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Mythologies
By Kasper Bech Holten
"The signifier of the myth presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other."
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
A woman enters an attic and strikes a match. She is Brünnhilde – looking back into her past to understand her life just when the self she thought she knew has come to an end. She is in the midst of the worst crisis of her entire life, having just betrayed the man she loves more than anything in the world. Now she wants to find out how it came to this. She wants to understand herself: to create her own mythology, her own framework for understanding the life she has led. Thus begins our staging of Wagner’s Das Ring des Nibelungen; thus begins Das Rheingold.
  
We start with the end rather than the beginning, and the entire Ring is experienced as one big flashback. We journey with Brünnhilde through her past and watch her attempt to cobble together the remnants of her life into something meaningful, a tool she can use.
In this way, the cycle of The Ring – which deals with the history of the world from beginning to end – becomes the story of one person’s world, an entirely personal mythology. But why?
Wagner’s Ring is an infinitely rich masterpiece that has kept artists and intellectuals continually occupied since 1876 and which has spawned more extreme interpretations than any other opera. The Ring can be read and understood on countless different levels; in fact, The Ring is as rich as it is precisely because one interpretation of its meaning could never suffice.
The Ring can be viewed politically, which is how George Bernard Shaw interpreted it in his book, The Perfect Wagnerite. Shaw perceived The Ring as a socialist rebellion against capitalism’s exploitation of people and nature. A very different political interpretation was ascribed to The Ring in 1930s Nazi Germany, where Wagnerian worship was led by Hitler himself. Both political interpretations can be applied more easily to the beginning of The Ring, where things are still relatively uncomplicated.
Up until his death in 1945, Hitler was increasingly unhappy with the fact that the pure Aryan hero, Siegfried, goes naively to his own death at the conclusion of The Ring. Shaw also found Siegfried wanting in that he felt that the character of the revolutionary leader was naïve, treacherous, and powerless to change the world!
The Ring cycle can also be interpreted philosophically. Wagner himself was very much inspired by several philosophers, particularly the Buddhism-influenced Schopenhauer. But even though Wagner wrote a so-called "Schopenhauer ending" for The Ring, he would reject its inclusion in the final version.
The Ring can also be explained from the perspective of developmental psychology. This is the interpretation given by Jungian scholar Robert Donington in his book, "Wagner’s Ring and Its Symbols", which decodes The Ring according to Jung’s psychology of the subconscious; The Ring has also been interpreted through the symbols of Freud and others. Certainly one can read the entire Ring cycle and its vast cast of characters as the story of various aspects of a human being, with each of the characters representing a particular aspect of our collective psyche.
The Ring can of course be interpreted historically (as in Patrice Chereau’s famous 1976 staging) and aesthetically (listen to the recordings of James Levine or Herbert von Karajan, or see Robert Wilson’s Zurich staging). And so on, and so on… clearly there are rich possibilities of all kinds for both decoding and deconstructing The Ring. When it comes to staging The Ring, the stage director’s biggest challenge consists in part in demonstrating how well he or she is acquainted with these interpretations – and in part in simplification. Many have attempted to forge a single understanding of The Ring through the use of symbols and persuasive ideas.
But if Wagner had wanted us to understand an intellectual idea, wouldn’t he have written a book instead? Actually, he did. He wrote countless books, and though they are somewhat interesting to read, they are certainly not the reason for Wagner’s lasting fame. His true achievement was making his myriad ideas live and breathe as musical theatre – and doing so simultaneously rather than by emphasising one element at a time.
Perhaps an additional challenge for the stage director should be to reveal The Ring’s ambiguity rather than attempting to reduce the cycle to just one of the levels of meaning Wagner consciously built into The Ring. Wagner endeavoured to place the various simultaneous levels of our existence into a larger framework of understanding by retelling them as myth. The myth takes hold of the concrete meanings of pictures and language, first enlarging them and then emptying them so that they become symbols we can fill with our own individual, concrete meanings. We recognise ourselves in the myth while feeling that our "little" lives have been placed in a larger context or, in the words of Roland Barthes, "a random event is justified for eternity."
It is here that we find the key to our particular interpretation of The Ring: I believe that every modern human being creates his or her own mythology. In the past, people could more easily belong to a collective mythology, but in the individualised modern times in which we live each of us tries to create a personal mythology in an attempt to both understand and construct the meaning of who we are as human beings. This is why The Ring is so fascinating to us: It depicts the exact process by which it is done. Wagner has created a mythology to fill modern man’s need to self-mythologize.
This is why our Ring is not about the history of the entire world; rather, it is about the world of one person. Brünnhilde looks into the past in her father’s attic so that she might understand: "from here my world began". In the course of The Ring we follow her as she tries to create her own personal mythology. Events that appear small on the outside are blown up to grand mythological size, and through stage direction we can shift gears between reminiscences represented at face value and the dreamy, unrealistic, pompous moments that Brünnhilde herself experiences as "mythological".
Through doing so we hope that the audience has a chance to identify with the process. Don’t we all understand far too well the attempt to give meaning to life? The journey back into reminiscences through which we explain who we are, so that we are not just a product of coincidence? In effect, this is the mythologizing of our own lives.
At the same time we are perhaps given the opportunity to create an ambiguous Ring staging, one that the audience member can interpret on many different levels depending on whether his or her perspectives are political, psychological, philosophical or even aesthetic.
Much must be left out in order to stage The Ring from, say, a political perspective. But just as there are countless levels in our own lives, so are there in that of Brünnhilde: Her life is sculpted both by large-scale political development and by her psychological struggle with the men in her life. We would like to open a number of doors to The Ring.
We tell the story of a human being. It is a true family saga about her father, herself, and her husband along with all of their friends and enemies. It is the saga of a family played out over an entire century – the 20th century.
Wagner wrote The Ring in roughly the same period in which the great ideologies were being conceived – those that would tear asunder the 20th century. Now, safely this side of the most dynamic and the most terrible century in the history of humanity, we tell the story of a family throughout that century; a family that sees the great political events of the time reflected in their lives.
Along with Brünnhilde we journey through the 1920s and 1930s in Das Rheingold, in which the great ideological structures are raised, until we reach the 1950s in Die Walküre where the Cold War has frozen those structures into fortresses through which the great powers zealously guard each other in excruciating anticipation. Siegfried brings us to 1968 where the eponymous young hero naively rebels against his father’s rules and ideals until the fin-de-siècle joy he expresses in Götterdämmerung comes to an abrupt end in a clash with pure evil of the type seen in Bosnia or Rwanda.
We also tell the story of a woman with such a powerful Electra complex that it prevents her from freeing herself from her father’s influence until far too late, and of the myriad psychological dramas that swirl about Wotan’s familial dinner table.
As the century gets more complicated and difficult to navigate, so does her life. The simple interpretations of Shaw and Hitler no longer suffice; the ideology is exhausted. We go from an orderly universe that can be understood through received wisdom – or for Brünnhilde herself: as daddy’s girl – to a complex modern world filled with hyperlinks, globalisation and the dilution and displacement of power.
Thus the conclusion of The Ring sees Brünnhilde carrying out her final rebellion against her father’s way of thinking – the masculine way – which has poisoned her own life: Finally she understands that the masculine interpretation of power and ideology must collapse, and she sets fire to her father’s ideological palace, Valhalla. What remains is a woman who, through her attempt to understand her own life, has ultimately liberated herself from her father in order to become who she truly is: Herself. What also remains is the question of how a woman would wield power and run the world in the 21st century, if she had been given the chance to start again.
By making The Ring the story of Brünnhilde’s attempt to understand her own life, we attempt to open the cycle to reveal the numerous layers of meaning that make it so fascinating to us all rather than locking it into just one interpretation. Like Wagner, we do it primarily through bringing the many problems in question to living, breathing reality – by telling a good story!
The political story is reflected in the personal. The psychological story is the basis for the philosophical. But more than anything, we hope to invite the public on a journey that feels both familiar and disconcerting: Our attempt – as Brünnhilde – to revisit our lives in order to understand where we come from, what it is that can free us and how we can become who we really are. If we dare. To be continued...
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The four operas
Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
Götterdämmerung
Articles
Kasper Bech Holten:
Mythologies
Interview with Michael Schønwandt:
On Das Rheingold
Kasper Bech Holten:
In Eternal Opposition
Nila Parly:
The Women of Das Rheingold
Gallery
See the photos from Das Rheingold
Biographies
The Ring Team...
Cast
See the cast
Biographies are available at www.kglteater.dk
Das Rheingold is sponsored by the Bikuben Foundation
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