Here’s my pitch, Mr. Jackson. You’re going to love it. You see, there’s this ring, this gold ring, and one day this little goblin-like creature happens upon the gold ring and, Mr. Jackson - you gotta listen, this is the really cool part - this gold ring has these magic powers, I mean it really does a number on this little guy, twists his psyche big time, makes him turn all nasty and ugly and greedy inside, kind of takes over his whole personality and makes him do all sorts of wicked things. And then the word gets out about this ring, you see? And suddenly all these creatures come out of the woodwork, powerful and not so powerful, big and small, good guys and bad guys, and they really want to get their hands on this magic ring. There’s these complicated subplots and everything, too, lots of mythical heroic-types with swords and spears and dragons and everything, love scenes by the barrelful - and castles, Mr. Jackson, and underground caverns and battle scenes, flying horses, too. And if you’re not afraid of film ratings and censors, Mr. Jackson, we can throw in some wife-swapping . . . even a little incest to keep things on the boil, you know? But you can tone down the sex stuff if you’re looking to bring in the kiddies, I mean there’s lots of options for the editing room And let’s not leave out the cities under siege, trolls and dwarfs and fiery end-of-the-world kind of stuff, lots of bodies by the wayside, too, if you get my drift - I’m telling you, it has Academy Award written all over it, Mr. Jackson. It cannot go wrong. . .
Well, J.R.R. Tolkien might have been appalled at the prospect of such a conversation taking place across a Hollywood mogul’s desk in Los Angeles, but it would have been a bit hubristic of him to get his literary feathers ruffled. The pitch being sold in that opening paragraph has nothing to do with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, of course. In fact, our budding film producer is talking about a treatment for another massive work of art, one that predates Tolkien by about 75 years. The author (and composer) is none other than that controversial giant of the world of opera, Richard Wagner. Instead of a trilogy, Wagner goes Tolkien’s mere bagatelle one better with a gargantuan four-part cycle! And Wagner doesn’t deal in penny ante stuff; the scope of the cycle is nothing short of the whole Megillah: his Ring starts with a musical beginning-of-the-universe in Das Rheingold and finishes, some 16 hours of heavy duty opera later in Götterdämmerung, with nothing less than the end of the world in all its fiery, apocalyptic splendor. Wagner accomplishes all this - and makes it sound utterly, ineffably glorious in the process.
One would need an entire website devoted solely to the purpose, and months and months of painstaking analysis and discussion, to do justice to Wagner’s Ring. The world’s library shelves are groaning under the weight of volumes written about it - volumes that concern themselves with the origin of Wagner’s ideas, the explication of Icelandic myth that gave birth to much of the “plot,” the nature of Wagner’s leitmotivs and recurring themes and symbols, the delineation and discussion of an enormous cast of characters. All fascinating, no doubt. Another subject worthy of exploration on another day is the particularly interesting way that the cycle found its way into the recording studio and onto records. (John Culshaw’s Ring Resounding, long out of print but most worthy of a search through used-book websites and dusty bookshop bins, is a riveting account of Decca’s landmark recording of the entire Ring Cycle with maestro Sir Georg Solti at the helm - and many, many recordings later, Sir Georg’s masterwork remains my favorite version of the cycle on disc.)
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While there is no gainsaying the enormity and depth of this, Wagner’s massive contribution to the cultural treasure house of the world, one should not lose sight of the essential core, the transcendent truth of the music of the Ring. It is awash in the sumptuous, ineffable sound that Wagner seems uniquely to have been capable of creating. (I have occasionally experimented with friends and acquaintances who have little familiarity with or interest in classical music: without a single word of explanation of the text or background of each piece, I will play a selection of Wagner orchestral excerpts - and inevitably receive the same response from my temporarily imprisoned listeners: “I can’t quite explain why, but for some reason, my eyes welled up and I felt an emotional pull, just listening to that music; I was moved, and I can’t figure out why.” It is a complicated response, too - not the easy, manipulative tear-jerk melodrama produced by Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-his-sleeve Pathetique, but a surge of mixed and complex emotions that Wagner, more than any other composer, seems to elicit in nearly everything he composed.)
The paradigm for this transcendent feature of Wagner’s music can be found in the second opera of the Ring cycle, Die Walküre. Despite the huge cast of larger-than-life characters, gods and goddesses, Valkyries who are half-god and half-human, dwarfs who inhabit the gloomy bowels of the earth - despite the unwinding of a long and complex history of world creation and the interplay of innumerable twists of plot, the central feature of this, Wagner’s most touching and beautiful Ring opera, is the very human and extraordinarily moving relationship between a father and daughter, between Wotan the god and Brünnhilde his Valkyrie offspring. At the conclusion of Die Walküre, we know that Brünnhilde has disobeyed her father’s explicit instructions not to interfere with the fate of another of the opera’s characters, Siegmund. Wotan’s love for Brünnhilde is absolute, yet he knows that fate requires punishment. The punishment that he metes out is the removal of her godhead - and the severing of her relationship with her father forever. In the final scene of the opera, Wotan administers this punishment and sings a long, emotionally wrenching aria, “Wotan’s Farewell,” in what is , to my mind, the most beautiful 20 minutes of music ever composed.
So after the kudos of the Oscar season have faded from memory, after Mr. Jackson has taken home the golden statuettes that mark his Ring cycle and displayed them with pride upon his mantle, may I recommend the reader to his or her own shelf - the one that contains that 16 hours or so of Wagner’s Ring on compact disc or vinyl - to lose himself in a glorious world of sound and emotion that neither Jackson, nor or Tolkien, could ever hope to duplicate.
Russ MacKechnie
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