Word: wagner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...than any one of the original operas except the "prologue" Das Rheingold. Sellars handles the musical cuts as skillfully as possible, and except for some of the act endings in Die Walkure and Siegfried, which he uncomfortably splices straight into the next scenes, they are not unsettling. Of course, Wagner's meticulous structure of 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...
...purists this approach is sheer heresy--they remember Wagner's demand that his works be called "music-dramas." But most scoff at that today, and take the music much more seriously than the drama. Sellars 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...
STRAIGHTFORWARD enactments of Wagner's text complement the implicit parody of the hand-puppets and dummies. For the entry into Valhalla over the rainbow bridge in Rheingold, the bridge is projected through a transparency onto the rear wall of the stage; Brunnhilde's enchantment at the end of Walkure occurs atop a ladder, wrapped in a crimson cape and defended by a cordon of flashing lights; for the funeral march in Gotterdammerung, Siegfried's body is set in a huge wooden cart that Brunnhilde, haloed by a spotlight, pulls along. Sellars manages these scenes better than many directors with...
...enterprise this huge, of course, there will be misses as well as hits, and Sellars has his share. Particularly in Gotterdammerung--where many critics say Wagner's inspiration failed him--Sellars falters too. Splicing in whole minutes of Kurt Weill music to back up the leather-jacketed, bar-stool Gibichungs may be a justified comment on their theatrical value in Wagner's original scheme. It also, however, shatters with an axe-stroke of cynicism the mood of benign humor that prevails until them. The musical effect is appalling, the lapse in taste alarming...