At 10 a.m. this morning, streaming will begin for the San Francisco Opera 2018 production of Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung). Each of the four operas will be streamed during the four weekends of this month. However, the performances themselves will be supplemented by a Ring Festival of auxiliary offerings provided through Zoom, including curated talks and educational events. Admission to each of those events will be $15; but $99 will purchase a Ring Festival Pass, which will cover not only all auxiliary offerings but also allow for unlimited viewing of the opera videos as they become available at any time beyond the usual free weekends.
The underground dwarfs of Das Rheingold (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)
Because of a commitment I had made before the Ring Festival was announced, I shall not be viewing this weekend’s opera, Das Rheingold, until tomorrow. As a result, I decided to provide an auxiliary offering of my own at no charge to readers! I saw Francesca Zambello’s staging of Das Rheingold for the very first time in June of 2008; and, like many, I was intrigued by her intention of “translating” a massive Nordic myth into an “American experience.” Rheingold struck me as particularly challenging, because no mere mortals figure in the cast. The gods of the Nordic pantheon figure significantly, but there are also the “demigods” associated with the Rhine river and an underground populated by dwarfs. (There is also a “land of giants,” about which we learn little until the third opera in the cycle.)
As is the case in most mythologies (not to mention the Marvel Universe), these characters tend, for the most part, to act like ordinary human beings, differing only by abilities to command “supernatural powers.” This led me to write an article with a title that was a mashup of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy and Friedrich Nietzsche’s book of aphorisms, Human, All Too Human. My title was “The Gods Must be All-Too-Human.” In that article I presented all of the members of the Rheingold cast in terms of their flaws, most of which will have repercussions in the remaining three operas of the cycle. (I provided the hyperlink as an alternative to reproducing this enumeration, since it is rather lengthy.)
However, the fact that the entire cycle is based on the lump of gold guarded (inadequately) by the Rhine Maidens at the very beginning of Rheingold, it is worth considering the extent to which the cycle is as much about capitalism as it is about relations that unfold between gods and mortals. Three acts of theft (check that list of flaws) take place during Rheingold, suggesting that the overall narrative can be examined in terms of legitimate and illegitimate exchanges, financial or otherwise. In the remaining three operas, we get to observe both those that benefit from those exchanges and those that do not.
For example, in the second opera, Die Walküre, the key mortal characters can be easily taken for “trailer trash,” while the Valhalla occupied by the gods amounts to a very contemporary office tower. (In the present-day context, a comparison with Trump Tower will probably be inevitable!) The basic message is that the gods “have;” and all the others “have not.” The rest of the cycle then amounts to a chain of events in which this economically-unfavorable “order of things” will be reversed. (Don’t worry: Karl Marx will not rise from the Rhine at the end of the final opera; but serious environmentalists will probably leave with some sense of satisfaction!)
There is a certain irony behind this take on nineteenth-century grand opera. The entire cycle was performed for the first time at the very first Bayreuth Festival in August of 1876, a little more than a month after the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Those that know the Wagner biography will probably know that he wrote a “Grand Festival March” for that centennial celebration, cataloged as WWV 110. We are now well into our country’s third century; yet all of the dark socio-economic conditions behind Wagner’s Ring are as problematic as they were when the Bayreuth Festival was launched, not only in the United States but on a global scale that few would have envisioned!
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