DB, I trust you understand that you will have a responsibility to attend and review this production. Yes, I know that it's fifteen hours long.
Wagner's Ring cycle has at least one singular honor. Mark Twain, as readers of this page well know, hated the whole business of enchantment. He wrote a famous, and very nasty, piece about Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe -- essentially suggesting that it was responsible for the Civil War. His "Connecticut Yankee" tale is mostly a mockery. So too he tried to mock Wagner, and the people who came to listen to him.
He sent home an essay that reads at first like a methodical takedown: he notes all the weirdness of the Wagner cult, the confounding aspects of the experience. “Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad,” he writes. Then, just when he seems ready to give the knife a final twist, he reveals himself as another convert. “But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.”You can read the journal of Twain's trip here.
"I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion." That is an interesting formulation, and one I'd like you to think about. The Ring is a work of art, and some would say that makes it at most a copy of what is real. Mark Twain saw many real things in his life. None of them, though, were "so real" as this thing -- this thing that was art and, therefore, 'artificial.'
Twain was a man who said what he meant. What might it mean for art to be 'more real' than reality? Is that right, or is it wrong, and why?
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