Das Rheingold - a brief commentary on the drama

Let's talk next about the drama of das Rheingold. There seem to be plenty of attempts to write something like a synopsis for the uninitiated. The storyline here seem simple enough. However, there are things that nobody ever quite points out.

In the beginning, Nature is pure and undisturbed, as we find ourselves in an idyllic mythological Golden Age. It is an idyllic age that is about to be brought to an end when Alberich steals the Rheingold, to forge himself the Ring that will make him the dictator over the world - if he should swear off Love. Immediately, this sets in train the series of events that leads to the cataclysmic ending of the Ring cycle: the conflict between Love and Power.

I have said before that the world of the Ring is an allegory of our world. It is a loveless world which risks being destroyed by the blind lust for power through the terrible conflicts that this engenders. Since Wagner's time we have seen world wars in which countless millions were killed and which saw the human appropriation of the essential power of Nature in the form of nuclear weaponry, on a scale that could potentially cause an apocalypse on planet earth. It was an appropriation not unlike Alberich's theft of the Ring from Nature's guardians.

Even as the threat of nuclear armageddon has partly abated we find ourselves amongst nations at conflict to gain power over the Black Gold of the planet - oil - even as this oil slowly inches us towards a global warming catastrophe. The lust for the Black Gold, and the power it brings, blinds nations to the cataclysmic damage this could inflict on Nature, on whom we rely for our very life.

This why Hans Sachs says in die Meistersinger:

Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!

Wohin ich forschend blick 

in Stadt- und Weltchronik, 

den Grund mir aufzufinden, 

warum gar bis aufs Blut 

die Leut sich quälen und schinden 

in unnütz toller Wut?

Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!
Everywhere I look searchingly
in city and world history,
to find the reason,
why even unto blood
people push themselves flay
useless in wild anger?

Even though we may cleverly wrest wondrously empowering secrets from Nature, so the naked political ambition to win absolute mastery of these powers blinds us to the apocalypse that this may engender. Is it a coincidence that you see here a Ring shape?

                

Such things were still unknown in Wagner - noch Zukunftsmusik as the Germans say. Yet already, rivers were being polluted by the satanic mills of the industrial revolutions. Sweat shops, and virtual slave labour like conditions were widespread - as they are still today in countries like China. The innocence of the past had already been lost. This too is reflected in das Rheingold as the power hungry Alberich enslaves the Nibelungen hoard to his machinations to become absolute dictator over the world. Wagner is essentially asking what the prime mover underlining human psychology is that drives people to treat other so cruelly, and the answer to this is that it is the Blind Will to Power.

In spite of all these darks ideas brooding at the basis of das Rheingold, it manages to finish despite this on a note of jubilant optimism as the gods cross the rainbow bridge into Valhalla. It is not hard to understand the immense popularity of this truly iconic scene. For just one moment all of the Angst over the apocalyptic end of the gods predicted for Wotan seems to melt away in the grandeur of the moment.