Ring Tradition

Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera completed a Ring of the Nibelung cycle, thereby accomplishing for the ninth successive year one of the greatest mechanical labors required of the stage. The four full-length Ring operas lasted a total of 14 hours, required 18 complete changes of scene, 34 major singers, a large chorus, 80 stage hands and technicians, an orchestra of 114, ten full beards, one horse. Richard Wagner's masterpiece contains practically every theatrical trick except Eliza crossing the ice--swimming Rhine maidens, a roaring dragon, a rainbow, galloping Valkyries, a Nibelung forge going full tilt, quantities of magic fire, and, at the end, the collapse in fire and flood of a castle full of gods.

All this was revolutionary theatre when, in the 18705, Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus was built to mount it properly. It is no longer revolutionary, for the Metropolitan, like the Festspielhaus, is hidebound by the Ring tradition that not a hair of Wotan's beard must be altered, not a comma of Wagner's copious stage directions deleted.

The Metropolitan technicians--Master Mechanic Fred Hosli, Chief Electrician Jacob Buchter, Master of Properties Philip Crispano--work with the very best equipment, but except for child auditors the Siegfried dragon, for example, seems hardly worth the trouble. This beast requires the services of eight men--two inside it, two to operate the pulleys opening and closing its jaws, one to shoot steam from its mouth, one to shout its music through a megaphone backstage, an assistant conductor watching for the conductor's beat through a peephole, a prompter speaking the dragon's words from the score. It is still only a papier-mache dragon.

Mechanical cost of each of the four Ring productions is about $2,500. As yet no machinery or stage effect has been devised to make paunchy Tenor Lauritz Melchior or big-womanly Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, and the likes of them, resemble the boyish Siegfried, the maidenly Briinnhilde.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.