Probably the only other spot this summer where one can hear in so short a period the 18-hour "Ring" operas - "Das Rheingold," Die Walkure," "Siegfried," and "Gotterdammerung" - is at Wagner's own self-made temple to his art at Bayreuth in Bavaria. Because of casting and labor problems, the Met has been unable to mount its own "Ring," and no one else is equipped to do one. Also, large numbers have arrived from the East Coast, which has suffered a "Ring" drought in the last decade. This year there have been tour groups from Germany and Japan.
Whereas most regional opera, including the Washington Opera, is keyed primarily to a local audience, the Wagner festival plays to the visitor about 60 percent of the listeners come from outside.
Seattle's "Ring" is the most audacious, and widely publicized, single event in American regional opera. In the century since Wagner finished "The Ring," it has become indelibly tied in the public consciousness with Germany own catastrophic wars of expansion and decimation. The Seattle Opera today finishes its seventh annual Pacific Northwest Wagner festival, in which there are two performances of each of the four operas of "The Ring of the Nibelung," the epic tale of how the ancient gods chartered their onw doom by betraying the social values chartered their onw doom by betraying the social values they were pledged to protect. Much has been made in recent years of regional theater, and of how the emergence of these institutions since World War II has at long last given actors, playwrights and audiences a stable, stimulating alternative to Broadway and its tributaries.īut in this city, the talk is more about regional opera, and of how in the last two decades companies like the Seattle Opera have developed along the lines of regional theater as full-time, vital second choices to those traditional, high-budget giants like the Metropolitan and the San Francisco operas.
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