Leitmotifs and the Ring Cycle

     The Ring cycle exerted a tremendous influence on the development of modern music, on Symbolist poetry and art, and on modern mythopoeic epics ranging from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (which Boorman tried to adapt for many years in the 1970s).
    It was also a great favorite of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis attempted a thorough and systematic appropriation of Wagner’s music and iconography. Albert Speer even organized a special performance of the final “Funeral March” from Götterdammerung by the Berlin Philharmonic on April 11, 1945, mere weeks before the end of the Second World War. This attempt at identification was so intense that Nazi associations continue to linger and shaped the work’s postwar performance history for decades. 
     The first performances of Götterdammerung at Bayreuth after 1945 were organized by Wagner’s grandson Wieland and took place against an almost entirely blank stage, as if he were attempting to purge and renew Wagner’s “absolute” music. In the 1976-1980 centenary productions at Bayreuth, however, director Patrice Chéreau and conductor Pierre Boulez pursued a very different approach and resituated the work in the 19th century in the context of the dramatic social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.