First of all; I am so glad to see someone (which happens to be Mr. Akima)
stress the symphonical qualities of Wagners works, point on all the
intelligence and wit the works are made with, setting the frame for the
most wonderful emotional and philosophical world.  And I choose the word
"world" here, because the Ring alone is an own whole world, so are also
other works.

I was tremendously overwhelmed when I discovered the formidable form of
Meistersinger, and the consequence with which the composer follows a form,
which he has filled with the most wonderful art.  I like surprises;
Recently my heart made some extra beats when I discovered that also
Emmerich Kalmans operetta "Die Zirkusprinzessin" has also a sort of
development of themes...That I had not expected!

I think both Mr. Akima and Mr. Webber have interesting things to say about
this music.  I'd like to make a few comments:

Christopher Webber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Satoshi Akima writes:
>
>>I fail to see anything delightful in Mime's evil and Hitlerian
>>plans to murder Siegfried and to gain absolute power over the world.
>
>Oh, spare us.  How can anyone fail to see that Mime provides the comic
>relief, amongst other things? If we've not been amused and delighted by
>his gleeful cauldron-capers with the wholesome soup I fear we've missed
>at least half the point.  It's great panto-mime (sorry!).

I agree that Mime is a comic figure, and this part (Akt II of "Siegfried")
is one of the parts I most appreciate for its humor.  I used to say that
there are much humor in Wagners works - and I really don't mean just
"Meistersinger"!  I will launch an exkurs on this if anyone is interested!

So far I agree with Webber, but where he claims the Ring to be "great
pantomime" (funny pun Mr.  Webber!), I go with Mr.  Akima!  It is far from
my point of wiew to see the Ring as great pantomime, but...the Ring has the
Ancient Greek Triologies as model, so has Shakespeare, and his and Wagners
opus are two different ways of solving the issues that the ancient drama
arised.  "Deeper...darker....profunder..." that are good words (I refuse to
see Mr.  Zarazuelas irony in them).  But why can't a tragedy be a tragedy
just because it contains humor and fun? There is something called "dark
humour" too...and of that there is plenty of in Wagner.  For me Wagner
ris a true "tragician" in humour.

Satoshi Akima <[log in to unmask]> replies to Webber:

>So I shall take your kind advice and now view the Ring as a giantuan
>musical comic puppet theatre.  All the things that Wagner himself said
>about the Schopenhauerian meaning of the Ring I now clearly see he meant
>only in gest.

This with the Schopenhauerian sides of the Ring one ned to treat carefully.
Wagner started form his ideas about thge Ring in the late 1840ies, in the
revolutionary air that flew over Europe, and at this time Wagner didn't
know the scripts of Schopenahauer.  About 15-20 years after the first frame
to "Die Goetterdaemmerung" Wagner absorbed the ideas of Schopenhauer, and
he begun to wiew his Ring with Schopenhauerian eyes, and he came to the
conclusion that the catastrophes not depended on the robbering of the
Rhinegold, the origin of the unright, but on the blindly working Want, that
is defeated by Wotan, and by Brunnhildes Immolation.

But this new wiew did not lead to a change in the thought that one has to
strive after a cosmos which stands on the fundaments of social rights and
love, but to another idea of how this goal may be reached.

Only a shorter time Wagner thought that rejection of the "want to live"
was the only solution; he should soon return to his original ideas, and he
melted his Schopenhauerian thought together with his original thought, and
he came to a syntheseis in a hegelian way of these thesises....Already when
he worked with the second act to "Tristan udn Isolde" he wrote in the diary
for Mathilde Wesendonck (01.12.1858) that the new reading of Schopenhauer
had caused him to, and I quote Wagner here:  "extend and - in a few
passages - even adjust my system [...] neither Schopenhauer nor any other
philosopher, realizes that the Will can be sustained with LOVE - noth
through any abstract philothrophy, no - but through the real love; that
between man an woman!".  Notice by all means how Wagner changed Brunhildas
last words first from the original text to a Schopenhauseian wiew, and
eventually back to something that came close to his original thoughts.

At the end of 1861 Wagner developed in the text to "Die meistersinger
von Nuernberg" a thought that goes beyond Schopenhauer.  In the
"Wahn"-monologue, sachs realizes that he has to steer the "blinded will"
onto a goal:  The good act!

In 1879 Wagner wrote (in a letter to Roeckel?) "...and so I, despite
all turns, return to the thoughts I had 30 years ago about these
circumstances...".  So the question of how much Schopenhauer influenced
Wagner is not so easy to tell!  Wagner apparently mixed thoughts from
Schopenhauer, with those of Bakunin, Proudhon, Feuerbach, and other
contemporary philosophers, melting everything in a pot to something that
was his very own.

Mats Norrman
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