My week with the gods, in Seattle

Published 5:00 pm Thursday, August 11, 2005

This has been an exhilarating WEEK in Seattle, seeing the four works that constitute Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. There is a palpable buzz in this audience. We are blessed with an extraordinary performance by a gathering of singers and musicians at their peak.

It is fitting that this particular Ring cycle falls between the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and V-J Day, the end of World War II. The Ring is a cataclysmic work of art. It is about a world turned upside down.

“The world is out of kilter,” sings Erda, the earth goddess as she tries to advise the chief god, Wotan. If we had an all-seeing power, she would say the same thing in 2005.

It is not difficult to see cataclysm in the choices that humankind is making. Environmentalists see it in climate change brought on by the hand of man. Some Americans see it in a presidency that makes tragic choices and mortgages the future. Other Americans see it in the break-up of the family and in widespread addiction to pornography and drugs.

Wagner built his Ring story on Norse and Germanic legends, which he reworked and embellished. The cyclone of the Ring is set off when a dwarf named Alberich makes a fateful bargain. He renounces love to obtain power over the world through possession of a golden ring.

Well prior to the beginning of the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan makes choices that doom him and the rest of the gods. By the fourth opera, Gotterdammerung (night falls on the Gods) his powers are gone.

The moral fallibility of Wotan is a useful comparison with our world leaders whose enablers cultivate the illusion of infallibility. No one less powerful is allowed to question President George W. Bush to his face. But Wotan is confronted at every turn. Moreover, Wotan must watch the consequences of rejecting those he loves best.

Seeing the four operas of the Ring cycle performed over six days, in festival style as Wagner intended it, is a rare opportunity. Seattle Opera is one of a few companies that does it. Opera companies in New York, Chicago or San Francisco typically present the operas of the Ring intermittently. Seattle’s cast this summer is perfection itself.

Wagner’s Ring is drawing huge audiences worldwide these days, and that wasn’t always the case. The Jesuit scholar Father Owen Lee points out that in the 20th century, during a heyday of German opera, the Metropolitan Opera’s Ring played to houses with empty seats, even with legendary voices such as the Norwegian Kirsten Flagstad.

All three of Seattle’s Ring cycles sold out in a single day.

Why is this happening? One factor is the resurgence of opera, especially in America. Also I suspect, there is a spiritual hunger to see a work that is implicitly about the human condition and a soul’s emptiness.

Time is the great luxury in 2005. Having a week to absorb a great work of art is a gift. Like other grand works of the 19th century, Wagner and his Ring are a reflection on our own noisy age. ‘The world is out of kilter,’ says Erda, the earth goddess.I say “noisy” because the reflection necessary to create such a monumental work takes time and silence, two commodities of which we Americans have precious little. Wagner created the four operas over a period of 30 years. After Wagner completed the second act of Siegfried, the third opera in the progression, he was at a crossroads and didn’t know which way to go. There was a 10-year gap before he took up the third act of Siegfried.

It is common these days to observe that no one seems to be able to write a simple melody. That is overstating it a bit. However, the monumental orchestration that one hears in Wagner operas is clearly beyond composers now living.

Wagner was a pioneer across a wide swath of art. He developed new concepts of stagecraft. He incorporated a continuous intellectual story line into his operas. He revolutionized music and affected every succeeding composer, right down to John Lennon of The Beatles. And like Lennon, Wagner explored Eastern religions, most apparently in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.

Tonight at 6 p.m. we’ll take our seats for Gotterdammerung. As the clock ticks past 11 p.m., the Rhine River will overflow its banks and the world will be consumed with fire. Wotan’s estranged daughter Brunnhilde and her horse Grane will walk through the flames. In the Seattle Ring, our last vision will be of a forest reborn, a hopeful sight.

On Saturday, we’ll pack our bags and head to the freeway and our own morally ambiguous world.

– S.A.F.