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Alles waer'dir das arme Weib, das mued und harmwoll matt von dem Schosse dir haengt?<br>

Nichts sonst hieltest du hehr?</i></font></p>

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Jurgen Flimm's <i>Ring</i>, which will be repeated in Bayreuth till 2006, is strong precisely at this level of intense intimate interplay; his staging is full of insightful ideas which, of course, sometimes work and sometimes not. Fricka is in <i>Rheingold</i> a careful saving <i>Hausfrau</i>, not the usual majestetic matron; Alberich is in the Act II of <i>Siegfried</i> accompanied by a boy, the young Hagen, whom he already trains for his future combat with Siegfrid (Hagen-boy plays with the small model of a dragon); etc. And Hagen is, together with Wotan and Alberich, the key person of Flimm's staging which presents the <i>Ring</i> as a drama of corrupted state power (Udo Bermbach was Flimm's official ideologue).<br><br>

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knicken und nicken,<br>

mit den Augen zwicken,<br>

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And, finally, one should not forget that, in the <i>Ring</i>, the source of all evil is not Alberich's fatal choice in the first scene of <i>Rhinegold</i>: long before this event took place, Wotan broke the natural balance, succumbing to the lure of power, giving preference to power over love - he tore out and destroyed the World-Tree, making out of it his spear on which he inscribed the runes fixating the laws of his rule, plus he pluck out one of his eyes in order to gain insight into inner truth. Evil thus does not come from the Outside - the insight of Wotan's tragic monologue with Brunhilde in the Act II of <i>Walkure</i> is that the power of Alberich and the prospect of the end of the world is ultimately Wotan's own guilt, the result of his ethical fiasco - in Hegelese, external opposition is the effect of inner contradiction. No wonder, then, that Wotan is called the "White Alb" in contrast to the "Black Alb" Alberich - if anything, Wotan's choice was ethically worse than Alberich's: Alberich longed for love and only turned towards power after being brutally mocked and turned down by the Rhinemaidens, while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying the fruits of love and getting tired of them. One should also bear in mind that, after his moral fiasco in <i>Walkure</i>, Wotan turns into "Wanderer" - a figure of the Wandering Jew like already the first great Wagnerian hero, the Flying Dutchman, this "Ahasver des Ozeans."<br><br>

<i>La Clemenza di Tito</i>,<br> or the Ridiculously-Obscene Excess of Mercy</b></font></td></tr>

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of the people bombarding me with their demands<br>

Have mercy, one after the other<br>

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TITUS: The true repentance of which you are capable, is worth more than constant fidelity.</font></p>

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Usually, it is Judaism which is conceived as the religion of the superego (of man's subordination to the jealous, mighty and severe God), in contrast to the Christian God of Mercy and Love - one opposes the Jewish rigorous Justice and the Christian Mercy, the inexplicable gesture of undeserved pardon: we, humans, were born in sin, we cannot ever repay our debts and redeem ourselves through our own acts - our only salvation lies in God's Mercy, in His supreme sacrifice. However, in this very gesture of breaking the chain of Justice through the inexplicable act of Mercy, of paying our debt, Christianity imposes on us an even stronger debt: we are forever indebted to Christ, we cannot ever repay him for what he did to us. The Freudian name for such an excessive pressure which we cannot ever remunerate is, of course, superego. It is precisely through NOT demanding from us the price for our sins, through paying this price for us Himself, that the Christian God of Mercy establishes itself as the supreme superego agency: "I paid the highest price for your sins, and you are thus indebted to me FOREVER..." Is this God as the superego agency, whose very Mercy generates the indelible guilt of believers, the ultimate horizon of Christianity? One should effectively correlate the superego unconditional guilt and the mercy of love - two figures of the excess, the excess of guilt without proportion to what I effectively did, and the excess of mercy without proportion to what I deserve on account of my acts.<br><br>

Perhaps, then, the fact that <i>La clemenza</i> was composed in the midst of the work on <i>The Magic Flute</i> is more than a meaningless coincidence: one is tempted to risk the hypothesis that <i>La clemenza</i> is the obverse, the hidden truth, of <i>The Magic Flute</i>, its necessary shadowy double, the obscene reactionary political reality that underlies the reinvented "magic" of the Flute universe. Back in the 1930s, Max Horkheimer wrote that those who do not want to speak (critically) about liberalism should also keep silent about fascism. <i>Mutatis mutandis</i>, one should say to those who detract <i>La clemenza</i> as a failure in comparison with <i>The Magic Flute</i>: those who do not want to engage critically with <i>The Magic Flute</i> should also keep silent about <i>La Clemenza di Tito</i>.