I knew what I was in for when I declared that Saturday and Sunday would be a Wagnerian Weekend. Now, on Monday, I have a case of opera butt and the coming week looks to be far less dramatic than what we witnessed during the 15 hours it takes to watch Der Ring des Nibelungen (or Ring Cycle).
While I have had a vague interest in opera for many years, my only familial connection to the form comes from my maternal grandmother, who used to sit faithfully each Saturday afternoon and listen to the CBC Radio opera presentation, following along with a synopsis that she received in the mail each week. Grandma Bath died when I was five, so my information is second-hand.
The first live opera we ever saw was in San Diego and we later introduced our then-young boys to Don Giovanni at the Banff Centre of Fine Arts. More recently, we have attended operas in an Anglican (no, really) church in Rome and in Venice’s beautiful La Fenice. In truth, though, our interest has really flourished since we began attending live performances of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a series that takes advantage of satellite technology to allow opera lovers around the world to see the operas in real time, in movie theatres. Only bad weather stops us from driving to Trail, Coeur d’Alene, Spokane or Calgary to take in each show.
Our fascination with those presentations inspired us to spend a week in New York last spring, where we took in three Met Opera shows, and also toured the facility.
As our interest in opera has grown, I’ve come to think of myself as a Verdi man. Nabucco is my very favourite — the music is beautiful throughout and it has lots of work for the chorus. And the more familiar La traviata, Il trovatore, Rigoletto, Don Carlo, Aida and Otello are all wonderful. But Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini, Rossini and modern composers like Phillip Glass have all contributed to sustaining this amazing art form through the centuries.
Today, when I read about opera or attend a performance, I try to remind myself that this was once very much a people’s entertainment form. It wasn’t the highbrow cultural genre that it is often, unfortunately, seen as today. Costs of putting on productions, though, are enormous — the Met is a $200 million a year operation — and ticket prices reflect that.
Beginning last fall, the Metropolitan Opera has been introducing a new Ring Cycle production. It is through watching these operas (the exception being the second opera, Die Walküre, which we left when the Calgary theatre we were in was unable to resolve a video problem) that my fascination with Wagner has grown. I own a CD version but can’t say it really resonated with me. And our DVD set of a 1990 Met Opera production has sat untouched for more than a year, until last weekend.
Last week, I watched the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung, in Calgary, and finally had a clearer picture of just what a mammoth undertaking Der Ring des Nibelungen is. Richard Wagner remains a controversial figure today, nearly 130 years after his death, but the quarter-century that he devoted to writing the Ring was time well spent. It is an epic by any definition, and an allegory that leaves itself open to endless interpretation.
I am not a musician, but I have become fascinated by Wagner’s use of the leitmotif, a musical passage that denotes an action, object, emotion or character. On the weekend, I found myself beginning to recognize the more obvious ones. Apparently, musical scholars have identified at least 150 different leitmotifs, which is surely a sign that Wagner was operating at a level of genius reserved for only a select few.
Our appreciation for our Wagnerian Weekend viewings was enhanced, unexpectedly, when we took the advice of our son, Evan, who recommended listening to a Radiolab podcast. Radiolab is a terrific weekly radio show from WNYC in New York. In its 2008 show, “The Ring and I”, host Jad Abumrad looks at the Ring Cycle from several angles. It is one of the most satisfying hours of radio I have ever heard, and I highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in music.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.
