Word: ring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Obviously, Sellars resorts to this approach because he has to--the Metropolitan Opera today can't assemble a group of singers capable of doing the Ring justice, and the Loeb isn't even within striking range. But he's also making a point about other, more serious productions: most of the performers in them are dummies, and that's why we've never seen a Ring that works both musically and dramatically...
...leitmotifs crumbles to the ground. But from the opening of Rheingold, when Sellars' voice and the rustle of silver paper (standing in for the Rhine) nearly overpower the river's flow in the orchestra's string section, we know this is to be a visual, not a musical Ring...
...does the opposite, and compensates for the loss in musical clarity with wonderfully adroit stagecraft. Sometimes it descends to the level of slapstick pot-shots at Wagner's Nibelungs, Gibichungs, forest-birds and bears, but at least as often it sensibly comments on the eternal production problems of the Ring...
...Walkure, the best of the four adaptations, flows well musically; Sellars cuts out nearly the entire second act. Though that act, with a 25-minute monologue from 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...
...evening, you are--as Sellars quotes Anna Russell (crediting her here, though he fails to elsewhere)--"right back where you started," only it's taken four hours instead of 15 for the gods to pass on, the world to burn up, and the ring to return to its rightful owners. You aren't any wiser than when you started, and you certainly haven't experienced the catharsis Wagner assumed he would induce...