Moot Thoughts & Musings

Last Saturday night Chris and I went to see Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold performed by the New Orleans opera association. This was the second opera each of us have been to (if you exclude the partial dress rehearsal of Tosca I saw and my participation in Pagliacci): I had been to Carmen several years earlier, and he had seen some Mozart something in Prague. I don't really like Wagner. But the Ring Cycle (four operas) is such a standard in the Western musical canon, and so many people just love it, that I thought perhaps actually seeing it live might help me warm up to it a bit. For the most part I wasn't disappointed.

The staging, scenery, and stage effects were really terrific. The soloists were all quite good, with Wotan being especially so. We were so far away, though, that it was difficult to really feel into the drama of it all. I could barely read the supertitles. The Wotan, though, had such good vocal presence that he felt right there even though we were in the nosebleed section.

I went back and forth from being really into it and being coolly detached, though still enjoying it. Like I said previously concerning my concert-going, I don't have an "aesthetic experience" anymore. I think I'd like to see the rest of the cycle as it is performed in subsequent seasons.

What I hate, though, is the real degeneration of concert etiquette. I don't know what it was like in the other sections of the hall, but in the nosebleed section there was constant whispering. It was driving me crazy. It wasn't from just one or two particular people, it was all over. It's like people are used to "entertainment" being in the "background". Gathering from the demeanor of most people around us, it was clear they hadn't a clue about what was going on, the various unique facets of a Wagner opera, or the fact that perhaps if they were wondering these things, they should voice these wonderments at the end of the opera and not during it. It's understandable and acceptable for these ignorances to be, but there were extensive program notes they could've read before hand to assuage their ignorance. I kind of wondered if people came because they thought it would be like Lord of the Rings, and I can't blame them, because that's how the opera people tried to bill it for popular appeal. Other than a ring that gives the owner unique world power, it isn't at all like LOTR. And everybody thinks the Ring Cycle is three operas, but it's four.

A Wagner opera takes a unique kind of concentration to watch, because it is through-composed. In other words, it doesn't have recitatives which are speech-like passages and in which most of the "action" and narrative takes place or arias, the lyrical solos in which the character soliliquizes (is that a word?). Rather a Wagner opera is continuous drama of somewhere in between a recit and an aria. There's no settling back for an aria, it requires your constant attention, which was a little difficult as I was scrutinizing the supertitles. We did enjoy it, though, and I think we'll go back.