| Abstract |
'The vastest piece of music ever conceived by the mind of man' (as the author says in his introduction to this book) is Richard Wagner's majestic The Ring of the Nibelung. Like the four operas of the Ring itself--Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung--the author's commentary draws on history, mythology, psychology, and philosophy, as well as a profound love and understanding of music. His book--which includes synopses of the operas and a selected discography--is the perfect companion to the composer's 'inexhaustible myth in music.' This volume takes its subtitle from C. S. Lewis, who remembered when he first encountered the Ring because it seemed at that moment 'the sky had turned round.' When the author gave his commentaries on the Ring during the intermissions of the Texaco-sponsored broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera in 1989, the response was overwhelming. Many listeners who had every reason not to like Wagner--or what Wagner has come to mean--found nonetheless that there was something transcendent in his music that they found nowhere else. From the theft of gold from the depths of the Rhine (and birth of man's consciousness) in Das Rheingold to the earth-flooding, heaven-firing catastrophe (and redemption of the world by love) of Götterdämmerung. The author's insight into Wagner's masterwork shows us a world that exists outside of time, in the realm of imagination and memory. Wagner intuited the relationship between psychology and myth long before Freud and Jung, the author writes. Though Wagner began the Ring as a political allegory for his own century, it soon became much more--until he wrote in astonishment to his friend Franz Liszt: 'Everything within me makes music. And a new world stands before me.' The landscape of that new world, as the author suggests in this splendid book, is not that of any one place, but of the human soul. |
