Stage hands handle a scene change during a September 2009 dress rehearsal… (Lawrence K. Ho, Los Angeles…)
By now you've probably gathered that Richard Wagner was opera's great maker of epics, with the singular ability to rouse emotions, amass followers and incite enmity. He was mythmaker, and he was mythologized. His operas are massive pageants of humanity, good and rotten.
He was voodoo artist — molder of melody, rhythm and harmony into hypnotic weaponry that bent listeners' ears to his will. He had an anti-Semitic streak a mile long, yet he inspired not only Hitler but also Theodor Herzl, Zionism's pioneer. He could make the glorification of adultery and incest seem like the moral high road. And talk about voodoo — he became patron of Modernism and Modernism's discontents alike. His "music of the future" came to be.
Were it not for Wagner, opera might have perished under the weight of boring recitative. Our idea of the festival is greatly indebted to Wagner's early example building Bayreuth, his home for the "Ring." Where would Proust, Tolkien, James Joyce, George Lucas or Marvel Comics have been without Wagner? In "A Defeat," an early Jean-Paul Sartre short story, the screwy friendship and then falling-out between Wagner and Nietzsche was a way for an Existentialist-to-be to try out ideas about being and nothingness.
A new book, respectably academic and published by Cambridge University Press, has the title "Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand." In it, Nicholas Vazsonyi isolates five areas of Wagnerian activity: "creation of a persona, public relations, development of a niche and brand, marketing embedded in the theatrical works themselves, and establishment of a hub and global network." Paris Hilton suddenly feels passé.
Work through another new book, "Wagner & Cinema," edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman, and you might begin to count the ways Wagner made not just art film but also popular entertainment possible. A composer's influence on music is the obvious part, since German émigrés the likes of Max Steiner and Franz Waxman invented modern film scoring using Wagnerian principles. But the Wagner ethos of total theater has also been the impetus behind much film, early and current. "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "Gladiator" and Bugs Bunny were not without their Wagnerisms.
I could go on, but why bother? The Wagner industry has landed in L.A. for a while, and until the end of June, there will Wagner, Wagner, Wagner, Wagner, Wagner — and more Wagner.
These topics and others are being explored in the expansive and anarchic Ring Festival LA. With Wagner, anything goes. A couple of weeks ago, a German performance artist and a few scraggly followers schlepped from Union Station to the sea wearing tin watering cans on their heads in the name of Siegfried, Wagner's superman. "Ring" tourism will, we hope, boost our economy; Joachim Splichal and his Patina minions promise wursts and cash registers at the ready.
But I'll be looking for more high-powered insights into Wagner's bizarre brain when the famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio converses with director Peter Sellars and video artist Bill Viola on Sunday at REDCAT. Two days later, the French philosopher Alain Badiou and the Slovenian cultural gadfly Slavoj Zizek will participate in UCLA's Wagner in L.A. conference at the Hammer Museum.
By undertaking the huge effort and not inconsiderable expense of mounting the "Ring" cycle for the first time, Los Angeles Opera asserts that it has come of age. And by initiating the citywide Ring Festival — while invoking the Olympic Arts Festival and its follow-up Los Angeles Festival — the company implies a new urban maturity.
This falls into the category of the public's right to know. Without contact with one of the greatest, most extravagant and most influential works of art of all time, and one that has a direct bearing on us as Angelenos and the direction of present society, can we fully understand ourselves?
Still, being a major city without a "Ring" doesn't really mean much. Versions of the cycle have been produced in Costa Mesa, Long Beach and San Diego. San Francisco and Seattle are "Ring" meccas from time to time. New "Ring" recordings and videos are released so frequently that only fanatics can keep up. We've already got two "Ring" cycles on Blu-ray and one on SACD. So it isn't as if the "Ring" is out of reach.
Nor are the three "Ring" cycles presented by L.A. Opera exactly designed for the masses. Given the capacity of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, only about 10,000 people will have access to a full cycle. Given both the expense of tickets and the time commitment, many in the audience clearly will have the means to attend the "Ring" elsewhere. Most will not be Wagner virgins. For the Ringhead, the cycle is a ritual.
