Wagners Ring

[extravirgin]

So as anyone set aside 16 hours to listen to this yet?

I would have thought the hard core Gap fans would have. My girlfreind is studying it at university at the moment, so I made her read the Gap.

(for thsoe who dont know this is the peice of music SRD based the Gap Series on...)

[[Syl]]

Man, I wish I had 16 hours to set aside. I have thought about it, though. The only barrier was the price of the CDs.

[matrixman]

I watched a production of The Ring on PBS back in '90 or '91. It was spread over 4 successive nights, to accommodate the 4 operas of the cycle. It was performed by the Metropolitan Opera, directed by conductor James Levine. It was a fine performance and is available on CD, but it's a full-price set. Ouch.

Sir Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic's recording of The Ring from the '60s is considered a classic and remains the top choice for many Wagnerites. But Solti's style never worked for me, whether in Wagner or any other composer. Too dry. He was that way no matter what orchestra he conducted. I think this recording is available at mid-price (from Decca).

I prefer something like Herbert von Karajan's performance with the Berlin Philharmonic. The kind of lush and powerful sound Karajan conjured from the Berliners is perfectly suited to the, um, excesses, of Wagner's music. This box set is available at mid-price from Deutsche Grammophon.

Karajan's version is also available as a single "Highlights" disc on DG's budget label. For $10 and change, it's a relatively painless way for people to check out one of the best performances of The Ring to decide if they like it or not.

For a more "complete" highlights package, Philips offers Karl Bohm's version with the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra as a budget 2-CD set. I haven't heard this one myself, but Bohm's style was the unassuming type. Not extrovert like Solti, or as charismatic as Karajan. But dependable. Whether or not that's sufficient for Wagner, I don't know.

The Gap? No, I buy my clothes elsewhere. Oh, the book you mean! Some guy named Donaldson, right?

[extravirgin]

Wow... that was certainly an informative post...

You know your composers matrixman

Matix... You obviously dig.. Were you happy withe the second and third movies?

[Fist and Faith]

Back when I worked in Durham, at what is now this store:
www.millenniummusic.citysearch.com
we sold a ton of copies of this:
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/ ... =classical
It's a budget-priced recording of the complete Ring. The sound is not as good as Solti's, but the performance is supposed to be very good. Again, I'm not an opera buff, but a couple of my coworkers and a few customers could tell you anything you'd ever need to know about any opera. They had great things to say about this recording, and we sold 40-something copies of it in the year we carried it before I moved away. (Yes, I just said we sold 40 copies of the complete Ring! I think that's pretty amazing. )

Anyway, I just emailed the store to see if they still had access to it. It doesn't look like amazon can get it. I'm not surprised, since I had to get it directly from the guy who took care of this label in the US. Since Gala is a very small label that is not part of a large distrutor, amazon probably doesn't bother with them. I'll let you know, in case anybody wants it.

[matrixman]

In answer to extravirgin: I posted an embarrassingly long rant about why I didn't like the 3rd Matrix movie in the 'Revolutions' thread in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Forum.

Reloaded had exciting moments. I thought they ended the film in a clumsy way, though.

The sequels can't touch the brilliance of the original. It stands on its own.

But if I'm angered and disappointed by the sequels, that shows I care. The idea of the Matrix remains an important one, despite the Wachowskis' best efforts to run it into the ground. Am I being harsh? Tough. Like I'm sure the Brothers are suffering from my words.

Back to Wagner: Fist, I checked your link to that recording. Now I know why it's selling for such a bargain price: it's in mono from 1953. I think it's only fair that I warn potential buyers of this fact, irrespective of the performance's artistic merit. If you're in the mood to listen to 16 hours of mono sound on your spiffy stereo system, then go for it. But don't say I didn't warn you...

[Fist and Faith]

Yes, true enough. Also, it's a live performance. Some don't like that idea. But those big opera lovers, the ones who own six other performances of the complete Ring, 30 different Aidas, etc, don't seem to care about such things. I don't have it myself. Not because of the sound, though. More because I'm not likely to listen to a 2-hour opera, much less 14!

[extravirgin]

Better idea... Go to your local university, or get someone who knwo who attends...

Go to the library, borrow the CD's and take them home and burn them, then return the cd's

It semi legal anyway, I'm pretty sure he has been dead more than 15 years

[extravirgin]

whoops... I meant 50 years

duh

[matrixman]

You're right about opera lovers, Fist. They're nuts! I really don't listen much to opera myself. I think Wagner's Ring is a great work, but like Caer mentioned, it's not easy to set aside 16 hours for it. The highlights are enough for me.

extravirgin, I wouldn't be surprised if the CD's from the library are all scratched over. I stopped borrowing CDs from libraries years ago. The things people do to CD's in their homes stupefies me. Looking at the condition of the discs, you'd think they enacted some satanic ritual or something.

[[Syl]]

You're absolutely right, MM, except for some odd reason, I've found that most of the library's classical CDs border on the pristine.

[Damelon]

On PBS, some years ago, they performed the four operas over four successive nights. I only got to see the first 2 though.

[Ylva Kresh]

I am not a big fan of Wagner. I think he "over does" his music and stories a bit too much* (but of course - you might catch me humming the theme of the Walkyrie every now and then, I admit it, that part is rather catching). However I am rather fond of the stories that are the bases of his operas (like Tristan and Isolde and the stories of Sigurd/Siegfried and the Dragon). I think I acctually started to dislike him when I learned that he was Hitlers favourite composer (not Wagners fault of course, but his operas are rather antisemitic and celebrates the Germanic/aric? heritage (whatever that is really...) - still I think that Wagner was no more a rascist than the majority of people of his time; it is hard to imagine a world/time where the ethical values were so much different from ours).

(to round up all these brackets, I suppose I must appologise if some of you have already read my views on Wagner in the Gap forum)

*No I dont think that applies to the work of SRD of course

[Worm of Despite]

For my money the best use of Wagner was in Apocalypse Now. Otherwise, I wouldn't listen to his stuff for pleasure. Not saying he's bad. Just not my cup of tea.

Interesting Wagnerian fact:

Because Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer, Wagner's music is banned in Israel. In around 2001-2002, musicians playing Wagner's music, unaware about the music's ties with Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, and the fact that Wagner is also unpopular in Israel, were booed off the stage when they played in a theater in Israel.

[Fist and Faith]

From what I've heard, Wagner might not have been entirely opposed to Nazism, but I don't really remember specifics. But he certainly wasn't a pleasant chap!

But everyone should have a disc of Wagner's preludes & overtures!!! The Preludes to Tristan & Isolde, Lohengrin, and Tannhauser, and the Ride of the Valkyre are all exquisite!! (Tannhauser is the music to the lyrics, "Oh Brunehilde, you're so lovely." "Yes I know it. I can't help it." One of the great moments of cartoon history, but get past that and hear the music! )

[Ylva Kresh]

Fist and Faith wrote:

From what I've heard, Wagner might not have been entirely opposed to Nazism, but I don't really remember specifics. But he certainly wasn't a pleasant chap!

LOL! No, I dont think Nazism as such was even invented in Wagners time... (I think he died in 1883) But I have also heard rumours that he was rather unpleasent anyway (and that his family kept that tradition during the nazitime - but I am not sure about those facts really).

[Theo]

Wagner certainly was an anti-Semite, something that was not universal even in 19th-century Germany. His stage directions clearly marked the evil dwarves in Niebelungenring as Jewish caricatures. On the other hand, I seem to recall reading he didn't mind working with Jewish writers, musicians and actors (although I could be wrong about this), and perhaps his anti-Semitism was more of an intellectual idea - although repulsive - which he shared with a lot of intellectuals at the time, including (say) Marx and most of the early socialist philosophers.

As for his family later on, I read somewhere that Hitler actually specifically freed his descendants from military service so as to not risk the family dying out...


On a lighter note, I also read an amusing anecdote about the 1876 premiere of Siegfried. According to this, Wagner ordered a huge dragon model from Richard Keene, a British propmaker, for the Bayreuth premiere of Siegfried. The dragon was to be sent over in three parts. The tail arrived promptly, but then nothing was heard for weeks. After Wagner had abandoned every hope, the body arrived. At the dress rehearsal the dragon was still without a front piece. The head did arrive in the nick of time, but the neck never showed up. So at the premiere they had to stick the head directly on to the body, inviting some ridicule from critics. The neck never arrived at all, and years later it was found out that it had accidentally been sent to Beirut (in Lebanon) instead of Bayreauth in Germany.

[Damelon]

Wagner's music is banned in Israel. I think the reason has more to do with that he was a favored composer of the Nazis, in particular the concentration camp overseers where it was favored music at the camps, than his own personal anti-semitism.

Slightly off discussion, Nietzsche, who had an interesting relationship with Wagner, and his philosophy, is also portrayed as anti-semitic. Though Nietzsche himself was certainly not that. He became a favorite of the Nazis because his sister was, and tried to portray his writings as such after his death. Hitler and his crowd were happy to buy into it.

[Frostheart Grueburn]

Bumpity.

Not participating in the convo about Wagner's ideals, but mentioning that I found the whole 16-hour Karajan clump on Spotify and have been listening to it with one ear while pottering around with other stuff today. Need to redo the various parts in smaller portions and unearth the German lyrics from somewhere; the epic's waaay too massive to swallow as a single chunk.

Haven't really touched this before, mostly due to the ghastly prices stamped on the CD boxes. But everyone recognizes the Valkyrie theme.

(Also it really is amusing how much, aside from GAP, the Covenant novels are built upon this...)

[DoctorGamgee]

If one is to discuss Wagner, one really can't forget to mention this:

Anna Russell's Analysis (audio only)

if you need the visual...

Video part 1

Additional parts can be found on the page.

I am one of those crazy Opera people (I sing it as well as watch it), and have done only a bit of Wagner in concert (Meistersinger and Tannhaüser). Watching the whole thing helps make it make more sense than setting it aside. And, of course, the Anna Russell is comic, but also spot on...priceless (and only 21 minutes...).

Doc