![]() Not only did I listen to last season’s cycle complete and on the air, but I also caught the PBS Live in HD re-transmission of the entire Ring, starting with Susan Froemke’s 2012 documentary Wagner’s Dream, about the making of this troubled Lepage/Fillion version. I’m glad to report that the Ring is one of those works. There are few works in the active repertoire that fill me with an overpowering desire to hear them anew, and at any time. However, there is no other readily apparent purpose or vision to this production except to tell the story of the Ring – more on this aspect later on. The Metropolitan Opera’s current version, directed by Robert Lepage, with sets by Carl Fillion, costumes by François St.-Aubain, lighting by Etienne Boucher, and video imaging by Boris Firquet, resorts to a talented team of artists and artisans for the project. Was the struggle worth it? Looking back on the sheer volume of productions over the past 130 some-odd years since the Ring cycle premiered in Bayreuth, I’d be forced to answer “yes.” In many of the most memorable Ring ventures there can be counted at least one outstanding feature in support of Wagner’s vision: in his grandson Wieland Wagner’s two cycles (one bare-bones, the other drawn from Jungian archetypes) from the 1950s and 60s in Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 centennial version (indebted to George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite) in Harry Kupfer’s “Road to History” edition (revived and modified in Barcelona) even the Otto Schenk/Günther Schneider-Siemssen retro Ring installment at the Met they all had something that encapsulated their creators’ themes. That and his disreputable ability to wrangle money out of friends and foe alike, all the way up to the crowned head of Bavaria, the mentally challenged King Ludwig, remain Wagner’s most ignoble feats. That he was able to see this vision through to the end is quite possibly, to my mind – and to the minds of musicologists and historians before and after him – one of his few redeeming features. Wagner was possessed, all right: possessed of an assiduous self-confidence, as well as an artistic vision and single-minded purpose few individuals could understand or appreciate at the time. Not for nothing was he regarded by record producer John Culshaw, and numerous other individuals, as “a man possessed.” It took composer Richard Wagner more than a third of his adult life to bring his monumental music drama, Der Ring des Nibelungen (known collectively, in English, as The Ring of the Nibelung), to life on the German stage. ![]()
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