One ‘Ring’ to rule L.A.

Placido Domingo in 'The Ring'

It’s a breezy evening Wednesday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) new open air entrance pavilion and L.A. Opera President Carol Henry is standing in line waiting for a glass of wine. She turns to a fellow imbiber and says, “This is stupid, making us stand here like this. There should be waiters with trays. Really, ludicrous.”

As president of the Los Angeles Opera, Ms. Henry knows a thing or two about throwing a party– the night’s event is a kick-off to a citywide celebration of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’, which is getting its first production in L.A.’s history.  In addition to the operas, the city is putting on the largest arts festival since the ‘84 Olympics, encompassing art museums, colleges, libraries and theaters, (there’s even an iPhone app) all showcasing some aspect of ‘The Ring.’

In a city whose most notable civic space is a mall designed to look like a real city street, this sort of urban cross-pollination is unprecedented.

The real question is, why all the love for a twelve-hour long, 141 year-old German nationalist opera written by an anti-Semite whose works inspired Hitler?

At first blush, Los Angeles and Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen couldn’t make stranger bedfellows.

Besides the aforementioned Nazi appropriation of the Ring Cycle, Los Angeles doesn’t have the reputation as the sort of place that dwells much on history, even when it comes to high art.

A scene from 'Die Walkure'

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is headed by 29-year-old conductor Gustavo Dudamel and is best known for eschewing endless Brahms and Mozart festivals in lieu of challenging programs celebrating 20th century minimalism, John Adams and world music. LACMA is run by Michael Govan, who wants to install a life-size steam engine suspended by a crane created by Jeff Koons.

Even the stuffy Getty Museum has made recent efforts to introduce contemporary works among its collections of priceless (and sometimes stolen) antiquities.

This focus on the modern and the new is partly a reflection of the city and partly a practical consideration; after all, most of the really good old stuff is already spoken for. Still, a citywide focus on ‘The Ring’ seems positively retrograde. Perhaps it’s just Wagner envy. Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and key figure in bringing ‘The Ring’ to L.A. says, “Every great city has its Ring Cycle. Now, it’s Los Angeles’ time.”

What makes The Ring Festival so exciting and ambitious, however, isn’t that it aims to bring a cultural chestnut to America’s last great cowboy town, but that it aims to demonstrate that ‘The Ring’, with all its cultural significance, is at home in sunny Southern California as it is in dreary Bayreuth, the tiny German hamlet that performs ‘The Ring’ each year in a sort of annual reenactment of the 19th Century of Woodstock.

What more, there’s ample evidence L.A. has as much a claim to Wagner as anyone.

Wagner, Wagner, everywhere

Contemporary audiences watching ‘The Ring’ will feel right at home. Hollywood’s penchant for the epic is mirrored in the opera, which aims to explain the rise and fall of the gods and man as something inescapable and eternal.

Admittedly, it’s a little more ambitious than your usual box office fare, but don’t tell James Cameron that.

Explaining just what happens in the three operas that comprise the ring would take far too long to explain, (though if you’re really interested and want a good laugh,the late British comedian Anna Russel explains it as good as anyone), but it’s no less obtuse than the Transformers movies.

The early 21st Century blockbuster is essentially a Wagnerian exercise: National myth-making serving as an excuse for outlandish pyrotechnics. In Wagner’s case, the fireworks were auditory, in Hollywood’s, it’s visual effects, but otherwise, the two are identical.

Both Wagner and Hollywood offer up undefined angst, epic struggles and the imagery of a fallen world (see: Terminator Salvation, anything by J.J. Abrams or the upcoming The Last Airbender, if you don’t believe me) and it’s easy to draw comparisons between Wagner’s age and our own. They are both times in which the world is profoundly shifting, but with the old order yet to be toppled.

A deep sense of dread pervaded Germany in the 1860s, just as it does in America today and Wagner, breaking free of the fanciful ornate music of the late-Romantic era, sought to capture that feeling just as Hollywood does today. After all, harnessing the zeitgeist equals big bucks.

This is the enduring power of ‘The Ring.’ Like all great art, it tells us more about ourselves than it says about itself.

And of course, Hollywood’s no stranger to Wagner. Consider the Looney Tunes classic, ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’, which parodies ‘The Ring’ with Elmer Fudd as the heroic Siegfried.

The Ring Festival occurs at venues throughout Los Angeles now through the beginning of June.
For more information on the L.A. Opera’s production of Der Ring Des Niebelungen, go here.