So... What will you be doing at about this time in 2009?
If you're wholly baffled by the question, then you're probably not a fan -- or at least not a fanatic -- of Wagner's operatic masterpiece, the Ring Cycle.
Wagner devotees know that they will, come hell, Valhalla, high water, or flaming stages be here in Seattle to take in Seattle Opera's next staging of the German composer's complete three-opera extravaganza.
This Wednesday, August 15, Seattle Opera director Speight Jenkens will
announce the dates and the cast for the 2009 Ring Cycle. And the company will also start taking names for ticket buyers.
The last time Seattle Opera presented The Ring was in 2005. It was a new production first staged in 2001. Tickets to both cycles sold out a year in advance. The next complete cycle here, in 2009, is likely to surpass that ticketing marvel.
In its
review of the company's 2001 production of The Ring, a classical music magazine
Andante calls Seattle "America's Bayreuth". (That, for non-fans, is the German town/Wagner shrine where the composer's clan mounts an annual production of the operas.)
Consider what it's like having Mt. Rainier looming outside the back door with all the shimmering majesty of your own private Valhalla, or the stunning marriage of water and mountain cradling Seattle. How else - other than such readily available grandeur-to account for what must have seemed like the pure madcap ambition of a provincial upstart back in 1975, when the fledgling Seattle Opera first undertook producing Wagner's complete Ring as part of a week-long festival?
Yet through its frequent revisitations of the cycle, the company filled a crucial niche. A quarter-century later, Seattle has become a Wagner mecca. Throughout August, operagoers from 19 countries trek into the Emerald City to experience Seattle Opera's Ring production -- the third in its history -- now being premiered in its entirety following sneak previews of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre last summer.
Befitting that moniker as "America's Bayreuth", Britain's
The Independent mentions Seattle's 2001 production as a benchmark in interpretations in its extensive review of this week's London production of the cycle:
The Seattle Opera House's recent production by Stephen Wadsworth featured Rhinemaidens swimming on a trapeze, a naturalistic forest and a real horse for Brünnhilde. "The production follows every one of Wagner's stage directions," commented the astonished Michael Portillo in the New Statesman. "Having endured many impenetrable interpretations around the world, opera-goers heave a sigh of relief that here is a Ring as Wagner intended it."
So... we're just saying: Wednesday's announcement is a
big deal.
But why worry about any of this? Well, fans of immersive dance music might recognize something of their experience in these 'graphs from
The Independent's review:
What is so special about this stuff? Well, if it were a drug, it would probably be banned. It's the closest thing opera offers to an acid trip. Wagner can force the listener into a kind of superconsciousness -- a relationship with time, space and sound that's far removed from everyday experience. He weaves a spell of uninterrupted musical intensity so overwhelming that, for those who surrender to it -- and it's hard not to -- it can become almost addictive. Nothing else matches its impact: therefore you simply have to go back for more.
And the Ring cycle's scale is unprecedented. Despite its length, every moment is laden with significance in the unfolding story. The whole thing surges onward with an inevitability that doesn't require the suspension of disbelief as much as the suspension of outside life for its duration.
Fortunately for non-fanatics, the early save-the-dates announcement also gives folks who don't quite understand what the fuss is about time to become fanatics. As always, Seattle Opera gives us hints of what is to come with a Wagner on this year's schedule. This year, the company will present Wagner's,
The Flying Dutchman, staged by Stephen Wadsworth who also directed the 2001/2005 Ring Cycle.
Dustin Kaspar, a tenor who sings in the chorus for this year's Dutchman,
explained his own growing infatuation with the music:
Wagner was an intermediate thing for me. I started listening to classical music in high school. I went from heavy metal to Wagner, Holst, and Stravinsky. The rhythmic intensity of their music, as well as the large amount of brass -- i.e. heavy metal -- made it an easy switch for me. I've loved it ever since. There's something great about Wagner-and-later music because it requires genuine effort. We show up to do Puccini and we learn it pretty quickly because there isn't much to it. But to tackle something with these complex rhythms and shifts, lack of tunes, etc. -- that's a real challenge. Wagner ends up meaning a lot more to me because it has a depth of character that you don't get anywhere else. It's not surface. There are layers of wonderful that get into you. You can't perform it without it being a part of who you are.
To help novices get to that point, the opera company offers what might be considered operatic training sessions. Their website offers
capsule summaries of the composer's works and of his
controversial life and even a
guide for opera virgins.
But there's more. In fact, there's a group called
BRAVO! Club set up especially for folks between the ages of 21 and 39. They host parties that, we're told, not only provide at least one glass of free wine but also large amounts of chocolate. Yes.
Chocolate. Membership would also entitle you to discounted performance tickets.
The headline on the page devoted to another
interest group Wagner and More is "How is Richard Wagner like a pink flamingo?" The page doesn't answer the question. But it does make us curious. For that, you'd probably have to
join the group [pdf], which is, however, open only to Seattle Opera subscribers.
Wednesday's announcement of Seattle Opera's new Ring Cycle comes just as a
major history is released that focuses new light on the bizarre Wagner family that still controls the composer's legacy in Bayreuth:
Making sense of this unholy family saga calls for the skills of a soap-opera scriptwriter and a seasoned political reporter. Jonathan Carr, the Economist's former bureau chief in Germany and a biographer of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, falls comfortably into the latter category yet has a keen eye for human foibles.
Carr's The Wagner Clan (Faber and Faber, 20 pounds, to be published on Sept. 6) is, remarkably, the first objective history of the family. He treats the endemic blend of ancestor worship, anti-Semitism, self-interest and mutual loathing with the fastidiousness of an English butler at an orgy. ...
Cosima held the reins until she was 69 and half-blind, handing over in 1906 to her only son Siegfried who, though affable, capable and suitably Judeophobic, was a gay Sybarite with potentially scandalous liaisons.
Mother found him an English orphan, Winifred Williams, raised by Wagnerians in Berlin. Siegfried was 46, Winnie 18; they produced two sons and two daughters before Siegfried died in 1930 and Winifred took over the festival.
The new boss nurtured a passion for a Munich rabble- rouser, Hitler, whom she supplied in jail, after the failed 1923 coup, with the writing materials that yielded Mein Kampf. As Fuehrer, Hitler forced his lumpen Gauleiters to sit through Wagner longueurs and consulted at length with Winnie on matters of staging and casting.
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