THE RING IN CHEMNITZ

ROBERT ANDERSON pays a visit

Performances of Wagner's Ring in Chemnitz are indeed his due, and it is appropriate that Chemnitz should be the only East German city (apart from East Berlin) to stage the work since the War. It was to Chemnitz that Wagner delivered Minna over the embers of the Dresden uprising in 1849, and it was there, more by good luck than good management, that he avoided capture and threw himself on the temporary mercy of Liszt in Weimar. Liszt took him to an orchestral rehearsal of Tannhäuser and he had an ardent discussion with Princess Wittgenstein about the Jesus of Nazareth play he had sketched earlier in the year. Then came the Swiss exile that saw much of the Ring's shaping. Wagner claimed that his revolutionary activities were a fundamental ingredient of the Ring A main companion at the time had been the great Russian bear Bakunin, uncompromising in his detestation of all government. And he, friend of Karl Marx, was less fortunate in Chemnitz, where he was arrested in his sleep. Marx was well aware of Wagner when Bayreuth first heard the completed Ring in 1876. He complained afterwards he was endlessly bombarded with the question, 'What do you think of Wagner?'

For a while it seemed as if Chemnitz had surrendered entirely to Marx. In 1953 the city was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt, and a gigantic head of the revolutionary economist, with tousled hair flying to the wind, still dominates a main street. The head on his Highgate grave in London, though monumental enough by Soviet standards, is as seen through the wrong end of a telescope when compared with the all-effacing Chemnitz head. It was a comfort, though, to see local striplings busy with blaring pop music at the base of the monument, and plotting maybe the next bout of graffito work round about. On the wall behind the head are blazoned in vast letters and four languages words that now seem further than ever from reality, 'Workers of the world, unite'. Chemnitz has resumed its ancient name and once again Marx must pay attention to the tiresome little Kapellmeister who has taken over the opera house.

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