Old School Tie-In: Richard Laing re-experiences an early lesson on the ‘Ring’, with mixed emotions

Many Wagnerites gained their first insights into the Ring through discussions of the system of leitmotifs, and of these, Deryck Cooke’s is perhaps the best known in English. Such a method of approaching Wagner’s tetralogy feels a little redundant today; you won’t find much analysis of motifs and their relationships in the pages of The Wagner Journal; perhaps scholars feel that there is little more to say. And one could argue that since Wagner intended his motifs (or, as he called them, ‘melodic moments of feeling’) to work on a listener’s subconscious, analysis such as Cooke’s destroys some of the magic of the operagoer’s experience. But the counter view might be that an understanding of the structure of the human eye or of the engineering behind the Apollo space programme serves to make each more wondrous, rather than less so. And thus Decca’s re-release of Cooke’s Introduction to ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ (recorded in 1965, first released in 1968) is of more than mere historical interest.