When several thousand citizens of Washington, D.C., (where the favorite aria is "Hail to the Chief," high drama is a Senate confirmation hearing, and opera is something presented either in New York City or Nashville) pay as much as $380 to attend a sixteen-hour, four-opera epic by a notorious anti-Semite who died more than one hundred years ago, one is obliged to ask: Why Wagner?
When the same work, Der Ring des Nibelungen, inspires so many interpretations - Marxist Rings, Nazi Rings, Freudian Rings, and the time-tunnel Ring offered in Washington - and such controversy (George Bernard Shaw called Wagner "the summit" of nineteenth-century dramatic music, whereas Friedrich Nietzsche described Wagner's music as "hysterical, convulsive, distorted"), the question persists: Why Wagner? What is there in his musical dramas, especially the Ring, that inspires or enrages so many?
Some ninety years ago, Shaw provided an answer: "The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its watermaidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity." If Shaw had been referring to the timelessness of the Ring's basic themes of greed, self-sacrifice, Armageddon, and redemption, I would agree; but Shaw, ever anxious to score a point for socialism, insists that the Ring is, in reality, a condemnation of capitalism. For him, the Nibelungs are the exploited masses, the giants underpaid artisans, Alberich an avaricious industrialist, and Wotan and the other gods the sybaritic upper classes; Siegfried, on the other hand, is the shining Fabian hero born to save the world from capitalist greed and religious decadence. The analogies are very Shavian and very strained, but demonstrate a key point: the Ring's themes are so fundamental to the human experience that we can make almost anything of them.
For example, one Washington observer, a law professor at the University of Maryland, has compared Ronald Reagan to Wotan, king of the gods, and Ollie North to Brunhilde, Wotan's favorite daughter, arguing that the central moral problem of Die Walkure is the same as that of colonel North's trial: Should a subordinate follow his leader's will or the law of the land? Just as Brunhilde is responsive to her father's true wishes, so North did what he was certain his president wanted him to do; both pay the consequences. The warrior daughter is humiliated and deprived of her divinity while the former Marine warrior is convicted and banned from voting. We are momentarily persuaded, but then the professor, conceding his adamant opposition to Reagan's Central American policies, tips his ideological hand and draws an analogy between Reagan America and Nazi Germany, where "legal philosophers proposed the theory that the Fuhrer's will was law." We must never forget, he concludes pompously, "as the authoritarian '80s draw at a close," that there is more to law than the "leader's will." I suppose the professor showed restraint by not referring to the “totalitarian" eighties. Notwithstanding his specious syllogism about Hitler and Reagan, he does make a valid point about moral dilemmas.
And it was inevitable, probably, that in the capital of the capitalist world, someone would dispute Shaw's thesis and see the Ring as a defense, not an indictment, of capitalism. Two Hayek disciples, writing in the Washington Post, of all places, argued that the Ring is a free-market classic. In their view, Wotan struggled with the terms of a contract he could not accept
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