Sagas are back - if they ever went away. The National Theatre has a sell-out on its hands with an adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials; Peter Jackson's film trilogy of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has won record audiences and Oscars; and on Friday night at London's Coliseum, there wasn't an empty seat for English National Opera's performance of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold.  We are rediscovering the compelling attraction of those alternative, mythical universes peopled by demons, pagan forces of awesome power, warrior armies of mutant human beings, spells and curses against which the heroes battle.  The English tradition, exemplified by Tolkien and Pullman, is one where, on the whole, we know good will finally triumph over evil and whatever the tribulations, the identifiable hero or heroine will win in the end. This is the reason video-game software writers find such literature a treasure trove.  But Wagner doesn't do good and evil quite so easily; he both revolts and attracts simultaneously, although even his sternest critic has to acknowledge that he is the composer of some of the most transcendent and original music ever written. Yes, he is quarrying the same mine of myth as Tolkien and Pullman; Das Rheingold 's characters could have come straight from Northern Lights or the Two Towers.  But there are no forces of unambiguous good or bad. Every character is compromised by some combination of lust, quest for power and uncertainty about its moral compass. In ENO's production, even the goddess Freia, turns out to have feet of clay. She, a god relied upon by other gods for the fruit that gives them immortality, allows her integrity to be compromised by accepting the advances of a mere giant. Every character's hierarchy of values is driven by their own appetites and needs.  I guess the larger question is why anybody should care, given the minority interest in opera. The trouble is that Wagner is out there; his work ranks alongside Shakespeare's as offering us a reference point with which to understand and interpret the world - and if you haven't been influenced and affected, someone else will have been.  And althugh his operas are manifestly high culture, ie over most of our heads, there are moments where I defy anyone not to be awestruck by the combination of music and operatic moment. Bluntly, he's a critical component of our culture. We are compelled to make sense of why Wagner deploys myth to prove our own moral uncertainties.  The reflex action on the Left is that he was a right-wing anti-Semite who foreshadowed Hitler, but I'm not sure that gets us very far. No mid-nineteenth-century European intellectual could escape the influence of anti-Semitism any more than Keynes and Shaw were later able to escape eugenics. Both credos were noxious elements of the then prevailing culture, but which still didn't pollute everything.  We don't write off the General Theory or Pygmalion because their authors were children of their time any more than we can write off Wagner's Ring cycle. As for politics, in 1849, Wagner manned the revolutionary barricades in Dresden with Bakunin, and although he became progressively disillusioned with political action, his work is saturated with both his early critique of capitalism and later pessimism about human nature - if anybody on the Left cares to notice.  So when ENO asked me to contribute to the opera's programme notes, I decided that I had to connect the myth to our times, unmediated by how it might have been interpreted before. I take Wagner's message as an ominous warning, especially in the light of how the first performances in the 1870s prefigured 60 years of economic and social mayhem.  The ring and the gold are pretty obvious symbols of a particular capitalist ethic that corrupt those that wield them. Once the free-market fundamentalist and neo-conservative libertarian arguments are accepted - that an order which allows human beings to give free rein to their instincts will necessarily produce the most efficient economy and best accompanying society - we are on our way to the perdition so eloquently portrayed by Wagner.  His gods break their word and their contracts to win material wealth; his women are seductive teasers who use artifice to control men and, thus, power; the giant brothers who labour honestly to build Valhalla fall out over money and women to the point one kills the other; his aspirant capitalist will sacrifice even love to win the ring that will give him limitless power to create wealth and power over others.  Everybody is corrupted by an universe in which the only certain mooring is to be richer than the next man or woman, the same universe which has given us Enron, Parmalat, executive salaries beyond the dreams of avarice and a moral code in which the richest have no qualms about creating artificial transactions just to avoid tax. This may be justified by the specious claim that it is 'wealth-generating', but it undermines the integrity of everything, even the happiness of the wealthy. We leave mutuality of obligation behind at our peril.  It's powerful stuff that deserves driving home, and director Phyllida Lloyd decided to do so by setting the whole opera not in mountains in prehistory but in today's sitting rooms and pole-dancing clubs with her singers dressed in modern clothes. Sometimes, it succeeds spectacularly, as it does when the gods are besieged by the media before crossing the bridge to Valhalla, but in the main, saga and myth don't translate into modern guise.  Myth gains credibility and force by distance which allows your imagination to do the work of both suspending disbelief and then making the connections you choose. If an amoral god is dressed as a senior partner of an investment bank in a minimalist loft space, you end up downgrading the myth and disbelieving the message. Better use modern theatrical technique to make the saga work in the dramatic setting in which it was meant to be told, rather as Peter Jackson did so brilliantly with The Lord of the Rings.  But Wagner trumps those saga-tellers where good so predictably will trounce evil; you know Frodo is going to be all right from the start of The Lord of the Rings, which is why, ultimately, the story is so unsatisfactory for adults. The greater truth is that we're in a constant struggle with ourselves, tempted not to behave as we should and using what props we can to get by in good order.  Wagner's gods are as ignoble as those businessmen who are allowed to take the main chance with no comeback. What is required is countervailing power to keep them honest, because moral compasses are not enough - even for gods.  This is a powerful message even before it is backed by awesome music. Give me ambiguous myth - and give it to me pure.
Will Hutton: If you want to understand Enron and Parmalat, you need look no further than the work of Richard Wagner.