Category: Uncategorised

Wilhelm Richard Wagner

Saturday 14^th June 2025, 10:30 — 12:00

Debunking Wagner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Richard_Wagner

?What myths have you heard about Wagner.

Ring:

‘Synopsis’

Royal Ballet & Opera video:

Rhingold ⬆️

Chapter 1: The Rhinegold

Chapter 2: The Valkyrie

Chapter 3: Siegfried

Chapter 4: Twilight of the Gods

Rhinemaidens:

Woglinde = Dance

Wellgunde = Music

Flosshilde = Poetry

Alberich – Elf, renouncing love

A representation of love: Stendhal‘s book titled Love

?What do you think about Alberich.

The following scenes in Chapter 1

Alberich’s repentance from sin. [Could Wagner be a Christian!?]

Wagner’s libretto — Stabreim

Groves Music Dictionary

Stabreim is a form of poetic verse

Iambic: Stress every second syllable

Shakespeare

Hamlet — “To be, or not to be: that is the question:”

Macbeth — “Double, double toil and trouble

Iambic Pentameter — 5 stress’ with a sentence of 10 syllables

e.g. Sonnet 18

Shakespeare & Goethe known to Wagner

Henry Cuyler Bunner, American novelist and journalist, on Goethe:

Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe, poem

My poetry books:

1. Soaring Higher
2. The Tara Brooch
3. Wagner’s Ring*
4. Blazon

*Wagner’s Ring started. Not completed at the time due to Shakespearean Tudor anachronisms. However, someone said I “can still do it.” Decided on couplet paraphrase, instead — AA, BB, CC etc. Next, Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, publishes his couplet version of the Owl and the Nightingale. Took my copy to the stage production at the Southbank Centre.

Read my incomplete paraphrase of Wagner’s Ring, Chapter 1: Rhinegold, Ii

Open mic:

Nick

Angela

Closing small talk.

"From left to right by nature’s design
Flows continuously the ready river Rhine
Lighter turquoise evenly spread
Becoming darker towards the bed
Near the floor the water dissipates
Leaving an increasingly breathable state
This vaporous man-sized space
Moves continuously and at a pace
Across the floor of the riverbed
Where no man can naturally tread
Are rough rocks and undercurrent tides
And vertical caverns unimaginably wild."