If you stage it, the Ring nuts will come
SAN FRANCISCO— Opera’s Mt. Everest? Individual masterpieces may come to mind, Berlioz’s Les Troyens among them, but to most commentators, the answer, hands down, is Richard Wagner’s four-part Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Performed without cuts, as done by the San Francisco Opera three times last month, it runs to about 17 hours of music, a marathon for listeners as well as performers, constituting the most ambitious stage work in the annals of Western musical theatre. The Canadian Opera Company mounted the complete cycle in Toronto only once, to open the Four Seasons Centre in 2006, and no other Canadian producer has yet attempted its challenge.
Small wonder. Some of the roles require heroic voices, the required orchestra is huge, and how many members of any city’s opera-going public can devote close to a week (four performance days separated by two off-days to facilitate performer survival) to witness the event?
And yet, there are Wagner aficionados — “Ring nuts” they’re often called — who literally travel the globe for the experience the Ring affords. The chairperson of a panel discussion held in conjunction with the recent San Francisco
Ring casually informed his listeners that this was his 48th.
The San Francisco staging was actually a revival of Francesca Zambello’s 2011 production, since mounted in Washington, and only the most recent mounted in Baghdad by the Bay, as a local columnist once dubbed the city whose resident company ranks among the world’s finest. The controversial German composer is no stranger here and, after all, as former resident Mark Twain one observed, “Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds.”
Zambello’s production numbers among the most dramatically coherent I’ve seen in recent years, a time of crazy experimentation at the composer’s own Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, a time when even the normally conservative Metropolitan Opera reached out to the highly imaginative Canadian director Robert Lepage to direct its latest production.
With its casts of gods, giants and quasi-mortals, the Ring admittedly invites a non-literal staging. No one these days expects the goddess Fricka to arrive in a chariot pulled by two rams.
All the same, Wagner’s music dramas (a term he preferred to opera) tend to be man-handled by directors caught up in their own fantasies. In New York magazine, Peter G. Davis described the multi-million dollar Lepage Ring as pound for pound and ton for ton (it is machinery-heavy) the biggest waste of money in recent operatic history.
Zambello has her own fantasy as well, or rather, her concept of an American and feminist Ring. The story is told in modern dress and her Valkyries, the maidens charged with transporting dead heroes to Valhalla, appear goggled as aviators. What she nevertheless seems to understand is the power of Wagner’s storytelling (unlike most composers, he wrote his own texts). The big themes of love, ambition and betrayal all come across clearly.
And the San Francisco Opera has served her well. This is not an age of great Wagnerian singing, but with such artists as Greer Grimsley (Wotan), Irene Theorin (Brunnhilde), Karita Mattila (Sieglinde) and Brandon Jovanovich (Siegmund) heading the cast lists, the performances were vocally solid.
As for the conducting, Donald Runnicles, a San Francisco veteran who has presided over a number of its Ring performances, exhibited a firm grasp of the music’s long spans. If his wasn’t a deeply moving reading, it was consistently musical and dramatically involved.
San Francisco Opera took its ancillary responsibilities seriously, surrounding the production with supportive talks and stocking its shop with relevant books, recordings and T-shirts. Wake me when it’s over.
Yes, a sense of humour helps, witness the late Anna Russell’s famous recorded guide, which manages to be simultaneously hilarious and accurate. On the surface, Wagner’s mythological tetralogy may be hard to take seriously. Deeper down, it resonates with a power virtually unique in the history of opera.
And despite Mark Twain’s cynicism, the music is as bad as it sounds, which is, for all its length, quite overwhelming.
William Littler is a Toronto-based music writer and a freelance contributor for the Star.