‘America is prepared for a brand new chapter,” Barack Obama declared to the Democratic Nationwide Conference in August, “America is prepared for a greater story.” Many would agree, however as commentators attempt to clarify the bewildering reversals and weird dynamics of this lengthy and unprecedented election marketing campaign.
Shakespeare has been a preferred reference level: Joe Biden has steadily been in comparison with King Lear in his reluctance to relinquish energy, Donald Trump to everybody from Richard III to Macbeth. But a fairly totally different type of drama, ostensibly much less reasonable and fewer clearly related to up to date politics, could in actual fact supply analogies which are extra illuminating nonetheless.
Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung was first carried out in its entirety within the Bavarian city of Bayreuth virtually 150 years in the past. Because the cycle of dramas begins, the dwarf Alberich, the Nibelung from whom it takes its identify, gropes the gorgeous Rhinemaidens and lasciviously compares their charms. They carelessly reveal that their river incorporates gold that would make its proprietor grasp of the world, however provided that he renounces love. Alberich accepts this situation and steals the gold, an act of despoliation whose penalties ripple out by the work’s 4 evenings. Along with his brother Mime as his apprentice, he makes a hoop and a magic helmet that deliver him supreme authority. Similarities with Donald Trump, his magnificence contests and gameshows, his misogyny, his exhortations to “drill, child, drill” and his amoral lust for energy, aren’t arduous to seek out.
Like Trump, Alberich holds on to energy for a lot much less time than he hopes. His enemies exploit his vainness to trick him out of the ring, effecting a transition whose legitimacy he won’t ever settle for. Alberich exhorts his followers to revolt, however with out success, and regaining the ring is an obsession that endures for the remainder of the story. Within the remaining drama, Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), Alberich enlists the assistance of Hagen, the son he has fathered in a loveless union with a mortal girl. Trump, too, depends on youthful relations to prosecute his pursuits: Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner had been essential figures in his presidency, Eric and his spouse Lara have just lately risen to prominence, Donald Jr is a continuing presence.
Trump’s newest surrogate is his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, seemingly chosen at Donald Jr’s behest. Like Hagen, Vance is a vociferous advocate of marriage: in Twilight of the Gods, Hagen seeks matches for his half-siblings Gunther and Gutrune, supposedly for his or her profit however in actual fact as a part of an elaborate technique to trick Siegfried into giving up the ring. Each Vance and Hagen supply plausibility, partaking in social interactions and vice-presidential debates with a superficial courtesy of which Trump and Alberich are incapable.
However each are much less all for serving their promoters than in securing for themselves the last word prize, whether or not that’s the ring or the 2028 Republican nomination.
The parallels between Biden and Wotan – the character who seizes the ring from Alberich – are equally placing. Just like the forty sixth president, the king of the gods has completed a lot throughout his lengthy profession as a legislator, notably constructing the magnificent fortress of Valhalla.
However he’s stricken by his waning talents, and the reluctant realisation that the duty he desires to perform himself – the restoration of the ring from the dragon, Fafner – can solely be achieved by a youthful proxy: stronger, fearless and fewer tarnished by a lifetime of compromise. Finally, it’s a feminine authority determine, older even than himself, who persuades him to desert his ambitions. Few individuals know what Nancy Pelosi mentioned to Biden in July, however the agonised confrontation between Wotan and Erda in Act III of Siegfried offers some thought of the seemingly feelings concerned.
Wotan’s daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, ends The Ring with an impassioned soliloquy. It’s now unimaginable to foretell whether or not Kamala Harris can emulate Brünnhilde by having the final phrase on this yr’s election drama – however thousands and thousands internationally cling to the hope that she is going to. Via most of Twilight of the Gods, Brünnhilde is exploited and humiliated by Siegfried, the hero she thought was her husband, and Hagen, the villain who makes use of her for his personal ends. However within the drama’s remaining minutes, she emerges from her torment to convey a commanding message of affection, laughter and pleasure. Harris’s willingness to embody these identical values, conspicuously absent from latest political discourse, fuelled her swift transformation from patronised vice-president to believable candidate. Journalists overlaying her marketing campaign steadily touch upon her private heat; her equally exuberant running-mate, Tim Walz, observes that “she brings the enjoyment”.
In fact, as many have famous, pleasure is just not a political programme, and regardless of Harris’s success in altering the marketing campaign’s character, she has struggled to outline what she would do in a different way from the unpopular administration she has served. Late within the day although it got here, Harris’s incursion into the hostile territory of Fox Information, the place she insisted that her presidency wouldn’t be a continuation of Biden’s, was a notable effort to do exactly that. The interview’s equal in The Ring is Brünnhilde’s searing encounter with Waltraute in act I of Twilight of the Gods, when she resists her sister’s pleas to halt their father’s decline by returning the ring to the Rhine. By doing so, she condemns Wotan to irrelevance, but in addition articulates what’s most vital to her, establishing the ethical authority that permits her to command the cycle’s ending as she does.
Evidently, the parallels between Wagner’s story and that of the election solely stretch up to now. Incest and immolation, key motifs in The Ring, haven’t surfaced as themes even in probably the most surreal of Trump’s ramblings – although with per week to go, something stays doable. Nor are there many swords and spears, dragons or speaking birds in right now’s American politics. Intrepid heroes, too, are notably absent, although maybe there have been sufficient would-be Siegfrieds amongst Biden’s 45 predecessors. But when we take The Ring much less actually, it presents extraordinary insights into how energy passes from one era to a different, into the implications of denuding the Earth of its sources, and into the transformative potential of affection.
Wagner has usually been appropriated by the political proper, notoriously in the course of the Third Reich, and there may be a lot in his writing to encourage fascists and authoritarians, not least the disgustingly antisemitic tracts that disfigure his posthumous status. However on the time he conceived The Ring, Wagner was a leftwing revolutionary, working to overthrow the regime in Saxony that employed him as Kapellmeister. As his idealism curdled into resignation, he experimented with totally different endings, giving Brünnhilde phrases that echoed the philosophy of renunciation of his new mental hero, Arthur Schopenhauer. He in the end determined to not set these phrases, giving the ultimate say as a substitute to music, and to an ecstatic melody that he informed his spouse Cosima represented the “glorification of Brünnhilde”.
The Ring is many issues: a sensible realisation of a revolutionary principle of musical theatre; a compendium of sensible orchestral sounds; a monumental bodily and psychological problem for singers; for some, a philosophical meditation or political tract. However it is usually, maybe above all, a supreme piece of storytelling, one which solely actually exists when performed out in a theatre. This want for perpetual recreation makes The Ring inescapably not only a story of its personal time however of ours too, one which absorbs and displays its viewers’s preoccupations. And by permitting music to take flight in his drama’s remaining moments, Wagner invitations his listeners to fill the imaginative house he has opened up, connecting his considerations with our personal.
Like The Ring, this election marketing campaign nonetheless permits many doable endings, and like Wagner, the American voters is leaving it uncomfortably late within the course of to make clear which can prevail. The last word destiny of Alberich is left ambiguous: virtually uniquely amongst The Ring’s main characters, he’s neither proven nor described as dying, although his world-view is discredited and his scheming thwarted, and he performs no half within the cycle’s remaining act. Maybe the one certainty about this election is that whether or not defeated or victorious, Trump is not going to stay equally silent. However regardless of the consequence, outdated tales like Wagner’s may help us perceive the latest chapters in our personal.
Michael Downes is director of music on the College of St Andrews. His ebook Story of the Century: Wagner and the creation of The Ring is revealed by Faber on 7 November.
