Book Review — Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring

Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring

By Philip Kitcher, Richard Schacht

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 31, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195173597
ISBN-13: 978-0195173598

Rating: 2 out of 5

I cannot begin to say how hugely disappointed I am with this book. Although written by two philosophers, there is little relevant philosophy in there, except for superficial philosophobabble poorly integrated into the interpretation of the Ring as a whole. A good example is how their lecture about different types of love is such a bore (a cut and paste from lecture material for first-year undergraduate philosophy students perhaps). Another example is where they suddenly toss in the Hegelian word Aufhebung out of the blue.  However, it just sounds they are showing off, because it isn't as though they present a Hegelian view of the Ring. Don't get me wrong — I really like Hegel and own his complete works in German. It's because I like Hegel that this just sounds like they are showing off unnecessarily. I cringed.

The two authors are said to be amateur musicians, but there is very little musicology in there either, and the word leitmotif almost never occurs in the entire book, and nor is leitmotivic development discussed in any structurally meaningful way. I had been looking forward to something of the sort in-depth discussion you get from Theodor Adorno at his best: a profound insight into the score and the philosophical background, at the same time. It is a gift for profound insight that surprisingly failed Adorno when it came to Wagner. Sadly, this book cannot be said to have succeeded where Adorno failed (oh how sad his writings on Wagner come nowhere near the penetrating depth of insight he shows into the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg and Mahler). It is just an often tedious and overly wordy synopsis with the occasional superficial philosophical asides poorly integrated into the book overall. The authors' writing style is bland and it makes staying awake while reading the book difficult. I had to force myself to read it.

This one quote summarises all that is wrong with the whole book in one sentence. In writing a lengthy synopsis of the confrontation between Siegfried and the Wanderer they say this:

For Siegfried to supplant Wotan and his brand of admirable order, there must be a confrontation, in which the hero must be victorious. 

Wotan's admirable order?  Wotan deceitfully sets tribe against tribe, who, each sworn to their oaths, are set against each other in brutal battle. This brutal world order imposed by Wotan is all about lies, manipulation, deception, war, hatred, and vengeance. This is meant to be admirable? You must be joking, surely? Sadly, it is not, and it renders the entire book a sad joke. 

The authors start out well by identifying Feuerbach and Schopenhauer as two prime influences. They then go on to dismiss Schopenhauer as a cynical crank, then do nothing to try to discover Feuerbachian early socialist thinking in the Ring at all. Wagner tells us we should understand the Ring on Schopenhauerian terms, but at the same time emphasises the anti-capitalist message of the Ring. If Schopenhauer was to be tossed aside, given that Feuerbach — the Young Hegelian — is regarded as an intermediate thinker between Hegel and Marx, I thought perhaps this aspect would be explored — but no, to my total astonishment it is not touched on in the slightest.

Both the early socialist and Schopenhauerian aspects of the Ring have been discussed in this blog, taking great pains to repeatedly use Wagner's own explanations as the starting point for the discussion on the meaning of the Ring. Not surprisingly Wagner's own writings on his Ring are almost totally ignored in this book, which just seems to belong to the tradition of wilfully imposing whatever irrelevant person ideological bias you want to onto the Ring like the Nazis — irrelevant, that is, for everyone except that person. Sadly, these irrelevant interpretations comprise the majority in the vast Wagner literature.

I am sure that the authors would consider this an unjustly harsh pronouncement, and would insist, as they do in the book, that Wagner went beyond both Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. Though they don't say it, the interpretation of the ending of Götterdämmerung they want to forcibly impose onto Wagner is more Nietzschean (and I don't just mean The Birth of Tragedy) when they say that it is both "tragic and affirmative" — one of the authors has written books on Nietzsche. Nietzschean affirmation of Life and World in the face of Tragedy and Destiny, a kind of amor fati, is supposed to be an anti-Schopenhauerian act. I must admit I used to think the same sort of way, which is to further confess that there would have been a time when I would have been foolish enough to be more welcoming of this book. However, as I keep saying on this blog — try as you may to dismiss Schopenhauer as a crank to be swept under the rug, in Wagner, you just cannot get away from him. If you do, you are only kidding yourself. That, ultimately, is the reason this book is a train-wreck after smashing head-on into Schopenhauer and coming off second best.

That said though, there are minor glimpses of insights along the way. The trouble is that overall they don't really amount to anything of any great profundity, even if I have no doubt that they have enough of an understanding of Wagner that they get a great deal of personal enjoyment from the Ring. It's just that it's not really worth boring anyone else with it. So I am afraid, I cannot possibly recommend this book to anyone — either to philosophers, musicologists who are trying to improve their understanding of the philosophical aspects of Wagner, and least of all to general music lovers. If one of these authors had given a pre-performance talk on the Ring at an opera house, I would probably have rudely stood up and walked out in the middle of it. Sorry.

If you are after a book that explains the fundamentals of the Ring to you, I am now convinced that Georg Bernard Shaw remains unsurpassed and that he had it basically right in The Perfect Wagnerite all along. If Kitcher and Schacht read what I just said they would pop an aneurysm and foam at the mouth — but, I couldn't care less these days. I just don't think anyone has managed to better Bernard Shaw, even though you will find aspects of the Ring discussed on this blog that are complementary to his view — which is to say that Shaw does not by any means exhaustively plumb the depths of the Ring. However, I must admit that for many years I dismissed Shaw, as I did in a recent post — I have now withdrawn that entire post after reading The Perfect Wagnerite again. The old bastard (bless him) had it basically right all along!

Those of you interested in exploring the philosophical background to Wagner are directed to Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee — see my review on this book, which succeeds admirably for all the same reasons that this book miserably fails.

[ADDIT: For a review of a book actually worth reading and discussing please see Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee.]