OPERA / Wagner for beginners: As Covent Garden gets a new 'Ring', Michael White introduces the most daunting of operas

RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883) dominates modern culture like no other artist in any discipline. W H Auden reckoned him 'the greatest genius that ever lived'. Thomas Mann thought that nothing in the annals of creativity compared with the Wagner operas, apart from 'a few Gothic cathedrals'. And if Wagner is all superlatives - the mightiest, grandest, longest, loudest - the superlatives pile to their dizziest heights on the Ring cycle (1853-74), which is the biggest thing an opera house can undertake, and the most daunting prospect an opera-goer has to face: 15 hours of music spread across four nights with the instalments getting longer as they go. By the fourth night, when you've already clocked up Das Rheingold, Die Walkure and Siegfried, you arrive for what is probably the 4.30pm start of Gotterdammerung knowing that Act I alone is longer than Boheme or Tosca and you won't be out before 11. This is not an evening to round off a hard day at the office.

But then Wagner would have been riled by the suggestion that it might be. It was Wagner's mission to restore Art (necessarily with a capital A) to the central status it supposedly enjoyed in ancient times as a regenerative public ritual. And he assumed it would precipitate some kind of revolution - which it did, aesthetically, though not politically (except in ways that Wagner couldn't have foreseen, when his work became the soundtrack to the Third Reich).

So the Ring was meant to be a celebratory, eisteddfod-like experience, in a dedicated temple of culture - Wagner's own theatre at Bayreuth, where the first production of the full cycle was staged in 1876 - with an audience of pilgrims who gladly set aside four days for the purpose. What they saw would be a myth of Wagner's own devising, drawn on medieval sources; in particular the Nibelungenlied, a 13th-century Scandinavian saga, rediscovered in the early 19th century and hailed by German Romantics as a sort of Teutonic Iliad.

Reduced to any kind of summary it sounds absurd: a dungeons-and-dragons fantasy of gods versus dwarfs, good versus evil, played out by heavyweight sopranos in horned helmets with the pigtails pre-attached. The Ring doesn't lend itself to abbreviation. It takes four days because it needs to, and because the

narrative is less about events than about how characters react to them. In most cases, slowly.

But for what it's worth . . .

The Ring of the Nibelung, to give the full title, scans the history of the world from start to finish in the manner of a cosmic pantomime: knockabout in parts, but subtle in that the Good make wrong and rash decisions while the Bad command a fair degree of passing sympathy.

Chief representative of Good is Wotan, king of the gods, who has decided, rashly, to engage two giants to build a heavenly palace, Valhalla, for a price - the person of the goddess Freia. This is not on. So the alternative is to pay the giants with gold which has been stolen from the Rhine river by Alberich, a dwarf of the Nibelung race, who has renounced love and thereby fashioned the gold into a power-bestowing ring. Wotan gets the ring by trickery and pays the giants. But the ring is cursed, and threatens the downfall of the world. Somehow it must be got back and returned to the Rhine.

But Wotan can't do it himself. He needs to find an innocent hero who will undertake the task of his own free will. To that end, Wotan wanders the earth, begetting children, and after a near miss with one of them, Siegmund, he finds a likelier candidate in Siegfried: a dwarf- and dragon-slaying adolescent who does get the ring and wins the heart of Wotan's daughter, Brunnhilde, in the process. But Siegfried is waylaid by trickery and killed before his mission is complete. Meanwhile, Wotan is in despair of matters ever sorting themselves out and sits waiting for the inevitable disaster. Brunnhilde builds a funeral pyre for Siegfried, then throws herself on it (the sort of self-sacrificing, redemptive gesture women invariably make in Wagner operas). And she throws the ring into the Rhine, which breaks its banks and floods the stage. Meanwhile, the flames pass upwards to Valhalla, which ignites in apocalyptic conflagration. End.

It is, though, an equivocal end. Why should Valhalla burn when things have been put right and the ring is back where it belongs? Wagner said it was 'emotionally' necessary, which is no answer at all. But it does indicate the extent to which the writing of the Ring was driven by instinct rather than reason - and resulted in a rambling fable with a biblical richness and ambiguity. If you choose to read it in such terms.

That no one can conclusively say what the Ring is about has been used as a licence by latter-day directors (and designers) to do their worst with it. And they haven't held back. The past half-century has seen abstract psychoanalytical Rings (stripped bare decor, uniformly grey-brown); anti-capitalist Rings (smoking jackets and leather armchairs); apocalyptic Rings (bomb-shelters and post-nuclear rubble); war-guilt Rings (a German speciality, awash with swastikas); space-age Rings (cartoon style, costumes filched from faded episodes of Star Trek); and even Rings that resurrect the Nordic literalism of the 19th century, complete with bearskins, sagging tights and stick-on pigtails. Collectively they prove that you can make a myth mean anything you please.

But there is a basic given, that the Ring is about the pursuit of love compromised by the desire for power. From there, modern readings proceed broadly in three directions:

(i) the Ring as a critique of capitalism - famously argued by George Bernard Shaw, who understood the cycle as a socialist allegory on material greed as the root of all evil.

(ii) the Ring as a response to Schopenhauer - whose profoundly pessimistic philosophy was a critical influence on Wagner and propounded the idea of the Will: the force that sweeps us on inexorably to death and renders all resistance futile.

(iii) the Ring as exploration of the human psyche - a Jungian interpretation, that takes the theft of the gold as a 'fortunate fall': a rite of passage from nature to culture that marks the birth of consciousness.

You pay your money, you take the director's choice; and whatever Richard Jones's choice is at Covent Garden this week, the reputation of the house will be at stake. The Ring isn't only a test of audience endurance but a health test for the companies who do it; and Wagnerian superlatives take some living up to.

'Das Rheingold' opens Thurs, 'Die Walkure' Fri: Royal Opera House, 071-304 4000. Both are sold out. Michael White's book 'Wagner for Beginners' will be published by Icon next spring.