Disillusionment of Revolutionaries: Wagner, Frank Castorf, and a Post-Dramatic Ring

Richard Wagner formulated his Ring project in the white heat of revolutionary excitement and involvement. Indeed, early work on the poems and his broader conception of ‘music drama’ may be considered as politically ‘revolutionary’ as presence on the Dresden barricades and theoretical writing. Wagner said that he intended here ‘to make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense,’ a meaning transformed by the increasing unlikelihood of another such revolutionary outbreak and increasing preoccupation with the ‘pessimistic’ philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Frank Castorf’s recent, ‘post-dramatic’ (post-Brechtian) Bayreuth Ring travels a similar, yet different journey. For Rhinegold we may often substitute oil. My interest here, however, lies especially with the two concluding dramas, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, where Wagner also deals with the apparent moment of revolution – Siegfried’s shattering of Wotan’s spear of law – and its diversion and/or unexpected outcome. How does Castorf’s alternative historical (post)communist line, symbolised by a Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Mount Rushmore, revolving to reveal a post-GDR, late capitalist Alexanderplatz, correspond to Wagner’s own revolutionary and post-revolutionary path? How did Castorf’s production draw closer during its five years onstage (2013-17) to a work from which it had perhaps initially stood too distant?

Mark Berry is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway. His research profile can be found here.

This event was previously scheduled for October 2018.