ANNOUNCER: This is a special presentation of WNYC, New York Public Radio.

MAN: Opera people are all nuts.

DOROTHY PEPKE: The Ride of the Valkyrie is my theme song. I'm trying to work it into my memorial service. I figured ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Well, if opera people are all nuts, then what makes Wagnerites special?

MAN: They're more nuts and more intense. Probably because Wagner was more nuts and more intense.

MAN: His desire to change his audience, not just to entertain them, but to change them, to get inside of them and stir them up.

MAN: I just was so moved by that thing.

MAN: This is what he was doing. This is what he did and he succeeded.

MAN: I could still—just thinking about it, still makes me kind of tear up. [laughs]

MAN: The man was an absolute horror when it came to stealing money, stealing women, but he never once compromised his artistic vision.

MAN: What I always tell people when they recoil at the idea of watching The Ring or other operas, is these are mirrors of us.

JAD: When you see a lot of people making a huge fuss over a work of art or an event or a happening, you get curious. The Ring Cycle is one of the biggest works of art ever created by one of the most controversial artists to ever live. Over the next hour, we'll explore the question of just what is this thing and why does it continue to inspire people? I'm Jad Abumrad, this is The Ring and I: The Passion, the Myth, the Mania. Stay with us.

JAD: So what is The Ring? If I had to describe it in one sentence, it would go something like this: The Ring is a German romantic view of Norse and Teutonic myth influenced by a Greek tragedy and a Buddhist sense of destiny told with the socio-political deconstruction of contemporary society, a psychological study of motivation and action, and a blueprint for a new approach to music and theater. But we'll get to all that. The first thing to know about Wagner's Ring is that it is an event. Productions of The Ring Cycle will happen all over the world at different times. But here in New York, it seems to roll through about once every four years, like the Olympics. And when it does, the air changes, people's eyes dilate, and Ring classes, like this one at Julliard, are practically standing room only.

JOHN MULLER: Okay, so let's begin the serious part of the class.

JAD: This is Professor John Muller. He stands by a piano and surveys the 40 or so mostly older Wagner lovers who were lucky enough to make it into his seminar.

JOHN MULLER: And I'm going to start with a quote, and it may seem like an odd way to begin this class, but when the third installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, they were doing a showing of all three of them. They referred to this as the Trilogy Tuesday, and author of the article in the Times made the comment about the need to see all three of them together. He says, "Shouldn't all three movies be watched together? Our forebearers had Wagner's Ring Cycle. We have Peter Jackson's Tolkien Trilogy.” I took offense to this statement.

[laughter]

JAD: With a theatrical flourish, Professor Muller flings the newspaper article away from him in disgust, almost hitting a student.

JOHN MULLER: Sorry about that. The Ring is still very much with us, and I don't think it's something just for our forebearers, and that statement really bothered me.

JAD: Nonetheless, one of the reasons I, and I would guess many people, are curious about Wagner's Ring now was because of The Lord of the Rings connection.

ALEX ROSS: The Lord of the Rings really could not have existed in the form that we know it now without Wagner as an example.

JAD: According to New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, there are the superficial connections like the way the characters dress.

ALEX ROSS: And also a lot of the language, particular Wagnerian phrases. A line like, "Ride to ruin in the world's ending."

JAD: And those similarities, he says, can be chucked up to ancient Norse mythology, where both Tolkien and Wagner got their stories. But Wagner threw something new into the mix which Tolkien borrowed outright—a ring.

ALEX ROSS: This is the main connection. The notion of this object which gives you power, and it ultimately makes you powerless. Ultimately, you are enslaved to it.

JOHN MULLER: Yes, The Ring is very much with us. You know, there are people who travel all over the world going to Ring Cycles. And I don't know, maybe some of you are those people. It's like the people who travel all over the world going to solar eclipses wherever they may happen.

JAD: We're talking about four operas here—or one opera in four parts. And it's 20 hours in all, but it's more than that too, which was clear from John Muller's class. Like a Hobbit convention or a Grateful Dead tour, a Ring Cycle is an event. It's a happening. It takes planning, so you'll need provisions. That's why we head to Fairway. Fairway is Manhattan's biggest grocery store, and when there's a Ring in town, it's where you'll find Manhattan's biggest Ring fan.

JAD: Fred?

FRED PLOTKIN: Yes.

JAD: Hey.

FRED PLOTKIN: Hi.

JAD: Jad, nice to meet you.

FRED PLOTKIN: Pleasure to meet you.

JAD: Fred Plotkin. He writes about food and opera. And get this, is on his 38th Ring Cycle.

FRED PLOTKIN: This year I'll be seeing three Ring Cycles in different places.

JAD: Which ones?

FRED PLOTKIN: I'm going to two at the Met with different casts, and then I'm going to one in Finland. My idea in creating a menu to dine while watching all four Ring operas is to be thematic with the Ring and inspired by the Ring. And I decided to look at the cycle and look for gastronomic cues of which there are so many throughout the Ring Cycle of foods, of food products.

JAD: He calls this the Wagner Meal Cycle. He's able to tell the entire story of The Ring through food. And that's why we're here, for sustenance, A ...

FRED PLOTKIN: I take doggy bags when I attend performances and eat them at the intermissions.

JAD: And B, because the plot of the Ring Cycle can get complicated fast, and this is an easy way to remember what's happening on stage. So Fred begins how the Ring Cycle begins, with gold, which we find at Fairway in the chocolate aisle.

FRED PLOTKIN: Gianduiotti are essential to the Ring Cycle, because these are little gold wrapped nuggets of chocolate. They're like currency, but shaped like bricks of gold.

JAD: The first opera, the Rheingold, begins underwater. At the bottom of the Rhine River, we see three Rhinemaidens swimming around. They guard the gold, and all is fine with the world, says Fred, while the gold stays there.

FRED PLOTKIN: That's your fundamental thing of the Ring Cycle. When it's stolen, theft and it's given away like taxes to the rich, what happens is everything goes askew, and therefore we try to put the gold back in the Rhine. It takes 20 hours to do it.

JAD: But for the moment, what we see on stage are Rhinemaidens swimming, shimmering gold. And what we hear is the orchestra building around one E flat chord. And this is where things get interesting. As John Muller tells his class, this may be more than just pretty water music.

JOHN MULLER: In one sense, the opening of the prelude is showing you the Rhine River, from the very depths of the Rhine when you get the opening E-flat and the double basses, then to higher levels and more activity with arpeggio figures in the strings. But on a much deeper level, Wagner's giving you creation itself, and he represents this by using the overtone series. In other words, we have in a sense the creation of tone from one pitch.

JAD: The birth of an entire universe as told in music, note by note, atom by atom. Which is why Professor Muller tells his students when they're in the audience during the scene, they may want to close their eyes.

JOHN MULLER: It's going to burst out after more than three minutes, and you get the first Rhinemaiden bride entering, Woglinde. And initially she sings a couple of nonsense syllables until she actually starts to speak the words of the opera. So it's as if Wagner is also trying to convey the creation of speech.

JAD: This is just one indication that Wagner's approach to drama is pretty wild. On stage, the eyes in our head are seeing Rhinemaidens swimming, while the eyes and our ears are getting another image—the cosmos being born. And perhaps Wagner meant for our mind to somehow blend the two. The question remains though: how do you even get the first part right? The visuals. This is opera, remember, so along with music we've got the problem of staging.

JOE CLARK: The Ring is the biggest project I think that any opera house faces always.

JAD: This is Joe Clark, the Metropolitan Opera's technical director. And we're on stage during a changeover.

JOE CLARK: There's a challenge there that I don't think is like anything else.

JAD: To our right, 4,000 empty seats. To our left, 60-some odd workers swing hammers and push props. And to my dismay, for the swimming Rhinemaidens' scene, he says they don't use an aquarium.

JOE CLARK: It's certainly not realistic water by any means. In fact, it's very stylized. But the whole proceeding is filled with a number of moving gauzes that are painted to look like water. They're constantly in motion, and there are smoke and dry ice effects operating at the same time with fans. Again, it sort of seems like currents underwater.

JAD: And the three Rhinemaidens, meanwhile, Joe has them stand on three separate stage lifts, which move up and down.

JOE CLARK: But very slowly so you get that sense of water flowing.

JAD: We'd heard that the Seattle opera takes it a bit further, so we called director Speight Jenkins. His company has taken the Rhinemaidens to new heights—literally. They suspend the singers 25 feet off the ground.

SPEIGHT JENKINS: Well it looks like Cirque du Soleil, is what it does. The first time I saw it, I almost dropped because you see, first of all, we dress them in kind of mermaid-ish type things, wonderful wigs. It looks as though it's a very fluid and easy movement. They can go down. In other words, they can go down and they can spin. Now what makes it unusual is that they do, in fact, flip as they sing. The three young women at first were a little bit nervous about it, but as we moved on into rehearsals and got to the provinces, they flipped all the time as they were singing, they would flip on singing a high note.

JAD: This voice right here is where the trouble starts. This is Alberich, the evil dwarf. He shows up at the bottom of the Rhine, starts to chase the Rhinemaidens round and round. They laugh at him, but then he steals their gold and forges a ring that will make him master of the universe. Eventually, the gods steal it from him and the world begins to go south. But Wagner's musical universe really starts to take off. For more on that, we visit pianist Jeffrey Swan.

JEFFREY SWAN: Come in. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

JAD: Jeffrey Swan lectures all over the country about The Ring, and in particular, on a system Wagner developed called Leitmotif. It's as if he gave each character a theme and then changed those themes as the characters change. He demonstrates as we sit at a grand piano that takes up almost his entire Midtown apartment.

JEFFREY SWAN: The ideal listener to The Ring early on needs to become aware, I suppose, of Leitmotifs. A real obvious one, when we hear the Rhinemaidens in the very first scene when they're singing their song of joy and they say, "Rhine gold, Rhine gold."

[plays piano]

JEFFREY SWAN: They sing it over and over again.

[operatic singing]

JEFFREY SWAN: At the end of the work, we sort of hear the Rhinemaidens offstage and now there'd be wailing their fate as it were.

JAD: Because they've lost the gold.

JEFFREY SWAN: They've lost the gold and the gods aren't giving it back to them.

[plays piano]

JEFFREY SWAN: Here it's something concrete, a change of harmony. The fact that the orchestration is completely different. There's just a harp on stage. The difference between [plays piano and [plays piano] but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

JAD: It gets much, much, much more complicated, says Jeffrey, because often Wagner will use Leitmotifs to comment on the action with a foreshadow. And this is something film composers have eagerly embraced. I mean, just imagine if the Rhinemaidens are swimming and you hear this in the orchestra ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Jaws theme]

JAD: ... you know immediately what's about to happen to them. Seems obvious, right? But think about how powerful this is. Just two notes create the image of a big fish in your mind. Which brings us back to Lord of the Rings and Oscar winning composer, Howard Shore.

JAD: Howard, if I were to call your scores for the Lord of the Rings movies, Wagnerian—not saying I would, but if I were to call it that, you would think what?

HOWARD SHORE: I would think leitmotif, music expressing emotional ideas and the use of leitmotifs.

JAD: Is that something you made use of in your score?

HOWARD SHORE: Oh, I think tremendously.

JAD: How so?

HOWARD SHORE: Well, there's over Leitmotifs ...

JAD: Oh, really?

HOWARD SHORE: ... used in the piece.

JAD: Do you have to reflect each individual character?

HOWARD SHORE: They reflect characters and the places and objects. The Ring itself has four motifs for its different moods.

JAD: And here's the one you may recognize if you've seen the movies. This seems like a good time to ask the question, "Why a ring?" This was something Tolkien borrowed from Wagner, but where did Wagner get it from, and what does it mean?

LAURIE SHAPIRA: Hello.

JAD: Hi, it's Jad from WNYC.

LAURIE SHAPIRA: Be right there.

JAD: So we visited Laurie Shaipra in her small office in Brooklyn.

LAURIE SHAPIRA: Come on in.

JAD: Laurie Shapira is a Jungian analyst, and also teaches a class about Norse mythology and symbolism in the Ring Cycle

LAURIE SHAPIRA: Okay, well first of all, the ring is made of gold. It's made of the Rhine gold. So it's manufactured, and I think that's an important piece of this. Gold is a treasure, right? But in its raw state, it's perhaps worthless in a way. Only valuable if it's made into something else. That's a very Western concept. A person who is willing to renounce love, and who has the skill to forge the gold into a ring will be able to have measureless might, is the way it reads, the libretto reads.

ALEX ROSS: It's a very modern idea.

JAD: New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross.

ALEX ROSS: It's not something that the old storytellers seem to think about. Any random person being able to pick up an object and automatically have power over everything. It wasn't part of their way of looking at the world. Power wasn't infinitely transferrable. Those who had power were born with power, and those who didn't, would never be able to touch it.

LAURIE SHAPIRA: He wrote this around the middle of the 19th century. Wagner wrote The Ring in the same year that Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. And there was a revolution going on. There was something in the air. We could view that as perhaps the real Dawn of the Age of Aquarius.

JAD: Now what that means is open to interpretation, but Laurie Shapira defines it as the beginning of the end. Destructive technology was on the horizon. Kings and queens were being replaced by new belief systems. Wagner was creating a mythology for these uncertain times with the ring of power at the center, a symbol of both what's possible and what might be missing.

TONY KUSHNER: It's a myth that appears apparently at around the same time that coins were invented.

JAD: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Tony Kushner.

TONY KUSHNER: And it has always stood on some level for the invention of money, the transfiguring power of gold in that it's an invisible force. I mean, the ring is always the thing that makes you invisible and unseen so that it can be there and not be there, or what's the thing in our lives that's there and not there at the same time that has immense power but is essentially invisible? It's the power of money.

JAD: Speaking of money, our first opera ends with the gods marching triumphantly into their new castle, Valhalla, built by giants and paid for with stolen gold. Fred Plotkin explains.

FRED PLOTKIN: It's a real estate deal. And the gold is stolen by Alberich the dwarf, and then it's taken by Wotan the chief-god, who gives it to the giants, Fafner and Fasolt, for their labors to build Valhalla. Now how do you get to this great big castle? You have to build a rainbow bridge. It takes energy to do that. So what do you eat? Rainbow trout. And that's what we're gonna do.

JAD: [laughs]

FRED PLOTKIN: Let's see if they have rainbow trout.

JAD: Coming up, incest, Apocalypse Now in a ring of fire. You're listening to a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio. The Ring and I: The Passion, the Myth, the Mania. I'm Jad Abumrad.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio, The Ring and I: The Passion, the Myth, the Mania. It's Amateur Night at Cafe Tachyon uptown. This place, we've been told, is where professional opera singers hang out after performances, and also where three times a week, up and comers strut their stuff. This is one of those nights, and we're hoping to see something from the Ring Cycle to use in this documentary. But this guy ...

BRIAN GRIFFIN: I'm Brian Griffin.

JAD: ... flat out refuses.

BRIAN GRIFFIN: I could never sing The Ring in my life, no matter what I do. I just don't have that kind of voice. I mean, it's the epitome of singerdom, if that's a word.

JAD: Another aspiring singer takes to the stage and lets rip some Italian opera. While I head to the back to join a table of Germanophiles, which includes rock guitarist Gary Lucas, formerly of the band Captain Beefheart.

GARY LUCAS: Let's just say that some of the classic Led Zep hits could be considered Wagnerian.

JAD: Can you give specific examples, I wonder?

GARY LUCAS: Okay, let's go to the very first Led Zep hits, A Whole Lotta Love, you know? It's got this motif, and that motif is really hammered home to death throughout the song. If you could go to, for instance, the primary motif that really rings throughout The Ring, ba ba ba da ba, that to me is like Bavarian. Okay? Maybe not exactly the same intervals.

JAD: Or abbreviated.

GARY LUCAS: Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like he was into live by the creation of leitmotifs. This is almost analogous to riff in rock music.

JAD: Whether or not you hear the similarity Gary Lucas is talking about, Wagner and rock are at least spiritual cousins, particularly when you throw this into the mix.

MAN: I did a version of Ride of the Valkyries, kind of in a surf guitar style. I don't know how else to describe that.

DOROTHY PEPKE: For me, The Ride of the Valkyrie is my theme song.

JAD: That's Dorothy Pepke from the American Wagner Association, to Gary's right.

DOROTHY PEPKE: I'm trying to work it into my memorial service. I figured, well, one day we'll all take the casket. It would be the time for The Ride of the Valkyries. But I have it on my answering machine.

JAD: We checked.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, answering machine: We are unable to answer your call at present. Please leave your name and phone number, and we will return your call as soon as possible. Thank you.]

JAD: If ever there were a soundtrack to an outgoing message—or the apocalypse—The Ride of the Valkyries is it. Just ask Francis Ford Coppola. His movie Apocalypse Now forever associated this Wagner anthem with war. In fact, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American soldiers reportedly played this in their vehicles before raids. Really what Wagner meant to evoke were warrior goddesses riding on flying horses over the battlefield of retreating fallen heroes.

JAD: In Norse myth, these corpse goddesses are called Valkyries, and that is the name of the second opera in The Ring Cycle, the Valkyrie. And as you can hear, this opera is bigger and bolder. Earlier at Fairway while shopping for Ring-themed menu items, opera and food writer Fred Plotkin put it this way.

FRED PLOTKIN: With Das Rhinegold, we laid down all the elements, but that's opera's only two hours and 40 minutes long. Now we're going to the big stuff. The Valkyrie, the story of the Valkyrie, Brünnhilde is five hours-plus. It has great sex, fantastic music, a great storm, a big eruptive fire at the end. It has everything. It's life. Who needs soap operas? Who needs reality TV when you have this, which is with much better music?

JAD: The Valkyrie is the story of Brünnhilde, possibly the most well-known figure in all of opera. She is opera, in fact, in the minds of many who know nothing about it. The hefty wailing Viking soprano with blonde braids and horn helmet? That stereotype comes from her, says Will Berger.

WILL BERGER: You know, I mean, not without reason. She does walk on stage like no one ever walks on stage. She makes her entrance into this world of the room screaming her head off.

[operatic singing]

WILL BERGER: It's meant to make an impression.

[operatic singing]

JAD: Soprano Jane Eaglen.

JANE EAGLEN: I think the stereotype of the woman with long blonde plats and horns on her head. I just think it's sad really that that is what people think it's about because it's so clearly not.

JAD: What it is about is choice and love and power and incest. Well, all those four things wrapped up together in one big family drama. You might think of this as All My Children meets Norse myth, meets Freud. Brünnhilde is the favorite daughter. Wotan, the head God, is the dad. Turns out he has kids all over the place. And we meet two of them, at the start of the story—Siegmund and Sieglinde. Twins, except they don't know they're twins. Author, Will Berger explains.

WILL BERGER: We have two lonely people who are these twin brother and sister parted at birth, and there's always been a sense of something missing in their lives. They've had rotten, miserable lives, both of them. And then they meet, and he says something that I think is so powerful. He says "You are the image that I've kept hidden in myself."

[operatic singing]

WILL BERGER: And that's why he loves her. And I think that's a beautiful moment for anybody who's ever had any kind of a coming out process, coming out as anything, coming out as full human being.

JAD: Incest as self-discovery. Sound crazy?

WILL BERGER: Hello, metaphor. If we're not capable of metaphor, you're probably gonna have a lot of trouble at the opera anyway.

JAD: Or the movies, Will says. Just think of all the cinematic incest out there. Princess Leia, Skywalker, Back To The Future, Cruel Intentions, House Of Yes, Oedipus Rex, Dangerous Liaison. This is a myth that speaks to our primitive brains, says writer and commentator John Rockwell.

JOHN ROCKWELL: The deepest archetypal needs and longings of a given culture, and these are common across cultures. And so almost every culture has an incest love story or a heroic hero who defeats a fearsome enemy and so forth.

JAD: A heroic hero and fearsome enemy come in our next opera. For now, back to the family drama. Wotan, the head god and dad of this dysfunctional family, has to figure out what to do about the incestuous twins. He does love the twins—they are his kids after all—but what they are doing is illegal and immoral. He tells his daughter Brünnhilde to go get Siegmund and bring him to Valhalla. In other words, kill him. She agrees and shows up at Siegmund's house, but finds that he doesn't want to come.

JANE EAGLEN: As far as she's concerned, it's like, "Hi, come on. Let's go to Valhalla. It's really great." And she can't understand why he wouldn't want to go. But when he explained it to her, she then starts to understand.

JAD: What he explains to her, said Jane, is that he's in love. He'd rather stay here on Earth with his sweetheart than go up to Valhalla, no matter how glorious it is up there. And that totally flips her. She's never seen true love before, and it makes her question everything. Should she even kill this guy or, God forbid, disobey her dad? Author Will Berger

WILL BERGER: So on the one hand we have these fairy tale, let's say. Fairy tale characters, but I think what is really superb about The Ring, they're real people too.

JANE EAGLEN: Real characters going through real emotions. And the fact that they happened to be gods is kind of immaterial in a sense.

JAD: Because what you've got here, says Jane, is a story anyone can relate to. A story about growing up and becoming independent. And that's why she loves this role.

JANE EAGLEN: Because of the development that you get. And that comes through the music as well as through the character and the drama.

JAD: Speaking of the music, in Wagner, the music knows everything. Even when the characters don't know what's gonna happen, the music does. This we found out from Jeffrey Swan. We're back in his small apartment with a giant piano for another demonstration. He explains that Wotan carries a giant spear wherever he goes.

JEFFREY SWAN: The spear stands for Wotan's power, his legal powers, his power to rule the world.

JAD: And the spear, he says, has a musical motif.

JEFFREY SWAN: The whole Opera Valkyrie is sort of—could be experienced strictly as or at least as a exercise in what happens to the spear motif.

JAD: In other words, what happens to Wotan's authority over his daughter? He demonstrates, starting with the original motif.

JEFFREY SWAN: The spear.

[plays piano]

JEFFREY SWAN: From that spear motif, you get something like ...

[plays piano]

JAD: See, I can't hear the difference there.

JEFFREY SWAN: If I deconstruct it for you, you can.

JAD: Can you give me like a 30-second deconstruction?

JEFFREY SWAN: Sure. The spear motif, let's put it in the convenient key. The scale, rhythmic going down.

JAD: Okay.

JEFFREY SWAN: First, let's put in the major. Then instead of continuing down, let's jump back on ourselves. Then let's slow it down.

JAD: I see!

JAD: This was an epiphany. The one thing anyone can hear in Wagner's Ring is flux. It's unstable music. Huge masses of sound swirling endlessly like waves, and yet inside that flux there is a center. You feel it. Millions of musical cells multiply, mutating, and make up the 18-hour organism that is the Ring Cycle, each cell attached to a character idea. All these characters and ideas in constant states of change. Like what we're listening to now, just one of those cells, a spear motif, a symbol of Wotan's power and authority transformed into this.

[swelling operatic tones]

JAD: Analyst, Laurie Shapira.

LAURIE SHAPIRA: The main conflict in The Ring is love versus power. Now it would be easy to say, "Well, the power guys are the bad guys and the love guys are the good guys in the world," but we all have inside of us a power drive and eros. Really, the most important way of interpreting is to look at it psychologically, that all of these characters are part of the individual, are parts of the personality that are in conflict. So the deepest way to interpret this conflict between love and power is to find it in oneself.

JAD: Brünnhilde is often referred to as Wotan's will, as if there are two parts of the same person. Wotan had ordered her to kill the boy twin because he felt bound to by law. She disobeyed his orders but fulfilled his true wishes. They meet on a mountaintop and he decides her punishment. Which brings us back to Fred at Fairway.

FRED PLOTKIN: Brünnhilde is Wotan's favorite daughter, and she shows up, does battle, disagrees with her father who she loves. And these are intolerant times. And though he says, "I love you," he says, "I have to put you to sleep." And so he kisses your eyes shut in a very tender scene. Suddenly he creates a fire.

[operatic singing]

FRED PLOTKIN: It's kind of like the fires of the Southwest. I know the president talks about his clean forest initiative, but he should see this. And then what you have is this incredible fire that protects Brünnhilde. It never burns her, so that only a great hero can penetrate the fire to wake her up. And she sleeps for 18 years, so when she wakes up, boy is she hungry! So I created rock shrimp flambé, because she's ...

JAD: Many later scenes in The Ring can seem hokey, but this moment at the end of the Valkyrie where Wotan gently kisses Brünnhilde's eyes to sleep is one of the most famous, most widely loved of the entire cycle. Soprano, Jane Eaglen.

JANE EAGLEN: My father died when I was very young, so the whole sort of father-daughter relationship is something which is very much in my mind. The idea of never seeing your father again is something that I can certainly relate to. Occasionally, there have been times in a Valkyrie performance when I have actually felt tears welling up just because you get so into the moment.

TONY KUSHNER: I mean, I do think that the Wotan-Brünnhilde scene at the end of Valkyrie is like the greatest father-daughter scene ever written.

JAD: Playwright, Tony Kushner.

TONY KUSHNER: I mean it's so moving. The music is so heartbreaking, and the things that they say to each other are, I mean, it's like deep, stubborn love that they have for each other. It's in dialectical tension to the way that everything else breaks under the spell of the goal that this isn't the kind of connection that simply cannot be savored.

JAD: You're listening to a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio: The Ring and I: The Passion, the Myth, the Mania.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is a special presentation from WNYC, New York Public Radio: The Ring and I: The Passion, the Myth, the Mania. There are certain facts about Wagner that get repeated over and over, however unbelievable. Here's one.

DOROTHY PEPKE: There are more books on Wagner than anyone except Christ.

JAD: That was Dorothy Pepke of the American Wagner Association. We called the Library of Congress, they couldn't verify it.

DOROTHY PEPKE: That is true, and every week there's another book on Wagner.

JAD: One thing is for sure though, if Wagner is second to God, he wouldn't be pleased. He thought he was God. And like it or not, he created a work in the Ring Cycle that is like the Bible. It's open to an infinity of interpretations—not all good.

LAURIE SHAPIRA: It would be very easy to interpret The Ring in terms of politics, let's say.

JAD: Analyst and historian, Laurie Shapira.

LAURIE SHAPIRA: Looking at different groups of people, the Nibelungs or the gods, to assign them to different ethnic groups, perhaps. Hitler loved doing that.

JAD: For instance, imagine how the third opera of The Ring Cycle might look through the eyes of the Third Reich. It's called Siegfried and it begins with an argument. On one side Siegfried, the muscular blue-eyed child of glory, on the other, Mime, a sniveling, crafty dwarf. The dwarf is the boy's guardian. Mime found him abandoned and the forest raised him, and now Siegfried is dying to get away. Playwright, Tony Kushner.

TONY KUSHNER: I mean, Mime is sort of this repulsive whining kvetch, is on one level, you're supposed to sneer at him as this person who's imprisoned Siegfried in this false domesticity and that he has to be—you have to throw off the chains of this terrible Jew who's like your Nibelung or whatever you want to call him, this untermensch who's, like, clinging to you so that you can go off and be the hero. But of course that isn't really the experience. I mean, what's really great about Siegfried is that it's like a fantastic portrait of this—and you know Wagner intended it. It's like one of the most marvelous portraits of a teenaged jerk.

[operatic singing]

TONY KUSHNER: You know, and those scenes between him and Mime are just fantastic.

JAD: And it's not to say that Wagner didn't hate Jews. He did. In an early essay he called Jews "worms" and "freaks of nature."

TONY KUSHNER: It's not that you're unaware of the fact that this is a great racial nationalist epic written by an anti-Semitic ego-maniacal monster, but it's just too great to leave alone.

JAD: Really, what we've got here is the most universal story known to man: a hero's journey. Like Star Wars, you've got a sword, much like a light saber, a boy looking for his parents, interesting creatures, some incest thrown in for good measure. Siegfried, it turns out, is the child of the twins from our last opera. And as writer Fred Plotkin explains back at Fairway, our hero has got a lot of growing up to do.

FRED PLOTKIN: And really, Siegfried the opera is the education of Siegfried.

JAD: Sort of a coming of age story, right?

FRED PLOTKIN: It's a coming of age story. Ashton Kutcher would do it now. [laughs]

JAD: It's probably an option in waiting.

FRED PLOTKIN: I think so.

JAD: Fred parallels Siegfried's Ring journey with his own gastronomic one, by ordering up a filet of swordfish.

FRED PLOTKIN: He goes from being a callow youth to getting an education. Literally sort of trials by fire. And the first fire is actually the forging of the sword, which is wonderful music. Once he's created the sword, he learns how to use it. And he discovers that Fafner—remember Fafner, the giant?

JAD: Fafner, the giant we met in the first opera. He built the gods a castle in exchange for the Rhine gold.

FRED PLOTKIN: He's been holding onto the gold for all these hours. Now the gold includes the ring. Whoever has the ring is master of the universe, but the ring has a curse on it. So he who takes something that's not rightfully his, like taking the White House when you didn't win, pays the consequence.

JAD: As you can see, this story is so archetypal that anyone can see what they want in it. While Fred imagines the giants as Republicans, Tony Kushner prefers the Marxist regime.

TONY KUSHNER: I mean, it's essentially a socialist parable.

JAD: Which equates the giants with the working class.

TONY KUSHNER: This gigantic inchoate force that's been promised a share in divinity.

JAD: In any case, Fafner the giant is no longer a giant. When he got his hands on the ring, he turned himself into a dragon, a singing dragon, not your typical Lord of the Rings dragon. He's sometimes depicted as a sad creature, woozy with the power of the ring. But here again, interpretations vary.

SPEIGHT JENKINS: Dragons are always in The Ring, cute.

JAD: Speight Jenkins, the Seattle Opera.

SPEIGHT JENKINS: So I said I want to have a dragon that is truly scary. Okay, fine. We thought, well, let's have a dragon bigger than the opera house, and so we only see his claws. Well, A) it was a bad idea and B) it was an idea that I didn't think through and nobody else did either because Siegfried is supposed to stab them in the heart, so how on eEarth do you stab them in the heart if you don't see a heart? We didn't.

JAD: [laughs] How did you not think of that?

SPEIGHT JENKINS: I don't know, but we didn't. Then we moved on to dragon number two. Dragon number two was a dragon seven feet tall, and this was a beautifully conceived dragon, I thought. It was a old locomotive with a steam shovel for a face.

JAD: Really?

SPEIGHT JENKINS: It came on stage led by stagehands, all dressed in black. And it puffed steam, and out of the steam shovel blew huge amounts of fire.

JAD: Wow!

SPEIGHT JENKINS: And the audience went totally crazy over it. When he was stabbed, all of the smoke died, all of the fire died, and all of the stagehands who had a chance to be real hands all fell to the stage dead at that moment.

JAD: After the dragon, Siegfried has an even bigger challenge: Brünnhilde. Remember her? She's been asleep for 18 years on a mountain surrounded by a ring of fire. Siegfried comes along to wake her up, sort of a Snow White, Sleeping Beauty situation. Here's Fred.

FRED PLOTKIN: We could also say that the whole progression of the cycle is not just the consequences of the ring, but the growth of Brünnhilde from a sassy young woman, a goddess full of piss and vinegar, to use a food term, or ginger, let's say. When she's been put to sleep for 18 years, she is awakened as a mortal.

JANE EAGLEN: Right.

JAD: Soprano Jane Eaglen.

JANE EAGLEN: The music becomes more dramatic, I think, as the cycle goes on, really. She's discovering her womanly qualities and falling in love.

FRED PLOTKIN: She's no longer a goddess and doesn't have the power she had, and therefore, develops as a human. And this is what is so fundamental to understand The Ring Cycle, that gods are not infallible. Mortals have great power and glory. If they know how to use it, they become the best that they can as human beings.

JAD: As Wagner approached the end of The Ring Cycle, which took him 25 years to write, a few things began to dawn on him. First, the theater. No theater in the world would be able to stage this. A dragon? A ring of fire? It was getting too big. What to do?

WILL BERGER: Well, first he tried to redesign the city of Munich around the ideal opera house that he would need in order to present this the right way. Okay, do you know any artists like this?

JAD: It wasn't simple vanity driving him, says Will Berger. Wagner wanted the opera house to redeem the world, and like Siegfried, he thought it was up to him.

WILL BERGER: Yes. It was very like the artist as savior of humanity.

JAD: What he wanted to save humanity from was fragmentation. In today's world, you've got art over here and politics over here, and philosophy and religion over there. Wagner wanted them all together in one glorious mind-altering fusion, a festival which would last for four days.

WILL BERGER: And then in this wonderful idea he had, at the end of these four days, you just burn the structure to the ground, because ...

JAD: Wow, like a Burning Man kind of situation?

WILL BERGER: Very Burning Man. Totally Burning Man.

JAD: Burning Man, incidentally, is an annual art gathering in the Nevada desert that ends with the burning of a giant wooden statue.

WILL BERGER: The entire community dancing around it in some way, praising all the art that had gone into it.

JAD: That's symbolic renewal. Like Burning Man, it would have to be outside the bounds of civilization. You'd have to travel long distances to get there. Leave your life behind. The place he chose was a small town in Germany called Bayreuth. A king built him a theater specifically to stage The Ring Cycle, and that theater and the town remain to Wagner's devotees, the Promised Land, the Hajj.

JOHN ROCKWELL: The most intense experience I've ever seen of real desperation was going to Bayreuth and seeing people trying to get in.

JAD: Writer and commentator, John Rockwell.

JOHN ROCKWELL: It is so so so hopelessly sold out, there's this desperate cadre of people holding up signs saying, "Suche," S-U-C-H-E, which means looking for tickets. And I was one of those people in the summer of 1959 or '60.

ALEX ROSS: I really feel like it's just stepping into an alternate universe.

JAD: New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross.

ALEX ROSS: You're living in Wagner's world. It's like a vacation inside a work of art, as I would describe it. It was only about these operas and so nothing else was going on.

JOHN ROCKWELL: And you sit around talking with these fanatics, of which you are one, about Wagner and about the experience, and about the performance and whether it was any good, and who was good and who wasn't good.

ALEX ROSS: I've just never experienced anything like that. When you go to the opera at the Met or any other urban opera house, you go, you're in this world for a few hours and then when you leave, you get into the subway and go home. The bills are there.

JOHN ROCKWELL: Now this is perhaps obsessive, but it is devotion. I mean, you know, people make fun of the romantic image of the artist as kind of mad men who are above the normal range of human experience and have some direct connection with the divine and blah blah blah blah blah. And it's very easy in our modern politically correct age to mock that. That all said, Wagner wrote the book on being a romantic artist. I mean, he was more brilliant and more talented, and more close to divine inspiration than most other people. And when you hear his music, you hear that.

JAD: We pick up the action with Siegfried and Brünnhilde on the mountain, right where we left him. Siegfried puts the ring of power on her finger and they embrace. If we were to stop the story right here, we'd have a happy ending. The ring of power becomes wedding ring. Love conquers all. And Wagner considered going this route, but then scrapped it because somewhere along the way, his outlook on life changed from Utopian to dystopian, and that's exactly what we get in his final opera, very large doses of things falling apart. And that's why it's called the Twilight of the Gods.

JAD: And Brünnhilde sends Siegfried off on an adventure while back at Fairway. Fred Plotkin grabs a package of Ring Dings off the shelf and explains the trouble that lies ahead.

FRED PLOTKIN: The one major character that we've not really spoken about yet is Hagen. He's the son of Alberich, who put the curse on the ring a long time ago. And Hagen is the bad guy. He is the one who plots to dupe Siegfried by taking him away from Brünnhilde and introducing him to a woman named Gutrune Gibich. I'm not kidding. Siegfried is duped. He's given drugs.

JAD: The classic love potion, and forgets about his wife and falls in love with another woman. He has betrayed Brünnhilde and she will betray him right back.

FRED PLOTKIN: He's just not swift, and ultimately will be duped by lots of people. And that's the great tragedy.

JAD: Maybe being a heroic hero is as much about being stupid as being courageous. In any case, Siegfried is clueless. The only character or thing that has any clue in this world is the music. Remember how Wagner created little musical themes for his characters and objects? Well, listen to how he uses them.

JEFFREY SWAN: Just looking at this page, I see so many things. Look at so many references.

JAD: We're back at pianist Jeffrey Swan's Manhattan apartment. We turned to a random page from the final opera.

JEFFREY SWAN: So we have [low piano chords]. That interval has to do with Hagen. There's the spear. [piano] Here's a new motif of the Blood Brotherhood. It's related to the Nibelungs, actually.

JAD: To the dwarfs?

JEFFREY SWAN: The dwarfs. And forging. But that has to stop a second. That was Gutrune and friendship and the fire they're gonna go through. This is back to the Blood Brotherhood again. It's gonna get complicated in a second. That's friendship and that's Hagen. There's the spear again. This is complicated.

JAD: Don't feel you have to follow any of this. People like Jeffrey Swan have spent their lives trying to decode it all and still can't, because maybe Wagner didn't intend it to make literal sense. We might imagine it like this. When you're walking down the street just living in your life, your brain is firing off all of these thoughts—half thoughts really. "Wow, cute dog. Am I fat? Hmm? Relativity. What am I gonna wear tonight? I like that song. Who am I?" All of these things you're thinking but not conscious of thinking.

JAD: If everyone else on the street is doing that too, when you could somehow collect it all, you'd have a gurgling, churning pool of longings and yearnings. Jung would later give this a name, "the collective unconscious." And that, says Jeffrey Swan, is what Wagner was doing with the instruments of his orchestra, trying to reflect the subconscious emotional life of his characters.

FRED PLOTKIN: Now how much does a casual listener pick up of this? I think he picks up some of it, actually.

JAD: Back at Fairway, as Fred explains, things with Siegfried are about to take a turn for the worse.

FRED PLOTKIN: He's taken on a hunting trip. All the guys are going out, you know? And there was swords. And Siegfried has his sword, but he's briefly distracted and Hagen stabs him in the back. This goes back to ancient Rome, if not before that, but Siegfried is stabbed.

JAD: Siegfried is superhuman, but he has one weak spot—on his back. And the real tragedy here is that it was Brünnhilde who told Hagen about it. She was blinded with rage over Siegfried's betrayal.

FRED PLOTKIN: And they carry him back to the castle, and there's this gorgeous music. Gorgeous. It's the funeral music, the Rhine journey and funeral music as they take him back. It's some of the most glorious music ever written.

JAD: Brünnhilde, now in the land of humans, sees the body and her anger turns to sadness. She realizes what brought about this treachery. Soprano Jane Eaglen.

JANE EAGLEN: At one point she says—another wonderful line from The Ring. She says, "Now I know everything. I understand everything. I know everything." She has to give the ring back to the Rhine, die, but everything will be fine.

JAD: Wow, it's almost like she becomes the hero then.

JANE EAGLEN: Oh, totally.

JAD: Siegfried, our tragic, not-so-bright hero, turned out to be a decoy all along. A woman comes through in the end. Carl Jung saw this as Wagner critiquing patriarchal rule. What the audience sees—or are supposed to see—is something that has tortured technical directors like Joe Clark for a hundred years.

JOE CLARK: A lot happens in a very short time. The list is long. [laughs]

JAD: We're at the Metropolitan Opera again, and this time underneath the stage. Joe explains his technique for destroying the world, which involves setting the entire stage above us on elevators.

JOE CLARK: And then at the point of collapse, the elevators themselves are moving down, at the same time elements of that scenery are coming apart.

JAD: No one would've ever thought to try this before Wagner, which is why The Ring is sometimes called proto-cinema. In movies, however, the music supports the visual. Here, says Joe, the music is out front with the visuals hanging on for dear life.

JOE CLARK: The way I often measure it—or at least I say I do—is does it look like it sounds? And if you can get something in The Ring to look like the ring sounds, it's sounding like one of the most remarkable things in the history of Western art. And if you can get something to look like that sound, it's quite wonderful.

JAD: In the theater in Wagner's head, it all happens in one astonishing moment. Brünnhilde lights Siegfried's funeral fire, throws herself in it. Flames seize the stage, and Valhalla, the home of the gods, collapses.

[operatic singing]

JAD: Then the Rhine River overflows its banks and the Rhinemaidens come swimming by to reclaim the ring. For the first time since the beginning of the cycle, the balance in the universe is restored. The Ring Cycle was Wagner trying to put his arms around the world, encompass everything. Thousands of years of mythology set to extraordinary music. And yet at the center of all that hugeness, it's just us up there. People, trying to be noble, showing possibility, failing. That's the surprising thing from a guy who thought he was God, we get a story about how the gods must die.

JAD: And maybe this is what it means to say something is Wagnerian, not just that you try to save everything. But that you try, even though you know you ultimately can't. Wagner's music can express more than any of us can, so perhaps the most important thing I can say to you now is: listen.

JAD: The Ring and I was produced by me and Aaron Cohen, with production assistance from Michael Raytheon, Jenny Schneier and Max Leper. Our executive producer is Elena Park. Special thanks to Dean Capella, George Preston. Margaret Jumpwit, Michael L. Sesar, Sarah Billinghurst, Ellen Godfrey, and the staff of the Metropolitan Opera, King FM studios in Seattle and Engineer Bill Sigmund. This program was made possible by the listeners of WNYC, New York Public Radio. I'm Jad Abumrad.

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.