From the sinister to the sublime at Berlin's Wagner festival

By HEATH LEES

There's something almost eerie about being in Berlin for Richard Wagner's week-long, four-opera cycle The Ring.

It's not just the 36-hour jetlag that does it. The problem comes from trying to work out whether life is imitating art, or the other way around. At the end of Wagner's first Ring opera, Das Rheingold, the gods retreat behind the enormous wall of Valhalla, cutting themselves off from a changing world.

In Berlin you feel this moment deeply because earlier that day you followed the bricks marking the path of Berlin's own infamous wall - a real-life barrier set up by political leaders and high-ranking officials who cut the city in two from 1961 until it was torn down in 1990.

Ultimately, the wall was as futile in life as it is in Wagner's operas. At the end of the final Ring opera, Gotterdammerung, change overtakes the gods, and the evil Alberich holds up the Ring triumphantly. But the old order has passed away, so the Ring crumbles theatrically in his fingers to drift to the ground and disappear into dust. Just like Berlin's wall. One day it began to crumble, and out came thousands of "wall-pickers" with their little hammers and chisels, like the dwarves in Wagner's underworld, tapping it into pieces and carting it away.

A kilometre from the opera house is Checkpoint Charlie, now a tourist mecca. Here too, Wagner's operatic message rumbles through a new economic cycle of exploitation where leather-jacketed wideboys offer you bits of the wall at hugely inflated prices. Their claim that every piece is authentic is as genuine as a three-euro note. Like Wagner's dwarves, they live on their wits, lying, cheating and marketing quite happily, pretending the punters want to be fooled.

There's a sinister side to Wagner in Berlin. The ghosts of Hitler and the Nazi leaders are sometimes close, and it's painful to remember that Hitler modelled his bid for power on the charismatic leadership of Rienzi, the subject of Wagner's third opera. Then again, during the intervals between Wagner's acts, as you walk round the manicured lawn of the square next to the State Opera House, you find yourself remembering it was here that the notorious Nazi book-burnings took place.

And there's the Jewish question. All his life Wagner was convinced there was a Jewish plot against him and his music. As he got older, his anti-Semitism became fanatical, and some of the deformed caricatures in his operas are obviously Jewish stereotypes.

Today, in Berlin, you can mix your Wagner opera with a visit to the new Jewish Museum, erected to destroy such prejudiced stereotypes. In shining aluminium gloss, the building has ugly gashes cut into its side as windows, and it contains a room called "the void" where you stand in a silently tall, tomb-like space with only a wisp of light from above, and no way out till the flooding relief when they open the door again.

One of Berlin's flattened bomb-sites is being prepared as a memorial to the Jews who died in the Holocaust, and as you pass it on the way to the opera, you feel uncomfortably tainted for loving Wagner's music while detesting his racist views, and the evil ideas that later built up around him.

Thankfully there's a sense of balance from the city's musical Hercules, Daniel Barenboim, the conductor of the four Ring operas, plus another six besides. Proudly Argentinian and Jewish by birth, Barenboim loves Berlin as much as he loves Wagner's works, which he has recently played to scandalised audiences in Israel, though half the hall walked out in protest.

But Barenboim perseveres, and appears frequently on television chat-shows and in the press, arguing for greater acceptance and human understanding for Wagner and his deluded genius on account of his fabulous music which, says Barenboim, rises above everything.

At the end of it all, Wagner's Ring works at the deepest levels because it is a monumental presentation of the continuous cycle of evil against good, power against love, and exploitation against compassion. In its final moments, the orchestra plays the sublime Redemption theme that closes the work on (literally) a note of optimism.

Outside, real-life Berlin, with its ghastly reminders and current rebirth, becomes a backdrop for Wagner's message that for every generation, past tragedies may yet provide the basis for present hopes.

As you board the plane for New Zealand, you find yourself hoping against hope that life will indeed imitate art, and that art might even recapture its power to influence life.

Somehow, what happens to Berlin seems vital for us all.