RIPOSTE
by RIP RENSE |
|
Seattle Ringer
Sixth of a completely inconsequential six-part series about my trip to
Seattle this past August to see Wagner's "Der Ring des
Nibelungen" performed by Seattle Opera.
TWILIGHT OF THE
SNOBS
(Jan. 15, 2010)
“The Ring” has Valhalla, home of the gods,
and Seattle has Queen Anne Hill, home of the snobs.
Actually, the denizens we
bumped into in
Queen
Anne Hill were friendly, down-to-earth, talkative. Perhaps
the snobs were on vacation. It was August, after all. But the
neighborhood sits high above the opera house and the city, a
lofty enclave of humans effectively as rich as gods, replete
with homes the size and sweep of Rhine castles and the
Hall of the Gibichungs of the fourth “Ring”
opera, “Gotterdammerung" ("Twilight of the Gods.")
I mean, a place like this
might as well be accessed by a rainbow bridge. Still, unlike
Valhalla, at least the average
Wolsung
can go for a stroll here.
So there we were on the
day after “Siegfried,” and the day before “Gotterdammerung,”
pumping our legs up ungodly inclines to the reward of a view of
Mt. Rainier and much of the western hemisphere. . .
I’m not a veteran of many
“Ring” cycles, but have experienced enough to know that there is
something about immersing yourself in this Wagnerian world for a
week that is good medicine. For one thing, it gets you out of
the current world, which I think few would find an undesirable
experience. Anything that gets you away from the onslaught of
artificial reality designed and deigned by corporate media and
Washington D.C. has to be a good thing, right? The world is not,
repeat not, made of CNN and preening senators and stupid wars
and bankruptcy and
weeping Oprah and I’m Lovin’ It and gay marriage and
abortion and celebrity deaths/facelifts/adultery and Rush
Limbaugh and Bill Maher and idolatrous commercials for Toyota
Tundras.
Really. It isn’t.
You could live inside
“The Ring,” and it’s not surprising that a lot of people do,
from academics to hobbyist admirers. This is one satisfying
alternate universe. It’s an event, an experience, that puts you
inside a tale, a play, a milieu, a myth, an atmosphere, an id,
a motivation. It immerses you in a saga so rife with romance,
intrigue, complexity, perversity, grandeur, banality, heroism,
cunning, mythos, foible, fate, as to afford endless
contemplation, exploration, cogitation. The more you listen and
see, the more this epic allures and beguiles.You walk through
the days, preoccupied with the operas at night. You see Seattle,
but you are thinking of Wotan and Brunnhilde, and their parting,
and of Siegfried’s impossible purity and naivete, and Siegmund's
nobility, and Wagner’s astonishing interweaving of
leitmotivs. You read the morning paper over breakfast, but
you are thinking about Brunnhilde’s Immolation to come that
night.
“The Ring,” in short, becomes your opera-tive frame of reference,
from how it was written over several decades(!), to how it is
being staged in a few nights, to
how-the-hell-do-they-sing-that-long, to yodeling “Heda! Heda!
Hedo!” in the shower. You know how everything will turn out,
only you don’t. Subconsciously or otherwise, you feel a
reflexive hope that this time it ends a bit differently---and of
course, it does. It is always different, depending on the
interpretation, the singers, the staging, what you might have
read about Wagner in preceding days, weeks, new thoughts or
insights or ruminations, or what you ate for lunch (salmon,
usually.) And this is why there are Wagner societies, and
Ringheads who travel from production to production, as if to
dwell in that strange world as constantly as possible.
There are worse ways to
spend your time.
So as I strolled through
Valhalla, er, Queen Anne Hill, with
Annie, and our “Ring”
friends, Keith and Jerry, I felt removed, a distant observer
of the moment. “Ring” themes played in my head in leitmotiv
scrambles that would have horrified Wagner: fragments of
“Wotan’s Farewell” and since the preceding night’s “Siegfried,”
the sweet and enchanting “Forest
Murmurs.” As I looked down on the
sweep of Seattle---strangely bucolic,
for a big city---I heard the gentle play of woodwinds as they
mimicked birds, and the lush swirl of strings answering. Jerry
and Annie were talking real estate, and Keith was well into an
expert commentary on the overall Seattle Opera "Ring"
production, and I was wondering how in the hell I could just
spend the rest of my life going to concerts, operas, and taking
afternoon walks in nice cities. Truth be told, I’m tired
of writing.
After a while, I’d had
entirely too much fresh air, sunshine, and lush
green-shrouded Seattle. I craved some smoky, dank crags where
Brunnhilde awaited, or one of those misty Nordic Walds,
or the slow-pulsing deep waters of the Rhine. Or at least some
bad restaurant food and a bionic “everything all right, guys?”
waitress with too many visible teeth. Old L.A. reflex. So we
stopped at the Queen Anne Café in a placid little neighborhood
that was so benign, so subtle in appeal, so homey, so suffused
with forgiving light, that you certainly had to have countless
millions of bucks to live in it. To my great disappointment, the
waitress turned out to be unpretentious, friendly, helpful. But
I figured on exposing her inner L.A. with this fiendish request:
“I know it isn't on the
menu, but can I just get some scrambled eggwhites with salmon,
please? And no pepper?”
Ha. That would
bring out the
Alberich in her.
“Sure, honey,” she said.
Well, it would
undoubtedly turn out to be one egg with little flecks of salmon
skin or something, and would take a half-hour to arrive, capped
off with forgotten toast, a mistake on the check, and a machine
that would not process my credit card. With raised eyebrows,
tense voices, and “Have a nice day, guys!” indigestion for good
measure.
But. . .no.
Not only was the hillock
of eggs well interspersed with fresh, wild-caught smoked salmon
chunks, but there was also a side of the poor, noble fish for
me, as well. Sigh. And as we stepped outside the Queen Anne
Café, sated and spoiled, we found ourselves serenaded. Yes,
serenaded. A group of about
fifteen old guys in
jaunty togs intoned a multi-part harmonized and surprisingly
moving version of “Red River Valley.”
The Seattle Seachordsmen,
they were called, and they seem to just wander about this
perplexingly happy city, making people feel good. Or maybe I’m
just a sucker for “Red River Valley.”
As we ambled back the
couple of miles downhill toward the opera house (with the
giant mural on the side proclaiming “The Ring” for all the city
to see), talk turned again to various grand old homes and
architectural nuance and decore and the general loveliness and
priceyness of the district. I sort of dropped out and let the
conversation have its flow, stopping occasionally to pet
fat cats that seemed to
approach passers-by just to cadge a free massage.
In a couple of hours, we
would take our seats for the end of the world. Or the end of
Valhalla, at least, and all the gods’ plans for humanity. Hey,
the way I figure it, the gods’ plans for humanity haven’t worked
out so well---either in “The Ring” or the so-called real
world---so I didn’t mind a little cataclysm, a little
apocalypse. I was in the mood for it, really. Brunnhilde the ex-Valkyrie
would soon become a sort of avenging angel and torch the whole
shebang, which was really the wish of her father, Wotan, anyhow,
wasn’t it? He was tired of all the games, all the double-dealing
with Nibelungen and giants, all the hectoring from his wife, all
the trouble with all those goddesses he’d fornicated with
(whether they'd agreed to it or not), and all that conspiring to
produce a hero to save the world, only to have him destroyed by
backstabbing (literally and figuratively.) Poor Welt-weary
Wotan wound up more beleagured than Bill Clinton. Who could
blame him for essentially egging Brunnhilde on to just nuke the
joint? Besides, L.A. was burning, or much of its surroundings,
and the evening seemed extra right for a little incendiary
resolution.
So as twilight stole
over Seattle, and the utilitarian electrical grid below
turned to twinkly poetry, I thought of the impending
Gotterdammerung, “The Twilight of the Gods,” and how it was
that one man not only had the mind to dream up a “Ring,” but to
spend
much of his life writing and staging it: libretto, music,
sets, effects, even designing the theater itself. And this in
between writing a bushel of other operas that would have
established him as one of the greatest composers, even had there
been no “Ring.” What a mind. It is hardly a revelation to say
that Wagner’s freakish genius probably required its accompanying
titanic egomania, just to sustain itself. As the critic and
composer Deems Taylor suggested in his iconographic essay, “The
Monster,” what were this man’s personal foibles compared with
the wondrousness of his creativity?
Yes, in a little while, I
would sit in a gorgeous opera house filled with merrily attired
and merrily mooded lovers of “The Ring” who would watch in
respectful silence (hardly any sneezing or coughing
during these operas, folks, and no applause after “big moments”)
as the fourth chapter opened and closed. And with it, the
annihilation of guile, deceit, cunning, madness, greed,
scheming, murder---all because Brunnhilde’s love and
understanding of her father, Wotan’s, truer nature superceded
her blind obedience to authority. Brava! She knew that Wotan
understood that the best laid plans of mice and gods are doomed,
and that all his dreams of living happily ever after in Valhalla
were bought at fatal expense.
Sounds just a
little like the real world, doesn’t it?
At the end of the
Seattle Opera’s production---the nature-oriented
“Green Ring”---the stage returns to designer Thomas Lynch's
dramatic primeval forest after Valhalla goes up in smoke. And as
the music settles poignantly, the last notes falling softly,
like the last leaves of autumn, the stage returns to the initial
forest scene, where there is new growth. The immutability of
nature? A touch of hope Wagner did not intend? Perhaps. But
given his love of the woods, rivers, mountains, one that he
might have embraced.
These were the thoughts
rambling through my head as Annie and our friends made our way
back that night, after the nice salmon-and-eggs, and the Seattle
Seachordsmen. I thought about how good the preceding week had
been, and how good it had been to exchange 21st century reality
for 19th century art and music, and how great it would be to
just stay there. Why can’t Seattle do the “Ring” every year? I
thanked Wagner and the gods for allowing me such an experience.
And I was just about to give boorish voice to these same
thoughts, when present company was spared such a fate by a
strange sound.
Was it coming from. . .a
house? No. A tree? Yes!
It was a. . .meow.
Yes, definitely, a meow.
A plaintive, upper-register meow, definitely a soprano. And it
continued, almost---dare I say---operatically commanding my
attention, and then Annie’s, and Keith and Jerry’s. Was there a
cat stuck in a tree? If so, it must have been a diva cat.
Bircat Nillson. Kitty Flagstad. I peered through the
gathering dusk at a large pine in front of an impossibly
picturesque gabled Queen Anne home, whose windows were now
transformed into yellow squares of elite prosperity and comfort.
Meowwwwwww.
Meowwwwwwwwwwww.
Huh?
We stepped forward,
but could see no cat anywhere. What manner of Forest Murmur
was this? And then I saw it, and if I had been a Tex Avery
cartoon, I would have rubbed and blinked my eyes, which would
have bugged out like binoculars. There, seated on a branch, tail
twitching, it stared down at us, and meowwwwwed again. This
would have all been perfectly fine, except the meower was. . .
A squirrel.
That’s correct, a meowing
squirrel. Perhaps it was the famous Meowing Squirrel of Seattle,
that I’d never heard of. I’d never heard of so many famous
things in Seattle, after all, but. . .
“Why is that goddamn
squirrel meowing?” I said.
Everyone stared. No one
had an answer.
Meowwwwwww, said the
squirrel.
I kid not.
After a minute or two
of speculation that involved a squirrel genius, or the
reincarnation of George Carlin screwing around with us, or a new
genus of squirrel (and a passing reference to the old Cream
song, “Cat Squirrel”), we shook our heads and moved on.
A meowing squirrel?
Loge, again.
printer-friendly version
SEATTLE RINGER PART ONE: Lugnuts
from Loge
SEATTLE RINGER PART TWO: Verdant
Valhalla
SEATTLE RINGER PART THREE: Der
Rense des Nibelungen
SEATTLE RINGER PART FOUR:
Sleepless in Seattle
SEATTLE RINGER PART FIVE:
Arterdammerung
REVIEWS: SEATTLE RING CYCLE:
Seattle Opera Revives its "Green" Ring Cycle
Seattle Ring's Triumphant Finale
Seattle Humanizes Wagner's Ring |
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