The Lord of the Ring

Wagner’s operas have their own special place in (or perhaps just outside) the continuum of Western music.  They certainly have their own place in my musical world.   

Wagner’s epic Ring cycle was probably the first classical music that I actually sought out on my own.  As a teenage boy who’d enjoyed Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Led Zeppelin, I was intrigued by an ad I saw for a complete set of recordings of Wagner’s Ring cycle – describing it as a tale of a magic ring, dwarves, creatures out of mythology… essentially saying to all the Tolkien fans out there, “hey, look over here!  This is where Tolkien got all that stuff from!”

Seeing the Ring was beyond my means; so was the full set of recordings touted by this ad.  But incredibly, my local public library had the operas, so I was able to find my way through the sordid tangle of human and divine misbehavior that Wagner set to music so splendidly.  “The Ride of Valkyries” turned out to be something I’d heard before – orchestral rock music, it seemed to me; and something about the “Magic Fire Music” was familiar too (Bugs Bunny, maybe?).  Then there was “Siegfried’s Funeral March” – a kind of slow, 19^th-century version of progressive rock, and reminiscent as well of Henry Purcell’s “Funeral Music for Queen Mary,” which I knew from the Wendy Carlos electronic version in the film A Clockwork Orange.  It also reminded me vividly of the scene where Gandalf dies in The Lord of the Rings.  (Omigosh, that has to be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written.  It may be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever read.)  This despite, as I would learn years later, Tolkien’s protests that he was not influenced by Wagner at all. 

The move from rock fan to Ring fan, it turned out, was not such a drastic one.  And that’s because Wagner’s music, while justifiably lauded as a high point in the history of Western classical music, is also somehow apart from that tradition.  I just find it impossible to talk about Wagner without thinking of things like Tolkien, Led Zeppelin, Bugs Bunny… because all of those things (and so many more) show how much a part of popular culture this “classical” work has become. 

Where do you hear or see Wagner’s influence today?  Leave a comment.