I admit it: I'm a Ring virgin Jul 22nd 2013, 12:29
I've managed to avoid it for years, but I'm embarking on my first ever Ring Cycle tonight at the Proms. What will I make of Wagner's magnum opus?
I have a confession to make: there's a gaping hole in my musical knowledge. The hole is round, gold, and forged in the shape of a ring. It's as deep as Nibelheim, about 16 hours long, and filled with dwarves, gods, leitmotifs and questionable politics. Standing guard round its rim are armies of geeks and scholars in horned helmets, raising their eyebrows at me. I'm a music graduate, a Radio 3 presenter and a supposed classical music "expert", and I don't know Wagner's Ring Cycle.
When I say I don't know the Ring, I really mean it: I've never seen the operas staged, never heard any of them all the way through, and until yesterday I didn't even have a clue about the plot.
Over the years, I've had plenty of chances to get to know it – invitations to acclaimed London productions, even a week in the Highlands with Edinburgh music students listening to a recording by an open fire with scores and tumblers of whisky – but every time I've found an excuse. When people ask why, I usually say it's because I've been saving myself for Bayreuth, but the truth is a bit more complicated.
I think my aversion to Wagner began with growing up Jewish, hearing my grandmother's first-hand Holocaust experiences, and feeling it was somehow distasteful to seek out the music which had been appropriated by the Nazis as a cultural backdrop to genocide. In fact, what little Wagner I did hear by accident as a teenager I really liked; I then got to know Tristan and Isolde at university, and more recently I've relished Parsifal at English National Opera and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Glyndebourne; but I still haven't felt ready to tackle the Ring. All the stuff I didn't know – the music, the complex plot, the history of the opera's genesis and reception, Wagner's philosophy – it all felt so much bigger than the possibility of discovering music I kept being told was great.
And I do keep being told it's great. Ring evangelists are everywhere. They're what scare me the most. I'm scared they're right, and I'm going to end up regretting having missed out on it all these years, but I'm even more terrified that I'll actually turn into one of those geeks who name their cats after minor Norse gods and are more interested in leitmotifs than personal hygiene.
It's a risk I'm finally willing to take. Yesterday, I hosted a BBC Proms discovery day for Ring beginners such as myself. I was reassured to hear how many other people there were daunted in particular by the plot; and yet, with the help of some jolly cardboard boxes designed by writer and opera aficionado Sarah Lenton, we managed to grasp the basic plot of the entire Ring in less than ten minutes.
Over the course of this week, beginning tonight with Das Rheingold, I'm going to hear the entire Ring in the Royal Albert Hall: no staging, no Gesamtkunstwerk, just the power of Wagner's music laid bare, conducted by perhaps the greatest living Wagnerian, Daniel Barenboim. I already know the prelude to the opera – a single chord of radiant E flat major rising out of primordial darkness and transforming into the sparkling waters of the Rhine – and I'm pretty sure it's going to suck me in. I'll be blogging again tomorrow to tell you what I made of it.
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