For as long as I can remember, politicians and my fellow political journalists have been conspicuously drawn to the astounding works of Richard Wagner. Many composers address political themes and confront the timeless dilemmas of political life. But none has the gravitational pull of the Wagnerian planet.



George Osborne and Michael Gove are passionate Wagnerites, as is Michael Portillo. So, indeed, was the late Frank Johnson – like me, a past Editor of The Spectator. My Guardian colleague, the brilliant political columnist Martin Kettle, travels far and wide to experience the best productions. Jim Naughtie, Paul Mason … the list goes on.

I’ll get to the reasons why we all turn up later. But the first point to make is that Wagner’s music has inspired political interpretation since it was first performed. The 35-year-old anarchist who befriended Bakunin and took part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849 was 63 when the Ring cycle was first performed. By then, Marx felt able to mock the former firebrand as a “musician of state”, a court composer remote from the social realities of the age; deaf to the first whispers of modernity. Yet the notion that the Ring is essentially a critique of capitalism has always had its adherents – most obviously George Bernard Shaw, whose The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) declares the Ring to be a dramatised allegory of “shareholders, tall hats, white-lead factories and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view”. In this scheme of equivalence, Alberich is the wicked capitalist and Nibelheim his industrial Hades. Siegfried shimmers into being as an avatar of Bakunin, the great rebel whose struggle for freedom ends in defeat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Treleaven as Siegfried at the Royal Opera House, October 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

In 1933, Thomas Mann was still speaking up for Wagner the social revolutionary: ‘This man of the people, who all his life set his face resolutely against power, money, violence and war, and who sought to build his Festival Theatre [in Bayreuth] for a classless society … let no spirit of pious or brutal regression claim him for its own, but all those whose efforts are directed towards the future’.

But, by then, Mann was up against the Nazis, who seized control of the composer’s legacy and works at the express command of Hitler and with the connivance of Wagner’s descendants. No discussion of Wagner’s Ring and its political significance can evade this horrible reality. The intimate association of these four mighty “music dramas” (and Wagner’s other works) with the vilest regime in human history must be addressed in any ethical reckoning. To do otherwise is moral cowardice.



That Wagner himself was a revolting anti-Semite is beyond dispute. In April 1851, he conceded to Liszt that “this resentment is as necessary to my nature as gall is to the blood”. His tract, Das Judentum in der Musik, ends with a curse that horrifically prefigures the Shoah itself: “But remember that only one thing can release you from the curse on you: the release that Ahasuerus [the Wandering Jew] knew – your destruction”.



Unlike his ephemeral prose, Wagner's timeless music is not propaganda. It stirs the emotions and challenges the mind.

It is hard to believe that the man responsible for the Tristan chord or the Siegfried Idyll could write such hateful trash. But he did: Wagner was a vile polemicist. Unlike his ephemeral prose, however, his timeless music is not propaganda. It stirs the emotions and challenges the mind. But it does not dictate a trajectory or a course of action. As the great conductor Christian Thielemann writes in his recent book on the composer: “I can’t play or conduct a six-four chord to make it sound either anti-Semitic or pro-Semitic, fascist or socialist or capitalist”. This is the heart of the matter. Whatever ideologies Wagner the man espoused at various stages of his life, his creations as a composer soar above them. Do we need to study Beethoven’s opinion of Napoleon to understand his Third Symphony? What matters is not the poison that flowed into Wagner’s prose – evidence, if ever it were needed, of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” – but the awesome emotional power, psychological content and mythic impact of his musical dramas. That is the transcendence that is such an integral part of genius.

Whatever ideologies Wagner the man espoused at various stages of his life, his creations as a composer soar above them.

Why then do politicians and political commentators love the Ring? The answer, I think, has much to do with the sheer scale of Wagner’s canvas: like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joyce’s Ulysses, the Iliad and the Shakespearean tragedies, the Ring is cosmic in its reach. It aspires to embrace all human experience and to confront all the dilemmas of life. Though the story ranges across a divine plane to mystic mountains, caves, and forests, populated by gods, giants, dragons, Valkyrie, Norns and river-maidens, the problems with which they wrestle and the flaws they reveal are those of the terrestrial, human world. As Isaiah Berlin wrote of the German Romantic school that influenced Wagner: “whatever fantasies of their own they may have generated, [they] do not cling to the myth of an ideal world”. Like Kant, the composer is drawn to understand “the crooked timber of humanity”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fricke (Anna Larsson) looks on as the pile of gold hides Freia in Carlus Padrissa and La Fura dels Baus production of Das Rheingold at Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain. Photograph: Palau de les Arts/Publicity image from TV company

What politicians share with the Ring’s extraordinary characters is an intensity of experience. They are brazenly theatrical creatures, romantics posing as technocrats. As Wotan sacrifices an eye for the sake of knowledge, and is diminished further as the cycle proceeds, so those in public life pay a heavy price for the acquisition and retention of power. Bill Clinton has talked about the “cellular damage” that political office exacts. Those close to Tony Blair concede that the Iraq War and its aftermath took a terrible toll upon him – justly so, his opponents might say. But what makes Wotan such a fascinating character is that the drama never simply or unambiguously condemns him. His long monologue in Act II of Die Walküre is all-too-human in its regret at the price he has paid for knowledge and power.

Most of all, this flawed deity understands (and laments) the intimate connection between power and love, and their incompatibility. Alberich foreswears love, a curse upon himself that earns him the right to the Rhinegold and the ring. But Wotan – a more nuanced character – recalls that, even with the world subject to his authority: “I could not / let go of love. / In my power I longed for love”.

His spear, carved from a branch of the World Ash Tree, is inscribed with all the laws and contracts that mediate his divine control of the world. And it is as upholder of the law that Fricka shames him: Wotan cannot intervene on Siegmund’s behalf when he fights Hunding, given that the Walsung, who is passionately in love with his own married sister, Sieglinde, is guilty of both incest and adultery.

Yet, as the Ring progresses, the power of law seems to diminish, as the domain of love grows and grows. In a 2010 essay, Slavoj Zizek aptly compares the emotions that Siegmund and Sieglinde ignite in one another to the love of Cathy for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.”)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mathew Best as Wotan and Elizabeth Byrne as Brunnhilde in Scottish Opera’s 2001 production of Die Walküre. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Brünnhilde, perhaps the most intriguing character in the entire cycle, defies her father’s command to let Siegmund die – but does so out of love for Wotan and her sense that this is what he really wants. Her noble rebellion is the hinge of the whole drama, the pivot around which the cosmic story rotates. In Western culture, it is matched only by Lear’s exchanges with Cordelia as an exploration of fatherhood, a child’s love, and their complexities.

Is Siegfried really modelled on Bakunin as Shaw believed? He seems to me to be much more and much less than that, so to speak. As the child of Siegmund and Sieglinde, he is indeed doomed to die at the hands of Hagen, Alberich’s son. But the core of his identity is a freedom from the ancien régime of divine law. He represents emancipation in all its forms – not only social revolution – and its tragic dimension.

Wagner understood that power and love were not only incompatible but the twin poles of human commitment

Any politician understands the intimate relationship between love and power. To devote oneself to the pursuit of the latter – at all costs – is to limit one’s access to the former. This is not to say, of course, that politicians cannot have happy home lives, spouses and children they adore, friends they love as siblings. But power – or, more accurately, the thirst for power – is all-consuming and respects no borders or boundaries. It craves the same terrain in a person’s soul as love, the claim to priority and centrality. When you are chasing power seriously – or struggling to retain it – nothing matters more. One of the most painfully accurate moments in The West Wing portrayed the White House chief of staff, Leo McGarry, coming home late, yet again, to find his wife packed and ready to leave him. “This is the most important thing I’ll ever do, Jenny,” he says. “I have to do it well.” His wife replies: “It’s not more important than your marriage.” To which Leo responds, with bleak but admirable candour: “It is more important than my marriage right now. These few years, while I’m doing this, yes, it’s more important than my marriage.”

Wagner understood that power and love were not only incompatible but the twin poles of human commitment. So one of the challenges of the Ring is to decide who is right. Is it worth renouncing love forever, as Alberich does, to win control of the Rheingold? What does Brünnhilde achieve by riding her horse, Grane, into the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre? What, if any, order will arise from the ashes of Valhalla?

The politics of the Ring are contemplative and interrogative rather than narrowly polemical. That is one of many reasons why these dramas are so beguiling and why so many, from across the political spectrum return to them again and again, year after year, in search of new answers. For in the end, there is no substitute for the experience of a performance. As Wagner’s witness at his wedding, Malwida von Meysenbug, is reported to have told him: “Don’t see too much in it, just listen!” Wise words, indeed.

Copyright Matthew D’Ancona/Opera North. This article was originally commissioned by Opera North and appears in the programme for their Ring cycle that begins in Leeds on 23 April and tours until 10 July. www.theringcycle.co.uk