Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.From the middle of the 19th century, Richard Wagner’s operas were seen as having a pathogenic effect. Audience members fainted; conductors, singers and orchestral players died or caught their death mid-performance. Friedrich Nietzsche described Wagner as a “corruptor” of nerves, and Dutch psychoanalysts blamed him for the insanity of their patients. In various interviews over a century later, Thomas Adès updated the impression of the German composer’s music and influence to “fungal”: a “growth” that has pervaded “everywhere”.This isn’t wrong. Twentieth-century classical music wouldn’t have happened without Wagner. When you hear a dramatic film score, that’s his trace. More recently, he has seeped into our moment with the rise of the Wagner Group: a Russian mercenary company allegedly named because of Hitler’s passion for the composer. In Story of the Century, conductor and academic Michael Downes has distilled the making of Wagner’s most monumental and challenging endeavour into a cogent narrative history, focusing on the composer’s lesser-known political associations. The Ring of the Nibelung, a 15-hour cycle of four operas based on a Medieval German epic, was imagined during a time of radical ferment. Before his print diatribes about “Jewishness” and other “foreign” elements in German music, Wagner had long been a committed republican, risking his solid position at the royal court of Saxony to espouse democratic reforms. He helped organise 1849’s May Uprising in Dresden, then lived for a decade in exile.It was in this revolutionary climate that he envisaged a story about the “violent overthrow” of the gods by humans. Downes, who has previously written a book about British composer Jonathan Harvey, details how Wagner, in the 26 years it took him to complete and stage The Ring, revolutionised both the performance and musical content of the medium. His operas weren’t sequences of big numbers, tethered by recitative, but continuous bolts of musical fabric. Densely applying recurrent musical themes, Wagner articulated information about character and story beyond what libretto or acting alone could achieve.Downes’s subject is liveliest in entrepreneur-mode, always coming up with new schemes to get his operas funded. He must be one of the most successful manifestors in history. At a time when he struggled to convince people to mount even satisfactory performances of his work, he was already planning entire festivals dedicated to his music in purpose-built opera houses, writing for instruments that “do not yet exist”, and “would not be manufactured for more than twenty years”. This all came to pass. The body of writing about Wagner is itself Wagnerian in scope. Of prominent recent titles alone, for example, there’s a Simon Callow memoir about playing the composer on stage, Christian Thielemann’s account of a career as the pre-eminent Wagner conductor of our time and Alex Ross’s tome Wagnerism, considering the ambiguities of his legacy.Story of the Century is a straightforward, gripping account of making art. But there is so much already published — something Downes acknowledges — that one finds oneself reaching for dreaded marketing phraseology to justify further additions to the field: why now? Why a full narrative account of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, besides a 150th anniversary being two years away?Downes deals subtly with Wagner’s controversial politics and behaviour, including but not limited to antisemitism, as and when it frequently arises. Accounts of The Ring’s afterlives, and 20th-century attempts to purge Wagner performances of their Nazi associations, inspire some of the book’s most powerful writing. But in 2024, I would have expected a more direct and in-depth treatment of this uncomfortable material. Especially in a book which argues for why the work “matters” and why it is “prescient” and “relevant”, implying Downes imagines a readership beyond already committed Wagnerites. A fuller accounting of the politics, as well as Wagner’s influence on Hitler and his subsumption into Nazi culture, would show us the full scope and tragic reach of this story as it played out across the centuries. But why does The Ring “matter” in the 21st century? We live in a world where Game of Thrones, Tolkien, Marvel and Star Wars IP dominates the entertainment landscape. There must be an argument to be made that The Ring is the first big-budget, blockbuster high fantasy. Even after a century’s worth of film music for which Wagner laid the blueprint, the most cinematic few bars ever written occur, to my mind, halfway into the first opera, Das Rheingold, introducing the infernal mines where a ring of power, cursed and coveted by all, is forged.Story of the Century: Wagner and the Creation of The Ring by Michael Downes Faber & Faber £22, 336 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
