Damian Thompson

 

Wagner is more important than the wretched Lib Dems ... and so say all of us!

Richard Wagner: you have to do your homework

How refreshing that George Osborne, Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey managed to slip away at 4 pm – yup, four in the afternoon – to watch Wagner's Die Walküre at Covent Garden yesterday, thus putting into proper perspective the comic-opera histrionics of the Lib Dem conference.
The second instalment of the Ring Cycle is enormously long, so I'm assuming that all three men are genuine aficionados. Here's the thing about the Ring: the leitmotifs (of which there are more than 200) really matter; if you don't recognise the snatches of melody representing the gold, Wotan's spear, Valhalla etc, then you're missing essential elements in the story – the argument that makes psychological sense of the fantasy. If you don't do your homework, you're lost.


Personally, I'd like to drag the entire Cabinet to the Ring Cycle. It would provide pleasure for those very few members who appreciate classical music, and exquisite torment for the cloth-eared majority. We all know that Hitler adored Wagner; what's less well known is that his lieutenants tended to be abject philistines. Perhaps the only amusing thing the Führer did in his life was to force them to sit through endless five-hour performances of Parsifal – and pretend to like it.