Radiolab - The Ring and I

Episode Date: January 1, 2008

On this Radiolab/WNYC Special, we explore the impact and influence of Wagner's Ring Cycle on the Metropolitan Opera's 2004 Presentation.

This is a special presentation of WNYC, New York Public Radio. Opera people are all nuts. The right of the Valkyrie is my theme song. I'm trying to work it into my memorial service. I figure, well, if opera people are all nuts, then what makes Vagner writes special? They're more nuts and more intense. Probably because Vagner was more nuts and more intense. His desire to change his audience, not just to entertain them, but to change them, to get inside of him and stir them up.

I just was so moved by that thing. This is what he was doing. This is what he did, and he succeeded. I could still just think about it. It still makes me kind of tear up. But, you know. The man was an absolute horror when it came to stealing money, stealing women, but he never once compromised his artistic vision.

What I always tell people when they recoil at the idea of watching the ring or other operas is, these are mirrors of us. When you see a lot of people making a huge, huge fuss over a work of art or an event or a happening, you get curious. The Ring cycle is one of the biggest works of art ever created by one of the most controversial artists to ever live. Over the next hour, we'll explore the question, just what is this thing? And why does it continue to inspire people? I'm Jad Abumrad. This is The Ring and I, the Passion, the Myth, the Mania. Stay with us. So, what is the Ring? If I had to describe it in one sentence, it would go something like this.

The Ring is a German romantic view of Norse and Teutonic myth influenced by a Greek tragedy and a Buddhist sense of destiny told with a sociopolitical deconstruction of contemporary society a psychological study of motivation and action and a blueprint for a new approach to music and theater. But we'll get to all that. The first thing to know about Wagner's Ring is that it is an event. Productions of the Ring Cyrel happen all over the world at different times,

but here in New York seems to roll through about once every four years, like the Olympics. And when it does, the air changes. People's eyes dilate and ring classes, like this one at Juilliard, are practically standing room only. Okay, so let's begin the serious part of the class. This is Professor John Mueller. He stands by a piano and surveys the 40-year-so, mostly older Wagner lovers, who were lucky enough to make it into his seminar.

And I'm going to start with a quote, and it may seem like an odd way to begin this class, but when the third installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, they were doing a showing of all three of them. They referred to this as the Trilogy Tuesday. And the author of the article in The Times made the comment about the need to see all three of them together. He says, shouldn't all three movies be watched together? Our forebearers had Wagner's ring cycle. We have Peter Jackson's Tolkien trilogy.

I took offense to this statement. With a theatrical flourish, Professor Mueller flings the newspaper article away from him in disgust, almost hitting a student. Sorry about that. The ring is still very much with us, and I don't think it's something just for our forebears, and that statement really bothered me. Nonetheless, one of the reasons I, and I would guess many people, are curious about Bogner's ring now, was because of the Lord of the Rings' connection. The Lord of the Rings really could not have existed in the form that we,

We know it now without Wagner as an example. According to New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, there are the superficial connections, like the way the characters dress. And also a lot of the language, particular Vaginarian phrases, a line like, ride to ruin in the world's ending. And those similarities, he says, can be chalked up to ancient Norse mythology, where both Tolkien and Wagner got their stories, but Wagner threw something new into the mix,

which Tolkien borrowed outright, a ring. This is the main connection, this notion of this object, which gives you power, and it ultimately makes you powerless. Ultimately, you are enslaved to it. Yes, the ring is very much with us. And you know, there are people who travel all over the world going to ring cycles. And I don't know, maybe some of you are those people. It's like the people who travel all over the world going to solar eclipses, wherever they may happen. We're talking about four operas here, or one opera in four parts, and it's 20 hours in all.

but it's more than that, too, which was clear from John Mueller's class. Like a Hobbit Convention or a Grateful Dead tour, a ring cycle is an event. It's a happening. It takes planning. So you'll need provisions. That's why we head to Fairway. Fairway is Manhattan's biggest grocery store, and when there's a ring in town, it's where you'll find Manhattan's biggest ring fan.

Fred? Yes. Hey. Hi. Chad, nice to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. Fred Plotkin. He writes about food in,

opera, and get this, is on his 38th ring cycle. This year, I'll be seeing three ring cycles in different places. I'm going to two at the Met, with different casts, and then I'm going to one in Finland. My idea in creating a menu to dine while watching all four ring operas is to be thematic with the ring and inspired by the ring. And I decided to look at the cycle and look for gastronomic cues of which there are so many throughout the ring cycle of foods, of food products. He calls this the Wagner Meal Cycle.

He's able to tell the entire story of the ring through food, and that's why we're here. For sustenance, A. I take doggy bags when I attend performances and eat them at the intermissions. And B, because the plot of the ring cycle can get complicated fast, and this is an easy way to remember what's happening on stage. So Fred begins how the ring cycle begins, with gold, which we find at Fairway in the Child.

chocolate aisle. John DiOcti are essential to the ring cycle because these are little gold-wrapped nuggets of chocolate. They're like currency, but shaped like bricks of gold. The first opera, the Rhine Gold, begins underwater. At the bottom of the Rhine River, we see three Rhinemen swimming around. They guard the gold. And all is fine with the world, says Fred, while the gold stays there. That's the fundamental thing of the ring cycle. When it's stolen, theft, and it's given away like taxes to the rich, what happens is everything goes to skew. And therefore, we try to put the gold back in the Rhine.

It takes 20 hours to do it. But for the moment, what we see on stage are Rine Maiden's Swimming, shimmering gold. And what we hear is the orchestra building around one E-flat chord. And this is where things get interesting. As John Muller tells his class, this may be more than just pretty water music. In one sense, the opening of the prelude, is showing you the Rhine River, from the very depths of the Rhine

when you get the opening E-flat in the double bases, then to higher levels and more activity with arpeggio figures in the strings. But on a much deeper level, Wagner's giving you creation itself. And he represents this by using the Overton series. In other words, we have, in a sense,

the creation of tone from one pitch. The birth of an entire universe as told in music, note by note, Adam by Adam. Which is why Professor Mueller tells his students, when they're in the audience during this scene, they may want to close their eyes.

It's going to burst out after more than three minutes, and you get the first ride maiden entering, Voglinda. And initially she sings a couple of nonsense syllables until she actually starts to speak the words of the opera. So it's as if Wagner is also trying to convey the creation of speech. This is just one indication that Wagner's approach to drama is, pretty wild. On stage, the eyes in our head are seeing Ryan Maiden's swimming,

while the eyes in our ears are getting another image of the cosmos being born. Perhaps Wagner meant for our mind to somehow blend the two. The question remains, though, how do you even get the first part right? The visuals. This is opera, remember, so along with music, we've got the problem of staging. The ring is the biggest project. I think that any opera house faces, always. This is Joe Clark, the Metropolitan Not. opera's technical director, and we're on stage during a changeover. There's a challenge there that I don't think is like anything else.

To our right, 4,000 empty seats, to our left, 60-some-odd workers swing hammers and push-props. And to my dismay, for the swimming Rine Maiden scene, he says, they don't use an aquarium. It's certainly not realistic water by any means. In fact, it's very stylized, but the whole proscenium is filled with a number of moving gauzes that are painted to look like water. They're constantly in motion, and they're smoke and dry ice effects operating at the same time with fans. Again, it sort of seems like currents underwater.

In the three Rhinemadens, meanwhile, Joe has them stand on three separate stage lifts, which move up and down. But very slowly, so you get that sense of water flowing. We'd heard that the Seattle Opera takes it a bit further, so we called Director Spate Jenkins. His company has taken the Rhineyne. maidens to new heights literally. They suspend the singers 25 feet off the ground.

Well, it looks like Cirque de Saleh is what it does. The first time I saw it, I almost dropped because, you see, first of all, we dress them in kind of mermaid-ish-type things and wonderful wigs. It looks as though it's a very fluid and easy movement. They can go down. In other words, they can go down and they can spin. Now, what makes it unusual is that they do, in fact, flip as they sing. The three young women at first were, you know, a little bit nervous about it, but as we moved on into rehearsals and got to the promontes, they flipped all the time, as they sang.

They would flip on singing high note. This voice right here is where the trouble starts. This is Albrecht, the evil dwarf. He shows up at the bottom of the Rhine, starts to chase the Rhinem maid maidens round and round. They laugh at him, but then he steals their gold, and forges a ring that will make him master of the universe. Eventually, the gods steal it from him, and the world begins to go sour. But Wagner's musical universe really starts to take off.

For more on that, we visit pianist Jeffrey Swan. Thank you, thank you. Okay. Jeffrey Swan lectures all over the country about the ring, and in particular on a system Wagner developed called Light Motif. It's as if he gave each character a theme and then changed those themes as the characters change. He demonstrates as we sit at a grand piano that takes up almost his entire Midtown apartment. The ideal listener to the ring early on needs to become aware, I suppose, of light motives.

A real obvious one, when we hear the Rine Maidens in the very first scene, when they're singing their Song of Joy and they say Rheingold, Rine Gold. they sing it over and over again. At the end of the work, we hear the Riding Maiden sort of off stage, and now they're bewailing their fate, as it were. Because they've lost their gold. They've lost their gold, and the gods aren't giving it back to them. Here it's something concrete, a change of harmony,

the fact that the orchestration is completely different. There's just a harp on stage. The difference between... But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It gets much, much, much more complicated, says Jeffrey, because often Wagner will use light motifs to comment on the action or to foreshadow. And this is something film composers have eagerly embraced.

Just imagine. If the Rine Maidens are swimming and you hear this in the orchestra, you know immediately what's about to happen to them. Seems obvious, right? But think about how powerful this is. Just two notes. create the image of a big fish in your mind. Which brings us back to Lord of the Rings.

And us for winning composer, Howard Shore. Howard, if I were to call your scores for the Lord of the Rings movies, Vaughnarian, I'm not saying I would. But if I were to call it that, you would think... What? I would think light motif. Music expressing emotional ideas

and the use of light motifs. Is that something you made use of in your score? Oh, I think tremendously. How so? Well, there's over 50 light motifs. motifs used in the piece. Do you have to reflect each individual character? They reflect characters and places and objects.

The ring itself has four motifs for its different moods. And here's one you may recognize if you've seen the movies. This seems like a good time to ask the question, why a ring? This was something Tolkien borrowed from Wagner, but where did Wagner get it from? And what does it mean? Hi, it's Jed from WNYC. You right there. So we visited Lori Shapira at her small office in Brooklyn.

Come on in. Lori Shapira is a Jungian analyst and also teaches a class about Norse mythology and symbolism in the ring cycle. Okay, well, first of all, the ring is made of gold. It's made of the Rhine gold. So it's manufactured, and I think that's an important piece of this. Gold is a treasure, right? But in its raw state, it's perhaps worthless in a way. only valuable if it's made into something else.

That's a very Western concept. A person who is willing to renounce love and who has the skill to forge the gold into a ring will be able to have measureless might is the way it reads, the libretta reads. It's a very modern idea. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. It's not something that the old storytellers seem to think about.

Any random person being able to pick up object and automatically have power over everything. It just wasn't part of their way of looking at the world. Power wasn't infinitely transferable. Those who had power were born with power and those who didn't, you know, would never be able to touch it. You know, he wrote this around the middle of the 19th century. Wagner wrote the ring in the same year that Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto.

And there was a revolution going on. There was something in the air. We could view that as perhaps the real dawn of the age of Aquarius. Now, what that means is open to interpretation. But Laurie Shapira defines it as the beginning of the end. Destructive technology was on the horizon. Kings and Queens were being replaced by new belief systems. Fogner was creating a mythology for these uncertain times.

With the ring of power at the center, a symbol of both what's possible and what might be missing. It's a myth that appears apparently around the same time that coins were invented. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Tony Kushner. And it has always stood on some level for the invention of money, the transfiguring power of gold in that it's an invisible force. I mean, the ring is always the thing that makes you invisible and unseen so that you can be there and not be there. What's the thing in our lives that's there and not there at the same time

that has immense power but is essentially invisible? It's the power of money. Speaking of money, our first opera ends with the gods marching triumphantly. into their new castle Valhalla, built by giants and paid for with stolen gold. Fred Plotkin explains, It's a real estate deal, and the gold is stolen by Albrecht, the dwarf, and then is taken by Voton the chief god, who gives it to the giants, Fafner and Fassol, for their labors to build Valhalla.

Now, how do you get to this great big castle? You have to build a rainbow bridge. It takes energy to do that, so what do you eat? Rainbow trout. Okay. And that's what we're going to do. Let's see if they have rainbow trout. Coming up, incest apocalypse now and a ring of fire.

You're listening to a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio, The Ring and I, The Passion, the Myth, The Mania. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio, The Ring and I, The Passion, the Myth, the Mania. It's amateur night of Cafetace, uptown. This place we've been told is where professional opera singers hang out after performances,

and also where, three times a week, up-and-comers strut their stuff. This is one of those nights, and we're hoping to see something from the ring cycle to use in this documentary, but this guy, I'm Brian Griffin, flat out refuses. I could never sing the ring in my life, no matter what I do. I just don't have that kind of voice. I mean, it's the epitome of singer-dom, if that's a word. Another aspiring singer takes to stage and lets rip some Italian opera. While I head to the back to join a table of Germanophiles,

which includes rock guitarist Gary Lucas, formerly at the band Captain Bafart. Let's just say that some of the classic Led Zep riffs could be considered Vagnerian. Can you give specific examples, I wonder? Led Zap, okay, let's go to the very first Led Zep hits. A whole lot of love, you know. It's got this motif. It's got this motif. Ba-da-da-da-boom.

Okay? And that motif is really hammered home to death. throughout the song. If you could go to, you know, for instance, the primary motif that really rings throughout the ring and ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-pah. That, to me, is like a very, and then, okay, maybe not exactly the same intervals.

Able abbreviated. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like he was into, by the creation of light motifs, this is almost analogous to riffs in rock music. Whether or not you hear the similarity Gary Lucas is talking about, Wagner and Rock are at least spiritual cousins, particularly when you throw this into the mix. I did a version of Ride of the Valkyrie who's kind of in a surf guitar style. I don't know how else to describe it.

For me, the Ride of the Volkary is my theme song. That's Dorothy Pepke from the American Wagner Association, to Gary's Wright. I'm trying to work it into my memorial service. I figured, well, when they rock, take the casket. That would be the time for the ride of the lottery. But I have it on my answering mission. We checked. We are unable to answer your call at present. Please and phone number. And we will return your call as soon as possible.

Thank you. If ever there were a soundtrack to an outgoing message, or the apocalypse, the ride of the Valkyries is it. Just ask Francis Ford Coppola. His movie Apocalypse now forever associated this Wagner anthem with war. In fact, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American soldiers reportedly played this in their vehicles before raids.

Really, what Wagner meant it to evoke were warrior goddesses, riding on flying horses over the battlefield, retrieving fallen heroes. In Norse myth, these corpse goddesses are called Valkyries, and that is the name of the second opera in the ring cycle, the Valkyrie. And as you can hear, this opera is bigger and bolder. Earlier at Fairway, while shopping for ring-themed menu items, opera and food writer Fred Placken put it this way.

With Das Rheingold, we laid down all the elements, but that's opera's only two hours and 40 minutes long. Now we're going to the big stuff. DeValkura, the story of the Valky, Bernhilde, is five hours plus. It has great sex, fantastic music, a great storm, a big eruptive fire at the end. It has everything. It's life. Who needs soap operas?

Who needs reality TV when you have this, which is with much better music? The Valkyrie is the story of a lot of life. Brunhilde, passed into the most well-known figure in all of opera. She is opera, in fact, in the minds of many who know nothing about it. The hefty, wailing, Viking soprano with blonde braids and horned helmet. That stereotype comes from her, says Will Berger. You know, I mean, not without reason. She does walk on stage like no one ever walks on stage.

She makes her entrance into this world of the ring, screaming her head off. It's meant to make an impression. Soprano Jane Eaglin. I think the stereotype of You know, the one with long blonde plaits and sort of horns on her head. I just think it's kind of sad, really, that that is what people think it's about, because it's so clearly not. What it is about is choice and love and power and incest.

Well, all those four things wrapped up together in one big family drama. You might think of this as All My Children Meets Norse-Smith meets Freud. Brunhilda is the favorite daughter. Voton, the head god, is the dad. Turns out he has kids all over the place. We meet two of them at the start of the story, Sigmund and Senglinda, twins, except they don't know their twins. Author Will Berger explains,

We have two lonely people who are these twin brother and sister parted at birth, and there's always been a sense of something missing in their lives. They've had rotten, miserable lives, both of them, and then they meet. And he says something that I think is so powerful. He says, are the image that I've kept hidden in myself. And that's why he loves her. And I think that's a beautiful moment for anybody who's ever had any kind of a coming out process,

coming out as anything, coming out as a full human being. Incest as self-discovery. Sound crazy? Hello, metaphor. If we're not capable of metaphor, you're probably going to have a lot of trouble at the opera anyway. Or the movies, Will says. Just think of all the cinematic incest out there. Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Back to the Future, Cruel Intentions, House of Yes, Edipus Rex, Dangerous Liaison.

This is a myth that speaks to our primitive brains, says writer and commentator John Rockwell. The deepest archetypal needs and longings of a given culture, and these are common across cultures. And so almost every culture has an incest love story or a heroic hero who defeats a fearsome enemy and so forth. The heroic hero and fearsome enemy come in our next opera. For now, back to the family drama. Voton, the head god and dad of this dysfunctional family, has to figure out what to do about the incestuous twins. He does love the twins.

They are his kids, after all, but what they are doing is illegal and immoral. He tells his daughter, Brunhillo, to go get Sigmund and bring him to Valhalla. In other words, kill him. She agrees and shows up at Sigmund's house, but finds that he doesn't want to come. As far as she's concerned, it's like,

Hi, come on, let's go to Valhalla, it's really great. She can't understand why he wouldn't want to go. But when he explains it to it, she then starts to understand. What he explains to her, says Jane, is that he's in love. They'd rather stay here on earth with his sweetheart than go up to Valhalla, no matter how glorious it is up there. And that totally flips her. She's never seen true love before.

And it makes her question everything. Should she even kill this guy? Or, God forbid, disobey her dad. Author will birger. So on the one hand, we have these fairy tale, let's say, fairy tale characters. But I think what is really superb about the ring, they're real people too. Real characters, going through real emotions. And the fact that they happen to be gods is kind of immaterial in a sense.

Because what you've got here, says Jane, is a story anyone can relate to. A story about growing up and becoming independent. That's why she loves this role. Because of the development that you get, and that comes with, the music as well as through the character and the drama. Speaking of the music, in Wagner, the music knows everything. Even when the characters don't know what's going to happen, the music does. This we found out from Jeffrey Swan.

We're back in his small apartment with a giant piano. For another demonstration, he explains that Voton carries a giant spear wherever he goes. The spear stands for Votan's power. His legal power is his power to rule the world. And the spear, he says, has a musical motif. The whole opera of Valkura is sort of, could be experienced strictly as, or at least as, a exercise in what happens to the spear motive.

In other words, what happens to Voton's authority over his daughter? He demonstrates, starting with the original motif. The spear. From that spear motive, you get something like... See, I can't hear the difference there. If I deconstruct it for you, you can. Can you give me like a 30-second deconstruction? Sure, the spear motive. Let's put it in the convenient key.

The scale rhythmic going down. Okay. First thing, let's put it in the major. Then instead of continuing down, let's jump back on ourselves. Then let's slow it down. Nice. This was an epiphany. The one thing anyone can hear in Wagner's ring is flux.

It's unstable music, huge masses of sounds swirling endlessly like waves. And yet, inside that flux, that flux, there is a center. You feel it. Millions of musical cells, multiplying, mutating, make up the 18-hour organism that is the ring cycle. Each cell, attached to a character or idea, all these characters and ideas in constant states of change. Like what we're listening to now, just one of those cells, a spear motive, a symbol of photon's power and authority, transformed into this. Analyst Lori Shapiro. The main conflict in the ring is love versus power.

Now, it would be easy to say, well, the power guys are the bad guys and the love guys are the good guys in the world. But we all have inside of us a power drive and arrows. Really the most important way of interpreting is to look at it psychologically that all of these characters are part of the individual, are parts of the personality that are in conflict. So the deepest way to interpret this conflict between love and power is to find it in oneself.

Boonhilda is often referred to as Voton's will, as if there are two parts of the same person. Voton had ordered her to kill the boy twin because he felt bound to by law. She disobeyed his orders, but fulfilled her. his true wishes. They meet on a mountaintop, and he decides her punishment. Which brings us back to Fred, at Fairway. Rundhilda is Voton's favorite daughter, and she shows up, does battle, disagrees with her father, whom she loves, and these are intolerant times, and though he says,

I love you, he says, I have to put you to sleep. And so he kisses your eyes shut in a very tender scene, suddenly he creates a fire. It's kind of like the fires of the southwest. I know the president talks about his Clean Forest Initiative, but he should see this. And then what you have is this incredible fire that protects Brunhilde. It never burns her so that only a great hero can penetrate the fire to wake her up. And she's lived for 18 years. So when she wakes up, boy, is she hungry. So I created rock shiard. Trimplabate. Many later scenes in the ring can seem hokey,

but this moment, at the end of the Valkyrie, where Boton gently kisses Brunhilda's eyes to sleep, is one of the most famous, and most widely loved in the entire cycle. Soprano Jane Eaglin. My father died when I was very young, so the whole sort of father-daughter relationship is something which is very much in my mind.

The idea of never seeing your father again is something that I can certainly relate to. Occasionally there have been time. in a Valky performance when I have actually felt, you know, tears welling up just because you get so into the moment. I mean, I do think that the Voton-Brunhilde scene at the end of Valkyrie is like the greatest father-daughter scene ever written. Playwright Tony Cushner.

It's so moving. The music is so heartbreaking and the things that they say to each other. I mean, it's sort of deep, stubborn love that they have for each other. It's in dialectical tension to the way that everything else breaks under the spell of the goal. This is this kind of connection that simply cannot be severed. You're listening to a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio, The Ring and I, The Passion, the Myth, the Mania. I'm Chad Aboum-Rod.

This is a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio, The Ring and I, The Passion, the Myth, the Mania. There are certain facts about Wagner that get repeated. it over and over, however unbelievable. Here's one. There are more books on Wagner than anyone except Christ. That was Dorothy Pepke, the American Wagner Association. We called the Library of Congress.

They couldn't verify it. That is true, and every week there's another book on Wagner. One thing is for sure, though, if Wagner is second to God, he wouldn't be pleased. He thought he was God. And, like it or not, he created a work in the ring cycle that It's like the Bible. It's open to an infinity of interpretations. Not all good. It would be very easy to interpret the ring in terms of politics, let's say.

Analyst and historian Laurie Shapiro. Looking at different groups of people, the nibelungs or the gods, to sort of assign them to different ethnic groups, perhaps. Hitler was loved doing that. For instance, imagine how the third opera of the ring cycle might look through the of the Third Reich. It's called Sigfried, and it begins with an argument. On one side, Sigfried, the muscular blue-eyed child of glory. On the other, Mima, a sniveling, crafty dwarf. The dwarf is the boy's guardian. Mima found him abandoned in the forest, raised him, but now Sigfried is

dying to get away. Playwright Tony Kushner. I mean, Mimi has sort of, you know, this repulsive, whining kvetch is, on one level that you're supposed to sort of sneer at him as this person who's like imprisoned Sigfried in this like false domesticity and that he has to be, you have to throw off the chains of this terrible Jew who's like, or Nebelung, whatever you want to call him, this Untermensch who's like clinging to you so that you can go off and be, you know, the hero. But of course that isn't really the experience. I mean, what's really great about Sigfried is that it's like a fantastic portrait

of this absolute, and you know Wagner intended it. It's like one of the most marvelous portraits of a teenage jerk. You know, those scenes between him, him and Mimi are just fantastic. And it's not to say that Wagner didn't hate Jews, he did. In an early essay he called Jews worms and freaks of nature. It's not that you're unaware of the fact that this is a great racial nationalist epic written by an anti-Semitic egomaniacal monster, but it's just too great to leave alone.

Really, what we've got here is the most universal story known to man, a hero's journey. Like Star Wars, you've got a sword, much like a light-same. They were a boy looking for his parents, interesting creatures, some incest thrown in for good measure. Sigfried, it turns out, as the child of the twins from our last opera. And as writer Fred Plotkin explains back at Fairway, our hero has got a lot of growing up to do. And really, Sigfried, the opera, is the education of Sigfried.

Sort of a coming-of-age story, right? It's a coming-of-age story. Ashton Coucher would do it now again. It's probably optioned in writing. I think so. Fred parallels Sigfrey's ring journey with his own gastronomic one by ordering up a flay of swordfish. He goes from being a callow youth, getting an education literally sort of trials by fire. And the first fire is actually the foraging of the sword, which is wonderful music.

Once he's created the sword, he learns how to use it. And he discovers that Fafner, remember Fafner? The Giant. Fafner, the Giant we met in the first opera. He built the gods a castle in exchange for the Rhine gold. He's been holding on to the gold for all these hours. Now, the gold includes the ring. Whoever has the ring is master of the universe, but the ring has a curse on it.

So he who takes something that's not rightfully his, like taking the White House when you didn't win, pays the consequences. As you can see, this story is so archetypal that anyone can see what they want in it. While Fred imagines the Giants as Republicans, Tony Kushner, refers the Marxist reading. I mean, it's essentially a socialist parable. Which quates the giants with the working class. This gigantic inchoate force that, you know, that's been promised a share in divinity.

In any case, Fafner, the giant is no longer a giant. When he got his hands on the ring, he turned himself into a dragon. A singing dragon, not your typical lord of the ring's dragon. He's sometimes depicted as a sad creature, woozy with the power of the ring. But here again, interpretations vary. Dragons are always in the ring cute. Spade Jenkins, the Seattle Opera. So I said, I want to have a dragon that is truly scary.

Okay, fine. We thought, well, let's have a dragon bigger than the opera house, and so we only see his claws. Well, A, it was a bad idea, and B, it was an idea that I didn't think through, and nobody else did either, because Ziegfried's supposed to stab him in the heart, so how on earth do you set him in the heart if you don't see a heart?

We didn't. How did you not think of that? Don't know, but we didn't. So then we moved on to dragon number two. Dragon number two was a dragon seven feet tall, and this was a beautifully conceived dragon, I thought. It was a old locomotive with a steam shovel for a face. Really?

It came on stage, led by stagehands, all dressed in black, and it puffed steam, and out of the steam shovel blew huge amounts of fire. Wow. And the audience went totally crazy over it. When he was stabbed, all of the smoke died, all of the fire died, and all of the stage hands, who had a chance to be real hands, all fell to the stage dead at that moment. After the dragon, Siegfried has an even bigger challenge.

Brunhilda, remember her? She's been asleep for 18 years on a mountain surrounded by a ring of fire. Sigfried comes along to wake her up. Sort of a snow-white sleeping beauty situation. Here's Frank. We could also say that the whole progression of the cycle is not, not just the consequences of the ring, but the growth of Brunhilda. From a sassy young woman, a goddess full of piss and vinegar,

to use a food term, or ginger, let's say. When she's been put to sleep for 18 years, she is awakened as a mortal. Right. Soprano Jane Eagle. The music becomes more dramatic, I think, as the cycle goes on, really. She's discovering her womanly qualities and falling in love. She's no longer a goddess and doesn't have the power she had, and therefore develops as a human. And this is what is so fundamental to understand the ring cycle, that gods are not infallible.

Mortals have great power and glory. If they know how to use it, if they become the best that they can as human beings. As Wagner approached the end of the ring cycle, which took him 25 years to write, A few things began to dawn on him. First, the theater. No theater in the world would be able to stage this. A dragon, a ring of fire? It was getting too big.

What to do? Well, first he tried to redesign the city of Munich around the ideal opera house that he would need in order to present this the right way. Okay, do you know any artists like this? It wasn't simple vanity driving him, says Wilburger. Wagner wanted the opera house to redeem the world.

And like Sigfried, he thought, thought it was up to him. Yes, it was very like the artist as savior of humanity. What he wanted to save humanity from was fragmentation. In today's world, you've got art over here and politics over here and philosophy and religion over there. Bobner wanted them all together in one glorious mind-altering fusion, a festival which would last for four days. And then in this wonderful idea he had, at the end of these four days, you just burn the structure to the ground. Wow, like a burning man kind of situation.

Very burning man. totally Burning Man. Burning Man, incidentally, is an annual art gathering in the Nevada Desert that ends with the burning of a giant wooden statue. The entire community dancing around it in some way, praising all the art that had gone into it. A symbolic renewal. Like Burning Man, it would have to be outside the bounds of civilization.

You'd have to travel long distances to get there. Leave your life behind. The place he chose was a small town in Germany called Bayreuth. A king built him a theater specifically to stage the ring cycle, and that theater and the town remain to Wagner devotees, the promised land, the Haj. The most intense experience I've ever seen of real desperation was going to Beirut and seeing people trying to get in. Writer and commentator John Rockwell. So it is so, so, so hopelessly sold out.

There's this desperate cadre of people holding up signs saying Zuhat, S-U-C-H-E, which means looking for tickets. And I was one of those people in the... summer of 1959 or 60. I really feel like it's just stepping into an alternate universe. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. You're living in Wagner's world.

It's like a vacation inside a work of art. I don't know how to describe it. It was only about these operas and nothing else was going on. And you sit around talking with these fanatics of which you are one about Wagner and about the experience

and about the performance and whether it was any good and who was good and who wasn't good I've just never experienced anything like that. When you go to the opera at the Met or any other urban opera house, you go, you're in its world for a few hours, and then when you leave, you get into the subway, you go home. You know, the bills are there.

Now, this is perhaps obsessive, but it is devotion. I mean, you know, people make fun of the romantic image of the artist as kind of madmen who are above the normal range of human experience. experience and have some direct connection with the divine and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's very easy in our modern politically correct age to mock that. That all said, Wagner wrote the book on being a romantic artist. I mean, he was more brilliant and more talented and more close to divine inspiration than most other people. And when you hear his music, you hear that.

We pick up the action with Siegfried and Brunhilda on the mountain, right where we left him. Siegfried puts the ring of power on her finger, they embrace. If we were to stop the story right here, we'd have a happy ending. The Ring of Power becomes a wedding ring. Love conquers all. And Wagner considered going this route, but then scrapped it. Because somewhere along the way, his outlook on life changed from utopian to dystopian, and that's exactly what we get in this final opera.

Very large doses of things falling apart. And that's why it's called the Twilight of the Gods. Brunhilda sends Sigfried off on an adventure. while back at fairway Fred Plotkin grabs the package of ringdings off the shelf and explains the trouble that lies ahead. The one major character that we've not really spoken about yet is Hagen. He's the son of Albrecht who put the curse on the ring a long time ago. And Hagen is the bad guy. He is the one who plots to Duke Siegfried by taking him away from Brunhilda and introducing him to a woman.

woman named Gatruna Gavich. I'm not kidding. Sigmfried is dup. He's given drugs. The classic love potion. He forgets about his wife and falls in love with another woman. He has betrayed Brunhilde, and she will betray him right back. He's just not swift and ultimately will be duped by lots of people, and that's his great tragedy. Maybe being a heroic heroic hero is as much about being stupid as being courageous. In any case, Siegfried is clueless. The only character or thing that has any clue in this, this world is the music. Remember how Wagner created little musical themes for his characters and

objects? We'll listen to how he uses them. Just looking at this page, I see so many things. So many references. We're back at pianist Jeffrey Swan's Manhattan apartment, and we turn to a random page from the final opera. So we have, that interval has to do with Hagen. There's the spear. Here's a new motive of the Blood Brotherhood that's related to the Niebelungs, actually. The dwarfs, the dwarfs, and forging. But that I have to stop a second. That was Gutruna and friendship and the fire they're going to go through.

This is back to the Blood Brotherhood again. It's going to get complicated a second, too. That's friendship. That's hoggin. There's the spear again. This is complicated. Don't feel you have to follow any of this. People like Jeffrey Swan have spent their lives

trying to decode it all. And still can't. Because maybe Wagner didn't intend it to make literal sense. You might imagine it like this. When you're walking down the street, just living your life, your brain is firing off all of these thoughts. Half thoughts, really. Wow, cute dog.

Am I fat? Hmm, relativity. What am I going to wear tonight? I'd like that song. Who am I? All of these things you're thinking, but not conscious of thinking. If everyone else on the street is doing that too and you can somehow collect it all,

you'd have a gurgling, churning pool of longings and yearnings. Jung would later give this a name, the collective unconscious. And that says Jeffrey Swan is what Wagner was doing with the instruments of his orchestra, trying to reflect the subconscious emotional life of his characters.

Now, how much does a casual listener pick up of this? I think he picks up some of it, actually. Back at Fairway, as Fred explains, things with Siegfried are about to take a turn for the worst. He's taken on a hunting trip. All the guys are going out, you know. and there are swords. And Siegfried has his sword,

but he's briefly distracted, and Hagen stabs him in the back. This goes back to ancient Rome, if not before that, but Sigfried is stabbed. Sigfried is superhuman, but he has one weak spot on his back. And the real tragedy here is that it was Brunhilda

who told Hagen about it. She was blinded with rage over Sigfried's betrayal. And they carry him back to the castle, And there's this gorgeous music, gorgeous. It's the funeral music, the Ryan Journey and funeral music, as they take him back, it's some of the most glorious music ever written. Brunhilde now in the land of humans, sees the body, and her anger turns to sadness.

She realizes what brought about this treachery. Sparano Jane Eagland. At one point, she said, another wonderful line from the ring, she says, now I know everything. I understand everything. I know everything. She has to give the ring back to the Rhine, die, but everything will be fine. Wow, it's almost like she becomes the hero then.

Oh, totally. Sigfried, our tragic, not-so-bright hero, turned out to be a decoy all along. A woman comes through in the end. Carl Jung saw this as Wagner critiquing patriarchal rule. What the audience sees, or supposed to see, is something that has tortured technical directors like Joe Clark for 100 years. A lot of stage stand clear list, five, six and seven. A lot happens in a very short time.

The list is long. We're at the Metropolitan Opera again, this time underneath the stage. Joe explains his technique for destroying the world, which involves setting the entire stage above us on elevators. And then at the point of collapse, the elevators themselves are moving down at the same time elements of that seam ring are coming up on. No one would have ever thought to try this before Wagner, which is why the ring is sometimes called proto-cinema. In movies, however, the music supports the visual here, says Joe, the music is out front.

The visual is hanging on for dear life. The way I often measure it, or at least I say I do, is does it look like it sounds? And if you can get something in the ring to look like the ring sounds, it's sounding like one of the most remarkable things in the history of Western art. And you can get something to look like that sounds, it's quite well. Wonderful. In the theater in Wagner's head, it all happens in one astonishing moment. When Hilda lights Siegfried's funeral pyreth, throws herself in it, flames seize the stage,

and Valhalla, the home of the gods, collapses. Then the Rhine River overflows its banks, and the Rhine maidens comes swimming by to reclaim the ring. For the first time since the beginning of the cycle, the balance of the universe is restored. The ring cycle was Wagner trying to put his arms around the world and compass everything, thousands of years of mythology set to extraordinary music. And yet, at the center of all that hugeness, it's just us up there. People trying to be noble, showing possibility, failing. That's the surprising thing.

From a guy who thought he was God, we get a story about how the gods must die. And maybe this is what it means to say something is vulgarian, not just that you try to say everything, but that you try, even though you know you ultimately can't. Fugner's music can express more than any of us can. So perhaps the most important thing I can say to you now is, listen. The Ring and I was produced by me and Aaron Cohen. With production assistance from Michael Rayfield, Jenny Schneier, and Max Leffer.

Our executive producer is Elena Park. Special thanks to Dean Capella, George Preston, Margaret Juntweight, Michael L. Sessor, Sarah Billinghurst, Ellen Godfrey, and the staff of the Metropolitan Opera, King FM Studios in Seattle, and engineer Bill Sigmund. This program was made possible by the listeners of WNYC, New York Public Radio. I'm Chad Hepham Rye.