Word: fafner
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...Valhalla by means of a balloon gondola. The Valkyries ride off to war aboard carrousel horses suspended in midair. Wotan puts Brunnhilde to sleep in what appears to be a cluttered attic, full of ungodly bric-a-brac, and she awakens in a starry mausoleum. Siegfried slays the dragon Fafner by chopping at a gigantic crab's claw and then pushing over a flimsy set of painted flats. The forest bird who guides the hero to Brunnhilde is a taxidermist's specimen, carried aloft on a stick by a highly visible soprano...
Such an interpretation is not without its perils, unintended laughter being foremost among them. It is difficult, for example, to understand how Siegfried slays Fafner by wounding him in a horned extremity. Nor is the production immune to directly contradicting the sense of the text. When Brunnhilde tells Siegmund that he must die in his forthcoming battle with Hunding, it is imperative that the exhausted fighter actually look upon her for the scene to make dramatic sense, especially since English supertitles are used. Further, some of the ideas are not very original. The use of 19th century costume (Wotan...
...Wotan, is the ideological lynchpin of the whole cycle, it rightly is the first to go in a conception of the Ring as entertainment. Walkure also benefits from the absence of Sellars' sometimes-intrusive narration. The presentation races through Siegfried, barely pausing for Siegfried to slaughter a garbage-bag Fafner, and into Gotterdammerung...
...believe in pat solutions. What interests me in Wagner are the contradictions." So he has staged the Ring largely in the "modern dress" of 1876, the year of its first full performance. To that basic idea he has added touches of surrealistic humor. For example, the giants Fasolt and Fafner, who gain the magic ring in Das Rheingold in payment for building Valhalla, lumber around on the sagging shoulders of two local weight lifters hidden beneath their cloaks. This joke is painful fun, since Bass Bengt Rundgren, who plays Fafner, is 6 ft. 4 in. tall and weighs...
...London's Ring a sword is a sword, a spear is a spear, and Fafner the dragon is a proper dragon-a 35-ft.-long by 15-ft.-high beauty of a monster that requires eight stagehands to operate. London's conception is not perfect: he may not put the Valkyries on wheels, but having them cavort like chorus girls is not an improvement. There is no bear for Siegfried to tug, alas, nor does Brünnhilde ride a horse into the pyre. But she does sleep on a genuine jagged peak-not just some symbolic platform...