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The Ring, though many years in gestation (1848-74), was essentially the fruit of Wagner’s politically most radical anarchist period concurrent with and immediately following the mid-century revolts. The nineteenth century was obsessed by the Myth of Revolution, the myth that was one of that century’s two most baleful legacies to the one that followed (the other one was the Myth of Nation). In Wagner’s tetralogy this obsession found its arguably grandest artistic expression. Inspired by Feuerbach, Proudhon, and Bakunin, it is a poem intoxicated by the orgy of destruction of the old world in which humans compete for power and riches and by the hopeful anticipation of the world to come, the world of spontaneous solidarity and love—an anarchist utopia.

This chapter investigates Ruth Berghaus’s rethinking of the canon in her post-Brechtian stagings of Der Freischütz, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal. Invoking Brecht’s call for historicity, Berghaus exposed the totalizing romantic ideologies that underpinned both the socialist canon and the reception of opera in the twentieth century more generally. Rejecting coherence as a dominant principle, she separated text from author, she divested the canon of its positive heroes and unconflicted teleological narratives, and she shattered the myth of the total work of art. Her semiotic approach was symptomatic of the wider shift from content to form that Alexei Yurchak identifies as a defining characteristic of late socialism. As the chapter explores, her stagings had resonances beyond the GDR’s borders. Her Wagner productions at Oper Frankfurt offered audiences a theatrical experience that encoded the irony and alienation of late modernity.

Wagner’s abundant evocation of fogs and fires in Der Ring des Nibelungen was unprecedented. The water vapor used in 1876 at Bayreuth’s inaugural festival provided Wagner with his most “real” stage ingredient. Additionally, the chapter proposes, steam could mediate between bodies and painted scenery and could both enliven and veil open transformations. Yet while onstage vapors became a visual icon of the Ring, steam also drew attention to tensions within Wagner’s works and theories. Although intended to evoke unspoiled mythic nature, this novel and multisensorial technology generated smells and sounds associated precisely with the industrial modernity that Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was to overcome. Allegorically, steam’s rendering of both fogs and fires anticipated the vanquishing of nature in the Ring by fire, the oldest human technology. Ultimately, its multivalence allowed steam to transcend both scenic realism and the operatic stage to become a cyp her of both modernity and performativityper se.

Eliot was already familiar with the opera and operetta before he went to Paris as his older brother had taken him to watch The Merry Widow in 1905. Although Eliot is known to have knowledge about and an appreciation for opera, the influence of the Parisian operatic scene has often gone unnoticed. This chapter attempts to reconstruct the revival of Debussy's only opera, productions of Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen by Wagner, the premiere of Ravel's first opera, and other such operatic offerings, to demonstrate several different influences of the opera on Eliot's works. The chapter provides information regarding the performances and the venues in which these operas were held, recent and modern operas, and Wagnerian opera.