This week, we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of
Richard Wagner. When I was in my 20s, I went to a full
Ring cycle at the English National Opera, and saw Rita
Hunter as BrÜnnhilde. It was utterly absorbing, but I have never
quite been able to decide where I am with Wagner.
As a child, I had a phase of being in love with Norse mythology,
something perhaps akin to C. S Lewis's fascination with
"Northernness", which he later identified as the first glimmerings
of spiritual awareness. I loved the ferocious energy of the Ride of
the Valkyries, and the elemental power of the opening of
Rheingold, the endless E-flat-major chord that evokes the
life of the Rhine, and prepares the way for all that follows.
But, mighty and magical though The Ring is, I
share the squeamishness of many about Wagner's vision. The
glorification of male power, the destruction of the divine realm,
and the birth of a human world soaked in the memory of violence and
the necessity of strife is not exactly sympathetic to a Christian
world-view.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ("God is dead") was deeply
stirred by the first performance of the Ring cycle at
Bayreuth. Wagner himself was notoriously anti-Semitic, and the
figure of Mime in Siegfried has been shown to reflect his
loathsome prejudice towards Jews.
Yet, in spite of all this, Wagner's greatness as a composer and
dramatist is undeniable. We applaud the genius, even as we abhor
the message. His anti-Semitism is subverted by the Jews who have
interpreted his work. One thinks of Daniel Barenboim, who conducted
Wagner in Israel in 2001, and Bernard Levin, who was a long-term
Wagner addict.
Interestingly, he ended up preferring the Christianised
Parsifal to the pagan Ring. A friend of mine was
converted to Christianity by a performance of this opera. What
overwhelmed him was the sheer beauty evoked by the Grail music, the
"otherness" breaking into our world, and drawing us towards the
divine - Northernness, again, and echoes of St Augustine's saying:
"Thou hast made us for thyself . . ."
Three years before Parsifal was composed, Charles
Villiers Stanford wrote a setting of the evensong canticles, with
an Amen that musically looks forward to the chorus of the Grail
knights. Our faith has dark roots in a pagan twilight, which it
both exposes and redeems. Nothing is as purely Christian as it
seems, and even the vilest paganism looks forward to Christian
themes. So I think of this, whenever we have Stanford in B flat at
evensong.
The Revd Angela Tilby is Diocesan Canon of Christ Church,
Oxford, and Continuing Ministerial Development Adviser for the
diocese of Oxford.