Word: ring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...session for the Loeb Mainstage's production of Candide, based on the Hal Prince musical that was a smash in New York several seasons ago. Director Prince literally tore up the theater, ripping up seats and laying down ramps and platforms. The effect was that of a three-ring circus, with the actors singing, dancing and sometimes shoving their way among the spectators. Reviewers praised the show for maintaining the satiric spirit of Voltaire's 18th-century masterpiece, which describes the spiritual education of a young man struggling to hold on to his belief that "this is the best...
People have read everything from Marxist philosophy to Jungian depth psychology into Richard Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Not least among the difficulties of untangling its 16 hours of music and text are the contradictions which Wagner, bursting with knowledge in many fields and expert in none, wrote into his own libretto. Yet Wagner always insisted that his "poetry" was the important thing and that his music existed only to serve...
English-speaking audiences usually sit through this marathon with only a vague idea of what's happening. They can tell the giants from the dwarfs, and maybe, after a couple of operas, they begin to realize the importance of that little gold ring. But unless you're willing to put in the time to read the entire libretto--and to study the leitmotif structure Wagner used to organize his music--the most you'll get out of the operas is a few gasps at the brilliance of the musical climaxes in between a lot of boredom. The subtleties Wagner took...
...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 Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde--he latched on to Schopenhauer's eastern mystic fatalism, and suddenly the philosophy of the Ring cycle took a sharp turn to the right...
...this intellectual dilly-dallying left the actual story line in woeful shape. Particularly in Gotterdammerung, there are major inconsistencies--most spectacularly, it seems the gods who expire in a blaze of flame and music at the very end need not perish at all, since the ring which had doomed them is back in the hands of its rightful owners...