Word: wagnerism
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...film that is the length of Wagner's Ring will be without its longueurs, and this one falls into a second-act slump that lasts about three hours. But the best and the most of Berlin is the best that Fassbinder-or just about anyone else lately-has done. He balances the weight of Döblin's carefully repetitious dialogue with the buoyancy of his creamy, elegiac visual style. He interrupts the naturalism of lives on the skids with scenes of shocking surrealism: an old goat-man slaughters a calf; Mieze's corpse turns to soft...
Hall, 52, has explicitly rejected Chéreau's revolutionary premise ("The Ring does not say that to me at all"), but offers in its place only the unremarkable notion that Wagner "elevated a fairy tale into adult myth." In staging the production, Hall said, he would try to follow closely the composer's own detailed stage directions to return to a romantic Ring. This faithfulness to the original-what the Germans call Werktreue-is admirable and, in this day of extravagant operatic reinterpretations, almost avantgarde...
...Doing all four parts of the Ring in a single summer is, of course, quite impossible," says Hall, rightly pointing out the difficulty of mounting four new major productions at one time. But the ability to do the quite impossible is a prerequisite for those who would tackle Wagner. After all, Wagner did it himself...
Hall's increasingly evident failure to produce a coherent view of the Ring rankled the highly critical, proprietary audience as the week progressed. Lusty boos began echoing through the acoustically perfect Festspielhaus (designed to Wagner's specifications) at the conclusion of Die Walküre, reaching their apogee at the end of Götterdammerung. Both Hall and Dudley, who had refused through the week to take curtain calls, were jeered when they finally came onstage-accompanied for protection by Solti, the entire cast and the Bayreuth orchestra...
Presiding over the music in magisterial fashion at his Bayreuth debut was Solti, 70. The manic drive and headlong energy that once characterized his Wagner have since been tempered by a lyrical impulse that has broadened and deepened his interpretation, although he has lost some of his electric excitement in the process. When, as for much of this Ring, there was nothing compelling to look at onstage, the listener could always concentrate with pleasure on the primary motivating force of Wagner's unique vision: the music...