about the downfall of the gods in “Götterdämmerung” (“Twilight of the Gods”), the final opera. Wagner’s effect on audiences has often been likened to that of mind-altering substances. Nietzsche compared it to the “continual consumption of alcohol”; Charles Baudelaire, a poet, to “the vertiginous imaginings of opium”. For most Wagnerians the gateway drug is music. “Das Rheingold” (“The Rhinegold”), the opening chapter, begins primordially, with a rumbling E-flat from double basses that seems to portend all that ensues. Soon the music depicts the undulating Rhine, one of more than 100 leitmotifs—earworms that recur and evolve throughout the cycle, announcing, recalling and commenting on characters, ideas and things. Figures express themselves not in the set-piece arias of conventional opera but in uninterrupted “infinite melody”. The characters, mythic but complex, are a second inebriant. Wotan, a trammelled divinity, disguises himself as “the Wanderer”; Brünnhilde, his daughter, defies his law in the name of love; Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero, turns out to be not such a hero. A work about abstractions like love and power is crammed with artefacts that might appear in a video game—and indeed have done. The Tarnhelm, a helmet that allows its wearer to shape- shift, pops up in “Diablo II”.
Drunk on ideas, Wagner intoxicates audiences with them, too. “All the currents of philosophical thinking that were important in his day…left traces in his dramas,” wrote Roger Scruton, himself a philosopher. Wagner wrote the text, and some of the music, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, an atheist who thought love could liberate mankind. Disillusioned by the failure of revolution, Wagner turned to the famously bleak Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed in resignation. The one thing Schopenhauer was optimistic about was music, which he thought revealed “the innermost nature of the world”. Under his influence, Wagner discarded the “Feuerbachian” ending of “Götterdämmerung”, in which Brünnhilde proclaimed a world “without rulers”. She immolates herself and the gods to the accompaniment of four minutes of nearly wordless music. After the curtain falls, you could spend another 15 hours discussing what it all means. In part for that reason, Wagner, more than any other composer, has influenced arts beyond music. Owen Wister, pioneer of the cowboy novel, was a besotted Wagnerian. James Joyce returned to certain images and words in “Ulysses”; so too did Virginia Woolf in “Mrs Dalloway”. Leitmotifs influenced film scores: think of “As Time Goes By” in “Casablanca” or the character themes in “Star Wars”. The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, is another bequest of the “Ring”: an expression of Wagner’s yearning to unite poetry, music and spectacle in a way that recalls the staging of tragedies in ancient Greece. His festival house in Bayreuth conceals the orchestra and fixes the audience’s attention on the stage, prefiguring cinema. Among the thinkers enthralled by the “Ring” was W.E.B. Du Bois, a black American sociologist. For him it “retold for mankind the suffering and triumphs and defeats of a people”.
Anti-Wagnerians, just as passionate, were sickened by the narcotic. Nietzsche, who never fully freed himself from his addiction, heard in the music “the complete degeneration of rhythmic feeling”, the opposite of the vitality he prized. He recoiled from Wagner’s antisemitism, which later helped endear the composer to the Nazis and alienate some music-lovers. The number of Wagnerians is shrinking. Membership of the International Association of Wagner Societies has declined by more than half since 2003, to 15,000. Yet the “Ring” is becoming more popular. The number of performances of the operas that make it up increased by 44% between 2000- 06 and 2020-26, according to Operabase, a listings platform. Perhaps that is because the sense that something is amiss with civilisation is even stronger than usual. Despite the Nazis’ imprimatur, the “Ring” reads more as a dream of the left than a fascist fantasy. Much as Wagner rejected kings, he reviled industrial capitalism, making him a rebel against modernity as well as its herald. Alberich exploits the Nibelungen who mine his gold. The cycle ends with a vision of a post-divine world governed by love rather than law and lucre. For conservatives like Scruton, the revolution is to occur not on the streets, but in people’s souls. The “Ring” presents “a vision in which art takes the
place of religion in expressing and fulfilling our deepest spiritual longings”, he wrote. Adding to its power is the paradox that the “Ring” is malleable in the hands of the auteurs who stage it. Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, set a precedent by staging highly abstract productions in Bayreuth that purged the works of their associations with German nationalism. Environmental plunder, inseparable from the renunciation of love, notes Mark Berry, an academic, has been a theme of stagings since the 1970s. In a production at the Grange Park Opera near London, Earth’s magnetic field is the “gold” that becomes electricity, which powers the social media that cut human beings off from one another. Imagery in the anniversary production in Bayreuth is generated by AI (the audience has booed). Revolutionary or royalist, Wagner was no liberal, and so did not see that modernity could self-correct even as it spawned new faults. But as long as humans fail to achieve their unattainable ideals, the “Ring” will resound. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/05/why-you-should-sit-through-15-hours- of-opera
A long-lost memoir brings the horrors of atomic warfare to life Tanimoto Kiyoshi, one of the subjects of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”, tells his story Aug 6th 2026 WHEN THE atomic bomb hit Hiroshima at 8.15am on August 6th 1945, Tanimoto Kiyoshi was helping a neighbour move furniture on the outskirts of the city. He hid between two rocks and, miraculously, emerged unharmed. Then Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, began a harrowing journey to search for his wife, daughter and church members. He encountered ghostly processions of naked people, their skin hanging from their flesh. “People were moving as if they were carrying precious porcelain with both hands,” he wrote in a memoir that has been newly rediscovered.
Some ten months later, with the city still in ruins, a lanky American journalist visited Tanimoto’s home. He said he wanted to investigate the effects of the atomic bombs “from the perspective of the people”. Tanimoto told the man his story; the journalist “listened intently and showed much sympathy”. That August, the New Yorker dedicated an entire issue of its magazine to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”. The article, later republished as a book, became a sensation. The American public was forced to confront the horrific human toll of the atomic bombings. “Hiroshima” also made Tanimoto and the other five main characters famous (though it took a couple of months for news of the publication to make it back to Hiroshima). Tanimoto later co-translated the book into Japanese and did a speaking tour across America. He campaigned for peace and disarmament until his death in 1986. Now, more than 80 years after the bombing, Tanimoto’s voice rings out again. He wrote his account in English, which he had mastered while studying in a seminary in Atlanta before the war. A copy was discovered in Hersey’s archives during research for a forthcoming film produced by Cannon Hersey, an artist and the author’s grandson, and Nishimae Taku, a Japanese film-maker. The memoir offers a significant contribution to the historical record.
It is also a valuable complement to Hersey’s work. Whereas Hersey employs the narrative rhythms of a practised storyteller in “Hiroshima”, Tanimoto’s “Hiroshima, 8:15” flows with the relentless intensity of eyewitness testimony. He notes a skeleton hanging from a streetcar, “the white ashes of Akiko and Makoto” in the ruins of their house, and a baby clinging to the unburnt nipples of an otherwise blackened mother as she slowly dies. He recalls how a badly burnt body was identified “by the colour and design of the slacks and the ribbon on the clogs”. He poignantly describes brief moments of levity. Priests discover pumpkins that have been roasted in the blast and joke that they are “better than chestnuts”. Faith keeps Tanimoto going. He sees the destruction unleashed on Japan as a kind of divine punishment for its wartime sins. He resolves to help Christianity spread in the country in the aftermath. He retains the hope of a true believer, ever attuned to signs of light in the darkness. After discovering aubergines growing in the ruins, he brings one to a parishioner whose eyeballs had to be removed. “Look, this eggplant has sprouted from the ashes and has borne a fine fruit,” Tanimoto tells her. “I hope you can overcome the atomic bomb as this plant has done.” The memoir’s discovery and publication is timely. The hibakusha (survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) are dying out: just over 90,000 remain alive, most of whom were young children during the war. As living memory fades, the dream of disarmament slips further out of reach. The arms-control architecture of the cold war has collapsed. Great powers are updating their nuclear arsenals as they gear up for a new era of competition and conflict; more and more countries are pondering acquiring nuclear weapons of their own. Hersey understood this dynamic all too well. As he told an interviewer 40 years after his landmark article, “I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.” ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/05/a-long-lost-memoir-brings-the-horrors- of-atomic-warfare-to-life
The rock-star chef is off the menu at Noma The world’s most famous restaurant hopes to reinvent its kitchen culture Aug 6th 2026 Everyone knows about Noma. The Nordic fine-dining restaurant dares diners to spoon brains from smoked ducks’ heads or eat salads crawling with snails. Since its founding in 2003, Noma has been through umpteen incarnations, from its Copenhagen restaurant (which has relocated once and closed twice) to residencies in Los Angeles and Tokyo. On August 5th Noma reopened at its previous site in Copenhagen. Despite all this travelling, most turbulence has been inside the kitchen. In March the New York Times published allegations that René Redzepi (pictured top), the head chef, had abused staff between 2009 and 2017, as Noma chased its third Michelin star. (Mr Redzepi said he did not “recognise all [the] details” in the article, but was “deeply sorry” and has “worked to