Although I swore not to write further on this topic but since Mats Norman
has made some interesting comments I feel I should write something.  Those
who see the Ring as pantomime are directed IMMEDIATELY to their delete
buttons!  Mats wrote:

>About 15-20 years after the first frame to "Die Goetterdaemmerung" Wagner
>absorbed the ideas of Schopenhauer, and he begun to view his Ring with
>Schopenhauerian eyes, and he came to he conclusion that the catastrophies
>depended not on the stealing of the Rhinegold, the origin of the injustice,
>but on the blind Will, that is defeated by Wotan, and by Brunnhildes
>Immolation.

In fact it was when he came to write the scene for Wotan's Rage in Die
Walkuere that he can to feel that the whole meaning of the Ring cycle was
Schopenhauerian.  He even dedicated the text of the work to Schopenhauer,
and sent a copy of the work to him.

>But this new view 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.

Absolutely right.  The earlier Marx-Engels-Hegelian dialectic style of
thought becomes mixed in with Schopenhauerian Idealism.  This is something
Bernard Shaw never understood - which is why he finds Die Gotterdaemmerung
to be incomprehensible.  Shaw wanted to interpret the whole work in a
Marxist sense, but fails to realise that there is much more to it than
that.

>Only a shorter time Wagner thought that rejection of the "will 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 synthesis in a Hegelian way of these theses ... 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 hat >was his very own.

This is also absolutely right.  One could mention other names such as
Fichte, Schelling and Goethe.  Having come to the Ring and Schopenhauer
at about the same time I first struggled with Wagner's interpretation of
him.  It was only after much thought I have come to appreciate Wagner's
unorthodox interpretation of Schopenhauer.  Despite all the other
distractions I have come to finally realise that it was Schopenhauer
who still predominated (although there is a strong Hegelian aspect to the
Ring which remained, but that's another story).  I have come to see that
Wagner's interpretation of Schopenhauer was not as totally eccentric as
it had initially struck me as being.  It is just that Wagner sees that
the 'Will' as being a Will to Power, and a lust for gold, whereas for
Schopenhauer it was an abstract blind Will.  To this Will to Power Wagner
opposes Love.  In Wagner Love is what grants the final redemption.  Thus
the Ring cycle becomes a struggle between Power and Love:  the Ring being
paradoxically both a symbol of absolute Power and supreme Love.

The most helpful thing I thus ever read on the Ring and which was
instrumental in my understanding it was the following passage from Wagner
himself in a letter to Roeckel, 25/26 Jan 1854 concerning the meaning of
the Ring:

    We must learn to die, in fact to die in the most absolute sense of
    the word; the fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness and
    it arises only where love itself has already faded.  How did it come
    about that mankind so lost touch with the bringer of the highest
    happiness to everything living that in the end everything they did,
    everything they undertook and established, was done solely out of
    fear for the end? My poem shows how.

Supreme Love in Wagner is always something unattainable in our life because
it is always tied down by in the fetters of petty worldly things.  Supreme
Love is attainable only through the Supreme Bliss ('hoechste Lust' in
Isolde's Transfiguration) - in other words through the release of Death.

Wagner goes on:

    ...The course of the drama thus shows the necessity of accepting and
    giving way to the changeableness, the diversity, the multiplicity,
    the eternal newness of reality and life.  Wodan rises to the tragic
    height of willing his own downfall.  This is everything that we have
    to learn from the history of mankind:  to will the inevitable and
    to carry it out oneself.  The product of this highest, self-destructive
    will is the fearless, ever loving man...  Siegfried - that is
    everything.  In detail:  the power of evil, the actual poison of
    love, which is stolen from nature and misused in the Nibelung's
    ring:  the curse upon it not redeemed until..  the gold is once
    again returned into the depths of the Rhine.

Thus Wotan says in Act II of Die Walkuere:

    The curse from which I fled still has not left me:
    I must forsake what I love,
    Murder whom I love,
    Deceive and betray he who in me trusts.
    Away then all the lordly splendour,
    Divine pride and shameful vaunting!
    Let it all to pieces crumble, all that I have built.
    My work I give up. Only one thing do I now will:
    The end ... The end!

In a letter to Franz Liszt he wrote (Dec 1854):

    Apart from my - slow - progress with my music I have now devoted
    my time exclusively to a man who...has been a gift from heaven to
    me in my loneliness.  This is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest
    philosopher since Kant...His central thought, the denial of the will
    to live, is of frightful seriousness, but the only salvation.  Of
    course it was not an idea new to me and no one can think it all in
    whom it did not already exist.  But it was this philosopher who
    first showed it to me with such clarity.If I think back to the storms
    of my heart and the terrible cramp with which it is clutched -
    against my will - at the hope of living, indeed when these storms
    even now still rise in tempestuous strength - now at last I have
    found a palliative which alone helps me sleep in sleepless nights;
    it is the deep and innermost yearning for death:  total unconscious,
    absolute non-being, the extinction of all dreams - unique and final
    salvation.....I have sketched a Tristan und Isolde...the most
    full-blooded musical conception; with the 'black pennant' with
    flutters in the end I shall then cover myself up - to die.

What amazes me about the Ring is there is so much depth to it.  Those
who had been planning to leave it till their retirement ought to start
now as there is a lifetime of discovery in this work which I feel I am
only barely beginning to uncover.  Even more remarkable is that these
multiple philosophical dimensions all come to attain dissolution into the
abstraction of symbol-myth which in turn attains its ultimate dissolution
into the abstraction of pure music.  This final dissolution is just that
same release which Isolde attains:

    ...into the surging swell
    into the resounding sound
    into the breath of the world
    wafting through all -
    to drown -
    to sink -
    oblivious -
    supreme bliss!

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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