February 21, 2013
Before Wagner’s Cycle, but That Legend Has a Familiar Ring
By ZACHARY WOOLFE
In Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” a film whose soundtrack echoes with the wide-vista twang of Ennio Morricone and some Rick Ross thrown in for good measure, one of the most important musical selections is one we never hear: Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.
Sitting by their campfire one night the two main characters in the film, which has been nominated for five Academy Awards, turn their conversation to the ancient tales on which Wagner’s cycle is based. The wife of the black slave Django (Jamie Foxx) is still being held captive. But he reveals that her childhood masters were German and called her Brünnhilde: Broomhilda von Schaft, to be exact, neatly summing up the film’s interweavings of deep myth, cartoonish playfulness and modern blaxploitation.
Django’s new friend and mentor, the German dentist turned bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), quickly perceives that his quest to rescue Broomhilda fits into a larger cultural pattern. After all, there was once another fearless young hero who saved an imprisoned woman called Brünnhilde. His name was Siegfried.
It is a story, Schultz says, that “every German knows”: how Brünnhilde, having disobeyed her father, the king of the gods, is put into a magic sleep and surrounded by a circle of fire that only the bravest man can penetrate. This is the part of the story that Wagner placed at the end of the cycle’s second opera, “Die Walküre,” and the beginning of the third, “Siegfried”; the febrile Magic Fire Music is one of the most frequently played excerpts from the score.
“Django Unchained” refers only to the source of the story in “German myth,” not explicitly to Wagner, who celebrates his 200th birthday on May 22. Bringing up Wagner’s “Ring” would be an anachronism. “Django” is set in the late 1850s, before the Civil War and long before the premiere of “Das Rheingold,” the first “Ring,” opera, in Munich in 1869, let alone “Die Walküre” (Munich, 1870) and “Siegfried” (Bayreuth, 1876).
But Mr. Tarantino hardly stints on anachronism in this film and in the rest of his body of work. And if a large public today knows the stories of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, it is only through Wagner’s passionate advocacy. To bring up the “Ring” myths is to bring up the “Ring.” So what is the purpose of having Wagner in “Django”?
Christopher Benfey, on the Web site of The New York Review of Books, suggests that what may have begun as an attempt to account for Schultz’s ? that is, Mr. Waltz’s ? German accent “seems to have spread into the plot,” which is also peppered with stock characteristics like beer drinking. The “Ring” story adds a note of the epic to Django’s story and prefigures the climactic conflagration.
From the 19th century on it was believed that there was something particularly American about the “Ring” myths. The critic Henry Krehbiel once wrote, as if anticipating Mr. Tarantino, that Americans “have not preserved Siegfried in the character of a popular hero, as the peoples who occupy our ancestral homes have done, but we have put his manliness and strength, and even his frank lawlessness, into many of the heroes of our fairy tales.”
But it is at least strange that a film about a rebellious slave and his violent rampages through Southern plantations takes its mythical backbone from the “Ring,” when Wagner’s views on race tended to the vitriolic and reactionary. His shadowy presence in “Django” unavoidably raises, in this birthday year, the ever troubling issue of Wagner and race.
Those views have some ambiguities. Wagner acknowledged in his prose writings that even his beloved Germans are themselves the product of generations of racial mixing, but he was clear in his belief that the races are “irremediably disparate,” and he mocked pretensions of equality like those that “authorized the blacks in Mexico to hold themselves for whites.”
Though Wagner, who died in 1883, was not around to see his music embraced by the Nazis, the operas are not exempt from the dark currents of his personal beliefs, including the “Ring” and “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” with their depictions of sniveling, vindictive characters seemingly modeled on Jews.
Not even his soaring valediction, “Parsifal,” which is now appearing in a thoughtful new production at the Metropolitan Opera, is free of taint. As the music historian Joseph Horowitz has written, “The desirable preservation of pure racial stock figures among the confusion of themes entangling ‘Parsifal.’ ”
Are Mr. Tarantino’s glimmers of Wagner, then, a cruel joke? Has he been drawn merely to the sweep of the story, ignoring its ideological side?
I’m not sure. But “Django” should play an important role in how we think about Wagner today.
It is telling that, as a friend pointed out, Mr. Waltz plays the same role in Mr. Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” as he does in “Django: a clever, polyglot, murderous huntsman with courtly manners. The difference ? and it is quite a difference ? is that in “Basterds” he is a Nazi villain, and in “Django” he is someone we are meant to root for, someone on our side.
Including the “Ring,” with all its baggage, in a narrative of violent slave rebellion is like casting Mr. Waltz as a Nazi before smoothly transitioning him to abolitionist. These juxtapositions encourage us to examine both sides more closely, to recall the Nazi when we watch the abolitionist and the “good guy” when the Nazi is on screen.
In the same way “Django” encourages us to put the “Ring” in a new, unexpected context of American slavery ? to make the two inseparable. We are not allowed to forget Wagner’s vicious, xenophobic writings or the troubled, troubling aspects of his works, but neither should we avoid his music or fail to take pleasure in it.
What we are required to do is to remain aware, as Mr. Tarantino’s film perhaps inadvertently reminds us, that Wagner’s operas do not exist outside history or politics. Robert Lepage’s production of the “Ring” cycle is proudly apolitical, but when it returns to the Metropolitan Opera in April, audiences will ideally have “Django” in the back of their minds when Jay Hunter Morris, as a muscular, blond Siegfried, crosses the magic fire and awakens Deborah Voigt’s blond Brünnhilde.