Perfect Wagnerite

The most improbable masterpiece of criticism ever written: an Irish playwright dissects a German opera cycle through the lens of Karl Marx. George Bernard Shaw published The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898, when Wagner's Ring was still fresh enough to scandalize and transfix European culture. Shaw asks us to see what Wagner barely admitted: that his four-opera saga of gods, giants, and stolen gold is really a ruthless analysis of capitalism's inevitable collapse. Wotan becomes a weary industrialist; the Ring's treasure is capital itself; Siegfried is the revolutionary worker who destroys the old order, only to be murdered by the very forces he unleashes. Shaw wrote for readers who loved the music but had no idea what it meant. What he found was revolution dressed in Norse mythology.