Word: wagnerism
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AUDIENCES have found Richard Wagner's operas everything but enjoyable. Stimulating, yes; emotional, even enlightening at times. But for over a century artists and audiences alike have treated with sacerdotal reverence works that were as revolutionary in their own time as they seem dated today...
Peter Sellars may be indicted with a catalogue of crimes against Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner's Ring cycle--indeed, at times he treats it like a woman of the streets, to be used and then discarded at will. But he avoids one crime, the reverential acceptance of performance traditions as gospel. In remolding the Ring to suit his aims and resources, he has played a final trick on Wagner, one even the most wilfully manipulative directors of the past haven't managed--turning these leaden operas into light entertainment...
...mixture of gentle smirks at Wagner's pomposity, jabs at his tortuous plots, and tips of the hat to his skill with musical and visual images gives this Ring a legitimate value of its own, beyond, say, the similarly scaled but more ludicrous parody staged last year in New York by the Ridiculous Theater Company. The Loeb production is a sort of live theatrical touchstone for Wagner's effectiveness--the best scenes in the Ring come off best here, and the worst are cut to ribbons or ridiculed beyond recognition...
Sellars boasts, with obvious irony, that his is "Boston's first complete Wagner Ring cycle." It is actually an anthology of the Ring, the most famous and most inspired passages spliced together from each opera, with the gaps in the music and plot filled in either by stage gimmickry or by Sellars' own entertaining, if self-conscious, narration. He uses good commercial recordings of the works, and provides surprisingly good reproduction for them. The cutting is drastic, though, and will disturb those who know the music too well. Sir Thomas Beecham used to complain of the "bleeding chunks of Wagner...
...sheer noise," but his popularity endured long after the demise of swing. He helped introduce Afro-Cuban rhythms to U.S. pop, invented the mellophonium, a trumpet-French horn hybrid, and wed classical music with jazz both in his own dissonant compositions (Artistry in Rhythm) and in unorthodox interpretations of Wagner and Ravel...