It may be the ultimate test of an opera company: 15 hours of music divided among four operas to be done within a week, requiring a sizable cast of big-voice singers, and a conductor and orchestra of considerable sophistication. Oh, and stage director, designer and costumer who can dramatize an epic of greed, exploitation, power grabbing, betrayal and final redemption.
Richard Wagner conceived his Ring of the Nibelung as a multimedia epic, uniting the arts to tell a story of gods, mortals and hybrids. But for generations, via recordings and radio broadcasts, it’s also been experienced, and enjoyed, as a purely auditory experience.
It’s as a concert performance, with some minimal staging and lighting effects, that music director Fabio Luisi will conduct the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and singers in the complete four-opera Ring Cycle Oct. 13-17 at the Meyerson Symphony Center. First, having presented the cycle’s first two operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, last May, the orchestra will perform the remaining Siegfried and Götterdämmerung Oct. 5 and 8, respectively.
Casts include Mark Delavan (Wotan/Wanderer), Stefan Margita (Loge), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime), Sara Jakubiak (Sieglinde), Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Stephen Milling (Hunding and Hagen), Lise Lindstrom (Brünnhilde), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried) and Roman Trekel (Gunther). Semi-staging, mainly in front of the orchestra, is by Italian director Alberto Triola, who also directed previous Luisi/DSO presentations of Strauss’ Salome and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.
Each of the three longest Ring operas will include an hourlong intermission, when three-course dinners will be available in the Meyerson’s Opus restaurant. The dinners must be reserved separately.
For a symphony orchestra accustomed to purely instrumental two-hour concerts, playing a multi-hour opera is a very different experience, with new degrees of mental and physical challenge. Representatives of neither Opera America nor the League of American Orchestras could think of another American symphony orchestra in memory to have attempted it.
But Luisi, whose operatic experience includes conducting the Ring at the Metropolitan Opera, considers performing operas important in cultivating the orchestra’s responsiveness.
“They have to be aware much more than in a concert,” he says. “They need to listen. They need to be involved in this musical process during the performance.
“They need to know that it can change from one performance to the next, because they have to go with the singers. Something can happen that wasn’t rehearsed. This spontaneity, this flexibility, is very important to me.”
What happens in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung
The Ring of the Nibelung revolves around a ring and a helmet with magical powers, both crafted from gold stolen from the Rhinemaidens. Everybody wants them — and the rest of the Rhine gold — but the ring also has acquired a curse.
At the beginning of Siegfried, the treasures are guarded in a cave by Fafner, a giant who has turned himself into a fearsome dragon. He’s slain by the young Siegfried, who takes the ring and Tarnhelm and heads off in search of a woman asleep on a fire-encircled mountain. As the only hero fearless enough to penetrate the fire, Siegfried awakens Brünnhilde with a kiss, and they fall in love.
The story gets more complicated in Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the longest of the Ring operas. Visiting the hall of the conniving Gibichungs, Siegfried is drugged to forget Brünnhilde and fall in love with Gutrune. Having given the ring to Brünnhilde, Siegfried snatches it back. Hagen stabs Siegfried, and in a dispute over the ring he also kills his half-brother Gunther.
Apprised of the drugging, Brünnhilde forgives Siegfried and orders a great funeral pyre for him. She mounts her horse and herself rides into the flames, and the hall of the Gibichungs catches fire, too. As the Rhine river overflows, the Rhinemaidens recover the ring, now cleansed of its curse. In the heavens, the home of the corrupt gods, Valhalla, also is devoured by fire as the orchestra pours forth a great surging theme of redemption.
For the audience, minus often elaborate visuals of Ring stagings, Luisi hopes there will be a new appreciation of music revolutionary in structure, harmony and expressive power.
“I hope the audiences will be involved with this music,” he says, “that they can let go with the music, just be carried along by the music. The music is not illustrating what is happening onstage, but what they are not saying. When they are lying, you hear it in the music, and they lie all the time.”
Details
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra will perform Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung as follows, at the Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St.
- Siegfried: 5 p.m. Oct. 5
- Götterdämmerung: 5 p.m. Oct. 8
Complete Ring Cycle:
- Das Rheingold: 2 p.m. Oct. 13 (2 hours, 20 minutes, performed without intermission)
- Die Walküre: 5 p.m. Oct. 15
- Siegfried: 5 p.m. Oct. 17
- Götterdämmerung: 5 p.m. Oct. 20
Single tickets $45 to $255; 15% discount for four-opera package.
Add-on dinners at the Meyerson Symphony Center’s Opus restaurant are $50 per person at these performances: Oct. 15 Die Walküre, Oct. 5 and 17 Siegfried, Oct. 8 and 20 Götterdämmerung.
For performance and dining reservations: 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org. Dining reservations are easier by telephone.
