![]() Leaving aside the complex topic of Wagner’s relationship to National Socialism, it seems clear that his “totalizing” operatic art-despite some of its decidedly non-fascist ideas-could lend itself to a certain kind of all-consuming quasi-mythic worldview that late modernist pluralism is almost in principle defined against. A weird encounter, but one that made me suspect for a moment that he was a white pride nutter with particularly bad taste, a Wagner enthusiast of what one could call “the old school.” (It turned out he was making a weird statement about “Homeland Security Service.”) ![]() And during intermission I was reminded one reason why: we passed by a middle-aged long-haired fellow in a proper German SS outfit, with a home-brewed armband reading “HSS.” He uttered a gently lewd complement to my astoundingly dressed wife. The preference for fragmentation and the distrust of totalizing organic structures are all well-defined late modernist aims at this point, and they tend to cut against such alchemy. This cycle is traditional not only in the sense that the trees look like the Olympic peninsula and the characters look like they perform in Finnish metal bands, but in the deeper sense that it seeks to manifest the grandiose integral aim of Wagner’s art: to create a synthetic work that fuses music, narrative, text, and theatre into an alchemical drama that achieves the resounding dimension of myth even as stages the final destruction of that dimension. The acting, staging, sets, and props, were all designed to draw us into a story as tensely knotted in its emotions, allusions, and philosophical implications as the world ash the supports Hunding’s hut. This a Ring cycle focused, first and foremost, on drama. ![]() Last night, the core strength of the Seattle Opera’s Ring became crystal clear.
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