SMiLE and the Ring

From The Smile Shop

SMiLE and the Ring, by MacAndrew

I happen to be a big fan of such diverse musicians as Richard Wagner and Brian Wilson. Now this is, to all appearances, paradoxical. Who could be farther from each other than the iron-willed Saxon and the fragile Californian? What farther than Wagner's immense musikdramas and Brian's little songs?

Well, the purpose of this small essay is to show that, in this case just as in many others, appearances may be misleading. Before embarking in the SMiLE-Ring comparation, I will point to some general similarities between these two otherwise widely different men:

FAME: Both share an extremely rare, and very strange, status: they are on the whole acclaimed as geniuses among the greatest in their respective fields, WITHOUT being really accepted as "mainstream". To better understand this, compare Brian's fame with that of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Wagner's with that of Mozart and Beethoven. One could argue that their overall exalted position comes from averaging four types of judgments:

• - The indiscriminate praise of an ultraloyal fanbase (of the kind that makes one recall that "fan" is short for "fanatic") which is fervently convinced, respectively, that Brian is the greatest pop/rock composer, and/or the greatest American composer, and Wagner is the greatest all-around composer, or even the greatest artist ever!
• - The educated praise of musicophiles that know enough about them and about music to acknowledge them their rightful places among the greats.
• - The indifference of a general public which mostly doesn't know and anyway doesn't care for their music.
• - The contempt of those who think of Wagner as a bombastic Nazi, though he died about forty years before National Socialism was born even as a thought, and of Brian as a surfsong author who "cracked up".

BIOGRAPHY: Both have led very conflicted and unusual lives. As for Brian, I won't attempt a resume here - I think almost anybody reading this knows better than me. Wagner took part in the insurrections of 1848, was sentenced to death as a result and had to live as an exile for a lot of years. It's interesting that, though this and though being both very eccentric, they are far from the solitary-genius stereotype: on the contrary, they are "family men", twice married, with multiple offspring and substantial circles of very affectionate friends, some of which have been decisive in permitting them to fulfill their art.

WORKS: Both have put forth an appreciable body of "youthful" works, some of which minor masterpieces in their own right, honing their talents and then exploding with their undisputed masterpieces: one "of the heart", thematically simpler and centered mostly about youth and love ("Pet Sounds" and "Tristan und Isolde") and one "of the mind", thematically very complex and centered about... what? everything? ("SMiLE" and "Der Ring des Nibelungen"). It's true that Wagner, when older than Brian is now, composed his "old man's symphony to God", Parsifal...

But now let's come to the main subject: SMiLE vs the Ring. Let's see, on one hand we have a 45-minutes pop/rock cantata (or whatever you prefer calling it), on the other a musical drama whose total duration I have never measured. I can only say that in most editions the complete Ring spans a whopping 18 CDs! One could argue that this alone means that trying to compare them is sheer folly. I'd answer that it means only that Brian has the gift of synthesis, which was the only one Wagner totally lacked. Anyway, SMiLE accounts for some hours of music, too, if we consider the sessions...

The first thing that makes SMiLE and the Ring works of art "of the same kind", much more than, say, SMiLE and Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro", is their immense, pivotal importance, for bad and for good, in the life and art of their respective authors. They have literally spanned their lives, being conceived in youth and completed many, many years later: Wagner's first draft of the Ring dates from 1848 and he completed it in 1874 - Brian beats him by 12 years more in this! Both works suffered a long interruption when they were near completion (in my opinion, about 3/4 in both cases) and would not probably have been finished, had it not been for the help and encouragement of a group of loyal friends.

The second thing, surely related to the first, is their very ambitious nature of "representations" and "recapitulations" - both of the world as filtered by the author's spirit and of the contemporary state of the representation medium, music. They want to be both a synthesis of the existing and something new, beyond anything attempted before.

The third thing is the "multimedia" aspect. In no classical/operatic work are music and poetry so integrated as in the Ring - in no pop/rock work so integrated as in SMiLE. In both, music and poetry TOGETHER convey meanings and emotions that are far more than the sum of the parts. That the Ring adds a third element, theatrical action, is too obvious - Wagner wanted the Bayreuth theatre built for the exclusive task of staging the Ring! SMiLE's connection with the theatre may be less obvious, but I think it was for some reason that it was presented to the world at the Royal Festival Hall and not in a CD. It's possible that its theatrical aspect will come out explicitly in the future: in my opinion, it could give birth, for example, to a wonderful modern ballet.

Both composers use to great effect the musical techniques normally available in their field, but go beyond them when it suits their thematic purposes. They use chromaticism when needed to establish a mood (as in "Cabinessence"), various sorts of concrete or near-concrete music, and Brian makes a pioneer foray into heavy metal to represent the Fire element. But I think that, above all, SMiLE and the Ring have two fundamental words in common: harmony and counterpoint - two great examples of the latter being "Surf's Up" ending and the moment when Siegfried walks through the flames surrounding Brünnhilde, both cases in which two very dissimilar melodies merge as they had been born as twins. The kaleidoscopic layering of melodic lines is an endless source of joy and fascination in both works. This is one of the reasons their music sounds so "visual" and "picturesque". The other reason is the richness of the instrumentation - and of the vocal parts, too, of course: both composers delight in using every sound possible (and some "impossible", like Wagner's stierhorns and Brian's theremin) and even recur to instrument combinations to obtain otherwise non-existing timbres. It's interesting that, to represent Earth as an element, both use workshop sounds - Wagner made use of real smithy anvils.

The similarities become uncanny when we consider the thematic aspect. A consensus of interpretation sets out the following main schema for the Ring:

• Part 1 (or Prologue, according to Wagner) - Das Rheingold: world of Gods, who represent the Elements: the Rhinemaidens, Water; Alberich and the Nibelungs, Earth; Loge, Fire; Wotan and the other Asi, Air. Let's note that the whole work begins with a E Flat Major pedal representing the "primordial vibration".
• Part 2 - Die Walküre: world of Heroes (= individual humans), with love as main theme.
• Part 3 - Siegfried: same as above, with innocence and loss of it as main themes.
• Part 4 - Götterdämmerung: world of History (= social humans), with greed and redemption from it as main themes.

Now let's see a very plausible SMiLE main schema, synthesised from an original essay by the SMiLE Shop member known as "Chalk & Numbers":

• Part 1 - Americana (Barnyard?) Suite: world of History, with Western expansion and its results as main theme.
• Part 2 - Childhood Suite: world of individual life, with loss of innocence, the Child and love as main themes.
• Part 3 - Elements Suite: world of Nature, with the four elements and their relationships with Man as main themes.
• Epilogue: Good Vibrations, going beyond "material" elements toward the universal vibration at the root of everything.

Is it practically the same schema - the same voyage - in reverse order, or what? SMiLE as the 21th century answer to the Ring, the return journey? I confess that I was astounded when I compared the two schemas for the first time. What's more, they were conceived wholly independently, and not by me, so there is no risk that I have, consciously or subconsciously, invented them to "prove my theory".

But then... what Divine folly or genius prompted a 24-year old composer and singer of pop songs and his gifted lyricist to conceive, and 38 years later complete, something thematically comparable to the most ambitious and complex work in the whole Western body of Art?

P.S. It's interesting that, though "his" journey in the "Ring" leads him from the primordial Vibration to the world of History, Wagner considers History as a blind alley. The first draft of the Ring text (1848) ended with naive revolutionary optimism: Siegfried occupied Wotan's throne and established a world of justice. Thankfully for the world of Art, the older Wagner dropped this ending in favour of one centered on the redemptive power of Love, intended in the mystic sense (this ending remains implicit in the music and becomes explicit in Wagner's last work,"Parsifal"). Nietzsche broke his friendship with Wagner for this "betrayal" of the Super-Man idea.

So, one more Ring-SMiLE thematic convergence: both are stories about Redemption (and themselves miraculously redeemed from a destiny of uncompleteness!) and in both the world of History is portrayed with great care and effectiveness, only to be shown as being unable to find Redemption within its limits. Something extra-historical is needed.

In the Ring's ending, destruction/purification is effected by Fire, but Brunnhilde redeems the World by letting the Rhinemaidens (Water Elementals, directly spawned by the Primordial Vibration) have the Ring of Power back. We all know how SMiLE ends: of course, not in tragedy but in joy... it's the reverse journey after all, in which it is the beginning that is troubled (Our Prayer, Heroes and Villains), but at the end "In Blue Hawaii" and "Good Vibrations" mirror the happy frolics of the Rhinemaidens at the beginning of the Ring. But there are resonances here, and extremely big ones at that.