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cahn"For the last year perhaps I have been in love... I could say it was a sort of madness. A possession, as by daemons. A kind of blinding." -A.S. Byatt, Possession
So, I'm quite embarrassed to admit it, but I... I... have been suffering for the past two months from this dreadful obsession with Wagner's Ring Cycle. I mean, let's face it, in just about every book I've read with one, the Wagner fanatic is a pompous bore who has nothing better to do with his (I don't think I've ever actually met a literary Wagner fan who was female) time than to spend twelve hours (at least) watching buxom women scream at the top of their lungs.
And, okay, there is a fair amount of buxom women and burly heldentenors screaming at each other. (The Siegfriend/Brunnhilde love scenes are just irritating.) But, but -- The Ring Cycle is totally like Beowulf meets the Silmarillion meets Star Wars, only with better music. It's got an awesome plot (waaaaay better than the epics from which Wagner drew the story; much more coherent) with a dragon, dwarfs, true love (sometimes romantic, sometimes not), a cursed ring, corrupt gods, a trickster god, betrayal, and the end of the world. I defy you to find anything in John Williams that matches the sheer exhilaration of the Ride of the Valkyries. If you get the Andrew Porter translation, you can see the lovely alliteration that I am just a sucker for (in fact, it was the poetry I fell in love with before I fell in love with the story, or the leitmotifs). It's got an incredibly complex series of allusions, both mythological and musical, that make up the fabric of the story and the music.
The thing is, I find most of opera pretty dreadful. The music, of course, is lovely, but the whole concept of opera is that it's supposed to be a story as well, and that's where a lot of them fall down. But with the Ring, I kept thinking over and over again while watching it, "Oh! THIS is what you can do with opera! It can be done! It really CAN, like the best literature, say something about the human condition that I didn't know before, and it can use the music to work with the plot to do that!" (A couple of other operas do that too, but the Ring does it very obviously.)
I mean. I'm not a huge rabid fan of Wagner's music; except for a couple of places in Die Walkure, it doesn't perk me right up the way Le Nozze di Figaro does, or wring my heart in two the way that the ending of Ballad of Baby Doe does. And it's pretty clear that Wagner was an excessively unpleasant guy (I used to think his anti-Semitism was just, you know, cultural blinders, but now that I know a little more he really does seem to have been quite disgusting on the subject, and let's not even get into his penchant for stealing other men's wives), which is reflected in Siegfried being quite awful (I can't stand Siegfried almost ever opening his mouth-- he comes across as a stupid and violent boor). And Brunnhilde goes from being totally awesome to really irritating, and the end of Gotterdammerung just didn't... quite... do it for me. And now that I've finished the whole darn thing, the obsession seems to have faded.
But Die Walkure is still made of win.
So, I'm quite embarrassed to admit it, but I... I... have been suffering for the past two months from this dreadful obsession with Wagner's Ring Cycle. I mean, let's face it, in just about every book I've read with one, the Wagner fanatic is a pompous bore who has nothing better to do with his (I don't think I've ever actually met a literary Wagner fan who was female) time than to spend twelve hours (at least) watching buxom women scream at the top of their lungs.
And, okay, there is a fair amount of buxom women and burly heldentenors screaming at each other. (The Siegfriend/Brunnhilde love scenes are just irritating.) But, but -- The Ring Cycle is totally like Beowulf meets the Silmarillion meets Star Wars, only with better music. It's got an awesome plot (waaaaay better than the epics from which Wagner drew the story; much more coherent) with a dragon, dwarfs, true love (sometimes romantic, sometimes not), a cursed ring, corrupt gods, a trickster god, betrayal, and the end of the world. I defy you to find anything in John Williams that matches the sheer exhilaration of the Ride of the Valkyries. If you get the Andrew Porter translation, you can see the lovely alliteration that I am just a sucker for (in fact, it was the poetry I fell in love with before I fell in love with the story, or the leitmotifs). It's got an incredibly complex series of allusions, both mythological and musical, that make up the fabric of the story and the music.
The thing is, I find most of opera pretty dreadful. The music, of course, is lovely, but the whole concept of opera is that it's supposed to be a story as well, and that's where a lot of them fall down. But with the Ring, I kept thinking over and over again while watching it, "Oh! THIS is what you can do with opera! It can be done! It really CAN, like the best literature, say something about the human condition that I didn't know before, and it can use the music to work with the plot to do that!" (A couple of other operas do that too, but the Ring does it very obviously.)
I mean. I'm not a huge rabid fan of Wagner's music; except for a couple of places in Die Walkure, it doesn't perk me right up the way Le Nozze di Figaro does, or wring my heart in two the way that the ending of Ballad of Baby Doe does. And it's pretty clear that Wagner was an excessively unpleasant guy (I used to think his anti-Semitism was just, you know, cultural blinders, but now that I know a little more he really does seem to have been quite disgusting on the subject, and let's not even get into his penchant for stealing other men's wives), which is reflected in Siegfried being quite awful (I can't stand Siegfried almost ever opening his mouth-- he comes across as a stupid and violent boor). And Brunnhilde goes from being totally awesome to really irritating, and the end of Gotterdammerung just didn't... quite... do it for me. And now that I've finished the whole darn thing, the obsession seems to have faded.
But Die Walkure is still made of win.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-07 01:26 am (UTC)I watched the version that Netflix has the entire 4-volume set of, which is the Pierre Boulez version (link to Netflix here (http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Wagner_Das_Rheingold_Pierre_Boulez/70037433?trkid=496751)). I thought Wotan (Donald McIntyre) and Loge (Heinz Zednik) were extremely good; Gwyneth Jones as Brunnhilde was very good in Walkure although she does look a little old for the part; Heinz Zednik was also awesome as Mime in Siegfried. Unfortunately Manfred Jung as Siegfried was, um. I don't know if it was him or the director, but he really did not make me think well of Siegfried. Oh, and Jeannine Altmeyer was also very good as Sieglinde and Gutrune - actually most everyone in Gotterdammerung was quite good (even Jung had his moments).
The staging is neither traditional (e.g., the Rhine becomes this kind of industrial sewer) nor excruciatingly avant-garde. I think I might have liked a more traditional staging. The Rhine and the end of Gotterdammerung in particular I thought really didn't benefit from the non-traditional staging, but most of it didn't really bother me.
The only available full Ring version that has traditional staging is Levine's, which is not available on Netflix (amazon version here (http://www.amazon.com/Wagner-Rheingold-Levine-Jerusalem-Metropolitan/dp/B00006L9ZU/ref=pd_cp_d_2)). Amazon has wildly mixed reviews. Netflix does have Levine's version of Siegfried, though, and it's next on my queue, so I can report back to you on how it compares if you like.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 04:17 am (UTC)But, but -- The Ring Cycle is totally like Beowulf meets the Silmarillion meets Star Wars, only with better music.
Wow. I think I need to see this, now.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-14 03:44 pm (UTC)Oh, speaking of music love, you have to see (if you haven't already) Masterpiece (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXhAz0DOpMU)... as a bonus it will also kind of sort of explain a little of my conflicting Wagner feelings :)