randy_byers | Entries tagged with wagner

Pyramid Sellers is listed as playing the valkyrie Gerhilde in the 1990 Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner's Die Walküre. It's the only reference to her I can find on the web. Pseudonym? One would hope!

As I think I've mentioned before, I'm making my way through the DVDs of this production of the Ring. So far I'm having pretty much the same reaction to the individual operas that I had when I saw them live at the Seattle Opera last summer. I liked all of Das Rheingold and I liked the first two acts of Die Walküre (especially the scene in Act 2 where Brünnhilde first appears to Siegmund in the moonlight) while finding large parts of the third problematic (although I do like "The Ride of the Valkyries" at the beginning and the magic fire music at the end.) The problematic part of Act 3 is the long discussion between Brünnhilde and Wotan about why (or whether) she betrayed him by trying to protect Siegmund against his professed will. The substance of the argument itself is interesting, but I find it overlong and much of the music not so interesting. Still, there were a couple of moments where the vocal work of now Brünnhilde and now Wotan were very beautiful even in this section. Over all, however, I got pretty bored and fidgety again, and that's even though I watched the opera in two different sittings, split about midway through the second act.

Well, there's a subject-line practically guaranteed to make

calimac shudder.

Whether or not Wagner's Ring Cycle had any direct influence on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, I've found some interesting analytical comparisons of the rings in the two works. The best thing I've read so far is Jamie McGregor's Two rings to rule them all: a comparative study of Tolkien and Wagner, which was originally published in the journal Mythlore. This piece goes through each work side-by-side identifying eight points, or stages, of comparison, and it's perhaps most enlightening in the way that it identifies various ways in which Tolkien's treatment of his Ring could be considered a critique of or response to Wagner's treatment of his. One fascinating point of comparison is how the two works view the attitudes of two innocents, Siegfried in Wagner and Tom Bombadil in Tolkien, toward the respective rings of power. Now there's a comparison I never would have thought to make! I was also struck by the point that the Ring Cycle ends on a utopian note of a fresh, clean world reborn from the ashes of the old, where in Tolkien it is still a fallen world, albeit one where evil has been defeated for the moment.

This point was restated in a way that jolted me when I read it yesterday: 'Where both works suggest that the world will continue going from bad to worse, and both locate final redemption beyond "the circles of the world" (LotR App.A.1035), Tolkien eschews Wagner's implied death-wish for an aching nostalgia for life reminiscent of late Mahler.' This comment is footnoted as follows: 'Arthur Morgan once suggested to me that a spiritual affinity can be sensed between Das Lied von der Erde, for example, and Bilbo's farewell song in Rivendell.' The jolt here comes because I've been listening to Mahler lately, and of the four major works I've listened to -- the Third Symphony, the Fourth Symphony, the Eighth Symphony, and the song cycle Das Lied von der Erde -- it is the wistful Das Lied von der Erde that I've fallen in love with. Although I should also say that having now heard some Wagner, it's opening up Mahler's symphonies to me as well. (Mahler was the director of the Court Opera in Vienna for a number of years and was noted for his interpretations of Wagner's operas.)

(BTW, there's plenty of crap written about Wagner vs. Tolkien too. For an example of something written by somebody who really doesn't get Tolkien -- although he does have interesting things to say about Howard Shore's Wagnerian music for the LotR movies -- I give you Alex Ross' "The Ring and the Rings".)

Wagner's opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, is the fourth version of this story (or parts of it) that I've read or seen. The first version I read was Nibelungenlied, which is an anonymous medieval epic poem that I read in a prose translation published by Penguin. I remember that I really enjoyed it, along with Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal, which I read around the same time. Sometime later I read a Norse version of the story, probably Völsunga Saga. I don't remember anything about it. More recently I've twice watched Fritz Lang's two part silent film, Die Nibelungen, which is based on Nibelungenlied.

Wagner's Ring Cycle incorporates elements from several different versions of the story, and his version of the Siegfried story is quite a bit different from the one in Nibelungenlied. In Wagner, Siegfried is led to Brünnhilde by birds after he slays the dragon, and the two of them swear oaths of love to each other. When Siegfried travels to Gunther's castle afterwards, he is given a love potion that makes him forget Brünnhilde and fall in love with Gunther's sister Gudrune. In Nibelungenlied Siegfried travels to Gunther's castle first and falls in love with Gunther's sister Kriemhild. Only then is he recruited by Gunther to woo Brünhild for him. In this version, there is no love between Siegfried and Brünhild. This is the heart of the difference, although there are many other variations. Probably because I came to the other version first, and had it pounded home by Lang's brilliant films, I prefer that story to the one Wagner tells. Nibelungenlied is really Kriemhild's story, and the second half of it is all about her revenge on her brother and his half-brother Hagen for their murder of Siegfried. For Wagner it instead becomes Brünnhilde's story, in concert with Siegfried. If it's not really Wotan's story instead.

This is a very Germanic story of the Will to Power, and it's actually interesting to consider Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as a response to Wagner. Wotan learns that the Will to Power is a desire for self-destruction, which is the only way to be released from desire. Before he learns this Wotan first tries to achieve his will to power by creating avatars in his child, Brünnhilde, and grandchild, Siegfried, but he cannot escape his own self, his own will, other than by intentional self-sacrifice, embodied in Brünnhilde's self-immolation on Siegfried's funeral pyre, which then sets fire to Valhalla and destroys all the gods as well. That's still too much will for Tolkien, who sees the destruction of the will to power only in Gollum's providential self-destructive power grab on Mt Doom. Gollum has the role of Brünnhilde in that he carries the ring into purifying fire, but he doesn't do it through noble self-sacrifice but through a final spasm of will to power. Tolkien's view is less romantic than Wagner's: There is no escape from the will to power via resignation or letting go. It only happens through providence, or through the will to power finally consuming itself.

Well, I've probably gotten myself in over my head on the philosophy there. I'll spare you the comparison to Star Wars and the Jedi ideal of letting go of self and trusting the Force.

I'm tempted to say that unlike Die Walküre and Siegfried, where I liked the first two acts and was bored by the third, in Götterdämmerung I was bored by the first act and enjoyed the second and third. But while there's some truth to that, I'd actually say (as a variation on what I said above) that I prefer Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen to Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, which cover the same story. Lang is grimmer and darker, while Wagner is more exalted and romantic. But another way to say it is that my enthusiasm for the Ring slowly drained away over the course of the four operas, and while I was still watching with analytical interest in the end, I wasn't getting caught up in it. I wasn't finding much of the music of interest, although that may be through unfamiliarity. It's a lot of damned music to absorb! But it didn't help that I continued to find the vocal music not very interesting, and in general just kind of shouty and pummeling and unmelodious. (There's a trio at the end of the second act of Götterdämmerung that's remarkable for how stridently unharmonized the three voices are. It only occurs to me now that the three characters all end up enemies of each other, so perhaps this was intentional. Compare and contrast the various trios sung by the Rhine maidens, which are much more melodious.)

There's no denying what a huge influence the Ring has had. There's no denying that there's a lot going on there, and for me to pronounce judgment after a single time through would be foolish. If nothing else, it has made me want revisit all kinds of things to see and hear them with post-Wagnerian eyes and ears: Lang's Nibelungen movies; the music of Richard Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg; the Nibelungenlied and Völsunga Saga; Debussy's opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, which was another attempt to wrestle with the legacy of Wagner. (How I prefer Debussy's uncertain dreaminess!) Shall I say that the music was too brassy for me, or that it often sounded incredibly cheesy? How much of the perceived cheesiness derives from the fact that it has been pilfered endlessly by Hollywood composers looking to jack up the melodramatic tension? Well, I'd love to find a site that's streaming these operas and go through them again just listening to the music this time. Next time I have fifteen hours available to me, ahem.

I mentioned in another post that I feel as though I've been living at the opera house in recent days. As is my wont, I even started to develop routines. One of them was that as soon as I had picked up my ticket at the window (usually I had to wait in line for a bit), I'd head to the ground floor bistro and get a turkey sandwich and a glass of wine, then I'd read a chapter of Iain M. Banks' Surface Tension while I consumed my little meal. Reading space opera in the opera house just seemed like the right thing to do. I highly recommend it.

I'm not sure I have anything coherent to say about this -- the third opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle, which I saw last night -- but I'm going to put down some notes in case I want to write about the whole shebang at some point. I went into Siegfried with the idea that it might be the least interesting of the four Ring operas, so is it a surprise that I came out feeling that way? At the same time I'm not sure why I felt it was the least interesting. As with the other two Ring operas I've seen so far, there were things I liked and things I didn't. Why did I feel dissatisfied overall with this one, where I mostly liked Die Walküre (except for the third act)?

Well, I think I found the music less interesting overall, although there were still some bits I liked. The orchestral interludes were kind of a letdown, whereas they've been the best part of the previous operas. I've had problems with the vocal parts in all the operas, but I really found little to like vocally in this one. Beyond the music, however, I just found the heroic and romantic ideal held up in this one completely ridiculous. Siegfried as the ideal man just wasn't cutting it for me. All the rampant phallic symbols (which have been there all through the cycle) became laughable. The love duet between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, with all its high-minded hogwash about "light-bringing love and laughing death," gave me a headache, whereas I found the love duet between Siegmund and Siegelinde in Die Walküre quite beautiful and delicate.

That said, much as with Die Walküre there were plenty of things in the first two acts that I *did* like. The sense of humor is great, and there's a goofy side to Siegfried that's much more appealing than his stalwart heroicism. Mime is one of the more interesting characters in the cycle as well, and he gets plenty of room to shine in the first two acts, before Siegfried finally offs him. The riddle scene between Mime and Wotan is great fun, and a clever way to deliver exposition about what has happened in the previous operas. Wotan is in great form in Siegfried, and his appearances in all three acts are pretty much the highpoints (although in the third act he basically delivers a big expository lump to poor, passive Erda -- mansplaining!)

As I said in my previous post about the Ring, the production is a big part of the fascination for me, so another reason Siegfried may have felt a little disappointing is that we had seen three of the four sets in the previous two operas. The spectacle therefore wasn't as fresh. One of the sets had been re-dressed with a large rotting log in an attempt to make it look different. The two others that we'd seen before I think were supposed to be the same locations as before, so it made sense. I say "I think" because in one case -- the set where Siegfried slays the dragon Fafner -- my only reason for thinking it was the same place where we had seen Hunding kill Siegmund is that I thought there was a bloodstain from where Siegmund died. However, this wasn't really commented on, so I'm not completely sure about that. I do think we saw Siegfried finger the stain at one point, which seemed significant to me. The argument against it being the same spot is that the dragon wasn't living there before. Maybe it moved in later?

Anyway, the one new set was a cliffside that looked like it could have come out of the Crooked River Canyon in Central Oregon. Considering the fact that many of the forest sets have reminded me of the rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula, it made me wonder if the set designers were consciously going for a Pacific Northwest look. I could imagine them traveling around the peninsula going, "Ooh, there's a great tree. Let's copy it!"

I was curious how they would do the dragon, and it was a nice piece of work. Basically they showed the tail coiled in a cave and snaking out to bop Siegfried in the face, making him think it was the whole dragon, and then the head and one huge wing hove into the gap between hillocks in the set. I kept expecting it to shoot fire out of its jaws, but no. It wasn't the greatest special effect in the operas, but it looked cool. Actually, I did wonder how they got the "blood" on Siegfried's sword when he stabbed the dragon, because I didn't see how it happened. (In some ways the best special effects in this episode came when Siegfried reforged the sword, Nothung, although I found the martial, hammering rhythm of this section just as dull and annoying as pretty much of all the more emphatic, thumping music in the whole cycle.)

Again, I saw and heard lots of things that have been echoed in later pop culture. Perhaps a stretch, but Wotan's wayfarer's hat reminded me of the hat Gandalf wears in Jackson's Lord of the Rings, but actually I suppose the influence could be in the other direction in that case, since costuming is not described by Wagner, as far as I know, so the costume designers could have taken their ideas from anywhere. Musically, there was an instance of Siegfried's theme that I'm pretty sure John Williams stole note-for-note for the scene where Luke Skywalker walks out of the family home on Tattooine and looks at the double suns on the horizon. In general John Williams used leitmotifs in a very Wagnerian way in the Star Wars scores. The other familiar notes I spotted were in the music for the dragon, bits of which were borrowed by Max Steiner for King Kong (1933). Very appropriate, too, because Fafner is an intelligent, feeling monster, just like Kong.

I'm really having a hard time with a lot of the vocal lines in Wagner. Twice now I've gone home after seeing one of these operas and listened to a bit of Schoenberg's Gurre-lieder, and the orchestral music sounds very similar but I far prefer Schoenberg's vocal music. I find Wagner's vocal music very stentorian and declamatory, and it wears me out. I've also been thinking I need to listen to Mozart's The Magic Flute again, because it's another German-language opera that's a fantasy with ritual overtones, yet I remember the vocal music being much more beautiful. From what I've read, Wagner was trying to move away from the more Italianate tradition of opera, unlike Mozart. Wagner apparently found traditional opera too feminine. After a major dose of heroic masculinity in Siegfried (in which even the one female character, Brünnhilde, is male-identified and has her very own phallic spear), I say bring on the feminine. Give me Susanna matching wits with the wily Figaro in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.

Okay, I'm going on and on here, but I also wanted to say something about the Ring experience as a whole so far. I mentioned the ritual aspect. In some ways it feels like a hazing! It's an ordeal that bonds us all together in our devotion of time and attention and aching asses to this damned thing. (I spent seven hours at the opera house yesterday! I feel like I've been living there the past few days.) People are way into the communal aspect, and it feels very fannish in many ways. It feels like we're at a convention. There are silly costumes and T-shirts with funny in-jokes! One of the T-shirts they're selling says Gotterdammitslong. I may have to get one of those just to show the world that I've been initiated into the tribe.

Also, other people are loving these performances. Huge applause last night for Stefan Vinke, who played Siegfried, and also for Greer Grimsley as Wotan and Dennis Petersen as Mime. People are having a great time, although our numbers last night were diminished compared to the first two nights. Some heroes have fallen by the wayside, alas. No doubt they are drinking martinis in Valhalla even now.

The past week has been quite a dose of culture. Last Tuesday Samuel R. Delany gave a reading at the downtown Seattle Public Library as part of this summer's Clarion West festivities. Delany is a terrific reader, and he was in fine form for this. He read from his latest novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and he also read from Phallos -- a novella that has recently been rereleased in an expanded version. (All of Chip's work is seemingly constantly under revision.) He introduced himself as our favorite dirty old man (the house was packed with enthusiastic folks), and both readings were blatantly sexual, although part of the joke in Phallos is that it's about a pornographic novel of uncertain provenance in which the sex has been censored to make it safe for the internet.

In many ways the Q&A session after the reading was even more entertaining. Somebody asked a question about "Aye, and Gomorrah," which won a Nebula Award in 1967. I can't even remember what the question was, but Delany called the politics of the story "trogdolytic" in its portrayal of queerness as something tragic and lugubrious, in short nothing like the life he was actually living in those pre-Stonewall days. He launched into a wonderful story about how he'd made his first trip to Paris in 1966 with two straight friends and had immediately run into a man masturbating in the Tuileries Garden and went home with him. This man was a medical student from Senegal, and the next day he and his friends (all of them gay Africans) invited Chip and his friends over for dinner. Well, it was all very much like a scene out of one of Chip's later stories, and it was completely delightful.

I confess that Chip's sex-drenched and socially-expansive stories left me feeling very wistful that evening. I've been in a mild funk since Westercon due to a new confrontation with my own sexual and social disabilities. Nothing very profound, just some ancient frustrations and confusions that I've long lived with. My life as an anxious introvert, I guess. I envy Chip the carefree attitude he projects in public.

Anyway, on Friday I went to SIFF Cinema Uptown to see the silent version of Hitchcock's 1929 film, Blackmail. (It was simultaneously filmed as his first sound film.) This was part of a traveling show called the Hitchcock 9, which features the nine surviving silent films by Hitchcock, all of which have been restored by the British Film Institute. Blackmail looked absolutely amazing. Hitchcock was already an accomplished visual stylist by this point (the influence of Murnau and Lang is plain to see), and this print (or digital file) was taken directly from the negatives, looking very sharp and pristine. The story was prime Hitchcock material: a Scotland Yard detective's girlfriend (played by Anny Ondra, who reminded me of Fay Wray in her mannerisms) goes out on a date with another man behind her boyfriend's back. The man tries to rape her, and she kills him. Another man knows she did it and tries to blackmail her. The layers of guilt are properly convoluted, but the story sags a bit in the middle when Hitchcock doesn't seem to know what to do with the characters except have them brood and leer at each other. Still, it was gorgeous to look at, and if it comes out on DVD I'll pick it up. I also enjoyed the minimalist, almost ambient accompaniment by the Diminished Men at this showing.

My plan coming into the weekend had been to catch another of the Hitchcock 9 on both Saturday and Sunday, but then another option presented itself to me. My neighbor's boss offered her a pass to the dress rehearsals for the Wagner Ring Cycle that the Seattle Opera is about to put on. My neighbor couldn't use it, so she offered it to me. I've always wanted to see the Ring, but never strongly enough to actually, you know, go. Here it was, handed to me on a platter. After examining the schedule, however, I wasn't sure I really wanted to devote that much time to it. The first opera in the cycle, Das Rheingold, is two and half hours long, but the other three are all over four hours apiece.

Well, I decided I'd go to Das Rheingold on Saturday at the very least, and so I did. I also went to Die Walküre on Sunday, and am now leaning heavily toward seeing the other two as well. Suffice it to say that I'm enjoying it so far, although not without some reservations. But there's something very thrilling and epic about it that cannot be denied. As a production, it is absolutely spectacular, with amazing sets and special effects and costumes. It also feels like a blast of our culture. It connects to so many different things, from the modern heroic fantasy genre to Star Wars to the music of Mahler and Schoenberg that I've been listening to in large doses lately. Listening to the music I can hear the echoes in so many things I've heard before. Last night at Die Walküre I was hearing the music from the 1939 Wizard of Oz, for example.

I liked Die Walküre better than Das Rheingold, although there was plenty of music in Das Rheingold that I really, really liked. There was singing in both of them that I didn't care for very much. (I think I like the singing in Italianate operas better than Germanic ones in general.) As much as I liked Die Walküre, I didn't care for the third act very much. My biggest problem with these operas so far is probably that there's too much declaiming of exposition, as the characters explain things to each other at great length. This leads to some strange staging as secondary characters move around aimlessly and strike poses just to try to make it seem like something is happening when nothing is really happening except exposition.

But then a magical moment will arise: Brünnhilde appearing to Siegmund in the moonlight, or Loge and Wotan tricking Alberich into turning into a frog in the dark gold mines. I can't begin to describe how splendid the sets and the production are. They've created the most beautiful forest sets! In the opening scene in Das Rheingold the Rhine maidens are "swimming" in the air -- essentially wirework in realtime, swooping up and down and floating across the stage and doing somersaults in midair. Simply amazing.

I could go on and on about things I've liked (much of the music, although not all) and haven't liked (some of the more emphatic, thumping music, for example), but I also want to talk about how much fun it has been going to the opera house. I wore my suit on Saturday, only to reacquaint myself with the fact that the slacks need to be taken in. So on Sunday I wore a shirt and tie with jeans. I've been admiring the women in their finery. It's like going to a costume ball. Because the tickets are first come first serve, you're advised to show up an hour and a half early. That has given me time to sit in the bistro and drink wine and people watch and read a book (Banks' Surface Tension, which coincidentally opens on an opera stage). The crowd is very enthusiastic. There's a lot of excitement in the air. People wonder aloud if Tolkien based Lord of the Rings on the Ring Cycle. (I refrained from telling them that Tolkien was influenced by the original mythology and actually detested Wagner.) And I hadn't been to McCaw Hall since it was remodeled, and it is quite a beautiful building itself. It's all a great deal of fun just as an event.

Meanwhile, on top of this epic flood of culture I'm also painting the backside of the house. I have been a very, very busy boy, I tell you. The weather has been brilliant, and I'm sure I've been flooded with Vitamin D as well as with culture. The physical activity has left me feeling energetic. To hell with mild funks and old frustrations. I'm having a ball!