MUSIC: Der Ring des Nibelungen

▪ 1997

      As the climax to its 41st season, in March 1996 the Lyric Opera of Chicago presented its first-ever production of Richard Wagner's four-part music drama Der Ring des Nibelungen. Staging The Ring cycle, with a total performance time of more than 15 hours, is a monumental task and one that tests the mettle of any opera company. But the sheer power and overwhelming popularity of The Ring make it an essential part of any opera repertory. The sold-out Lyric performances, which drew an audience from throughout the U.S. and from a number of other countries, received kudos from both opera lovers and critics.

      The Lyric's Ring cycle actually began in the 1992-93 season with the staging of the first of the works, Das Rheingold, which was followed, one per year, by Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. After the close of the regular 1995-96 season, the company then gave three performances of the complete cycle in three consecutive weeks. The Lyric production, which was directed by August Everding, used clean, stylized but highly expressive sets that featured, among other things, neon lighting in various shapes and colours. The swimming Rhinemaidens were represented by jumpers on bungee cords, the galloping Valkyrie by acrobats on trampolines, and the giants by huge robotlike figures. Overall, the production focused on the mythic elements in Wagner's drama of gods, dwarfs, giants, and humans—of heroes and villains engaged in struggles for wealth and power and motivated by greed and love.

      Six months later, in September, the Royal Opera presented a controversial new Ring at Covent Garden in London that eschewed magic and fantasy in favour of the 20th-century Theatre of the Absurd. Indeed, director Richard Jones said, "There is a duty not to present the Ring in a romantic context, so that it can be honoured as the warning it is." The Royal Opera offered the Rhinemaidens in rubbery body suits that made them appear plumply, grotesquely naked and introduced automobiles, a cluttered urban landscape, and a bearded goddess Fricka onstage.

      Der Ring des Nibelungen was an enormous challenge from its inception. Wagner laboured on the tetralogy for more than 25 years, starting in 1848 when he began the verse on which he based the librettos for his epic story derived from Germanic myth. The music for Götterdämmerung was finished in 1874, and the complete cycle was mounted for the first time two years later at the composer's purpose-built theatre in Bayreuth, Ger. The first U.S. production was in 1889 at New York City's Metropolitan Opera (the Met). By the 1990s most of the world's major opera companies had accepted The Ring as the ultimate test of commitment and endurance. Many Wagnerian fans experienced the tetralogy dozens of times with almost cultlike devotion: some were known to travel thousands of kilometres to see a new production.

      In more than a century of Ring performances, the varied interpretations included classical, modern dress, Freudian, neofascist, Marxist, and even science fiction. In the 1990s they ranged from the relatively traditional naturalism of the Met (in a production first staged in 1988-89 and scheduled to be revived in 1996-97) to the stark, witty modernism of the Lyric to the philosophically bleak avant-garde reinterpretation at Covent Garden. (ROBERT RAUCH)

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