Ravishing Wagner

It occurred to me this morning that the two words, ravish and rape are cognates, both derived from the Latin rapere, to seize.

To rape is to seize by force and violate a woman; horrendous as it is, a woman raped, obviously from the male point of view, is ravished -- rapt, enraptured, even raptured, which means transported from earth to heaven, all derived from rapere. A similar dichotomy exists in capture and captivate.

This gave me an insight into Wagner’s operas. All my life, I hated Wagner. To avid Wagnerians such a statement is a sacrilege. I’ll be more reasonable and say that I have always held a strong resistance to Wagner. It is a matter of personal taste; but, on the other hand, it is a taste shared by my friends who think of the paradigm of the opera as Italian, where the beauty of the human voice is venerated for what it is by isolating the singing and framing it in the form of arias. For Wagner, on the other hand, the voice is only one of the symphonic instruments, submerged in the gushing torrent of sound.

I find Wagner self-indulgent to the extreme and his operas overwrought and unbearably domineering. I made efforts nonetheless and attended the Ring Cycle and most other works at the Met and elsewhere at least once, and I listen them on CD. As I write this, the radio is broadcasting Siegfried, a production of the LA Opera, the most overbearing of the four that make up the Ring, and listening to it symphonically without the burden of the dense mythology-invested theatricality, I am finding the music, woe to me, ravishing.

I had for some time, regarding Wagner’s opera, another notion -- that it is a kind of art that perhaps holds a special appeal to the masculine appetite for power in us, both women and men, but particularly the latter. His operatic creations are, above all, grander than grand -- grandiose; they require a colossal orchestra, superhuman voices, and long hours to perform. So, they exude an overpowering sense of power; if you are willing to submit yourself to them, they are empowering. Wagnerians find them awesome -- almost like a seismic catastrophe, a great conflagration, a volcanic eruption, a super-Godzilla -- and intoxicating; they delight in being transported into ecstasy, the state of being ravished.

Wagner means to ravish us. He takes hold of us and means to exercise a total control of us -- our intellect and our emotion. Every great work of art, to think of it, transports us to a higher level of consciousness. To those of us who resist Wagner, his force is coercive, perhaps dictatorial. He ravishes us whether we want to be ravished or not. The problem, I confess, is mine.