No one these days expects the goddess Fricka to arrive in a chariot pulled by two rams.Īll the same, Wagner’s music dramas (a term he preferred to opera) tend to be man-handled by directors caught up in their own fantasies. With its casts of gods, giants and quasi-mortals, the Ring admittedly invites a non-literal staging.

Zambello’s production numbers among the most dramatically coherent I’ve seen in recent years, a time of crazy experimentation at the composer’s own Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, a time when even the normally conservative Metropolitan Opera reached out to the highly imaginative Canadian director Robert Lepage to direct its latest production. The controversial German composer is no stranger here and, after all, as former resident Mark Twain one observed, “Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds.” The San Francisco staging was actually a revival of Francesca Zambello’s 2011 production, since mounted in Washington, and only the most recent mounted in Baghdad by the Bay, as a local columnist once dubbed the city whose resident company ranks among the world’s finest. The chairperson of a panel discussion held in conjunction with the recent San Francisco Ring casually informed his listeners that this was his 48th.

Some of the roles require heroic voices, the required orchestra is huge, and how many members of any city’s opera-going public can devote close to a week (four performance days separated by two off-days to facilitate performer survival) to witness the event?Īnd yet, there are Wagner aficionados - “ Ring nuts” they’re often called - who literally travel the globe for the special experience the Ring affords. Opera Omaha is making a name for itself with festivals, productions Gianandrea Noseda cleverly links Russian music with an Italian conductor Thirty years later, the National Academy Orchestra of Canada still develops Canada’s professional musicians The Canadian Opera Company mounted the complete cycle in Toronto only once, to open the Four Seasons Centre in 2006, and no other Canadian producer has yet attempted its challenge. Performed without cuts, as done by the San Francisco Opera three times last month, it runs to about 17 hours of music, a marathon for listeners as well as performers, constituting the most ambitious stage work in the annals of Western musical theatre. Everest? Individual masterpieces may come to mind, Berlioz’s Les Troyens among them, but to most commentators the answer, hands down, is Richard Wagner’s four part Der Ring des Nibelungen.

San francisco opera ring cycle 2018