Wagnerpunk:
A Steampunk Reading of Patrice Chéreau’s Staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876)
Keywords:
Patrice Chéreau, Der Ring des Nibelungen, magic, myth, nineteenth century, opera, Richard Wagner, staging, steampunk, technologyAbstract
Director Patrice Chéreau describes the nineteenth century as “our mythology and our past, containing our dreams” (Chéreau 1980: 430). His 1976 opera production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), considered perhaps the most influential Ring cycle of all time, evokes a nineteenth-century dreamscape: gods, giants, dwarves and mermaids in dinner jackets and petticoats scheme against the backdrop of steel dams and massive cogwheels. Traditionally, critics have seen this production as a continuation of the Marxist legacy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Viewed instead as an early representative of steampunk, the social critique, environmental concerns, and retro-futuristic ideas featured in this staging become contextualised within a coherent framework – one that explores contemporary social and technological anxieties through the metaphor of an epic fantasy world.
