In Rheingold, where it all starts, visually we’re in the 19th century with pure and beautiful landscapes like California and Yosemite in the lavish paintings of Albert Bierstadt. For example, thanks to special LED lights, now the floor becomes an equally important canvas for the projections in addition to the walls and backdrop. Every time we revisit this production there is a change in technology which has helped the visual landscape. We've been doing it for a decade, on and off. So, the visual world is where you're going to tell the story. We don't write the music, we interpret it. The first thing you do when you're hired as a director is choose your design team. Mulligan as Donner, Jamie Barton as Fricka and Greer Grimsley as Wotan. You get to time-travel with the gods!Ī scene from Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” with Julie Adams as Freia, Brandon Jovanoviich as Froh, Brian. Just give yourself over to this experience and you will come out with an amazing spiritual reward. And people get on long intercontinental flights, right?! To Dubai or Beijing. For example, Rheingold is two-and-a-half hours with no intermission. There is real dramatic spectacle, music that is so romantic, it's like an aphrodisiac, and Herculean singing and acting. Nowadays we have less patience, but this is not just another boring opera! I’ve seen many boring operas. So, what’s in it for the audience who’d give all these hours of their life to an opera? People seem to be open to longer engagements. It’s a good way to be able to discuss it once people are united around music and ideas.Īngels in America, another very political play, runs nearly 9 hours and it’s a smash Broadway hit right now. I don’t think you need to avoid politics in the arts. They were all about changing the class society.

Take Mozart, his Don Giovanni or The Marriage of Figaro. People often believe that through power and wealth they do not have to follow the laws or morals. Well, the behavior of the gods here is like that of people who consider themselves superheroes. In the age of supervillains and branded revolutions, it’s hard to keep track of real heroes… Iréne Theorin as Brünnhilde and Greer Grimsley as Wotan in Wagner's 'Die Walküre.' Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera From the corporate ladder culture to Exxon Valdez and beyond, it’s a story of broken social contracts and how things destroyed by greed can only be repaired by love. He tells this story to his daughter in front of him not realizing that she herself is the perfect hero. Another interesting part of the incredible tragedy in this piece is that to achieve greatness Wotan needs a hero for building Valhalla. That sounds like a lot of people, doesn’t it? The world is only made right when his daughter, Brünnhilde, returns the gold to nature. In this process he destroys everything in his life. His desire to procure the gold at any cost has him selling out family, behaving irrationally, committing major crimes. He defies nature stealing gold from the Rhine River. Well… it’s about a family of gods with Wotan as its head.

Impeccable.Is it possible to summarize an 18-hour story into one paragraph?! Zambello’s Norns (Ronnita Miller, Jamie Barton and Sarah Cambidge) are the hapless ghosts in this machine and they couldn’t be better sung. Here, a trio of visually-impaired engineers grapple with a mountain of unwieldy cabling in a futile attempt to keep up with the rampant advance of micro-technology. Katy Tucker’s effective video once again). With an echo of Silicon Valley run wild, the Prologue opens in a burst of visual electronics (S. Sarah Cambidge (Third Norn), Ronnita Miller (First Norn) and Jamie Barton (Second Norn). Add merciless images of factories and power plants belching acrid smoke and a river bed strewn with plastic bottles and you have the visual background to the final part of Francesca Zambello’s cohesively argued and increasingly impressive production of Wagner’s mighty tetralogy. As reported by the three Norns, the mutilated world-ash-tree has withered and been cut down, the spring has dried up. Ringmerely a hippie-dippy 21st-century directorial fad need look no further than the poem for Anyone who considers bringing climate change and man’s destruction of the planet into Wagner’s

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