SINGING DAS RHEINGOLD Podcast & Pictures

Our new podcast features musical examples from recordings of Das Rheingold ranging from 1904 to 2015. In case you’d like to look while listening, here are photos of some of the singers featured in this podcast.

Praise for Tristan and Isolde

The reviews are in for Tristan and Isolde and it's a hit! Read what critics had to say about this beautiful production.

Mary Elizabeth Williams (Isolde) and Stefan Vinke (Tristan) in Tristan and Isolde. © Sunny Martini.

TRANSPORTING IT TO A NEW PLANE

Mary Elizabeth Williams has a habit of stealing the show when she appears at Seattle Opera. Her uncanny ability to fuse sound, sense, and stage action has made her a company favorite—not to mention the kind of singer Wagner fantasized about when he dreamed up his “total work of art." Preparing Isolde for the first time has been an extraordinary adventure for Williams, who now invites us to come along with her on this journey.

Five Ways Wagner Changed Opera Forever

German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was tremendously influential on the development of opera. With his groundbreaking music dramas and extensive theoretical writings about art and theater, Wagner changed not only the way people wrote opera, but also the way audiences engaged with the art form. Here are five ways the eccentric polemicist changed opera forever.

Loving Wagner, Hating Wagner...and the Middle Path

Listen now—wherever you get your podcasts—to Seattle Opera's episode "Loving Wagner, Hating Wagner...and the Middle Path." 

Seattle Opera Scholar-in-Residence Naomi André and Dramaturg Jonathan Dean discuss the most controversial of all opera composers, Richard Wagner, whose Die Walküre the company will present, in concert (and abridged) at Fisher Pavilion on August 28. Wagner’s astonishing masterpieces continue to challenge and delight audiences, although his legacy is tainted because of his obnoxious attitudes and how his work was appropriated by the Third Reich. André and Dean discuss approaching Wagner, not from an ‘either/or’ mentality, but from a “both...and” way of thinking.

A few excerpts of their conversation below:

OPERAWISE: Singspiel

Seattle Opera · OPERAWISE: SINGSPIEL

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Singspiel (that’s German for SongPlay) mixes songs, dialogues, choruses, and marvelous orchestral writing with fun and fantasy for a lowbrow, family friendly art form—the ancestor of today’s Star Wars movies. Mozart’s ever-popular Magic Flute is the perfect introduction to Singspiel, as well as one of the most beloved operas ever written. Another wonderful Singspiel, Weber’s Der Freischütz, demonstrates the power of this form to send a wonderfully creepy chill down your spine.

Musical examples on the podcast include:

• •Celebratory chorus from Hans Heiling, Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Ewald Körner (Marco Polo 1992)
• •“Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja” from Die Zauberflöte; John Moore and Seattle Opera orchestra conducted by Julia Jones, 2017
• •Hunters’ Chorus from Der Freischütz; Seattle Opera chorus and orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz, 1999
• •Melodrama from Fidelio, Jane Eaglen and Kevin Langan, Seattle Opera orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz, 2003
• •A line of Papageno’s from Die Zauberflöte, John Moore and Seattle Opera orchestra conducted by Julia Jones, 2017
• •Act 1 Finale from Die Zauberflöte, Andrew Stenson and Seattle Opera orchestra conducted by Julia Jones, 2017
• •Act 2 Finale from Die Zauberflöte , Seattle Opera orchestra conducted by Julia Jones, 2017
• •“Der Hölle Rache” from Die Zauberflöte, Christina Poulitsi and Seattle Opera orchestra conducted by Julia Jones, 2017
• •“O Isis” Chorus from Die Zauberflöte Seattle Opera chorus and orchestra conducted by Julia Jones, 2017
• •Opening duet from Fidelio, Lucia Popp, Adolf Dallapozza, and Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Deutsche Gramophon, 1978)
• •“O namenlose Freude” from Fidelio, Gundula Janowitz, René Kollo, and Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Deutsche Gramophon, 1978)
• •Cat duet from Der Stein der Weisen, Jane Giering-De Haan, Kevin Deas, and Boston Baroque conducted by Martin Pearlman (Telarc, 1999)
• •Wolf’s Glen Scene from Der Freischütz, Harry Peters, Gabor Andrasy, and the chorus and orchestra of Seattle Opera conducted by Gerard Schwarz, 1999
• •Overture from Der fliegende Holländer, orchestra of Seattle Opera conducted by Sebastian Lang-Lessing, 2016
• •Dance of the Apprentices from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , forces of the Bavarian State Opera conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (EMI Classics, 1993)

Stay tuned for one more podcast introducing another kind of opera next week!

OPERAWISE: Music Drama

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Music Drama was the personal solution to the problems of presenting opera in nineteenth-century Europe developed by composer/librettist Richard Wagner, opera’s ultimate mad genius. These long, loud, big works challenge artists, audiences, and the art form itself. Their complex music and unique spins on old stories continue to attract, repel, and provoke all who encounter them. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865) serves as an example of the genre, as does the Richard Strauss opera Elektra (1909).

OPERAWISE: Grand Opera

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Grand opera developed in the mid-19th century and centered on performances at the Opéra in Paris. The roots of the genre stretch back to the opulent court of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, and continue to influence how opera is presented to this day. Verdi’s Aida (1871) is probably the world’s favorite grand opera (although it’s not necessarily a textbook example of the genre, since it wasn’t written for the Opéra, is sung in Italian, and is briefer and more straightforward than most grand operas). Another beloved masterpiece is Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845), a work retro-fitted in 1861 for performance at the Opéra.

Top 10 most recognizable opera pieces used in film

You probably know more opera music than you think you do. If you like to watch TV or go to the movies, you’ve undoubtedly heard music from operas used in ways the original composers could never have even imagined. We’ve raided the Seattle Opera archives to put together a playlist featuring some of opera’s greatest hits—tunes you may already know because you’ve heard them in the cinema.

#1: From Apocalypse Now: Ride of the Valkyries (Die Walküre)

Francis Ford Coppola used the “Ride of the Valkyries,” famous music from the second opera of the Ring cycle, not for Wagner’s Norse goddesses of death but for American helicopters dealing out death from above in Vietnam in Apocalypse Now. It made for a brilliant, chilling moment—opera music used not just for emotional effect but as part of a film’s story.

Sung by Wendy Bryn Harmer, Jessica Klein, Suzanne Hendrix, Luretta Bybee, Tamara Mancini, Sarah Heltzel, Renée Tatum, and Cecelia Hall, with the Seattle Opera Orchestra conducted by Asher Fisch.

Meet Our Singers: DAVID DANHOLT, Erik

We’re excited to welcome Danish tenor David Danholt to Seattle Opera. Danholt officially makes his debut today, in the role of Erik, Senta’s jealous ex-boyfriend. But Seattle’s hardcore Wagnerites will remember Danholt from his prize-winning appearance at our 2014 International Wagner Competition, a great festival of song intended to identify and encourage the Wagner singers of the future. This affable young man discussed singing Mozart and Wagner with me, as well as his remarkable experiences starring in The Passenger, a Soviet-era opera dealing with the Holocaust which is impressing opera audiences all around the world.

David Danholt's prize-winning performance at Seattle Opera's 2014 International Wagner Competition, conducted by Sebastian Lang-Lessing

Welcome (officially!) to Seattle Opera! And best wishes for a debut as successful as your earlier Seattle Opera experience.
Yes, the 2014 International Wagner Competition was really wild. I came here as the alternate; I was not supposed to be in the competition, the idea was they’d call me in if one of the others had to cancel. But a half hour after my rehearsal with Maestro Lang-Lessing and Speight, I got a phone call: they’d changed the plan, there wouldn’t be eight competitors, there would be nine.

Were you conscious of making a strong impression in that rehearsal?
No! I remember Speight saying to Sebastian, “Maestro, I want to talk to you. Goodbye, David!” But I didn’t expect to compete, let alone win. There’s a photo and you can see, I look like someone who just fell down from the moon.

Helena Dix and David Danholt at Seattle Opera's 2014 International Wagner Competition
Alan Alabastro, photo

To be frank, I’m not a competitive person at all. I don’t really like competing this way about music; the competition is always with ourselves—self-discipline, striving to do your best. But I’ve gotten so much good out of this experience. For me it was a confirmation that I’m going down the right path; that I’m a singing actor, a story-teller, instead of a bravura singer who’s great at throwing out high notes!

But young tenors are typically asked to do lighter, more lyric roles: Mozart and Rossini before Wagner.
Yes, and I love singing Mozart, I’ve done Tamino, Don Ottavio, Idomeneo, and I want to keep doing them. But Rossini? I actually turned down a job offer to sing Count Almaviva, in The Barber of Seville. It didn’t really fit my temperment or technique. Honestly, I tend to get bored when I listen to Rossini. But not Wagner or Strauss or Mozart!

What about modern music? In the last two years you’ve been starring in this fascinating work, The Passenger, which has been given now in Poland, England, Germany, Austria, and at several theaters around the US.
Yes, The Passenger was written in the Soviet Union in the mid ‘60s by Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg. He was Jewish, he fled Poland during World War II; but he fled the other way, to Russia, where he became a protégé of Shostakovich. This opera is based on a play written by a Catholic Polish woman, Zofia Posmysz, who was in Auschwitz. Because as you know the Nazis put not only Jews in the concentration camps, but also Catholics, gay people, Communists, gypsies, all sorts of people whom der Führer didn’t like. It’s a very, very profound and important piece. I think it needs to be shown again and again.

I’ve been on this journey with The Passenger all the way, from its first staged performance, in 2010 in Bregenz, where I sang one of the minor roles, and covered Walter, one of the main roles. And then I sang Walter in Detroit and Miami.

Did European audiences respond differently than American audiences?
One thing every performance had in common at the end: silence. Normally you get applause after an opera. This didn’t happen with The Passenger. The performances of course attracted big Jewish audiences; at every performance there were people who had been in concentration camps, or their children and grandchildren. And everything was very realistic. The costumes, for instance, were copies of what was actually worn. The uniforms of the SS officers, the clothing for the prisoners. We had talkbacks after the Miami performances, and I remember a fragile old lady taking the microphone and saying, “I was in Auschwitz from the age of 16 to 19. I came out of it. Everything you’ve seen tonight, it really happened. It was just like that.” Well.

Video from Lyric Opera of Chicago Promoting The Passenger

Is that opera difficult to sing?
Weinberg is not typical 1960s; it’s very melodic, it’s quite easy to learn. The tessitura, the range, of my role, Walter, is close to the lyric roles of Wagner. The difficult part is what you have to say. My character is this West German diplomat with a shady past. The idea is, I was caught up in the madness of the Third Reich but got away; the opera happens many years later, as I’m going to Brazil. But I say these horrifying things: my character believes in the ‘master’ race, all that stuff.

David Danholt as Walter and Davida Karanas as Marta in The Passenger at Florida Grand Opera

Who is your favorite composer?
At the moment I have a thing for Beethoven and Brahms. I’m about to sing Florestan in Fidelio, in the original version, where the tessitura is a bit lower, a bit more human. But I wouldn’t mind doing the final version. It’s one of my favorite operas. And Beethoven’s musical language really speaks to me. I love doing Missa Solemnis, the 9th symphony, his songs. Beethoven is not known to be merciful to his singers, but I like singing his music.

Do you find a connnection between the way Beethoven writes for the voice and early Wagner?
Yes, very much. I’ve actually sung a lot of early Wagner. In Leipzig and Bayreuth I sang the tenor roles in Die Feen (Arindal) and Das Liebesverbot (Claudio), two operas Wagner wrote before The Flying Dutchman. There’s a reason Wagner later abandoned those early works. They’re not great. They go on forever, and you have to cut a lot. In Das Liebesverbot, he was attempting to write a pastiche of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, but he was very young and didn’t quite know what he was doing.

Now, let’s talk about Erik. This is not the first time you’ve sung The Flying Dutchman.
I did it in Milwaukee, at Florentine Opera. I really like singing Erik. He’s a beast. It sits a bit higher in the voice than a lot of other Wagner tenor roles. It’s not too long; it’s about the same size as Parsifal, who only sings for about a half hour.

It seems to me that Erik’s music has a connection to the lied, to Romantic German art song.
Exactly. His cavatina could have been written by Bellini or Schubert; it resembles Beethoven, and early Schumann, and bel canto Italian opera. That’s good for a singer like me. My voice isn’t a great big shining-steel heldentenor sound. Erik has to sound youthful. He’s what the Germans call jugendlicher heldentenor—young hero-tenor, not a dramatic tenor, but rather a full lyric tenor.

Now, there’s some latitude in interpreting the character of Erik. The last time we did The Flying Dutchman in Seattle, we had a very literal by-the-book production, and he was just a regular guy, with his huntsman’s plaid flannel—looked like your typical Seattle ‘lumbersexual.’ But this production really pushes him to the extreme.
It’s very clear in Wagner’s score: Erik has a strong personality. He’s this guy from the woods, a guy who could tear down the building if he wants to. He’s not a sweet little Don Ottavio. I’ve seen several productions where he’s that guy, and I don’t buy it.

You mean, an interpretation of The Flying Dutchman where Senta dumps Erik because the Dutchman is dark, brooding, and mysterious, whereas Erik is easy and boring. You’re right, that’s inconsistent with the libretto, where Erik is constantly threatening suicide or murder—“Senta, you’re killing me!”
He’s outspoken, highly charged, all the time. In this production, [stage director] Chris [Alden] pushes Erik’s sanity, or insanity, to the extreme.

David Danholt as Erik at Seattle Opera
Philip Newton, photo

I know one of the big influences on Chris Alden, with this Dutchman, has been early 20th century German expressionism. You must have studied The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu and silent films like that, to get the acting style so spot-on.
No, I can’t take credit for that. I hadn’t actually seen those films until last week! But I have been rehearsing with Chris Alden, and he really does take us down that path. It’s almost like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Erik really should be drugged, put in an asylum. And here he is, running around with a gun! I like such characters, people who are pushed to the limit.

Now here in Seattle we’ve recently done a lot of by-the-book Wagner; productions where, if it says, “A bunch of mermaids swim in,” then in our production the mermaids swim on in. But this production demands a bit more imagination. How would this Dutchman production go over in Europe?
This wouldn’t shock the Germans at all; I think they’d find it quite ordinary. I don’t think this production is out of bounds. It’s very faithful to the story, and Chris is a wonderfully musical director. I have worked with stage directors who are extremely unmusical, and it ends up being a struggle, because they don’t understand where to go with the story. I don’t like it when stage directors put themselves above the composer or librettist.

I was struck by how Chris knows the music and text of this opera by heart. Every time I peeked into rehearsal, he was singing along.
Yes, and his brother, David, is just the same. We did Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria in Copenhagen, and he knew the score better than the conductor. He even understood how to embellish, Monteverdi-style! This is not a conventional Flying Dutchman; but if you can look beyond that, you’ll like it. It’s dark, and a bit traumatizing.

On a different topic, many great Danish Wagnerians have sung here in Seattle. Your countryman Stephen Milling won our Artist of the Year award, some years ago, and has sung here many times. Is it easy to become an opera singer in Denmark these days?
Scandinavia has always sourced great Wagnerians: Kirsten Flagstad, Ingrid Bjoner, Birgit Nilsson, Nina Stemme. Melchior, who’s an idol of mine, was Danish. But you don’t see a lot of Italianate singers coming from our region. And I fear that in the future, you won’t see the same level of quality Wagnerians coming from my part of the world. We don’t have the teachers. The skills needed for Wagner are very different from those for Italian music. You need stamina. You have to be able to sing, in the middle range, for a very long time. We have to recognize that Wagner is not only loud. His scores are very precise about dynamics. Yes, he has a big orchestra; but sometimes he makes them play very softly. All the great old Wagner singers sang it with nuance, sang the dynamics. We have to get back to that.

What new roles will you be learning in the next season?
In the fall I’m going to Arizona for my first Prince in Dvořák’s Rusalka. Another youthful heldentenor role.

Yes, that’s a role Ben Heppner sang here in Seattle, early on in his career. But Czech is such a tricky language to sing!
There’s a Czech woman who works at our opera theater in Copenhagen. She lives just two blocks away from me, and I have the sense that I’ll be moving in with her for language lessons. When I do operas I like to be as flawless as possible with my language. I don’t want anyone to tell me “it sounds like you’re a foreigner.” And sometimes it’s difficult not to sound like a foreigner!

I gave up trying to learn even how to pronounce your mother tongue, Danish. That language is hard!
Yes, Danish is actually considered a throat condition, not a language!

A Lexicon of Wagnerian Gibberish

Wagner considered himself first a writer and poet, and secondarily a composer. So far as he was concerned, he only wrote music because his words made a stronger impression when sung. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote all his librettos himself. Thanks to the curiously dual nature of his genius, his words and music, united, are much stronger than either by itself. When pontificating about his art (a favorite pastime), he loved to speak of a ‘marriage’ between words and music, sense and sound, with the masculine word planting a seed in feminine music, who then brings to bear glorious fruit.

Curiously, despite Wagner’s own bias towards words and ideas, some of the liveliest moments in his operas come when his characters stop singing words and start singing nonsense instead. In The Flying Dutchman, for example, the maritime setting and sea-shanty-soaked score calls for lots of “Yo Heave Ho” sailor/pirate jabber.

Jonathan Dean Speaks About Wagner in Beijing

Hi, I'm Jonathan Dean, your faithful Seattle Opera blogger and supertitles-guy, here to wish everyone a great Wagner's birthday and to share with you a little of the amazing week I have coming up. Over the 18 years I've had the good fortune to work for Seattle Opera, I've had many unusual adventures; but this week surpasses them all. I am traveling to Beijing, along with Seattle Opera Executive Director Kelly Tweeddale, to participate in the World Theatre Forum at China's National Centre for the Performing Arts. In honor of Wagner's bicentennial this Wednesday, I've been asked to speak about the Ring, our signature work here at Seattle Opera. The National Centre for the Performing Arts, just off Tiananmen Square, is China's biggest opera house. They've been presenting lots of western operas, although they haven't done the Ring...yet. Kelly and I are thrilled to be going to the NCPA, and I hope to check in with you later in the week and report on our experience.

For now, here's what I'm planning to say at the forum. (It was necessary to write this speech ahead of time so it could be translated into Mandarin, since many of the attendees are coming from opera companies around China. I can usually make myself understood in Italian, French, and German--languages which I translate into English for Seattle Opera's supertitles--but I haven't yet gotten very far with Mandarin!)

Jonathan Dean speaking before Seattle Opera's 2009 Ring
Alan Alabastro, photo

The Challenges and Rewards of Presenting the Ring
By Jonathan Dean

Dà jìa hăo! (Thank you so much.) It is a tremendous honor to me and to the city of Seattle that I have this opportunity to speak to you about Wagner and Der Ring des Nibelungen, today, as May 22, Wagner’s 200th birthday, dawns in the Far East. I am here on behalf of Speight Jenkins, General Director of Seattle Opera, who unfortunately couldn’t be here at the World Theatre Forum today because, in about 24 hours, when May 22 concludes in the Far West, he’ll be cutting a giant birthday cake at a tremendous birthday party for Wagner in Seattle.

I could tell you a lot of things we’ve learned at Seattle Opera about putting on a good production of the Ring; I could tell lots of entertaining (and sometimes horrifying) stories about things we’ve learned the hard way, about how NOT to present the Ring: stories about prop malfunctions, casting mistakes, ill-conceived designs, orchestral problem-spots, and, of course, special effects disasters, including the mermaid who swam into a dragon by mistake and the magic fire that burned a little TOO brightly.

But in Wagner’s honor, I’d rather talk today about why. Why did Glynn Ross, the founding General Director of Seattle Opera, decide in 1973 that our fledgling company should attempt to scale this Mt. Everest of the opera world? Why are we still putting it on, forty years later? Why do so many opera lovers become Ring fanatics, following productions of Wagner’s Ring to the ends of the earth, forever yearning, like Goethe’s Faust, for some unattainably perfect ideal production? What is this hunger people have, to experience this mighty work and make it their own, to find new ways of listening to it, approaching it, thinking about it? Why, for so many of us, is the Ring the work we’d take with us to a desert island—the one opera I wish everyone had a chance to attend?

To begin with, the Ring is unique—unique in its challenges and in the rewards it offers. There is nothing else like it in the world of music: nothing so vast in ambition and scale, so organically unified, and yet so popular and accessible. In drama, film, and narrative fiction there may be works of art that have much in common with the Ring; but because the Ring tells its story through music, such comparisons are ultimately meaningless. The Ring is one of a kind, like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Dante’s Commedia, or the Xī Yóu Jì. We pursue it because it is very large and we are very small, and we know our lives will be richer if we engage with even a little bit of this amazing work.

No opera has so much in it. It touches pretty much every field of inquiry the mind can pursue: it is at home in every department at a university, every section in a newspaper. Wagner took a wondrous legend from ancient northern Europe, arranged it into drama following the theatrical tradition of ancient southern Europe, and with the most compelling music hitherto created in the West told stories that explored all the issues of his nineteenth-century European world. But these are today’s issues, too. Political issues, about the warring of the tribes and nations, about labor and capitol, power struggles between competing ideologies. And psychological issues—stories about people from broken homes, about messed-up relationships between parents and children, about love and sex and marriage and unfulfillable need. And philosophical issues: a story that questions the nature of good, the origin of evil, and that climaxes in the death of a god. In the 19th century, the Ring may have been a parable about industrialization, the most pressing issue of the day in Wagner’s Europe; for our 21st century, it certainly is a parable of environmental degradation, an issue which concerns us all. No matter who we are, we continue to find our story in the Ring.

The Ring manages to show us ourselves in the most curious way—it takes us away from our lives in order to show us our lives. Although it is attractive, at surface level, with its cast full of wonderful characters, dramatic situations, huge orchestra, and glorious voices, the Ring is too big for superficial acquaintance. Its vast size demands a commitment: you have to undertake the journey and enter its world. And as it whisks you farther and farther away from the world you thought you knew, the stranger and more wild and weird its situations get, the more you discover yourself and what is most important in your life.

We saw this feature of the Ring in a dramatic way in Seattle when we did a production of Das Rheingold, the first opera of the Ring, for elementary school children, ages 8, 9, 10 years old. For the thousands of children who became fascinated by this opera, Das Rheingold wasn’t about gods and dwarfs and giants and mermaids: it was about teasing and bullying, very real issues in the lives of every child in America. It may be easier to talk about poor loveless Alberich than your own wounded heart; but it turns out they’re the same thing. Alberich only exists in us.

The Ring rewards all those who dare enter into it and find themselves. And its rewards are also its challenges, for the Ring is nothing if not challenging.

The Ring poses enormous challenges to everyone involved. It challenges the singers, the orchestra, every department backstage, and even the audience. In America, where television and now social networking encourages short attention spans, some people find the commitment necessary to be a member of the audience for the Ring daunting. But that’s fine, Richard Wagner understood that situation, even in the 19th century, and made that choice. He envisioned a Festival Theater situation where the audience would have made a pilgrimage to his temple of art; and he would reward them for their sacrifice, for taking all that time and coming all that distance, with a work of art that was bigger, more complex, and more engrossing than what was typically offered up at their opera houses. In my experience, this question of audience commitment takes care of itself: those who shy away from the Ring are probably not ready for it; and those who are ready develop a hunger to experience the work and participate in the community that gathers around its week-long production. To put it in terms of the story, you have your timid Mimes, cringing forever inside their little caves; and also your bold Siegfrieds, ever eager for new challenges, mountains to climb and dragons to defeat. Those are the opera-goers who will rise to the challenge of the Ring, and there’s no stopping them.

The Ring is a challenge for the performers. There are no more difficult pieces that an orchestra will ever play in an opera house than the Ring. In Seattle, we’re fortunate today because of our long history with the work; our Seattle orchestra started playing the Ring a generation ago. So the musicians have the piece in their fingers (or their lips, if we’re talking about the horn players who perform Siegfried’s famous call); they’ve worked on it every few years, and many of its trickiest passages are in their muscle memory. For some, the great challenge is no longer the technical difficulties of the music, but instead the focus and stamina this vast work demands.

The singers face the same challenge and more. Vocally, singing the Ring is exhausting—it’s all night every night for many of the performers. Voices with the requisite steel to cut through Wagner’s enormous orchestra don’t grow on trees, and it can be a challenge for Young Artists Programs to identify and nurture them properly. That's why Seattle Opera inaugurated our International Wagner Competition in 2006, a competition which returns next summer.

And, although the Ring needs extraordinary voices, the performers must be better actors than they are musicians, or else the operas don’t quite work. More so than almost any other opera, the Ring is a play set to extraordinary music. Ultimately, Wagner was more interested in drama than in music, so one of the greatest challenges with the Ring is staging it properly. Each of the scenes, each of the acts, each of the operas is long and complex. Each of the scenes requires a strong beginning, a middle that ramps up the tension, and a satisfying ending. Until that shape is felt by all the artists working on the production, the scene is not ready for the audience. That makes for a challenge!

The magic tricks that go into the Ring—the dwarf that turns into a toad, the sword that cleaves an anvil apart, the dragon and earth goddess and magic fire, are literally the stuff of legend. They must not only delight the audience: it’s best to surprise the audience at each of these moments, since many will know the story and may be expecting some kind of magic trick. Getting these tricks to succeed, so that the audience squeals with joy, can be incredibly challenging. But that’s fine, we love those challenges and we will continue to rise to them as we create Ring cycles in the years to come!

It is tempting to think of the Ring as something like the nearby Great Wall, or the Great Pyramids of Egypt, you know, a phenomenon which has been there so long, and which is so vast, that its future will likely look much like its past. But that is the wrong way to think about the Ring. It hasn’t always been there—it’s only 137 years old, and it has already changed enormously over those 137 years, just as it has changed the culture around it. The Ring first revolutionized the way operas were written, then planted the seeds for cinema, and, in the years following the Second World War, changed the way all classical theater is produced in the west.

Even in remote Seattle, the Ring has meant different things over the course of its 40 year history. The company’s first Ring, which had an enormous romantic appeal not just to classical music buffs but to ‘70s hippies from up and down the west coast, might strike us as a bit simple nowadays. I can’t speak to this production from personal experience, but from my research I can tell you it was a straightforward fantasy of mythic monsters, Valkyries with winged helmets and gods in tunics, and beautiful lighting effects. I get the sense that this was a Ring that seized people’s hearts, but not necessarily one that challenged their minds. Our second Ring, which we presented between 1985 and 1995 (when I worked on it), was influenced not only by the many conceptual productions then the norm in Europe, but by the alienation-theater of Bertolt Brecht. Although you might think that Brecht would make an odd bedfellow with Richard Wagner, the pairing proved inspired: the ironic distance afforded by the staging kept the mind ever alert and focused, while the music continued to command our emotions. And our third Ring production, which premiered in 2001 and which begins rehearsal today, seeks to build on the successes of these previous productions: to enchant the heart with dazzling beauty while drawing the mind logically through Wagner’s gripping story. Technological advances in stagecraft enabled us with this production to represent the true organic chaos of nature onstage in a way that audiences find extremely satisfying—and, what’s most important, in a way that supports the storytelling.

What comes next for the Ring in Seattle? And in the world? The future of this work is up to us. It’s up to us to embrace its challenges, to meet its demands, and to reap its rewards. There are solutions that others have tried in the past; some of them have worked, others haven’t worked so well. Our responsibility is to find solutions that are ours, with whatever tools are at our disposal. We must continue to try to give life to this extraordinary work and make it available to people. Although the recent economic slump has meant that there isn’t as much opera being produced in America as there was even ten years ago, the Ring is still more accessible, to more people, today than ever before in its history. And I want to see that access continue to expand.

What are we to do with the Ring? If the story itself is any guide, we cannot just put the Ring back in the river—the cycle will simply start all over again. Nor can we hoard it, like greedy dragons in our cave, or use it to pay off old debts, like the irresponsible gods. Let us do something nobody in the story ever managed to achieve—let us find a way to share the Ring, so that people everywhere can benefit from its magic. Thank you, xiè-xiè.