tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/richard-wagner-7823/articlesRichard Wagner – The Conversation2023-03-14T17:18:49Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2008912023-03-14T17:18:49Z2023-03-14T17:18:49ZWhy Old Norse myths endure in popular culture<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514666/original/file-20230310-14-72f1pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C10%2C3477%2C1841&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Marvel Studios' The Dark World from 2013.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.alamy.com/chris-hemsworth-thor-the-dark-world-2013-image472865537.html?imageid=0BB208C1-FE37-4C76-9731-904462B5103E&p=1913542&pn=1&searchId=21f2e4a6290695fa2c8a3ce8bf511534&searchtype=0">Maximum Film / Alamy</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From <a href="https://www.eno.org/composers/richard-wagner/">Wagner</a> to <a href="https://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/exhibits/show/translations/anderson-oldnorse/anderson-oldnorse-ch1">William Morris</a> in the late 19th century, via Tolkien’s dwarves and CS Lewis’s <a href="https://www.tor.com/2021/03/17/better-things-ahead-the-last-battle-and-the-end-of-narnia/">The Last Battle</a>, through to last year’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/22/norse-code-white-supremacists-reading-the-northman-robert-eggers">controversial film The Northman</a>, Scandinavian gods and heroes have been central to the stories we tell ourselves.</p>
<p>As professor of medieval European literature, I have been exploring Old Norse mythology since my undergraduate days. I have always been fascinated by the ways in which the old myths remain vital and relevant in the present, particularly now in various pop-cultural forms. In my new book, <a href="https://thamesandhudson.com/the-norse-myths-that-shape-the-way-we-think-9780500252345">The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think</a>, I explore how 10 key Norse myths and legends have been reworked over the last 200 years.</p>
<p>Although these stories have been influential since their discovery in 17th-century Europe, in recent years Norse narratives have exploded across fiction, Hollywood blockbusters, rock albums, opera, video games and TV shows – these are just a few of the cultural spheres in which Norse myths have been put to work. Here I introduce three of the most important gods, the feminine divine in the form of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Valkyrie-Norse-mythology">valkyries</a> and shield-maidens, and finally, the looming threat of <em>ragna rök</em> – the end of the world.</p>
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<h2>Gods and monsters</h2>
<p>The main gods – not so much the goddesses unfortunately – offer ways to think about different stages of masculinity. <a href="https://historiska.se/norse-mythology/odin-en/">Odin</a>, the all-father, is the leader of the Norse pantheon, creator of humankind and god of wisdom. He will die at <em>ragna rök</em>, devoured by the great wolf Fenrir.</p>
<p>Starting with the main character <a href="https://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/the-aesir-gods-and-goddesses/odin/">Wotan</a> in Das Rheingold, the first part of Wagner’s <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/wagner/guides/wagner-ring-cycle-where-start/">Ring Cycle</a> – and also in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 epic <a href="https://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Books/American+Gods/">American Gods</a>, and Douglas Adams’ 1988 comic novel <a href="https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/The_Long_Dark_Tea-Time_of_the_Soul">The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul</a> – Odin is a figure who senses that power is draining away from him. Yet he ingeniously seeks out ways of clinging to his waning authority, cutting dodgy deals and manipulating his own flesh and blood through cunning and deceit.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.marvel.com/explore">Marvel Comic Universe</a> has already killed off the aged god, for he embodies an older patriarchal principle, one that refuses to step aside for the next generation. </p>
<p>In Norse myth, <a href="https://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/the-aesir-gods-and-goddesses/thor/">Thor’s</a> main role is smiting giants with his great hammer Mjöllnir, patrolling the borders of the gods’ and human territory to keep out enemies. An indomitable performer of mighty feats, he is not always taken seriously in the myths: a favourite story involves him being forced to cross-dress as a reluctant and implausible bride.</p>
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<img alt="A stained-glass window showing a viking warrior looks at the sea." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514504/original/file-20230309-570-xg4o05.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514504/original/file-20230309-570-xg4o05.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514504/original/file-20230309-570-xg4o05.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514504/original/file-20230309-570-xg4o05.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514504/original/file-20230309-570-xg4o05.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514504/original/file-20230309-570-xg4o05.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514504/original/file-20230309-570-xg4o05.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Viking warrior detail from stained-glass window at Miss Maud Swedish Hotel, Perth, Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Davis</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>So too, the modern Thor is often depicted as a bumbling loutish thug, reaching for his hammer instead of thinking things through. Contemporary writers, such as Joanne Harris and Francesca Simon, make him the butt of their tales for younger readers – the cross-dressing story makes for great comedy.</p>
<p>The god’s image has been rescued through his incarnation as the Mighty Thor. In Marvel comics and movies, he has learned maturity, how to wield and to restrain his power, and has come to care for others, both humans and his own people, the semi-divine Asgardians. Marvel’s Thor is constructing a new kind of masculinity, one that understands that violence is not always the answer and which has learned the value of forethought and compromise. </p>
<p>Half-god, half-giant, <a href="https://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/the-aesir-gods-and-goddesses/loki/">Loki</a> is a strangely ambiguous being; in the Marvel Universe he is Thor’s adoptive brother, though not in the original myth. He gets the gods out of tight situations – often ones that he himself has caused – but he will march against them with their enemies at <em>ragna rök</em>. For novelist AS Byatt, he is the intellectual’s god, questioning and nonconformist, while Marvel and Disney have made Loki into a shape-changing, gender-bending cult hero, always ready with a quip as he double-crosses Thor once again.</p>
<h2>A female perspective</h2>
<p>Loki is also the father of monsters: his daughter Hel, goddess of death, is the heroine of Gavin Higgins and Francesca Simon’s chamber opera from 2019, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/22/the-monstrous-child-review-linbury-theatre-london">The Monstrous Child</a>. Hel is a sparky teenager living with disability and consigned to a grim underworld, a girl whose story takes in love, vengeance and learning the true extent of her powers.</p>
<p>Warrior-maidens and fate-goddesses rolled in one, the valkyries range high above the battlefield, determining who shall live and who shall die. Wagner’s <a href="https://thenorsegods.com/brunhilde/">Brünnhilde</a> is the most remarkable of the valkyries, the true heroine of his <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/wagner/guides/wagner-ring-cycle-where-start/">Ring Cycle</a>, fulfilling her father Wotan’s will and finally bringing down the gods. </p>
<p>Valkyries were also imagined as the battle-trained women warriors who now throng such TV shows as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2306299/">Vikings</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4179452/">The Last Kingdom</a>, skilled fighters who battle on an equal footing with men. These women vividly dramatise aspects of contemporary femininity: effective in traditional masculine domains, wielding power and choosing their own lovers, yet still working out how to manage sexual relationships and motherhood alongside their professional identities.</p>
<p>Literally “the doom of the gods”, <em>ragna rök</em> lies in the mythic future for gods and humans: the powers of ice and fire will destroy the earth. Tolkien suggests that this inevitable ending shapes the northern spirit, kindling courage and resignation in the face of certain doom.</p>
<p>Wagner saw his Götterdämmerung (the twilight of the gods) as sweeping away the corrupt divine order, leaving a purified, empty world where free human beings could build anew. In HBO’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944947/">Game of Thrones</a>, humanity’s apocalyptic clash with the icy power of the Night King is resolved by one young woman’s courage and determination.</p>
<p>The Norse myths envisage a cleansed green world that rises again from the ocean, but the climate cataclysm towards which we are heading admits no such renewal. Perhaps we can learn from the gods’ bad faith and carelessness in time to avert the downfall that <em>ragna rök</em> foreshadows for us all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200891/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carolyne Larrington has recently published The Old Norse Myths that Shape the Way We Think with Thames and Hudson.</span></em></p>Ancient tales of gods and heroes and medieval Scandinavia help us make sense of things like masculinity, betrayal, revenge and the end of the world.Carolyne Larrington, Professor and Tutorial Fellow in English, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1831332022-05-25T20:16:39Z2022-05-25T20:16:39ZThe singing was great – but what was it about? Why opera companies should explain themselves better<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464735/original/file-20220523-21-abdt19.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C7%2C5168%2C3437&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby/Opera Australia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Opera Australia has received <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/lohengrin-opera-australia/">outstanding reviews</a> for its Melbourne season of Richard Wagner’s opera <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohengrin_(opera)">Lohengrin</a>. </p>
<p>The casting of German singer Jonas Kaufmann in the title role has been universally praised. Kaufmann demonstrates to the hilt the kinds of vocal skill and dramatic artistry that have led him to be considered by many to be the greatest tenor in the world today.</p>
<p>The staging, however, has not been received so positively.</p>
<p>The opera is directed by Frenchman Olivier Py, in a co-production with the national opera of Belgium, the Théâtre Royale de la Monnaie in Brussels. </p>
<p>Wagner drew inspiration for Lohengrin from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_von_Eschenbach">Wolfram von Eschenbach</a>’s 13th century rendering of the legend of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_of_the_Swan">Knight of the Swan</a>, alongside actual events from the foundation years of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire">Holy Roman Empire</a> around the 10th century. </p>
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<span class="caption">The production is set in an apocalyptic post-second world war landscape.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby/Opera Australia</span></span>
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<p>In Py’s rendering, however, we are presented with an apocalyptic post-World War II landscape where death reigns. Graffiti daubed on walls quotes from Paul Celan’s poem <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesfuge">Todesfuge</a> (1945). Other scenic interpolations are drawn from esoteric Nazi iconography – such the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_cross">Celtic Cross</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(symbol)">Black Sun</a> (Schwarze Sonne).</p>
<p>This is not unusual. Over the past 80 years or so, operas have increasingly been reframed to provide a vehicle for commentary: either on the composer and society that created them, or on our own times. The original plot and setting is something to be riffed off, rather than revered or reproduced. </p>
<p>In Europe, useful background and context for these interpretative overlays is usually provided to the audience through accompanying program essays. </p>
<p>In Australia, we seem to be missing out on such outreach.</p>
<h2>The director’s opera</h2>
<p>This kind of opera production is commonly known in opera circles as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regieoper"><em>Regieoper</em></a>, or director’s opera. </p>
<p>The most influential early practitioner was Richard Wagner’s grandson, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieland_Wagner">Wieland Wagner</a> (1917–1966). In the years immediately after the second world war, Wieland tried to distance his grandfather’s operas – and the festival theatre he built for them in Bayreuth, Germany – from their prominent appropriation by the vanquished Nazi regime. </p>
<p>Typically, he substituted the naturalistic settings of the original works with minimalist stagings that foregrounded their underlying psychological meanings.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A 1973 performance of Wieland Wagner’s 1951 production of Parsifal for Bayreuth.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Subsequent <em>Regieoper</em> directors have been more interested to draw our attention precisely to the historical and ethical fault lines in these (and other) operatic works. Such productions commonly ask the audience to reassess the value (and values) which may have been simply presumed in the opera’s original staging. </p>
<p>Melbourne-born director Barrie Kosky’s 2017 production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/27/die-meistersinger-von-nurnberg-bayreuth-wagner-antisemitism">is a celebrated recent example</a>. Here the opera’s plot – based around a medieval music competiton – is re-framed to put aspects of the composer’s infamous antisemitism on trial. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-we-must-keep-talking-about-wagner-and-antisemitism-19717">Why we must keep talking about Wagner and antisemitism</a>
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<p>But such directorial interventions rely on the presumption that audiences are already aware of the history and context of the original. </p>
<p>In the case of a German opera-going public watching a German opera, this may be a reasonable assumption. In Australia, arguably, it is less so. </p>
<h2>The importance of the program essay</h2>
<p>In many other countries, helpful background information and context is offered to audiences in the accompanying program.</p>
<p>It seems folly to assume a Melbourne audience will instinctively be able to appreciate how an 1848 opera based on a German medieval fable might serve as a commentary on events from 1945. </p>
<p>When this Lohengrin opened at the Théâtre Royale it was accompanied by substantial program essays that detailed not only why the Lohengrin story first attracted the attention of its notoriously politically minded composer, but also why Py now saw fit to link the work to Germany’s more recent past. </p>
<p>No such explanatory material was found in the program supplied by Opera Australia. </p>
<p>An otherwise fine essay by Wagner scholar Heath Lees provided some general historical background, but it offers no bridge between the work and what the audience now sees on stage. No mention was made, either, of the remarkable first Australian performances of Lohengrin in Melbourne in 1877. </p>
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<span class="caption">The production’s symbolism was explained in extensive program essays at its run in Belgium.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby/Opera Australia</span></span>
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<p>As much as the opportunity to witness Kaufmann’s vocal mastery might yet have been “<a href="https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/great-tenor-shame-about-the-bric-a-brac/">enough to justify the price of the tickets</a>”, Opera Australia does the art form no favours if it gives the impression it is first and foremost just a vehicle for a vocal superstar. </p>
<p>Ironically, such an impoverishment of theatrical, and indeed social, ambition for opera was a danger that Wagner himself <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_and_Drama">famously rallied against</a>.</p>
<h2>An informed audience</h2>
<p>Opera Australia should have enthusiastically seized the opportunity to educate its audience about why this production took the form it did. Its public role, after all, should not be just to entertain us, but also to inform and at times – as <em>Regieoper</em> seeks to do – challenge us. </p>
<p>By actively helping to set the scene, as it were, Opera Australia can also show how historic works like Lohengrin – nominally separated from our everyday lives by content, time or place – can still speak meaningfully to us, whether or not they are presented in a “traditional” or <em>Regieoper</em> garb. </p>
<p>Heritage art forms like opera ought to be able to sit comfortably alongside cutting-edge contemporary work as part of a fully rounded national culture but audiences should always be encouraged to understand and engage with that heritage critically.</p>
<p>Ultimately, encouraging a healthy and honest dialogue between our various pasts and our multifaceted present is one sure way we have to imagine a better future.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-australian-opera-lost-the-plot-12289">How Australian opera lost the plot</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tregear is chair of Melbourne-based not-for-profit chamber opera company IOpera.</span></em></p>In many countries, helpful background information and context is offered to audiences in the accompanying program – why are Australians missing out?Peter Tregear, Principal Fellow and Professor of Music, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1162792019-05-09T20:08:43Z2019-05-09T20:08:43ZFriday essay: separating the art from the badly behaved artist – a philosopher’s view<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272925/original/file-20190506-103053-4opofv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">US actor Kevin Spacey is escorted into Nantucket District Court in January for arraignment on a sexual assault charge. His lawyers entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">CJ Gunther/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When actor <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-09/kevin-spacey-cut-from-ridley-scott-movie-weeks-before-release/9134872">Kevin Spacey</a> was accused of attempted sexual assault of a teenage boy, his role in the Ridley Scott film, All the Money in the World, was erased and reshot with Christopher Plummer. When the celebrated Torres Strait Island painter Dennis Nona went to jail for raping a 12-year-old girl, Australian art galleries responded by <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2016/12/03/dennis-nona-and-moral-questions-about-criminal-artists/14806836004048">taking his works off their walls</a> and putting them into storage. R Kelly’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/arts/music/r-kelly-rca-sony.html">concerts were cancelled</a> and his RCA contract was not renewed because of his alleged sexual abuse of underage women. </p>
<p>The history of art is full of artists who were cruel, exploitative, prejudiced or predatory. Picasso mistreated women, the Renaissance painter Caravaggio was a murderer. Wagner was an anti-Semite, Alfred Hitchcock tried to ruin Tippi Hedren’s career as an actress <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/31/tippi-hedren-alfred-hitchcock-sexually-assaulted-me">because she refused his sexual advances</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272966/original/file-20190507-103053-yj4p8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pablo Picasso, pictured in 1962: mistreated women.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The #MeToo movement has thrown a spotlight on contemporary cases of artists and producers harassing and bullying those in their power. </p>
<p>Those who harass or rape should be exposed and punished. The license to break moral rules that genius is sometimes thought to bestow on artists has to be revoked. But should the character of an artist affect how we judge their works? </p>
<p>Should the works or performances of wrongdoing artists be censored, shunned, or locked away? Should good behaviour be a criterion for exhibiting an artist’s works? “Once we start removing paintings from walls, where do we stop?” asks arts editor and art historian <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/on-artists-paperback-softback">Ashleigh Wilson</a>. </p>
<p>Shunning art because of the behaviour of the artist offends against traditional assumptions about the value of art and the relationship between artists and their works. </p>
<p>We are supposed to value artistic expression and oppose attempts to suppress artistic works even when people are deeply offended by their content. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Piss-Christ">Piss Christ</a>, a photograph by Andres Serrano of a crucifix submerged in a tank of his urine, was exhibited in galleries even though many Christians viewed it as sacrilegious. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272922/original/file-20190506-103060-1hv5hoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tippi Hendren and Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. The actress claims Hitchcock assaulted her while filming The Birds.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">idmb</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But if it is wrong to censure art or refuse to display it because of its content, how can it be right to shun it because of the behaviour of the artist? What’s the difference?</p>
<h2>The perils of biography</h2>
<p>The view that we shouldn’t judge art because of the behaviour of the artist is backed up by common ideas about how we should appreciate art. A work of art or a performance is supposed to have value and meaning in its own right. It’s supposed to be judged for what it is and not its relation to extraneous factors. This view allows that the biography of the artist can be used to provide an insight into the work, but the life of the artist is not supposed to affect our judgement of the aesthetic value of his or her works. </p>
<p>Artists themselves warn against taking their works as a reflection of who they are. When asked whether his films helped him work through his life dilemmas, <a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,723927,00.html">Woody Allen denied any relation between his life and his works</a>. “Movies are fiction. The plots of my movies don’t have any relationship to my life.” If works of art belong to a realm separated off from the life of the artist they can’t be polluted by the bad things artists do. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272926/original/file-20190507-103049-o65jbc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Woody Allen and Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall (1977).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions, Rollins-Joffe Productions.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The separation of life and character from art is far from complete. In his new book <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/on-artists-paperback-softback">On Artists</a>, Ashley Wilson finds a scene in Allen’s Annie Hall that suggests the wrong kind of attitude to children’s sexuality. This scene is especially disturbing because of Allen’s daughter Dylan’s accusation that <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alisonvingiano/woody-allens-adoptive-daughter-speaks-out-about-her-sexual-a">he sexually assaulted her as a child</a>, which Allen denies. Wilson also cites dialogue in Hitchcock’s Marnie that seems to reveal his perverse obsession with Hedren. </p>
<p>Some of R Kelly’s lyrics can be interpreted as condoning sexual harassment and it is not difficult to find anti-Semitic or pro-nationalist elements in Wagner’s operas. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272921/original/file-20190506-103068-1ul7f6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Composer Richard Wagner photographed in 1861: an anti-Semite.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But does this matter? Works of art now regarded as classics frequently contain assumptions about race or the roles of women that we now reject. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice makes anti-Semitic assumptions about Jews and Taming of the Shrew has its misogynous moments. But they do not significantly detract from the value we find in these works.</p>
<p>We should be willing to accept that artists are not free from the prejudices of their culture, from blindness to its prejudices or from faults of character. We should make allowances for that when we evaluate their art and not let ourselves be distracted from appreciating its values. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/michael-jackson-r-kelly-debate-spotify-youtube">When Spotify took R Kelly off its playlist</a> it faced the objections of fans who value his music. The brilliance of Michael Jackson’s music transcends accusations of paedophilia levelled against him. Many people, including Wilson, believe that Wagner’s works deserve veneration despite their dubious elements. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dont-ban-michael-jacksons-music-talk-about-the-accusations-113109">Don’t ban Michael Jackson's music – talk about the accusations</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>When is a ban justified?</h2>
<p>The distinction between art and the artist breaks down when the intention of the artist is to support a racist or sexist ideology. <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/leni-riefenstahl">Leni Riefenstahl</a> used her talents as a filmmaker to celebrate Hitler’s regime. D.W. Griffith defended the prejudices of white Southerners in <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/birth_of_a_nation/">Birth of a Nation</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272920/original/file-20190506-103068-tfdte9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leni Riefenstahl directing in 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">idmb</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It also breaks down when the artist is a celebrity and a role model. One museum director defended her refusal to exhibit Nona’s art because showing it would endorse his status as a role model in his Indigenous community. Football players are suspended for acting badly. Why not penalise artists by taking their art out of circulation?</p>
<p>If a work of art vilifies a group or incites violence then there are legal as well as moral reasons for banning or censoring it. If showing an artist’s work impacts on his community and causes serious distress to his victims, then these people should have a say about what should be done with it. </p>
<p>But a ban on a work of art is only justifiable so long as the danger or harm exists. Nona has apologised for his deeds and has tried to rehabilitate himself. There is no good reason why his works should not reappear on gallery walls. </p>
<p>The #MeToo movement provides the most plausible reason for shunning or boycotting the works of artists who rape, assault or bully others. This movement arose from women’s complaints about their treatment by powerful men as actors and producers – men whose position and fame gave them the power, the women allege, to wreck careers and get away with sexual assault and harassment. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272933/original/file-20190507-103078-l00jhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">R. Kelly is escorted out of jail on bail by his attorney Steve Greenberg in February. Kelly, who has been charged with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse, has pleaded not guilty to the charges.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tannen Maury/EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Punishing these men through the courts is a difficult course of action. The charges are often hard to prove and cultural acceptance of bad behaviour by artists sometimes makes it difficult for judges, juries and witnesses to regard their acts as serious wrongs. </p>
<p>What is needed, most #MeToo advocates agree, is a cultural change. An effective way of changing the culture of artists is to prevent them from exhibiting their works or performing their roles. Kevin Spacey’s removal from All the Money in the World (despite the fact that he has <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-08/kevin-spaceys-lawyers-enter-not-guilty-plea/10696430">pleaded not guilty</a> to the charge that he assaulted an 18-year-old busboy in a Nantucket bar) sent the message that sexual assault would no longer be overlooked or tolerated. It was both a punishment and an expression of moral distaste. It vindicated the status of the victims and it warned others to avoid offending.</p>
<h2>A dangerous way to achieve cultural change</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272964/original/file-20190507-103060-15ue8ru.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272964/original/file-20190507-103060-15ue8ru.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272964/original/file-20190507-103060-15ue8ru.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272964/original/file-20190507-103060-15ue8ru.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272964/original/file-20190507-103060-15ue8ru.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272964/original/file-20190507-103060-15ue8ru.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272964/original/file-20190507-103060-15ue8ru.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>But this strategy for achieving cultural change has obvious dangers. Wilson is right to worry about where we are going when we start removing pictures from gallery walls or preventing actors from performing. If the character of the artist becomes a criterion for judging art then the door is open to the exclusion of artists because they belong to a despised group or <a href="https://theconversation.com/weve-scrubbed-dennis-nonas-art-from-our-galleries-to-our-cost-39693">because they have said or done something that many people do not like</a>. </p>
<p>Removing or censoring art works can also be an unfair way of achieving a moral goal, especially when wrong doing by artists has been encouraged by the complicity of others. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/magazine/the-revenge-of-tippi-hedren-alfred-hitchcocks-muse.html">In an interview after Hitchcock’s death</a>, Tippi Hedren refused to allow the wrong he did to override her judgement about his talent and contribution as a film director. “I still admire the man for what he was.” </p>
<p>The distinction she insists on making is worth preserving. We should expose the wrongdoing of artists and but we should not be prevented from admiring their works.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/116279/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janna Thompson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If it is wrong to censure art or refuse to display it because of its content, how can it be right to shun it because of the behaviour of the artist?Janna Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1069322018-11-14T04:53:24Z2018-11-14T04:53:24ZA knowing, modern yet mythic production of one of Hitler’s favourite operas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245495/original/file-20181114-194516-1gkw6di.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The cast of Opera Australia's 2018 production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Arts Centre Melbourne. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Melbourne.</em></p>
<p>Australian productions of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) are rare and for those of us attending the opening night of Opera Australia’s production in Melbourne, it is easy enough to see why. </p>
<p>Die Meistersinger is an extravagantly long, complex, and resource-intensive piece of theatre. But this, in turn, reflects the ambition of the composer to create works that would have an equally grandiose social and political impact on audiences.</p>
<p>For economic reasons alone, co-productions make particular sense, and here Opera Australia has collaborated with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, to mount a production conceived by the Royal Opera’s then house director, Kasper Holten, in 2017.</p>
<p>Holten’s work has typically divided critics, and this production is no exception. When it premiered in London, the Spectator’s Michael Tanner declared, “Nothing could prepare me for so deep an abyss of idiocy”. Others, however, have found Holten’s directorial interventions to be revelatory. </p>
<p>Such a stark division of opinion reflects the nature of so-called Regieoper, a style of production where a director feels licensed, if not obliged, to reinterpret the largely 19th century Western European operatic canon in order to reflect contemporary sensibilities and concerns.</p>
<p>In Holten’s hands (and brilliantly realised through Mia Stensgaard’s stunning set design, Anja Vang Kragh’s costumes, and Jesper Kongshaugh’s lighting design) Wagner’s 16th-century guild of mastersingers becomes a modern-day men’s club. The whole setting of Act II is changed from a village street scene to that club’s backstage area. Walther von Stolzing, the knight errant (and, eventual prize-winning singer), is dressed to look more like Meat Loaf than a Lancelot.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245489/original/file-20181114-194500-1vc4che.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stefan Vinke as Walther Von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: dressed to look more like Meatloaf than a Lancelot.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wagner’s works are, however, particularly ripe for such treatment because he was himself a pioneering modern dramatist. His operas foreshadow cinematic styles and techniques as well as the themes and interests of symbolist and psychoanalytical drama. </p>
<p>While Die Meistersinger stands apart from Wagner’s other works in being grounded more in historical, rather than mythical, materials (we find here, for instance, no goddesses with winged helmets, nor knights arriving on the backs of swans and the main character, the cobbler and poet Hans Sachs, is based on an actual historical figure), he still ultimately gives this material a mythic frame. </p>
<p>The setting of the opera, the city of Nuremberg, a town in the geographical heart of Teutonic Europe, serves as the embodiment of the spirit of the German people writ-large. The singing competition that lies at the heart of the opera’s plot thus acts as a means for Wagner to proselytise what he considers to be quintessentially German cultural qualities and virtues.</p>
<p>It was no surprise, then, that Die Meistersinger eventually became a favourite work of the opera-loving leader of the Third Reich. The work was performed, for instance, at Adolf Hitler’s formal inauguration in March 1933. </p>
<p>And the character of Sixtus Beckmesser (here brilliantly sung and acted by Warwick Fyfe), the one person in the opera who does not seem to be able to “get” what makes German art great, has more recently been interpreted as an evocation of anti-Semitic tropes. Certainly we know from his own writings that Wagner believed that Jews were a corrupting influence on “true” German culture.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245491/original/file-20181114-194488-4djc67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Warwick Fyfe as Sixtus Beckmesser.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As is so often the case, Wagner’s works (as opposed to Wagner the man), ultimately defy straightforward interpretations. Beckmesser’s role as a comic foil in the opera derives from his musical (and, by extension cultural) conservatism. Yet, despite his eventual public humiliation, by the end of the opera Hans Sachs seems ultimately to support his point of view, declaring that Germans should honour their masters. Even if Germany itself were to disappear as a political entity, he declares, “Still would remain/ Our sacred German Art”.</p>
<h2>Gender politics</h2>
<p>One of the benefits of Holten’s staging is that what we see and hear at this point, however, is no longer a simple, direct, appeal, but rather a knowing representation of one. Similarly, Holten is also interested in reminding us of the gendered aspect underpinning Wagner’s drama. </p>
<p>At the conclusion of the opera, in defiance not only of her father, and the men-folk of Nuremberg, but in defiance of the opera itself, Eva quite literally walks off stage. She refuses to play her otherwise pre-destined role as a wife and mother, or indeed as Walther von Stolzing’s ‘prize’.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245492/original/file-20181114-194516-o0ghed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Natalie Aroyan as Eva and Dominica Matthews as Magdalene in the Melbourne production.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s a clever move. But here, too, it does not close the issue. What, then, do we make of Eva’s actions given that she also sincerely loves Walther? Does not her act of freedom come at the price of emotional honesty? Gender politics aside, is it not an uncomfortable truth (for both sexes) that loving another always involves a degree of personal compromise?</p>
<p>I suspect Wagner himself, however, would not have been upset were we to contemplate such issues, given his own lifelong interest in the struggle we all face to reconcile the competing demands of social and personal integrity. And it is one sign that this, ultimately, is a successful production. It is also terrific to see the full stage of the State Theatre in use. So often Melbourne audiences for Opera Australia productions have had to put up with “cut down” stagings that were designed initially for the much smaller dimensions of the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245493/original/file-20181114-194519-887p2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Natalie Aroyan as Eva and the Opera Australia ensemble.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Conductor Pietari Inkinen, already well known to local audiences through his musical direction of Opera Australia’s two seasons of Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, directs Orchestra Victoria in an accomplished reading of Wagner’s complex score. As for the performances on stage, Warwick Fyfe’s outstanding musical and dramatic characterisation of Beckmesser alone makes a ticket worthwhile, other standout cast members are Nicholas Jones (playing Sachs’ apprentice David with youthful aplomb) and Natalie Aroyan as a radiantly sounding Eva. </p>
<p>Hans Sachs was sung beautifully by German bass-baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky even if he didn’t quite have the vocal gravitas that both role and the venue really required. Vocal presence was certainly not an issue for Stefan Vinke as Walther von Stolzing, but he did not sound comfortable meeting the exceptional technical demands of the role.</p>
<p>The minor principals and chorus, however, all acquitted themselves admirably. Any quibbles aside, this is a great ensemble performance by Opera Australia and well worth a listen and look.</p>
<p><em>Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is at the Arts Centre Melbourne, State Theatre, on Sat Nov 17, Mon 19 Nov and Thurs 22 Nov.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106932/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tregear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremburg) is a long, complex work. An ensemble performance by Opera Australia transports Wagner’s 16th-century guild of mastersingers to a modern-day men’s club.Peter Tregear, Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1030772018-09-12T21:21:37Z2018-09-12T21:21:37ZDoug Ford’s attack on the ‘Court Party’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235996/original/file-20180912-133877-zu10ms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks to reporters in Toronto on Sept. 10, 2018, after announcing he'll invoke the notwithstanding clause in his battle to shrink Toronto city council. Is Ford taking on the "Court Party?"</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ontario Premier Doug Ford has announced he intends to use the notwithstanding clause of Canada’s Constitution in his battle to shrink Toronto city council and reintroduce his controversial <a href="https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-42/session-1/bill-5"><em>Better Local Government Act</em>.</a> </p>
<p>The unexpected announcement immediately followed a ruling by an Ontario Superior Court justice who ruled that the proposed legislation, <a href="https://news.ontario.ca/opo/en/2018/07/the-better-local-government-act.html">which would reduce the number of wards in the upcoming Toronto municipal election from 47 to 25,</a> violates the Charter rights of municipal candidates and voters. </p>
<p>If Ford follows through, it will be the first time the notwithstanding clause has been invoked in Ontario. The move has sparked outrage from Ford’s political opponents and municipal candidates, who have <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-city-council-cuts-doug-ford-reaction-1.4817125">decried Ford’s use of the clause as an undemocratic abuse of power. </a></p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235997/original/file-20180912-133883-jec253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235997/original/file-20180912-133883-jec253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235997/original/file-20180912-133883-jec253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235997/original/file-20180912-133883-jec253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235997/original/file-20180912-133883-jec253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235997/original/file-20180912-133883-jec253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235997/original/file-20180912-133883-jec253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Brian Mulroney, father of Caroline, is ‘not a fan’ of the notwithstanding clause.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even former prime minister Brian Mulroney, the father of Ford’s attorney general, Caroline Mulroney, <a href="https://ipolitics.ca/2018/09/11/premier-using-notwithstanding-clause-to-override-a-court-a-problem-brian-mulroney-says/">has publicly called the move “a problem.”</a></p>
<p>Ford’s motivation to slash the number of council seats seems clearly motivated by his personal experiences as a Toronto city councillor, where he worked alongside his brother, the late and controversial Toronto mayor Rob Ford, to reduce the size of government programs, limit municipal spending and reduce government waste in Canada’s most populous city.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/who-votes-for-a-mayor-like-rob-ford-20193">Who votes for a mayor like Rob Ford?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But Ford’s wielding of the notwithstanding clause should also be understood as part of a broader opposition to judicial activism that has developed among right-wing politicians and academics in the post-Charter era. </p>
<p>Ford is not merely taking a political shot at Toronto city council, but instead is using Section 33 of the Constitution to reassert the primacy of representative institutions over judicial authority. </p>
<p>Ultimately, this pushback against judicial activism is consistent with Ford’s populist drive to limit the influence of special interests and reinvigorate majority rule in Ontario. </p>
<h2>The Charter revolution</h2>
<p>The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 had a transformative impact on Canadian politics. Charter cases have been used to resolve disputes and chart new policy direction over some of Canada’s most divisive political issues. Issues such as <a href="http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/cases.html">same-sex marriage, abortion, assisted dying, Indigenous rights and religious freedom</a> have all been subject to Charter jurisprudence. </p>
<p>While the Charter has served as an important tool for the recognition of minority rights, it’s also invited a great deal of debate and criticism.
In their widely influential book, <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Charter_Revolution_and_the_Court_Par.html?id=QD-TG9jic9EC&redir_esc=y">The Charter Revolution and the Court Party</a></em>, political scientists F.L. Morton and Rainer Knopff have argued that the Charter has undemocratically empowered the judiciary at the expense of elected bodies and the bureaucracy. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235999/original/file-20180912-133880-xzhy2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235999/original/file-20180912-133880-xzhy2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235999/original/file-20180912-133880-xzhy2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235999/original/file-20180912-133880-xzhy2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235999/original/file-20180912-133880-xzhy2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235999/original/file-20180912-133880-xzhy2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235999/original/file-20180912-133880-xzhy2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leader of the ‘Court Party?’ Richard Wagner, Supreme Court of Canada chief justice, is seen in this March 2018 photo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Morton and Knopff argue that in empowering the judiciary and allowing for the adjudication of important public policy decisions and social issues, the Charter has helped to create what they refer to as the “Court Party.”</p>
<p>Comprised of a cadre of left-wing groups and social movements, the “Court Party” concerns itself with causes like feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism and environmentalism, relying on the Charter as a strategic tool to pursue their political agendas in the legal arena. </p>
<p>The influence of these views on the Charter has extended well beyond the walls of academia to inform the opinions of political leaders. Stephen Harper was one such disciple of this view of judicial activism <a href="http://www.leaf.ca/elimination-of-the-court-challenges-program-ccp/">who, when in power, took steps to eliminate support for the funding of Charter challenges</a>. </p>
<p>It is within this broader intellectual tradition of opposition to judicial activism that we can understand Doug Ford’s decision to invoke the notwithstanding clause. </p>
<h2>A populist declaration against the courts</h2>
<p>In responding to the Superior Court judge’s ruling, Ford offered a response that harkened back to the notion of the “Court Party” while also offering opposition to judicial activism on democratic grounds. </p>
<p>Ford argued that the only opposition to his proposed legislation are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HChEDG8n4a0">“a small group of left-wing councillors” and “a network of activist groups who have entrenched themselves under the power of the status quo.”</a> </p>
<p>This framing of his opponents as institutionally entrenched, left-wing social activists evokes many of the defining characteristics of the “Court Party.” The response to the judge’s ruling is also consistent with what has become Ford’s governing mantra focused on limiting the influence and privilege of special interests while promoting the interests of “the people.”</p>
<p>It’s along these lines that Ford has also voiced his opposition to judicial activism. Ford concluded his bombshell news conference by stating that “if you want to make new laws in Ontario or in Canada, you first must seek a mandate from the people and you have to be elected.” </p>
<h2>Challenged courts’ legitimacy</h2>
<p>In this statement and others, Ford did not challenge the legal reasoning behind the judge’s decision. Instead he chose to attack the democratic legitimacy of the courts to make a ruling that overrides elected decision-makers. </p>
<p>Ford’s opposition to judicial activism on the grounds that it threatens the power and jurisdiction of elected institutions and representatives is clearly linked to his populist world view and vision of government.</p>
<p>However, it’s important to recognize that Ford’s framing of his opponents and the role of the courts is not of his own invention. It’s part of a longer intellectual tradition among right-wing thinkers in Canada.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103077/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brian Budd receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada</span></em></p>Doug Ford’s wielding of the notwithstanding clause is part of a broader opposition to judicial activism that has developed among right-wing politicians and academics in the post-Charter era.Brian Budd, Ph.D Candidate, University of GuelphLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/752232017-05-21T20:10:46Z2017-05-21T20:10:46ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164230/original/image-20170406-16614-1kes7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Composing a symphonic landscape: Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 oil painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic reality”, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/293954-he-who-climbs-upon-the-highest-mountains-laughs-at-all">said</a> the prophetic protagonist in the German philosopher Nietzsche’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51893.Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra">Thus Spoke Zarathustra</a>. </p>
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<span class="caption">Richard Strauss in 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Richard Strauss, who had already produced an orchestral work inspired by that book, seemingly took this injunction to heart when composing An Alpine Symphony (1915), which despite the title is better considered as the last of his “tone poems”. </p>
<p>The eight earlier tone poems, single-movement orchestral pieces with titles and prefaces linking the music to literature or other subject matter, had made Strauss one of the most celebrated (and controversial) composers of his day. However, although he continued composing until his death in 1949, he concentrated thereafter on opera rather than orchestral music. </p>
<p>Consequently, An Alpine Symphony marks the end of an era, both for the composer and for German symphonic music more generally, because after the First World War big romantic works like this went severely out of fashion. Though this tone poem was completed while the horrors of war dominated the news, it does not suggest any awareness of its larger political or historical situation. Rather, An Alpine Symphony remained focused on the representation of a landscape through music.</p>
<h2>Tragic inspirations</h2>
<p>Strauss first began working on what would become An Alpine Symphony in 1900, under the title “Tragedy of an artist” - a reference to the suicide of Swiss-born painter <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/ARTstauffer.htm">Karl Stauffer-Bern</a>. In the following decade he set the project aside and seemingly swapped orchestral composition for opera, achieving enormous success on stage with the scandalous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViLcRFqtTpk">Salome</a>, and the still darker <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqWbxitsIvM">Elektra</a>, before he turned back to more accessible musical fare with the waltz-filled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi810zB3L04">Rosenkavalier</a>. </p>
<p>The immediate impulse for Strauss’s return to An Alpine Symphony was the premature death in 1911 of his friend, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler too had bid farewell to the German symphonic tradition in his Ninth Symphony, which expires exquisitely into nothingness at the end of the fourth movement. </p>
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<p>Even when Strauss took up work on the project again, its name was still in flux. He envisaged calling it “The Antichrist” (after <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18304.The_Anti_Christ">Nietzsche’s book</a> of the same title), since it “represents moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, [and] worship of eternal, magnificent nature”, as Strauss wrote on <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ijEp8a7FawEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA93#v=onepage&q&f=false">his diary</a> in May 1911. But when this title was dropped in favour of An Alpine Symphony, the link to Nietzsche was obscured. </p>
<h2>Man vs. wild</h2>
<p>On the surface then, the final form of An Alpine Symphony is a sonic portrait of an unidentified protagonist successfully conquering a mountain. By this point in his career, Strauss was living at least part of the year in the southern Bavarian town of Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), within sight of Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak. Strauss loved to go rambling in the alps. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Strauss in Garmisch, Germany in 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Strauss_1938.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>The unbroken 50 minute tone poem contains 22 parts describing a variety of landscape features on the route to and from the mountain summit: the climber passes through the woods, by a stream, near a waterfall, across flowery meadows and pastureland, through thickets, and onto the glacier before reaching the top, each of these suggested by some sonic analogue. </p>
<p>Nature’s temporal and climatic changes are also prominent: the events of the day are bordered by sunrise and sunset, and the hiker encounters mist and a storm. </p>
<p>The composer’s customary skill at representing non-musical entities through music is on full display here: the waterfall is a particular highlight in its imaginative rendition of the water’s spray.</p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>To suggest the sound of Bavarian mountain pastures, Strauss used cowbells – an instrument which had been memorably featured by Gustav Mahler in his Sixth Symphony.</p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 (known as the Pastoral symphony) is in some ways a precedent for Strauss’s work. Both compositions feature a brook, and later a violent storm followed by a beatific calm. <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Pastoral_Symphony,_The_(Beethoven)">Beethoven</a>, however, claimed that his Symphony contained “more expression of feeling than painting”, and the title of his first movement (“Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country”) bears out its focus on the emotional journey of experiencing the landscape, rather than on painting the landscape itself. </p>
<p>Strauss, on the other hand, wanted to represent nature in sound, but also to show the human protagonist who experiences it. In this sense, he goes beyond Beethoven in the boldness of his depictions.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Strauss conducting in 1917.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_orchestra_and_its_instruments_(1917)_(14780185164).jpg">Esther Singleton, Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>The climber is introduced in the third section in a bold striding theme, which confidently traces a jagged ascending course – until it pulls up briefly a few bars later, as the climber runs out of breath. </p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>This theme was actually modelled on an idea from the finale of Beethoven’s <a href="https://youtu.be/hsuwwzthcA8?t=9m22s">Fifth Symphony</a>, although scholars only discovered this much later. Ingeniously, Strauss later flips his theme upside down as the mountaineer descends in haste through the storm.</p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>In between, the climber manages to <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=23m0s">attain the summit</a>. Here Strauss swaps landscape painting for evoking feelings of triumph that he himself would have experienced many times in his mountain wanderings. </p>
<p>Yet again, the opening of this new theme is a borrowing, this time from the <a href="https://youtu.be/RxJJYdG1_E8?t=6m30s">second movement</a> of German composer Max Bruch’s beloved Violin Concerto no. 1. Strauss freely reshapes this idea into a passage of sublime magnificence – symphonic music at its most monumental.</p>
<h2>Playing with history</h2>
<p>There are other, looser connections to earlier music. The opening of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJYMdiB6fME">Strauss’s tone poem</a> recalls the Prelude of Richard Wagner’s opera, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1zsSaLiD7Q">Das Rheingold</a>, the opening drama of his <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-ring-cycle-7999">four-part Ring Cycle</a>. </p>
<p>Both works start out from a place of quiet stillness, from which the music gradually grows in loudness and liveliness. The two composers were trying to represent nature in its most primal form, and the burgeoning of life that arises from it. Interestingly, when a teenage Strauss was caught out a storm in the mountains, he channelled the experience into an improvised piano composition: “naturally huge tone painting and smarminess à la Wagner”, the precocious 15-year-old wrote, being no fan of Wagner’s music at the time. </p>
<p>But by the time he wrote An Alpine Symphony, Strauss had been a card-carrying Wagnerian for many years. It is likely that this was a deliberate homage to the effect Wagner created – although the actual themes in both passages are quite different.</p>
<p>Yet another sort of allusion is found in the <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=14m39s">flowery meadows passage</a>, where the accompanying plucked strings (“pizzicato”) and mellifluous string writing strongly recall a texture typical of German composer Johannes Brahms. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture conducted by American composer Leonard Bernstein.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Even Strauss’s earlier works are revisited: the explosion into life at the “<a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=3m12s">Sunrise</a>” in An Alpine Symphony is akin to one of his previous, and more famous, openings: the start of <a href="https://youtu.be/ETveS23djXM?t=56s">Also Sprach Zarathustra</a> – where the prophet greets the sun. This passage has become iconic, thanks to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/">2001: A Space Odyssey</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra makes for a memorable intro in 2001: A Space Odyssey.</span></figcaption>
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<p>And finally, the opening of An Alpine Symphony, with its slow descending scales, directly quotes from the start of Strauss’s much earlier <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO22oE7jZ4c">F minor Symphony</a>. Here, Strauss returns to his beginnings for what turned out to be his last major orchestral tone poem.</p>
<h2>Down to earth</h2>
<p>So what do all these borrowings and allusions signify? First, they cement the picture of Strauss as heir to the German music traditions. Before he decisively transferred his allegiance to Wagner, Strauss had undergone a brief Brahms infatuation, and this, too, had left its mark. Nonetheless, Strauss did not reproduce earlier ideas in a passive fashion in his Alpine Symphony. Rather, he transformed and reworked a wide range of source materials. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Strauss in 1922.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_Schmutzer_-_Richard_Strauss,_1922.jpg">Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>More radical still was Strauss’s larger agenda, where he parts company from his symphonic precursors. Since at least the time of Beethoven, the symphony had been treated as a semi-sacred genre. It was perceived to have metaphysical significance. The writer and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=UmYZzMF1oiUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false">critic E.T.A. Hoffmann</a> expressed it thus in a famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810: “Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him.”</p>
<p>In recent decades, musicologists such as <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=21904">Charles Youmans have recognised</a> that Strauss’s agenda in his orchestral compositions was deliberately at odds with this. He rejected these metaphysical pretensions, and his explicit tone-painting in works like An Alpine Symphony expresses a more grounded, earthly agenda. Nietzsche <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/563547-i-beseech-you-my-brothers-remain-faithful-to-the-earth">called in Also sprach Zarathustra</a> for mankind to “remain true to the earth; do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes”. In nature, Strauss had found an earthly object that was worthy of worship. </p>
<p>A few decades later, Strauss envisaged writing one more tone poem called Der Donau (the Danube), a tribute to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But he never got further than the preliminary sketches. </p>
<p>An Alpine Symphony therefore remains his last substantial output within this arena. There are many ways to approach this work: we can rejoice in the sonic gorgeousness of its surface, or admire how cleverly Strauss has re-imagined of nature in musical terms, or hear in it a farewell to a tradition Strauss himself had subtly subverted. </p>
<p>It’s a more complex composition than it appears to be. And as it fades away enigmatically into <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=47m2s">nocturnal darkness</a>, so too did a glorious chapter in German symphonic music pass with this work into history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75223/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Larkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With An Alpine Symphony, Richard Strauss achieved something remarkable: the painting of the German alps, complete with cow meadows and waterfalls, in sound.David Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/774952017-05-10T23:04:24Z2017-05-10T23:04:24ZWhat I discovered inside Edinburgh’s museum of musical instruments<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168750/original/file-20170510-28075-1nvsx94.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">St Cecilia's Hall.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Cecilia%27s_Hall">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>You can’t often travel around the world, traversing six centuries in just ten paces. But that’s the offering at Edinburgh’s Musical Instruments Museum, one of the world’s leading collections of its kind. Situated just off the Royal Mile in the Scottish capital, it reopened on May 11 after three years of refurbishment. </p>
<p>The museum is housed in St Cecilia’s Hall, the oldest purpose-built concert hall in Scotland. This Georgian grande dame of British music history has just completed a <a href="http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/library-museum-gallery/museums-and-galleries/musical-instrument-museums/sch">£6.5m redevelopment project</a>. I arranged a sneak preview of the collection ahead of the opening to see what it has in store. </p>
<p>The study of musical instruments, known as organology, is an often overlooked branch of music. Yet in the age before sound recording, nothing can get us as close to the musical soundscapes of Mozart and Bach as the actual tools of their time. </p>
<p>St Cecilia’s Hall consolidates a collection it previously shared with another building. Spread over four galleries, it displays a selection of some 6,000 instruments (there’s also an online repository of sounds <a href="http://www.euchmi.ed.ac.uk/ujia.html">here</a>). </p>
<h2>Peacocks and sax appeal</h2>
<p>Stepping from the entrance vestibule into the Laigh Hall gallery on the ground floor, you are whisked from the Renaissance to the 21st Century, from North America to Asia and back again. A small violin with no sides, made before the shape we know today became the norm, is by the Bassano family – a famous group of Italian instrument makers employed at the court of Henry VIII. </p>
<p>A few paces to the right is the visually enticing Indian mayuri. From the 19th century, and also probably from a courtly setting, it is carved and richly decorated to look like a peacock to represent <a href="http://www.sanatansociety.org/hindu_gods_and_goddesses/saraswati.htm">Saraswati</a>, the Hindu goddess of music. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168719/original/file-20170510-28078-rkp1th.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The 19th-century mayuri.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/UoEart~2~2~73102~164129:Peacock-vina---top-view?qvq=q%3Apeacock%3Bsort%3Awork_creator_details%2Cwork_title%2Cwork_display_date%2Cwork_technique&sort=work_creator_details%2Cwork_title%2Cwork_display_date%2Cwork_technique&mi=16&trs=23#">University of Edinburgh</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Through into the Wolfson gallery, you are accosted by a four-and-a-half-foot serpent: a wind instrument. Originally devised in the late 16th century, it was meant to be used for church music, but was also included in orchestral works by composers such as Mozart and Wagner. This <a href="http://collections.ed.ac.uk/mimed/record/18242?highlight=contrabass+serpent">oversized example</a>, known technically as a contrabass serpent, is a more recent creation made around 1840. </p>
<p>Keeping the serpent company is a quartet of saxophones from the workshop of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antoine-Joseph-Sax">Adolphe Sax</a>, the Belgian who invented them in the 1840s. Like the serpent’s influence on the bass range of the orchestra with the ultimate creation of the tuba, Sax’s invention had most impact on jazz and pop. Behind these somewhat clunky originals is a sad story, however: Sax died in poverty in 1894 at the dawn of jazz.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1299&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1299&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168723/original/file-20170510-28092-5d0pbr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1299&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ye olde Gibson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/UoEart~2~2~51942~104337:English-guitar--W-Gibson----FRONT?qvq=q%3Agibson%3Bsort%3Awork_creator_details%2Cwork_title%2Cwork_display_date%2Cwork_technique&sort=work_creator_details%2Cwork_title%2Cwork_display_date%2Cwork_technique&mi=6&trs=101">University of Edinburgh</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>At the other side of the gallery, a selection of plucked and bowed western instruments display a variety lost to 19th-century orchestral standardisation. An English guitar by William Gibson from 1772 sits beside an electric Fender Telecaster: the former used mainly by women to display their talents and attract an eligible husband, and the latter vice versa two centuries later. </p>
<p>A tiny dancing-master’s fiddle from the mid-17th century, known as a pochette, was used to accompany dance lessons in preparation for the frequent balls and assemblies – essentially an early form of speed dating. </p>
<p>There’s also a clutch of <em>violas d’amore</em>, or violas of love. As well as the name and eye-catching design, additional resonant strings create an unusual sweet and enveloping sound that would undoubtedly have been used to woo the opposite sex. </p>
<h2>Ebony and ivory</h2>
<p>The two upstairs galleries house countless keyboard instruments, many still frequently used in concert. Dressed in slightly unsympathetic red leather panels, the Binks gallery exhibits instruments from the famed <a href="http://www.ruckersgenootschap.be/HIS.php">Ruckers workshop of Antwerp</a>, the <a href="http://aviolinslife.org/stradivari/">Stradivari</a> of the harpsichord world. </p>
<p>Beside these examples of perfection sit fakes and forgeries, such as the Goermans harpsichord of 1764, altered in the 1780s by the French craftsman <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pascal-Taskin">Pascal Taskin</a>. Taskin made the instrument appear not only a hundred years older, but to also hail from the Ruckers family. That Goermans was still making harpsichords in Paris at the time just a short walk from Taskin’s workshop raises questions of his complicity. </p>
<p>Next door in the 1812 gallery is a clavichord made in Hamburg by Johann Adolph Hass, one of the best makers of his generation. Made in 1763 – the year St Cecilia’s Hall was built – it would effectively be impossible to reproduce today with its use of tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, rosewood, kingwood and ivory. </p>
<figure>
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<p>There is also a dinky harpsichord known as an octave spinet. Reminiscent of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuQBjuySvyw">Schroeder’s toy piano</a> in Peanuts, it could be easily transported for use during travel, or moved around the home to accompany singing – quiet instruments such as spinets and clavichords were designed for domestic use. </p>
<p>It sits next to the Burkat Shudi harpsichord of 1766, an impressive instrument with two keyboards. It had a variety of stops to vary its tone, which was used before the more versatile piano became the parlour mainstay. Believed to have been owned by the Duke of Hamilton in Naples, the below painting by the Italian artist Pietro Fabris places the duke and Kenneth MacKenzie, 1st Earl of Seaforth, at a concert party with Mozart and his father Leopold. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/168742/original/file-20170510-28100-e9qvmj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pietro Fabris: Kenneth Mackenzie at home in Naples.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Hamiltons were musical, and it is <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2002/mar/04/entertainment/et-swed4">noted that</a> the Mozarts visited their home in 1770 and that Hamilton’s first wife, Catherine, performed on the harpsichord for the great composer. She is likely to have played on this Shudi, which raises the possibility that Mozart himself may have passed his hands over its keys. The instrument is still playable today, so it is possible to briefly inhabit Mozart’s Neapolitan soundscape on a visit to the museum. </p>
<p>In sum, Edinburgh boasts a thrilling collection of bygone instruments. Most museums let us passively observe history, but the musical palettes on display here are a chance to truly step back in time. It shows how organology can improve our understanding of the past from a more cultural perspective than most museum artefacts. This is not just a collection of musical instruments, it is a snapshot of who we were before.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77495/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachael Durkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Scottish capital is reopening a well kept secret: one of the world’s finest collections of vintage sound machines.Rachael Durkin, Lecturer in Music, Edinburgh Napier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/635472016-08-09T07:58:42Z2016-08-09T07:58:42ZHow to negotiate the tricky territory of ‘fascist music’<p>Certain musicians or pieces of music, for one reason or another, will always carry unsavoury associations. Wagner, whose music was co-opted by the Nazi party, is the obvious example. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoU-iCT21fc">overture</a> of his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was featured in a Nazi propaganda film. And there are many other examples of music that have been performed to great acclaim in societies that have conventionally been labelled fascist, and as a result will be seen as tainted.</p>
<p>Some of the composers also have questionable personal histories. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpMPyzu9TOI">Luigi Dallapiccola</a>, for example, was an explicit fascist sympathiser at least early on in Mussolini’s regime. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3WicjLqccc">Arthur Honegger</a> cultivated contacts with the German occupying forces in France and was viewed by some as a collaborator. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMP9mkNXzJk">George Enescu</a> was a sympathiser of Octavian Goga, Romania’s fascist and fundamentalist anti-semite prime minister between 1937-38 (and who had proposed Enescu for election to the Romanian Academy in 1933), and conducted special German nationalist concerts.</p>
<p>But to simply label these composers’ music as “fascist” is too easy, and certainly simplistic. Some pieces have found favour in markedly non-fascistic social contexts, some strongly resemble other work produced in other types of societies or by anti-fascist or communist composers. Other composers had explicit fascist sympathies (such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt16Kwmir7M">Webern</a>, who praised Mein Kampf and wrote to a friend in 1940 of his dream of a German Empire which would stretch to the Pacific, or Stravinsky), but found their work denounced or even censored by fascist politicians.</p>
<h2>Enter Donald Trump</h2>
<p>The “fascist music” argument reared its ugly head most recently in a Slate <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2016/08/donald_trump_s_favorite_aria_by_puccini_nessun_dorma_is_sort_of_fascist.html">article</a> in which Brian Wise argued for a fascist reading of Donald Trump’s appropriation at political rallies of Puccini’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raJkCwQB2CY">Nessun dorma</a>”, an aria from the opera Turandot. The article exposes all the flaws in a too-easy labelling of certain composers or musical pieces as “fascist” and therefore unsavoury. It does so by conflating an enormous and disparate set of links and connotations into an ugly – and untenable – whole.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/raJkCwQB2CY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>Part of Wise’s argument is biographical, and there’s not much to fault here. Puccini’s expression of qualified sympathy for Mussolini soon after the 1922 March on Rome is clearly documented, as is the fact that <a href="https://ianpace.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/mussolini-musicista-1927-full-text/">he met the dictator at least once</a> before the composer’s death in November 1924. He also reluctantly accepted honorary Fascist Party membership and was made a senator of the realm in September 1924, a position he had coveted since before Mussolini’s assumption of power. Turandot, incomplete at the time of Puccini’s death, had a hugely successful premiere in Milan in 1926 that was attended by Mussolini, though subsequent performances were not frequent, and it would not enter the standard repertoire until a later period.</p>
<h2>Loose associations</h2>
<p>But Wise then quotes some very generalised statements from musicologists to back up his argument.</p>
<p>First there’s <a href="http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/music/schwartz-arman.aspx">Arman Schwartz</a>, who has compared the opera’s setting to Rome in the 1920s. Schwartz also identifies the relationship between virile hero and heroine to be conquered as fascistic, as well as the irrational and violent crowd. The first of these points is plausible, but the second and third are found in numerous earlier 19th century operas (such as Bizet’s Carmen, Wagner’s Siegfried, Halévy’s La Juive, Donizetti’s Les Martyrs or Verdi’s Don Carlos, to name just a few). Turandot hardly stands out on this front.</p>
<p>Wise then cites musicologist Alexandra Wilson’s <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/music/twentieth-century-and-contemporary-music/puccini-problem-opera-nationalism-and-modernity?format=PB/">argument</a> that the opera’s combination of appeals to modernity and tradition makes it a “fascist emblem”. But this, too, could be said of a huge amount of music from Mozart to Brahms and well beyond.</p>
<p>Then there’s conductor Leon Botstein’s <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2016/08/donald_trump_s_favorite_aria_by_puccini_nessun_dorma_is_sort_of_fascist.html">claim</a> that this “regressive, narcotic, illusionistic music” provided no resistance to the regime. But evidence of musical works ever providing meaningful and productive resistance to dictatorial regimes is extremely slim. Furthermore, Botstein’s musical characterisation of Puccini’s music could equally apply to of the work of Debussy, Ravel, Szymanowski, Scriabin, Richard Strauss, Florent Schmitt and many, many others.</p>
<p>Wise then cites Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, who alludes to high decibel levels and themes of domination and colonialism. Once again, these are both frequent and generic aspects of operatic traditions and such classification would make huge swathes of popular music fascist.</p>
<h2>Aria to opera</h2>
<p>As the above litany of references makes clear, such all-encompassing fascistic interpretations of this opera are problematic, as the most intelligent recent commentator on music in fascist Italy, Ben Earle, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cnwbdaaaqbaj&pg=pa180&lpg=pa180&dq=turandot+fascist+italy&source=bl&ots=woj6rbwlta&sig=jswptnhj--hd7q6glabuao30ara&hl=en&sa=x&ved=0ahukewjb-sbr0qxoahxl0hokhrgscfaq6aeindae%23v=onepage&q=puccini%252c%2520fascism%252c%2520and%2520the%2520&f=false">has shown</a>.</p>
<p>And all of this ignores the fact that Trump only appropriates one brief aria from this opera, and another from the earlier Gianni Schicci. Ironically, both are actually relatively conventional compared to other examples of Puccini’s volatile music. Notwithstanding their obvious passionate and sensuous qualities, the vocal writing is generally much smoother and steadier than in other more hysterical numbers or other musical passages. To read fascist implications into these arias on the basis of the rest of the operas makes little sense when there is a high likelihood that neither Trump nor his supporters will be aware of them in any case.</p>
<p>Research into the relationship between a long tradition of Western art, music (and for that matter, popular and non-Western musics) and fascism is vital, though far from easy. Scholars have looked in the context of fascism at musical biography, work, reception, instrumentalisation, institutions, music teaching, journalism and scholarship with subtlety and nuance. Most cogently argue that the relationship between these things and their social context is complex and multifaceted. </p>
<p>There may indeed be fascist dimensions to Wagner, Trump’s music preferences, or even the 1990 World Cup (where Nessun dorma also played a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqzz7B7V2IE">central role</a>), but it requires a good deal of rigorous investigation to demonstrate this. As such, to condemn Nessun dorma on such flimsy grounds is a lazy approach to investigation of the disturbing Trump phenomenon.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63547/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Pace does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Donald Trump has been accused of using a ‘fascist’ Puccini aria at rallies. But labelling this music as fascist is deeply problematic.Ian Pace, Head of Performance and Lecturer in Music, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/359542015-02-12T00:51:00Z2015-02-12T00:51:00ZSailing the high seas in 3D: The Flying Dutchman goes hi-tech<p>3D goggles might be commonplace at the cinema, but few associate the opera with digital technology, or would ever expect to wear 3D goggles in a theatre. </p>
<p>A new production of <a href="http://www.palaistheatre.net.au/whats-on.htm?event_id=482">The Flying Dutchman</a>, created by <a href="http://www.victorianopera.com.au/">Victorian Opera</a> and <a href="https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/motionlab/">Deakin Motion.Lab</a>, and featuring the <a href="http://www.ayo.com.au/">Australian Youth Orchestra</a>, is set to challenge these assumptions.</p>
<p>Premiering February 14 at St. Kilda’s Palais Theatre, The Flying Dutchman brings together digital environments, CGI characters and live performers for a spectacular interpretation of Richard Wagner’s beloved opera. The production uses modern cinematic techniques – polarised screens and powerful stereoscopic projectors – to bring a new spin to performing arts in general, and opera in particular.</p>
<h2>The Dutchman and the deep</h2>
<p>With its violent storms, mythical characters, enormous ghost ship, and thrilling tale of supernatural love, The Flying Dutchman merges a fantastical story with Richard Wagner’s epic score.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71140/original/image-20150204-28618-24cy9o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The arrival of the Flying Dutchman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Victorian Opera/Deakin.Motion.Lab</span></span>
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<p>The opera draws on nautical folklore of a doomed ghost ship, telling the story of Captain Daland and his crew’s encounter with the Flying Dutchman’s ghost ship in the middle of a storm. Daland meets the Dutchman himself, a shadowy man cursed to sail the seven seas for all eternity.</p>
<p>Once every seven years, the Dutchman is given the opportunity to find a good and faithful wife, and to finally be freed of his curse. Daland offers his daughter, Senta, to the Dutchman … for a price. The end, which sees Senta and the Dutchman united beneath the waves, is both tragic and redemptive – exactly the recipe for an epic opera.</p>
<p>As a character, the Dutchman has been the subject of pop culture for centuries, appearing to great acclaim in Disney’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325980/">Pirates of the Caribbean</a> franchise. In Wagner’s interpretation of the myth, Daland’s inner battle between helping the Dutchman and feeding his greed becomes the focus of the opera.</p>
<h1>Wagner and the totality of art</h1>
<p>When it first premiered in 1843 in Dresden, The Flying Dutchman encapsulated the idea of <em><a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/231963/Gesamtkunstwerk">Gesamtkunstwerk</a></em>, or “total artwork” – the perfect merging of all media including theatre, literature, art, design and music. Wagner didn’t coin the term, but his operas have come to represent this notion of the totality of art, in which media converges and the lines between art-forms become blurred.</p>
<p>The sheer scale of Wagner’s operas lends itself to the use of digital and computer-generated 3D media. As fans of opera will be aware, the Ring Cycle has already been given a partial digital <a href="http://ringcycle.metoperafamily.org/">make-over</a> at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, directed by Robert Lepage. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70874/original/image-20150203-9181-119kko3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/taaalia/9264730265/in/photolist-6hAGcV-6hESTQ-6hAFRi-6hAGZa-8J36w8-2vVkpu-f7GawH-6hETiE-6hERgG-6hAJXK-6hESj9-6hETKd-6hAJoa-6hAGkg-6hEUx3-6hAGtF/">Taaalia/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Lepage’s extensive mechanical set, which elevated performers on stage and transformed into representations of fjords, horses, an underwater world or the mythical Valhalla, was overlaid with interactive digital imagery. Despite wonderful moments of imagery, the creaks and groans of Lepage’s mechanical machine, as well as the exorbitant expense of mounting the production, will most likely defer the re-staging of that particular Ring.</p>
<h2>Bringing the opera to new audiences</h2>
<p><a href="https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/motionlab/">Deakin Motion.Lab</a> has embarked on a major partnership with Victorian Opera (funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant Scheme) to develop full digital scenographies for three operas and to test the creative possibilities for digital technology in traditional and non-traditional environments. </p>
<p>Underlying these research aims is a question about how digital technology might make opera economically viable to tour more widely, including to audiences in rural or regional settings. Because large set-pieces have found new incarnations as weightless digital objects, the trappings of large-scale and epic opera productions become easily transportable to any space with a screen. </p>
<p>Unlike Lepage’s Ring, this production of The Flying Dutchman takes full advantage of digital technology, using a much more minimal set than is normally required. </p>
<p>It has been carefully designed by designer Christina Smith and Matt Scott to integrate the visual perspective of the 3D images. This approach greatly reduces the need for sets or props to be shifted between scenes, or to be stored between seasons.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71141/original/image-20150204-28598-xid4a0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two ships shear past each other.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Victorian Opera/Deakin.Motion.Lab</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The project also examines how digital technology might attract new audiences for opera, in particular younger generations who are already comfortable with 3D imagery and the interactive technology that drives the gaming industry. By creating the opera sets using game engine software, artists can provide opportunities for interactivity with the performers onstage. </p>
<p>Almost as if they were creating a film, cameras fly over the ocean at speed. They zoom in on the ship to take audiences inside the Dutchman’s vessel or moving along the roads to meet the Flying Dutchman as it makes berth at the harbour. Within these epic landscapes, digital scenography creates depth and volume that is unhindered by the size of the stage itself.</p>
<p>Digital characters will populate the world of The Flying Dutchman, and unlike human actors, these characters are not bound by gravity or the limitations the human body. For that reason, supernatural characters like ghosts are ideal to represent as digital avatars, doubling or tripling the size of the performing cast. </p>
<p>In this version of The Flying Dutchman, ghostly crews aflame with the blue glow of St Elmo’s fire populate the Dutchman’s ship. Deakin Motion.Lab’s artists, coders and 3D character animators are able to draw from human movements and actions using motion capture technology, which provide the movement cues for the digital characters.</p>
<p>Over the next two years, Deakin Motion.Lab will work with Victorian Opera on two more productions, investigating the potential to take trans-media performance further. Hopefully this will give traditional works, like Wagner’s operas, a new life in non-traditional venues and attract younger audiences.</p>
<p><em>The Flying Dutchman plays at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne on February 14, 17 and 19. Details <a href="http://www.palaistheatre.net.au/whats-on.htm?event_id=482">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kim Vincs works for Deakin University. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council, and from research consultancies in the digital and performing arts.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordan Beth Vincent works for Deakin University. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council and from research consultancies in the digital and performing arts. She is a dance critic for The Age newspaper, and a board member of Ausdance Victoria. </span></em></p>3D goggles might be commonplace at the cinema, but few associate the opera with digital technology, or would ever expect to wear 3D goggles in a theatre. A new production of The Flying Dutchman, created…Kim Vincs, Director, Deakin Motion.Lab, Deakin UniversityJordan Beth Vincent, Associate Research Fellow, Deakin Motion Lab, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197172013-12-03T03:14:18Z2013-12-03T03:14:18ZWhy we must keep talking about Wagner and antisemitism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36740/original/pfypfhs5-1386034165.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bicentenary celebrations have re-invigorated the 'Wagner question' around the world.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As part of the wave of Wagnermania currently sweeping Melbourne — including Opera Australia’s <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/ring_cycle">Melbourne Ring Cycle</a> and a month-long <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/festival/about_the_festival">Ring Festival</a> — a symposium titled <a href="http://wagnerandus.com.au">Wagner and Us</a> will take place at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music on December 5-8. </p>
<p>It will explore the ongoing cultural, political and historical significance of the German composer, and the difficult questions surrounding <a href="http://www.thewagnerjournal.co.uk/wagnerandanti-se.html">his antisemitism</a> will be on the agenda.</p>
<p>Richard Wagner is perhaps the most controversial composer in the history of Western art and his music and ideas have provided plenty of fodder for both public and scholarly debate. In 2013 – 200 years after his birth – he continues to be the subject of heated discussions and arguments. </p>
<p>Indeed, the bicentenary celebrations have re-invigorated the “Wagner question” around the world, and prompted dozens of new (and often controversial) interpretations of Wagner’s operas.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34632/original/4tn6kp82-1383796108.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>As always, the composer’s infamous antisemitism has been a frequent topic of discussion in the media and a number of new productions have made reference to it. </p>
<p>In May, a Düsseldorf production of the opera <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=23">Tannhäuser</a> was cancelled after audiences were deeply upset by scenes depicting people dying in gas chambers. </p>
<p>Wagner’s antisemitism is inescapable for anyone thinking about Wagner and his legacy in the 21st century – yet the issue remains surrounded by misconception and ambiguity, particularly in the public sphere.</p>
<h2>Judaism and music</h2>
<p>In 1850, Wagner pseudonymously published an essay called <a href="https://archive.org/details/judaisminmusicda00wagn">Das Judenthum in der Musik</a> (Judaism in Music, or Jews in Music) in a German music journal. The work was a lengthy antisemitic diatribe against Jewish composers who, according to Wagner, were inherently unable to produce true art. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36743/original/96b4xrcq-1386034875.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Melbourne Ring Cycle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jews, Wagner argued, were incapable of authentic artistic expression because they lacked a nation and culture of their own. Although they could be clever and industrious imitators, they would never be capable of pure artistic inspiration.</p>
<p>Although many scholars have argued the essay was simply a product of Wagner’s jealousy over the success of Jewish opera composers such as <a href="http://www.meyerbeer.com/">Giacomo Meyerbeer</a>, the ideological framework supporting Wagner’s accusations was clearly well thought-out; it was not a spontaneously conceived argument that Wagner would come to regret. </p>
<p>In fact, it was later re-published under his name and translated into other languages. </p>
<h2>Hitler and the Bayreuth Festival</h2>
<p>Wagner’s writings on Jews in music are not particularly well known by the general public. Most people make the connection between Wagner and antisemitism because they know he was Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer and that there were strong ties between Hitler and the <a href="http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/english/english_156.html">Bayreuth Festival</a>, a Wagner festival run by the composer’s descendants that continues to this day. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1193&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1193&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36742/original/ztf9qyyq-1386034695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1193&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hitler in 1937.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Third Reich’s appropriation of Wagner’s music for political purposes has tainted the music for many potential listeners, and the furious debate that rages in Israel over an unofficial ban on live performances of Wagner’s music tends to obscure the facts. </p>
<p>We know Hitler was enamoured with Wagner’s music from a young age and that he maintained close ties with Winifred Wagner (Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law) and the Bayreuth Festival – but there’s no evidence to suggest Hitler was directly inspired by Wagner’s <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Brilliant-Troubled-Legacy-of-Richard-Wagner-216638401.html#Richard-Wagner-troubled-legacy-statue-631.jpg">ultra-nationalist</a> and antisemitic ideology. </p>
<p>Some scholars see Wagner’s ideas as a clear precursor to Nazism, whereas others warn against blaming Wagner for historical developments that took place after his death. </p>
<p>Such debates feed into another question that arises from discussions of Wagner and antisemitism, one which has been relegated mostly to academic circles: is there antisemitism in Wagner’s music?</p>
<h2>Antisemitic music?</h2>
<p>A number of musicologists have argued characters such as Beckmesser in <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=61">Die Meistersinger</a>, Alberich and Mime in The Ring, and Kundry in <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=701">Parsifal</a> are Jewish caricatures who are musically depicted in an antisemitic light. </p>
<p>Although this is a scholarly debate that involves close examination of the music, it effectively comes down to the question of whether we think it necessary to separate the man from his music, or whether we see his personal views and ideology as being embedded in his art.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/36739/original/rgfwzc58-1386034093.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Melbourne Ring Cycle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Opera Australia’s Melbourne Ring Cycle does not grapple with questions related to antisemitism in any direct way – and that may be a relief for those who simply enjoy the music and are sick of the polemics that follow Wagner’s music around the globe. </p>
<p>Yet the very fact The Ring is being performed in a city with a significant Jewish community – and one that is largely made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendants – makes it imperative that we ask these questions, even if we cannot agree on answers. </p>
<p>The problem of Wagner and antisemitism goes to the heart of a much broader question about music and politics, and whether music has a role to play in the great moral dilemmas of our time. </p>
<p>And that is a question that should concern us all, Wagnerians or not.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>A roundtable on Wagner and antisemitism will form part of the Wagner and Us symposium, jointly hosted by the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Richard Wagner Society in Melbourne, December 5-8. For further information, visit <a href="http://wagnerandus.com.au">http://wagnerandus.com.au</a></em></p>
<p><br>
<strong>Further reading:</strong><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-wagners-ring-cycle-der-ring-des-nibelungen-20475">Explainer: Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen</a><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/wagners-ring-cycle-works-people-up-but-why-19485">Wagner’s Ring Cycle works people up – but why?</a><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-melbourne-ring-cycle-is-a-once-in-a-century-celebration-19519">The Melbourne Ring Cycle is a once in a century celebration</a><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/should-we-fund-wagner-operas-or-statues-of-kyle-sandilands-19520">Should we fund Wagner operas or statues of Kyle Sandilands?</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19717/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Orzech has been involved in organising the Wagner and Us Symposium at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and she will be presenting a research paper at the symposium.</span></em></p>As part of the wave of Wagnermania currently sweeping Melbourne — including Opera Australia’s Melbourne Ring Cycle and a month-long Ring Festival — a symposium titled Wagner and Us will take place at the…Rachel Orzech, PhD candidate, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/194852013-11-26T03:23:28Z2013-11-26T03:23:28ZWagner’s Ring Cycle works people up – but why?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35866/original/rfmsjydq-1385086922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Valkyries in Opera Australia's Ring Cycle aren't the only ones to feel emotional. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Opera Australia is currently performing Richard Wagner’s most famous work, Der Ring des Nibelungen – <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-wagners-ring-cycle-der-ring-des-nibelungen-20475">The Ring Cycle</a> – marking the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, at a <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/neil-armfield-promises-a-ring-of-revolution-with-opera-australias-production/story-fn9n8gph-1226741165764">reported cost</a> of A$20 million. If that brings out strong emotions in you, you’re not alone. </p>
<p>From its first performance in 1876 in the German town of Bayreuth, The Ring Cycle has been controversial. Wagner is much more than a “mere” composer – he’s a cultural phenomenon, as the <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/festival/about_the_festival">long list of events</a> associated with Opera Australia’s sold-out run of The Ring Cycle demonstrates. </p>
<p>What is it about this enormous work that draws passionate reactions from both opera devotees and those who wouldn’t be seen dead in an opera house?</p>
<h2>Wagner’s influence</h2>
<p>Wagner himself has always cast a long shadow in the opera world. The German composer was born on May 22 1813, the same year as his Italian counterpart <a href="http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/verdi.php">Guiseppe Verdi</a> and 100 years before the British <a href="http://www.its.caltech.edu/%7Etan/Britten/britbio.html">Benjamin Britten</a> – and celebrations to mark the Wagner bicentenary are crowding out the other anniversaries. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wagner in 1871.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wagner was a divisive figure virtually from the outset of his career and as a gifted if inconsistent writer of prose, was able to present his views, including a particularly virulent form of antisemitism, on a variety of topics with force, never skirting controversy. Extremely critical of the state of opera in Europe in the mid-19th century, he saw The Ring as pointing the way forward.</p>
<p>In this he succeeded as no opera composer has done before or since. He completed <a href="http://www.wagneroperas.com/indexwagneroperas.html">13 operas</a> and we are still grappling with the ideas and artistic practice developed within them. His influence, more than that of any other composer, is still very present in the opera world.</p>
<p>Indeed, his influence extends into many aspects of European and world culture, not the least on an art form not invented in his day – cinema. Wagner’s <a href="http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/english/english_156.html">concealed orchestra</a> at Bayreuth, the German town where The Ring was first staged, is an important precedent to the use of music in film.</p>
<h2>How The Ring changed opera</h2>
<p>The significance of The Ring lies both in its underlying theoretical frame and in the successful realisation of the ideas it embodies.</p>
<p>Wagner saw contemporary opera as decadent and dying, and, just as the “inventors” of opera did 250 years before, he went back to Greek drama for his inspiration.</p>
<p>The Ring itself is modelled on Greek tragedian Aeschylus’ great tetralogy, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Oresteia-Agamemnon-Libation-Eumenides/dp/0140443339">The Oresteia</a>, with three main dramas, preceded by a prologue. There had been several reforming impulses in opera, but Wagner’s innovations were the most comprehensive and influential.</p>
<p>The Ring changed the musical language of opera, effectively doing away with the musical structures such as <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/493574/recitative">recitative</a>, <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/34102/aria">aria</a>, duets and larger ensembles that had constituted the dramaturgy of the art form. </p>
<p>Wagner turned back to drama and developed music that could accommodate the complexities but retain the flexibility of dialogue between two or more characters. That staple of opera, the aria, disappears, as do larger ensembles where two or more characters sing simultaneously. There is virtually no chorus in The Ring.</p>
<p>Fundamental in the structure of The Ring was Wagner’s evolution of what became known as <a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/leitmotif"><em>leitmotivs</em></a>: recurring musical phrases that constitute a web of associations as the drama unfolds. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35868/original/mf7738mx-1385088148.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Melbourne Ring Cycle, by Opera Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Characters, emotional states, even ideas and a wide variety of other elements become associated with particular musical phrases, rhythms or harmonic progressions, thus creating a dense, constantly evolving, and fully enclosed dramatic world – the orchestra becomes the equivalent of the novelistic omniscient narrator, but also functions as a form of character stream-of-consciousness.</p>
<p>The musical complexity of The Ring is staggering – particularly when one remembers its composition occurred over a period of more than 25 years, interrupted by Wagner’s writing first one of the longest operas in the repertoire, <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=61">Die Meistersinger of Nürnburg</a>, and then <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=86">Tristan und Isolde</a>, a work which begins to dissolve the whole tonal system developed in Western music over hundreds of years.</p>
<p>As with the great tragedies of Shakespeare, The Ring is timeless. It can be interpreted and staged in a multitude of ways, inevitably revealing fresh insights into the world of the drama itself – and also offering new perspectives on our contemporary world. </p>
<p>The Ring is now often presented as an environmentalist drama suffused with an anti-capitalism sentiment, reflecting Wagner’s interest in Buddhism – he was contemplating an opera on the Buddha, but did not live to complete it.</p>
<h2>Is The Ring worth doing?</h2>
<p>Opera Australia evidently thinks so. Given its scale, The Ring is a hugely expensive undertaking for any opera company, but the significance of the work, whether one likes it or not, is undeniable. </p>
<p>For Opera Australia it will probably mean cuts in other areas, particularly in commissioning new work, which is regrettable – but the Wagner bicentenary is just too good an opportunity to miss.</p>
<p><em>Performances of the sold-out <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/ring_cycle/tickets/dates_and_prices">Melbourne Ring Cycle</a> take place until December 13, 2013.</em></p>
<p><strong>Further reading:</strong> <br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-melbourne-ring-cycle-is-a-once-in-a-century-celebration-19519">The Melbourne Ring Cycle is a once in a century celebration</a><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-wagners-ring-cycle-der-ring-des-nibelungen-20475">Explainer: Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen</a><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/should-we-fund-wagner-operas-or-statues-of-kyle-sandilands-19520">Should we fund Wagner operas or statues of Kyle Sandilands?</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19485/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Halliwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Opera Australia is currently performing Richard Wagner’s most famous work, Der Ring des Nibelungen – The Ring Cycle – marking the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, at a reported cost of A$20 million…Michael Halliwell, Associate Professor of Vocal Studies and Opera, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/195192013-11-22T05:30:15Z2013-11-22T05:30:15ZThe Melbourne Ring Cycle is a once in a century celebration<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35870/original/jpgmhsvq-1385088822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wagner has been inflaming people for a long time. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Even if you’ve not had the chance to see it, you’ll know Melbourne is currently going to town over Wagner and <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-wagners-ring-cycle-der-ring-des-nibelungen-20475">The Ring Cycle</a>. There’s a clear historic precedent for this – but we have to go back a whole century to find it. </p>
<p>In 1912, Englishman [Thomas Quinlan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Quinlan_(impresario/) visited Australia with his travelling opera company as part of an Empire circuit. His company promised to sing “in English to English speaking peoples all the time, never leaving the red portions of the geographical map”. </p>
<p>Before departing Australia he posted a letter in major newspapers alerting readers that he would be back in 1913 and was willing to put on Wagner’s Ring Cycle – “if 1,000 subscribers could be found to provide an advance subsidy”. </p>
<p>Quinlan’s production would mark the centenary of the German composer’s birth. A century later, Opera Australia’s <a href="http://opera.org.au/whatson/melbourne_ring_cycle">Melbourne Ring Cycle</a>, directed by theatre veteran <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/neil-armfield-promises-a-ring-of-revolution-with-opera-australias-production/story-fn9n8gph-1226741165764">Neil Armfield</a>, is the centrepiece of this month’s <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/festival/about_the_festival">Ring Festival</a> in Melbourne.</p>
<p>The full Ring Cycle was performed in <a href="http://operainsider.info/index.php/historical-essay-wagners-ring-in-australia/">Adelaide in 1998</a> and <a href="http://www.lares-lexicon.com/AdelaideRing/adelaidereviews.html">again in 2004</a>, but it hasn’t been performed in its entirety anywhere else in Australia since Quinlan’s version. </p>
<p>Tickets for the current production sold out quickly – the <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/ring_cycle/tickets/dates_and_prices">cheapest</a> going for A$1,000 a pop – and the best seats in the house for A$2,000. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35874/original/sx2wt2tr-1385090444.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Opera Australia’s Melbourne Ring Cycle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Because opera lovers can’t elect to go along for just one night of Wagnerian excess – the Ring Cycle is made up of four operas, <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=711">Das Rheingold</a>, <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/synopsis/walkure?customid=454">Die Walküre</a>, <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=712">Siegried</a> and <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/synopsis/gotterdammerung">Götterdämmerung</a> – it’s the whole cycle, or nothing. But this clearly hasn’t been a deterrent. </p>
<p>Quinlan encountered similar enthusiasm to that evidenced by the forthcoming sell-out shows when he put his proposal to Melburnians more than a century ago.</p>
<p>He asked for <a href="http://www.ask.com/question/how-much-is-a-guinea-worth-today">one guinea</a> each for dress circle tickets, less for stalls and gallery and no tickets issued except for the whole cycle. Quinlan made big claims about Wagner’s four-opera cycle: </p>
<p>“The Ring, which is the supremest expression of music drama, and which should be of incalculable service to the advancement of Australian musical art has to be done on a scale of splendid completeness or not at all. It does not admit of mediocrity.”</p>
<p>Quinlan obtained his subsidy easily and returned the following year with 475 tons of scenery and wardrobe, and 176 people. </p>
<p>The company, many of whom were recruited from Covent Garden, sang the operas in English and travelled with their own large orchestra. Members of the company knew each other well. </p>
<p>They were well rehearsed when they arrived and could thus set a truly punishing schedule as can be seen from the following list for Melbourne: </p>
<ul>
<li>opening night on the Saturday was Wagner’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/21/guide-wagner-die-meistersinger-nurnberg">Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg</a></li>
<li>Monday, Verdi’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/synopsis/rigoletto?customid=134">Rigoletto</a></li>
<li>Tuesday, Wagner’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=711">Das Rheingold</a> (the first of the Ring operas)</li>
<li>Wednesday, Offenbach’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=15">Tales of Hoffmann</a>, matinée and Puccini’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/synopsis/tosca?customid=792">Tosca</a> evening</li>
<li>Thursday, Saint-Saëns’ <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=22">Samson and Delilah</a></li>
<li>Friday, Wagner’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/synopsis/walkure?customid=454">Die Walküre</a> (the second installment in the Ring Cycle)</li>
<li>Saturday, Gounod’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=695">Faust</a></li>
<li>Sunday, free</li>
<li>Monday, Wagner’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=712">Siegried</a> (the third of the Ring operas)</li>
<li>Tuesday, Verdi’s <a href="http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/Opera-Synopses/qt/Aida-Synopsis.htm">Aida</a></li>
<li>Wednesday, Tales of Hoffmann matinée and Wagner’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=23">Tannhauser</a> evening</li>
<li>Thursday Charpentier’s <a href="http://imslp.org/wiki/Louise_(Charpentier,_Gustave)">Louise</a></li>
<li>Friday, Wagner’s <a href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/synopsis/gotterdammerung">Götterdämmerung</a>, the final opera in the Ring Cycle. </li>
</ul>
<p>All up, the company performed 14 different operas in 14 days. Such a feat is unheard of today!</p>
<p>Although The Bulletin’s critic maintained steady ironic criticism of the libretto of The Ring – writing that “a God incapable of sterilising a gnome’s curse or stopping his wife’s tongue is not much of a person to write a four-volume opera about” – the majority of the critics raved about the Ring claiming a new epoch in Australia’s musical history</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35872/original/vrbgsk74-1385090221.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Opera Australia’s Melbourne Ring Cycle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Audiences flocked to the Ring Cycle, despite expensive tickets – they cost twice as much as those to the other operas in the season – and there was an overall sense of gratitude to Quinlan. </p>
<p>(Tickets to The Ring Cycle are still much more expensive than those for other operas. The priciest tickets for Opera Australia’s production of Puccini’s <a href="http://opera.org.au/whatson/events/labohemesydney">La Bohème</a> in Sydney in January 2014 go for more than $300 – but it’s also possible to score a seat for $70.)</p>
<p>Melbourne was greedy for more, and a petition was put to Quinlan to put on another Ring Cycle. He obliged and it was a weary troupe that then moved on to Sydney.</p>
<p>Quinlan’s desire to perform in English had an evangelical edge to it. He was on a mission to introduce new audiences to opera and he stated confidently:</p>
<p>“I am quite certain that no other language will in future be acceptable to English-speaking audiences in any country that we have visited.”</p>
<p>Plans for further tours were stopped by the first world war, and The Ring was not staged in its entirety in Australia until 1998 when the State Opera of South Australia tackled it. Obviously antagonism towards Germany had an impact on performances of German opera in the periods after two world wars. </p>
<p>But opera programs after 1913 also showed a growing conservatism. Touring companies did not feel able to take risks, since the costs of box office failure were crippling. And when finally the first permanent opera company, the <a href="http://opera.org.au/aboutus/opera_australia/our_history">Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust</a>, as Opera Australia was first known, was established in Australia in mid 1956, risk taking was also not on the agenda.</p>
<p>Now 100 years later Melbourne audiences again have the opportunity to see the entire Ring Cycle in their home city. Sung in German this time, but as in 1913, with tickets far more expensive than those for any other opera – and sold out the day after the box office opened to the public. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>Performances of the sold-out <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/ring_cycle/tickets/dates_and_prices">Melbourne Ring Cycle</a> take place until December 13, 2013.</em></p>
<p><strong>Further reading:</strong> <br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-wagners-ring-cycle-der-ring-des-nibelungen-20475">Explainer: Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen</a><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/should-we-fund-wagner-operas-or-statues-of-kyle-sandilands-19520">Should we fund Wagner operas or statues of Kyle Sandilands?</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19519/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerry Murphy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Even if you’ve not had the chance to see it, you’ll know Melbourne is currently going to town over Wagner and The Ring Cycle. There’s a clear historic precedent for this – but we have to go back a whole…Kerry Murphy, Head of Musicology, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204752013-11-20T19:17:18Z2013-11-20T19:17:18ZExplainer: Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35547/original/vp54ydx3-1384823071.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Melbourne Ring Cycle is big, befitting the opera's stature. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It should come as no surprise in the nation that gave the world the Big Pineapple, the Big Guitar, the Big Sheep, and, for that matter, a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6uJlI-t14">Big Ad</a>, that the size of a cultural artefact in and of itself is enough to impress us. </p>
<p>Build something large enough, or do something often enough, and it stakes a claim on our attention. No immediate surprise, then, that Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen also fascinates Australians, including many who might not otherwise give opera a second thought. </p>
<p>Extending over four nights, it consists of almost 16 hours of music written for immensely powerful voices singing over a colossal pit orchestra, and took about 26 years (from 1848 to 1874) to complete. If that is not a big enough list of “bigs”, the budget required to stage it is also of such a size that it can cripple even the most well-endowed opera company.</p>
<p>In the case of The Ring, however, size is most definitely not everything; there is more to our interest than that. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35546/original/9ydhphy6-1384823010.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Terje Stensvold as Wotan Jacqueline Dark in The Melbourne Ring Cycle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wagner’s professed aim, in fact, was not to be grandiose <em>per se</em>, but to equal what he considered to have been the highest achievement of human creativity – Greek tragedy. The Greeks, he believed, had developed a kind of communal art-as-therapy where the polis came together to celebrate and reflect upon what had sustained and nurtured them both as individuals and as a community. </p>
<p>Moreover, their theatre had also involved a successful combination of all the arts: poetry, drama, costume, dance, music, song.</p>
<p>Subsequently, however, this Greek drama had disintegrated, if not degenerated, into its various components, so that by Wagner’s time (1813–1883) we had been left, as he saw it, with instrumental music without words, theatre without poetry, poetry without music, and so on. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35549/original/bmxbpzcd-1384823898.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Warwick Fyfe as Alberich in The Melbourne Ring Cycle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This was no mere historical observation but was instead, he believed, a sign of a larger societal decay. For him, opera in particular had become little more than entertainment for the weary professional classes, a frivolous and vulgar manifestation of a world becoming inexorably estranged from itself. </p>
<p>His critique, which helps explain much of the plot of The Ring, preempts much of Karl Marx’s theory of <a href="http://www.marxists.org/subject/alienation/">alienation</a> (Entfremdung), which similarly asserted that we were becoming estranged from the products of our labour and from each other.</p>
<p>So that is what the fuss is about. But what is The Ring itself about? </p>
<p>Well, the convoluted plot is principally derived from a collection German mythical stories called the <a href="http://www.pitt.edu/%7Edash/nibelungenlied.html">Nibelungenlied</a>, a sort of Northern European version of the <a href="http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/iliad/">Iliad</a>. </p>
<p>Like its Greek counterpart, it involves gods and mortals incestuously interacting with one another in the manner of one colossal dysfunctional family and, taken out of context, the tale appears (like many opera plots before and since) to border on the ridiculous. </p>
<p>So too, however, do many of our classic myths, so we should not be concerned by this fact. The Ring is not meant to be realist drama, but rather a drama-as-allegory. </p>
<p>Its real dramatic content is not so much “out there” on stage as something found within in the minds of the characters, and in what is implied, what is alluded to, by their actions. Going to The Ring, then, is more like witnessing a collective dream, and like all dreams it demands, and rewards, interpretation (it is not for nothing that Wagner’s music dramas are also particular beloved by psychoanalysts).</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AgzZ_nLOJJE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Ring Cycle, summarised.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our portal into this inner world of The Ring, and also what ultimately makes it so compelling, is Wagner’s music. By doing away with the conventional structural forms of opera and composing instead a texture that he described as “<a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/texas_studies_in_literature_and_language/v055/55.1.rasula.html">endless melody</a>”, Wagner was able to create a complex and profoundly interconnected set of “leitmotifs” (sonic calling cards, if you like) that enable the orchestra not merely to reflect what is going on the stage action, but to become intimately fused with it, and indeed analyse it. </p>
<p>In effect The Ring ends up becoming one vast symphonic drama, with the orchestra as its most important character.</p>
<p>The broad details of the plot will be already familiar to those who have read (or seen) The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. Both works involve giants and dwarfs and such-like, and concern rings that corrupt the wearer while giving him or her mastery over the world. </p>
<p>Both, indeed, are also implied critiques of industrialised capitalist society. For those wanting to know more of the plot in finer detail, a great place to start is with two clever on-line resources; a two-and-a-half minute (yes, almost 400 times shorter than the actual Ring) plot summary (see video above) recently prepared by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and the justly famous comic (but ultimately reverential) analysis by the English-Canadian singer and comedienne Anna Russell, below:</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cv7G92F2sqs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p><em>Performances of the sold-out <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/ring_cycle/tickets/dates_and_prices">Melbourne Ring Cycle</a> take place until December 13, 2013.</em></p>
<p><strong>Further reading:</strong>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/should-we-fund-wagner-operas-or-statues-of-kyle-sandilands-19520">Should we fund Wagner operas or statues of Kyle Sandilands?</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/20475/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tregear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It should come as no surprise in the nation that gave the world the Big Pineapple, the Big Guitar, the Big Sheep, and, for that matter, a Big Ad, that the size of a cultural artefact in and of itself is…Peter Tregear, Professor and Head, School of Music, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/195202013-11-17T20:22:30Z2013-11-17T20:22:30ZShould we fund Wagner operas or statues of Kyle Sandilands?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35241/original/fwp8ck3w-1384390604.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Melbourne Ring Cycle is expensive – but it may be worth it. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Keith Saunders</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The cultural dollar is tight. Why spend taxpayers’ money on mounting Wagner operas rather than – say – erecting a mile-high statue of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1234216/">Kyle Sandilands</a> on the moon warning alien civilisations what to expect should they approach further? </p>
<p>The list of things considered culture is endless. Once dance, drama, ballet and opera ruled the performing arts roost. But now, in an age of user-generated content and zombie walks, it’s hard to defend opera’s pre-eminence. Should we even try? </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35246/original/qbcrws6g-1384391839.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Zombie walks – not opera.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sheba_Also</span></span>
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<p>Isn’t everyone’s taste equally valid? You like <a href="http://www.hberlioz.com/">Berlioz</a>; I prefer boot-scooting. Why should one be thought better than the other, or attract public support to perpetuate its privileged status?</p>
<p>Wagner is expensive even by opera’s standards, and the <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/home">Ring Cycle</a>, which launches in Melbourne this evening, is expensive even by Wagnerian ones. </p>
<p>The production <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/neil-armfield-promises-a-ring-of-revolution-with-opera-australias-production/story-fn9n8gph-1226741165764">reportedly</a> cost Opera Australia A$20 million to stage. </p>
<p>It’s pricey for audiences too – it costs <a href="http://www.melbourneringcycle.com.au/ring_cycle/tickets/dates_and_prices">A$1000-2000</a> to attend four consecutive nights of The Ring Cycle). It’s the sort of signature event that has opera buffs audibly panting and others muttering about the cost of it all.</p>
<h2>To spend or not to spend?</h2>
<p>The free market works, at least in theory, by striking a balance between the supply of something (s) and its demand (d). A good (x) is provided to consumers by producers, who vary in number depending on the level of profit that can be made. </p>
<p>Fixing the relationship between (s) and (d) is the index finger of Scottish philosopher <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Smith.html">Adam Smith</a>’s “invisible hand”, the price mechanism (p). </p>
<p>Here is the source of all political objections to supply-side subsidy, be it for the car industry or for installation art: it queers (p), throwing out the delicate calibration between those who can provide a good and those willing to pay for it. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ulyVXa-u4wE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” explained in 60 seconds./movie>
If people want to watch Wagner they should stump up for a ticket without relying on government help, and thereby distorting a self-regulating means of exchange. The real-life problems with this idealised model give experts in the dismal science much to ponder. Two are especially relevant for culture.
Public and private benefits
The first is the extent to which art generates public as well as private benefits. If watching Wagner operas can be shown to produce more creative citizens, increase national cohesion or improve public morals, there might be a case for more generally supporting it.
A considerable amount of research has been done in this area, as the 2004 Rand report, Gifts of the Muse details. Attending the Ring Cycle may supress thoughts about Kyle Sandilands, for example – a public benefit many Australians would acknowledge.
Perfect knowledge
A second problem with the model is its assumption of “perfect knowledge”. Consumers are supposed to acquire – it’s never clear how or from where – an in-depth understanding not only of their own needs but the complex strategic goals of different producers.
Pietari Inkinen rehearses The Melbourne Ring Orchestra.
Aidan Corrigan
Competition only works where there is the possibility of “substitution” – that is, of replacing one good with another of similar benefit in order to maximise personal satisfaction.
Obviously this is much easier with goods that are homogenous and divisible (bread, bricks, toilet paper etc). The more singular (x) is, the more it resists substitution or – another way of saying the same thing – the more knowledge you need to substitute something for it.
In the real world people’s preferences as revealed by the price mechanism are not a guarantee of good market outcomes because people:
a) often don’t know what they want
b) haven’t the wherewithal to find alternatives
c) can’t tell when they’re being sold a crock
Such “market failure” is the reason usually advanced for arts subsidy and unlike the private/public benefit argument it touches on culture’s intrinsic qualities as a “merit good”.
Societies need to educate their citizens to make informed cultural choices and provide cultural services which ensure the ongoing development of desirable norms and values.
Does ‘one-off’ art trump market failure?
Enter Wagner like a rampaging Valkyrie. At a certain point a ground needs to be established for people to define themselves as choice-making beings, a pre-economic level of experience to assist cultural tastes to come into existence in the first place.
The Melbourne Ring Orchestra rehearses.
Aidan Corrigan
How can we judge the value of Wagner operas unless we have a chance to go to one every now and then? Our immediate needs are only part of the benefits equation.
Economists recognise “existence value”, the price consumers will pay to ensure (x) continues to exist regardless of whether they use it or not; “option value”, what they will pay to ensure they can use it; and “bequest value”, the price they will pay so their children and children’s children can use it.
The cultural experiences that shape us most deeply are the resolutely singular ones. You can quantify their benefits but not their value.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have one, only that it does not lend itself to aggregate numerical assessment.
The Ring Cycle is an example of “one-off” art. It does not supply an ongoing market need for long, gloomy operas about Norse heroes. It provides an experience that helps define us as human beings so we can make meaningful choices thereafter (including a few economic ones).
Get to know Wagner first
Every once in a while you have to take a chance with art if you want a life fully lived. It’s expensive, yes, and there are no guarantees. You can certainly object to subsidising a particular staging of the Ring Cycle.
But you have to know a bit about Wagner first – his operas are potentially a transformative encounter.
The silent shadow of the price mechanism is opportunity cost – what we stand to lose if we do not buy (x). Many Opera Australia patrons this month will be seeing the Ring Cycle for the first time and for some it may indeed be a “life-changing experience”.
In terms of supporting the production with public money, under what circumstances can we afford not to?
<em>Performances of the sold-out Melbourne Ring Cycle take place from November 18 to December 13, 2013.</em></span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19520/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The cultural dollar is tight. Why spend taxpayers’ money on mounting Wagner operas rather than – say – erecting a mile-high statue of Kyle Sandilands on the moon warning alien civilisations what to expect…Julian Meyrick, Professor of Strategic Arts, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.