Join Chris Stacey, Presenter, and Daniel Balsam, Commentator, for the inaugural presentation of the Coda Clash series on Wagner's Ring Cycle. In an age that believed reason could solve every problem, progress could cure every wound, and science could replace every god, Richard Wagner reached back into the oldest darkness of human memory and pulled out something the Enlightenment had no instruments to measure and no weapons to defeat — the enduring power of myth to disturb, renew, and transform human society.

This presentation traces the mythic architecture that Wagner built his revolutionary vision upon. From Prometheus and Oedipus to the doomed Volsung bloodline of the Norse sagas, from the great transgressive figures of the Poetic Edda to the Ring's own gods, heroes, and victims, we'll interrogate how and why these ancient sources shaped Wagner's central characters with a force that reason alone could never explain. At the center of it all stands a single image that connects the Norse world to Wagner's vision with devastating precision: the World Ash Tree, Yggdrasil, whose roots drink from the wells of wisdom and fate, and whose slow death is the Ring cycle's master symbol for what civilization does to the living world when it mistakes power for meaning and progress for truth.

Join us for what promises to be a genuinely provocative evening.

Date: Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Time: 6:30Pm Central, 7:30PM Eastern, 4:30PM Pacific. For those in Europe the time is 12:30AM in London on July 23.

Location: Zoom Video Conference

Cost: Free

Photo Credit: "Raging, Wotan, Rides to the Rock," Arthur Rackham, WikiArt, Public Domain