jeopardy, notwithstanding that each outlay of the State has the look of aiming more at the insurance of possession than anything else.
If the application of ‘Know Thyself’ to our Church’s religious descent would turn out poorly for our case against the Jews, the result will be no less unfavourable if we investigate the nature of the only thing our State systems understand by possession, before endeavouring to secure it from the Jews’ encroachments.” [1065W-{1-2/81} Know Thyself – 2nd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 267]
And in the following passage Wagner undeniably provides a viable reading for Alberich’s curse on his Ring as expressing what Wagner describes as the curse of money:
“Clever though be the many thoughts expressed by mouth or pen about the invention of money and its enormous value as a civiliser, against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always been doomed in song and legend. If gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood’s innocence, our greatest poet [Goethe, in his Faust, Part II] shows at last the goblin’s game of paper money. The Nibelung’s fateful ring become a pocket-book, might well complete the eerie picture of the spectral world-controller.” [1066W-{1-2/81} Know Thyself – 2nd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 268]
When Wagner goes on to say here that this money is the demon strangling man’s innocence, we are inevitably reminded of Alberich’s curse on love, which leaves the (seemingly) innocent Rhinedaughters moaning the Rhinegold’s loss in the dark, because Alberich’s theft of it put out its light. And who can fail to see in Wagner’s description here of the Ring transformed into a pocket book which becomes the “spectral world-controller,” Alberich, made invisible by the Tarnhelm, enslaving the Nibelungs to serve him forever even where they cannot see him or least suspect him. Such evidence was the basis for George Bernard Shaw’s famous, and hugely influential, Ring interpretation.
Finally, Wagner could not have provided a more definitive declaration of his allegorical intent than the following comment recorded by Cosima in 1881, that in the Ring he provided a complete picture of the disasters which the curse of greed for money brings in its wake:
“Recently R. expressed his pleasure at having provided in ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ a complete picture of the curse of greed for money, and the disaster it brings about.” [1074W-{2/15/81} CD Vol. II, p. 624]
Our main problem in accepting this evidence from Wagner himself for our reading of the Ring is that it only makes sense of a few details of the Ring seen in isolation, whereas the other evidence we’ve found in such profusion not only in the Ring libretto and music, but also in Feuerbach’s and Wagner’s writings (and recorded remarks), and in Wagner’s other repertory operas and music dramas, for our broader, more universal, less topical reading, makes sense of virtually the entirety of the work, even those portions generally invoked to support the notion that it’s an allegory for the curse of money. I believe we can best resolve this seeming contradiction by acknowledging that though Wagner’s conception of his Ring drama in its earliest phase of formation was primarily an allegory of the cultural damage which was the price for industrialization and capitalism, an emphasis on profit at the expense of humanity itself, Wagner in the course of writing it broadened
