The Ring at the Met # 1: A Prelude to the Prelude

This week I'm off to New York on an adventure of a lifetime: my first chance to see a complete integral presentation of Richard Wagner's epic Der Ring des Nibelungen live on stage, at (of course) the Metropolitan Opera.

Just as Wagner reached a point where he needed to add an introductory evening to his already-massive trilogy of music dramas, so I have decided to add on an introductory post to explain a few elements which are common to the entire cycle of four operas in this production.

The story of the Ring is an epic tale rooted in the misty background of Nordic mythology.  As a mythological story, it includes gods, humans, giants, dwarves, river nymphs, dragons, a toad, a songbird, a horse, multiple settings, including a riverbed and a cloud castle, and a culminating catastrophic destruction of the world by fire and water.  The composer's massive artistic vision demands a very large orchestra and a whole cast of some of the largest, most dramatic singing voices in the world.

Since the Ring requires immense scenic, vocal, and orchestral resources from any company aiming to mount a performance of respectable or better quality, live performances are generally (though not entirely) restricted to the upper tiers of the operatic world, the opera houses which can muster the financial backing and the stage facilities needed for such a project.

The Ring which I am seeing in New York this week is a remount of the production originally staged over 2 seasons in 2010-2012 (those first stagings were also broadcast to movie theatres worldwide and issued on DVD).  The work of Canadian designer/director Robert Lepage, this Ring seeks to tell the story as Wagner wrote it, rather than trying to superimpose an interpretation or narrative of the director's own choosing.

Lepage devised a unit set which could be used in all four parts of the cycle.  It consists of a series of parallel boxes referred to as "planks", mounted on an axis which stretches right across the stage from one side to the other.  The planks can be rotated to show either top or bottom surfaces, right through a 360-degree rotation, and can be moved individually, in groups, or as a whole.  

The most striking aspect of the Lepage "machine" (as the entire unit is known) is that the upper and lower faces are coated with a reflective finish, allowing for all surfaces to serve as projection screens.  Throughout the cycle, these projections continuously change and develop, depicting all the numerous scenic worlds envisaged by the composer.  The images also change and move in synchronisation with the movements and singing of the characters, and the playing of the orchestra.  

This set design incorporating video projections is necessarily complicated, and requires very sophisticated computer software to operate it -- but when it works, the scenic effects range from subtly effective all the way to total dramatic knockout punches.

In choosing to mount the Ring again, the Metropolitan Opera has actually cast two parallel but separate Rings.  I am seeing one of the three complete cycles which were sold only as cycles.  Two of them run along a single week, with performances on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday (that's what I'm doing).  The third is given on four consecutive Saturdays.  In addition, a number of stand-alone performances of each of the four operas have been scheduled, and these involve a different cast of principal singers from the integral cycles.

The spacing of performances is an absolute necessity.  Although the prelude, Das Rheingold, is only two hours and twenty minutes long (with no intermission), each of the other three operas stretches to four hours or more.  The lead singers are quite understandably exhausted (physically and vocally) at the end of a performance, and absolutely need a day off to recover for the next show.  But there's a catch, for the baritone performing the role of Wotan, the head god.  He has to sing a sizable and challenging role in Das Rheingold, and then return the very next night for an even larger part in Die Walküre.  

We can fairly assume that things are equally wearing down in the orchestra pit, for both conductor and players.  And we haven't even mentioned yet the arduous duties of all the backstage personnel from dressers and props to the stage hands and especially the stage manager -- who has to call a show with many hundreds of cues each night.

A final note: attending the Ring is expensive.  My seat, centre of the house, and just under the edge of the first balcony, cost me US$740 for the four performances.  To move forward out from under the overhang would have taken the price up to US$1900 and change.  And then there's the cost of staying and eating in New York for a week.  Safe to say, this is likely to be both my first and my last complete Ring.

It's definitely going to be an adventure.