Story Of The Century
Story Of The Century – Wagner And The Creation Of The Century, by Michael Downes
A Book Review By Brian Bannatyne-Scott
There have been countless books written on the subject since 1876, when Richard Wagner’s great tetralogy, ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen,’ saw its first performances at Bayreuth in the newly-built Festspielhaus. This latest volume, published in November 2024 by Faber, is a welcome addition to the collection, and offers an intriguing and insightful introduction, intelligently written, immaculately researched, in an innovative style, including intuitive impressions of his intellectual intentions interspersed with interesting items about his intimate inclinations!
Michael Downes is Director of Music at the University of St Andrews, where for ten years, I worked alongside him as Honorary Professor of Singing. Prior to this, I sang in several productions of Wagner’s Ring, most notably with the City of Birmingham Touring Opera in 1990/91, as Fafner and Hagen, with Longborough Festival Opera in 1997-2002 as Wotan, with the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland in Limerick and Symphony Hall, Birmingham in 2002 as Fafner, and with Seattle Opera in 2009 as Fafner and Hagen.
Dr Downes has written an extremely readable book about the creation of the Ring, the extraordinary story of its genesis and production, with a detailed analysis of its many complexities, and with an oversight as to how it has been interpreted over the 150 years since it was first seen and heard in that sleepy town in southern Germany, performances attended by princes, princesses and kings, and an amazing collection of some of the greatest composers and musicians of the time.
It’s quite different from the majority of books on the Ring, as it tells the story, in a historic present, of how Wagner came to write his magnum opus, without musical examples or comparisons of endless ‘leitmotifs’, but using his extraordinary life story as the springboard which propelled him ever onwards in his determination to write something amazing and earth-shattering. Given that the climax of the whole four opera work heralds the end of the world, in fire and flood, that would seem perfectly to justify the approach!
Dr Downes’ chapter headings neatly encapsulate his method, and they are worth outlining here:
1) Wagner’s Story
2) Sourcing the Story
3) Shaping the Story
4) Sounding the Story
5) Selling the Story
6) Staging the Story
7) The Story retold
In the course of a modest-sized book, he has managed to pack an enormous amount of information into his chapters, all in a free flowing style which is as easy to read as Wagner’s music is to listen to. Aha, you say, but surely Wagner’s music is incredibly dense and difficult, and enormously complicated? Well, yes and no. The assumption must be that anyone who reads this book is already well-disposed to Wagner’s music, and those of us who love it actually find that it is astonishingly approachable, despite the complicated nature of its construction. It is music that appeals directly to the senses, which moves and delights and intoxicates the listener, and Dr Downes’ easy style is the perfect complement to this music.
I was introduced to the marvels of the Ring in 1971, when as a schoolboy, I was driven from Edinburgh through to the King’s Theatre in Glasgow for the first ever Scottish Opera full Ring Cycle. Our music teacher, Richard Telfer, was one of the founding fathers of Scottish Opera in 1962, and this Ring Cycle, conducted by the Music Director of the company, Sir Alexander Gibson, was the culmination of the first ten years of the company’s existence. At the age of 16, we were able to hear and see, over four nights of wonder and bliss, this extraordinary tale of power, intrigue, hate, passion, revenge and above all, Love, unfold before us, with music of such deep emotion and grandeur that it took the breath away. I still remember coming out after each act saying - “Wow! That’s the best music I’ve ever heard!” One of my teenage companions on those magical nights was Donald Runnicles, now a knight of the realm and one of the finest Wagner conductors in the world, who makes an important appearance in Dr Downes’ book!
That production of the Scottish Opera Ring, by Peter Ebert, using new lighting techniques involving a transparent gauze hanging across the proscenium, and heavily influenced by the astonishing Bayreuth production by Wieland Wagner in the 1950s, was a triumph of clarity and direct story-telling, a far cry from the modern obsession with Director’s Concept Opera, the one aspect of Dr Downes’ book with which I disagree, of which more later.
Many books have tried to explain Wagner’s music by equating his extraordinary life with his creative work, but I like the fact that Dr Downes has preferred largely to document the various phases of that life, leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions. Polemicist, revolutionary, anti-Semite, lover, writer, poet, composer, conductor, storyteller, Wagner rarely spent any time in one place. Often pursued by creditors, or police, or enraged husbands, his life story is worthy of an opera itself, except no one would accept the libretto! Comedy or tragedy, who knows? Then when we add in the whole obsession of Hitler and the Nazis with Wagner’s music, another strand is piled on, and more recently, we have seen the desperation on the part of stage directors to reinterpret his operas to such an extent that it seems almost impossible to mount any Ring Cycle anywhere in the world which adheres to the basic storyline which Wagner spent his whole life creating.
It would be trite to dismiss Dr Downes book as a middle of the road venture, a sort of beginner’s guide to ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’, telling the reader about Wagner’s life, his loves, his dalliance with Schopenhauer, his obsession with a true Germanic history and mythology, his endless quest for money for his lavish lifestyle and the desperation to produce his opera as he imagined it on stage. His, to say the least, complicated love life in an era of traditional morality has been explored ad nauseam elsewhere, as has his unique system of musical phrases to represent people, thoughts, ideas and events, the ‘leitmotifs’. Whole volumes have been written, explaining every leitmotif, but none are recorded here. Rather Dr Downes has explained how they are used and how they were developed, during the long years of gestation of the cycle.
I feel that this book is destined to become a must-have companion for anyone who is interested in the Ring Cycle, a complement to the more in depth books which have come before, but one which is essential reading nonetheless. The freshness of the writing commends itself, and there is something for everyone in its pages. I was particularly interested to read about Wagner’s special pride in his librettos, which he prized almost as highly as his musical scores. Certainly, his unique alliterative style, Stabreim, is a feature which most commentators have drawn attention to, but I hadn’t realised that he actually organised readings of his librettos in public for friends and admirers.
I would have appreciated a little more about the inconsistencies in the final librettos, where the long process from first draft to publication often resulted in plotting anomalies, creating difficulties for directors and singers, particularly in Götterdämmerung, and I found Dr Downes’ fondness for radical modern productions, many of which have departed so far from Wagner’s original operas as to be less re-interpreted than re-written, utterly at odds with my own taste. He describes the concluding pages of ‘Siegfried’, for me some of the most joyous and exultant music ever written, a duet for two lovers, potential saviours of the world, in a production in Berlin thus: “the exhilarated Brünnhilde holds the score aloft, tears out its pages and throws them down to the other sets of lovers of all ages and orientation who surround the piano, ready to engage in orgiastic celebration!” This is simply a tiny example of one contemporary production, and to be fair, Dr Downes makes a decent attempt at describing it, but such total transformations from the original work fill me with horror, and I simply cannot imagine myself as a performer being told to act out these directorial fantasies. Modern singers are being asked daily to act and sing totally against the words and music, and to become almost cartoon characters in someone else’s vision.
That is, however, a discussion for another day, and I cannot recommend too highly Michael Downes’ new book, ‘Story of the Century’. It’s well written, informative and fascinating, and is a welcome addition to the catalogue of books about Richard Wagner, the definitive enigma of a composer, a terrible man but a total genius!
