the “Siegfried Idyll.” I recorded thousands of recitals in my three years working in the recording studio and I can’t think of a single instance of anyone even performing a single Wagner excerpt, except for when brass players asked me to record their audition tapes.
In fact, the degree to which my professors refused to even engage with Wagner beyond the building of Bayreuth, the leitmotif, the Tristan chord, and the antisemitism question, is actually a bit strange in retrospect. I remember my music history professor putting on the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde and going “ok, yada yada” midway through after which everyone laughed. I took several courses on opera history, and getting to Wagner eventually meant feeling very, very awkward. The way out was always to talk about the technical achievements and pairing them with a disclaimer that you do not, in fact, have to hand it to him.
The need to acknowledge past wrongs (wrongs that frankly have never been materially atoned for in classical music ever – acknowledgement, of course, is always enough) eclipsed everything else, even the music. And some folks may still say “as it should.” I’m not interested in having the perennial discussion of separating the art from the artist. Enough people have done this, many of them experts, to whom I defer. If you’re interested in that argument, that side of Wagner, or his reputation both today and among his contemporaries, I recommend ditching this essay and reading Alex Ross’s book Wagnerism instead. Wagner himself is (thankfully) dead, and has been for a long time. He’s dead in all respects. His reputation has become synonymous with shame in a field that rarely ever feels it. Fine by me.
But surely some of you are reading this and thinking, well, what’s in there? What could possibly be in that work that’s worth so much upheaval, disavowal, devotion, obsession, mythology, horror? Don’t you, just a little bit, want to peek inside? Indeed, given the prevailing sentiment of contemporary culture in which one’s aesthetic preferences are linked indisputably (very disputably) to one’s moral character, Wagner’s reputation has produced the curious effect of not just avoidance but of the potential listener being afraid of what they will find in his work. This was true even of myself. After all, what if it does to me what it did to Hitler? (I should hope we’re all better than Hitler.) Even worse, what if I like it? Will that make me a bad person? (Did it make Marcel Proust, George Bernard Shaw, Slavoj Žižek, or the countless other non-Hitler interpreters of Wagner throughout the ages bad people too?) What if it really is that important? Worst of all: What if it changes my life?
This sentiment is especially true of Wagner’s myth-sized tetralogy of operas (or in his words, “music dramas”) Der Ring des Nibelungen, better known as the Ring cycle. And for good reason. The Ring can change your life. It can ruin your life, as testified to by the last however many months of my life spent writing this series of essays despite the fact that very little about the Ring has gone unsaid. And it’s true: there’s no way about it: the Ring is massive and intimidating. It is a maze of implications, questions, and interpretations, in which it is possible to very easily become lost. The work’s scale has become a cliche at this point, punctuated by that special grad-school word, the Gesamkunstwerk. But it really is that big.
It’s because of this scale that there’s already something in the Ring for everyone. The philosophy enthusiast will love the butchering of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach that ends up looking a little bit Hegelian if the light is adjusted right. The technologist finds great interest in the construction of the cycle’s purpose-built home, Bayreuth, with regards to the history of theater architecture, acoustics and stage technology. One can, of course, also point to contemporary culture and crow about how the Ring influenced everything from Tolkien and other fantasy writers to John Williams’ horn writing inStar Wars. I’m not going to do that either because it’s been done to death. Truly, if there was ever a work who needed fewer cheerleaders, it’s this one.
My perspective on the Ring is this: it is one of the most mysterious works in all of that beast we call “Western Art.” Important, yes, but elusive. It works affectively in equally elusive ways. There’s a good chance that any given potential Wagnerite will sit down to watch it and it will do nothing for them because, well, it’s more than a little insane. This is what happened on my first attempt in high school, when watching the Ring felt like something one had to do in order to be “cultured.” What turned me off about it then was the fantasy element. I just really wasn’t into dwarfs and rings at that age. I probably could’ve been more swayed by the relentless desire depicted in "Tristan und Isolde." In college, a product of my era, I watched the Ring on DVD with a sense of smug detachment, of being a better person than the work was intended for. I promptly forgot the entire plot because more important to me at the time were John Crenshaw’s Decca recordings and how he got them to sound that way. Ten years passed until I watched it again.
Whether it’s your first opera (and, really, why not? Go big or go home), or your fiftieth, if you embark upon the Ring and do as I said in the beginning of the essay: dispel with irony and accept the stakes of the work – a work that is all stakes – maybe you, too, can become a Ring person. It’s never a simple task — for anyone — watching 20 hours of grand opera. Most of us have to go to work and are too exhausted afterwards to deal with something that’s, well extremely exhausting. Besides, being a Ring person remains a rather alarming cultural affectation best not mentioned in polite company. Finishing the Ring is enough of an achievement in the first place. Most people get done and walk away thinking “well, that was deranged.” Or monumental, or an achievement, or moving, or fascinating, or weird, or uncomfortable, or what have you. My husband and I watched it together, and his conclusion was that he found the work very “dialectical,” which is true. It is maddeningly so.
But for me, no. The curtain fell on Götterdämmerung and I realized, to some degree of horror, that it had finally happened to me, the thing I did not want to happen, the thing that happens to maybe ten percent of the people who view the Ring: obsession. Something about it, I felt, was going to drive me mad. This sentiment could only be expressed at the time in a kind of subterranean, pure affect. Heart palpitations, the phrase “holy shit.” A certainty that no, something is in there. Of course it is. Something is always in there for the people who let themselves look.
That’s what the Ring is, a kind of looking glass that shows you what you want to see. And when one peers into the Ring and sees what they want to see, that seeing is not necessarily a kind of identification with the characters in a contemporary “representational” mode of “feeling seen.” (Though this is certainly possible and I myself have done it.) Rather, it uncovers something in between allegory and identification. Or, as my friend Jonathan Repetti put it to me in an exchange of notes on the subject, an “oscillation between the perfect universalizing sublimation of your own particular experience, and the realization that this perfection is only communicable because of the particular experience you bring to it.” For a long time, I thought of the Ring as a kind of scab I was picking at while trying to figure out why I couldn’t simply let the wound heal. Years have passed, and I still feel exactly the same.
The reason the Ring works this way is because it is an open enough work to be interpreted by people across the ideological spectrum, from nationalists and fascists to milquetoast liberals to card-carrying Marxists. To paraphrase Alex Ross, Siegfried’s Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung was played at Lenin’s funeral long before it was played at Hitler’s. And even among like minds, people disagree. The leitmotif meant one thing for Adorno, who, rather disdainfully, considered it to be the weakness of the whole work, emblematic of the individual atomization of all these characters who were supposed to be bringing about a new world together — not to mention its jingly nature gleamed the coming of mass culture. The leitmotif meant another thing entirely for Fredric Jameson, who saw it as a critical turning point in modernity: the shift from clearly defined and labeled emotion as expressed via the aria to a kind of nondescript and inexpressible affect.
In another example, Alberich’s renunciation of love, his theft of the Rheingold and his forging of the ring is sometimes viewed as the rape of the (fetishized) natural world at the hand of vulgar modernity — a very 19th century sentiment. (In which case, the resolution of the cycle represents a desirable return to Nature.) For socialists such as George Bernard Shaw, the forging of the ring is an allegory for the establishment of capitalism and all its attendant exploitation — of nature and of people — as something distinctly different and existentially threatening to the ancien régime.
However, the subject of the Ring is the end of the world and nothing less. It is the end of the world Wotan and the other gods up in Walhall (henceforth referred to in the English, Valhalla) made, a world whose destruction they themselves set in motion by making promises they couldn’t keep. But, crucially, this world comes to an end without an explicit vision for the world to come. It ends, and that is it. This ambiguity lies at the heart of the work’s interpretational flexibility. On a general level, given Wagner’s own (pre-revanchist) participation in politics via the German uprising of 1848, for which the composer was later exiled in Switzerland, the work’s political sentiment (if we accept these terms) is best described as a kind of bizarre mystical anarchism, one colored by the disillusionment of failure. Perhaps this is why the critical theorist Theodor Adorno found the ending of the Ring to be cynical and anti-human, even though, technically speaking, it is humanity that gets the last word as the gods go up in flames. We, however, do not have to accept that interpretation, or any other, because The Ring is what one makes of it. The only commonality between all interpretations is what happens. To paraphrase the overused but still apt Gramscian triad, when the curtain rises on day one, a curse is born and with it, an imperative that the old world must end. On day four, by the time the final curtain falls, the new world struggles to be born. The time that spans those two curtain calls is the time of monsters.
Note: The original essay, "Wagner's Ring: Believing in the Stakes", published in 2024 on my Substack The Late Review contains a section on the question of agency in "Das Rheingold." Because that material is covered extensively elsewhere, this reproduction of the essay has been edited for brevity.