Word: rheingolds
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Each of the four operas takes less than an hour, and the whole evening adds up to about four hours in all--less than any one of the original operas except the "prologue" Das Rheingold. Sellars handles the musical cuts as skillfully as possible, and except for some of the act endings in Die Walkure and Siegfried, which he uncomfortably splices straight into the next scenes, they are not unsettling. Of course, Wagner's meticulous structure of leitmotifs crumbles to the ground. But from the opening of Rheingold, when Sellars' voice and the rustle of silver paper (standing...
...real problem with presenting Wagner in translation is that it exposes all the confusion in Wagner's thinking. No one is sure just what he intended his mythological, melodramatic "music-dramas" to mean, and it's likely that he never knew himself. Das Rheingold, the first opera in the cycle, shows heavy socialist influence, and some critics say Wagner's early sketches of the character Siegfried were based on Mikhail Bakunin, the mid-nineteenth century anarchist. But in the decade between the composition of acts II and III of Siegfried, the third opera in the cycle--during which Wagner wrote...
...watch the Mets, unless you're at Shea with a couple of sixpacks of Rheingold. Do shed a tear for Jerry Koosman, one of the classiest guys in sports...
...because if Massachusetts adopts this amendment, other states will doubtless (see "1776" for proof) follow. And as soon as New York passes the amendment, those Yankee Stadium bleacherites will refrain from throwing their empty Rheingold cans at the enemy rightfielder so as not to lose their nickel of a deposit...
...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...