Der Ring des Nibelungen Lyric Opera of Chicago, 4/11, 12, 14 & 16
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I was in the lobby of the Civic Opera House for the first night of my first assault on the Everest of opera: Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Four operas, actually–Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung–in four nights, each longer than the last, portraying a cycle of connected stories based on German and Nordic myth. The Ring cycle took Wagner almost 30 years to write, from 1848 to 1874, two years before it premiered at the Festspielhaus built specifically for it in Bayreuth, Germany. Few opera companies routinely perform this singer-exhausting, money-sucking, giant-orchestra-needing behemoth, especially in America. The Lyric Opera’s recent run (the whole cycle three times in three weeks, ending April 16) was only its second ever, and it was the same production as the first, a fantastic modern-looking narrative version introduced in the mid-90s.
One of the best things about the Ring is that you don’t go through it alone–even if you go alone. “Seatmate . . . soulmate! We are all soulmates in this together, yes?” I was seated in a little row of women attending the Ring by themselves, and the woman two chairs over was directing this at me. It wasn’t actually until the second opera, Die Walkure, that I started to feel chummy, but once the ice was broken, we all traded painkillers and candy, gossiped when somebody missed an early curtain, commiserated about bolting our dinners, worried aloud about the singers who had announced colds, and talked about how we explained this strange activity to others. “I tell my son it’s like a Grateful Dead concert,” said one neighbor.
In that tug-of-war between assly concerns and Gesamtkunstwerk, there was no middle ground. I was either wide-eyed awake or feverish with lack of sleep, can-openered open in ways I couldn’t control. That’s what the Ring does to you. The last act of Die Walkure–which begins with “Ride of the Valkyries,” the kill-the-wabbit Wagner most familiar to popular audiences–got its hooks in me with the final scene, sung by the two main characters in the Ring, chief god Wotan (James Morris), and his daughter Brunnhilde (Jane Eaglen). She defies him by trying to protect his half-god son on the battlefield; he strips her of her godhood and consigns her to sleep; at her plea, he surrounds her with a ring of fire that only the bravest man would be able to breach. The music of love, pain, and sad forgiveness between father and daughter is almost completely overwhelming.
