Roads to salvation
IT WAS the Guardian columnist and Wagner-lover Martin Kettle who recommended the Ring Cycle at the Oper Berlin, with its radical Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, its seats more comfortable than Bayreuth, and its tickets much cheaper than those on offer at the Royal Opera House.
My husband was slightly daunted by both the scale of it and AI’s online explanation of the dress code, which said “Smart but comfortable”, and, oddly, to avoid swimwear. I explained to him the plot –— that it was both human time and cosmic time — and he asked under his breath when it might be bedtime.
We got to the bar ahead of curtain up to find a man ahead of us in the queue dressed only in vest, pants, and black socks; so the dress code seemed more eclectic than we had imagined. He turned out to be a member of the chorus, which spent most of Rheingold onstage in its underwear. Four days later, they were back on stage, similarly dressed, for the end of Siegfried, intruding on the emotional climax between our muscular hero and his Brunnhilde.
When I asked a British friend and director for his thoughts on these stage flourishes (which had earlier included the arrival on stage of an entirely imagined figure), he explained that it is now routine for directors of Wagner productions to introduce new characters: “Donald Duck, Einstein, Hitler . . . doesn’t matter who.”
The Wagner disciples, some of whom I met in Berlin on their way back from the Milan Ring Cycle, and before they headed off to productions in Vienna and Paris, seemed to love the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Whatever the costume reservations, The Ring Cycle is transformative and transcendent. By the end of it, you feel that something extraordinary has happened.
It has been claimed that art and religion are the two basic needs of humankind, and that this is a figurative religious experience. Wagner himself was clear: “I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven. . . I believe that through art all men are saved.”
Circles of complexity
I WATCHED the opera with Stephen Green and his wife, Jay. Stephen is a former chairman of HSBC bank, and an Anglican priest, so he took a particular interest in the metaphysics of the work as well as its exposition of power, wealth, and domination.
I asked him if he regarded the restoration of the ring to the Rhinemaidens as rightful resolution. He said that he heard the musical refrain of hope, but not certainty. The more Ring Cycle productions he sees, the more complex and layered the world of Wagner becomes. It is not the order of Luther, this Sturm und Drang — more like Schopenhauer.
Ticking over
WE DINED with another couple who had seen Berlin through its extraordinary history — had, indeed, been with the American soprano June Anderson shortly before she sang in Bernstein’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on Christmas Day 1989, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, Berlin is a popular destination for digital natives, cleverly captured in Vincenzo Latronico’s satirical novel Perfection.
The extraordinary ambition of restoration since the Second World War made me question my tendency to judge renewed buildings as inferior to the original. Imagine the creative ingenuity of restoring the windows in the chancel of the Berlin Dom using drawings and fragments of glass. But the destruction of beautiful buildings is its own tragedy, and I watch video of Israel’s bombing of the ruins of Tyre, in Lebanon, with fresh heartache.
A friend of mine from Paris observes wryly that Paris and Rome may have had an inglorious war, but this has been greatly to the advantage of their architectural heritage. I would say, civilisations will always be better and more beautiful without wars, but am mindful of the quote reputedly improvised by Orson Welles in the film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace; and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Light transcendent
THE Holocaust memorial in Berlin finds its expression of unimaginable horror through brutalist concrete pillars and walkways. I have been thinking about different kinds of memorials as a trustee of a charity, On the Record, which has commissioned a memorial at the National Arboretum, in Staffordshire, for journalists killed in conflict.
The winning design, by Wolfgang Buttress, was voted for by a panel including Maria Balshaw, former director of the Tate. It is called End of Copy, Words of Light, and features aluminium columns arranged in a Fibonacci spiral to resemble rays of light. A corresponding lantern will stand at St Bride’s, in Fleet Street, the journalists’ church. The sculpture is not intended to be religious, yet it has a sacred quality to it. Any suggestion of a greater meaning or dimension than that of our daily lives has the aura of the sacred.
Words that move
HOLY mystery is at the heart of the work of Malcolm Guite of this parish, the extraordinary poet and Anglican priest who is reimagining the Arthurian legends, through ballad, in a series published by Canterbury Press.
Like C. S. Lewis — and, indeed, Wagner — Guite conjures the numinous; the awe-inspiring, terrifying glimpse of the divine. Of the many excellent reviews for his latest work Galahad and the Grail, the one Guite liked best, in The Times, described his book as a “miracle” in these days of “AI slop”.
I visited him recently in his Norfolk home, where he says that poetry comes to him, as it did for Tennyson, as he walks, and he can remember it on return. He asks his readers to speak the verse aloud — best of all, read it out loud to children. I have tried it on my grandson, who listened rapt. I know the legend will stay with him.
Against the traffic
THE backlash against over-use of social media may be the start of a more contemplative life. The particular vice that my husband and I are determined to stamp on is looking things up in real time during conversations.
Because we are policing each other we have stopped doing this during meals, but I noticed my husband slyly putting down his bedtime novel, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, to Google the car model in the book, an Austin Gipsy — and he was soon lost in history, availability, and purchase. Our resolution is a work in progress.
How firm a foundation
THE obituaries for Gordon Knights, the former publisher and chief executive of Hymns Ancient & Modern, have been inspiring. As many readers will know, the hymnal was born out of a conversation between clergymen on the Great Western Railway in 1858, and remains a glory of our culture. From the 1960s, Gordon Knights shaped the organisation into a charity which published theological books, and, in due course, acquired the Church Times.
As the organisation continues to evolve and thrive, we still ask, before making strategic decisions, What Would Gordon Do?
Sarah Sands is a writer and the Chief Executive of Hymns Ancient & Modern.