Thanks to the efforts of small independent record companies like La La Land Records, Film Score Monthly, and Screen Archives Entertainment, the past year or so has been a bonanza for collectors of classic fantasy and science fiction movie scores. Recent releases that I once thought I’d never lay my eyes on (at least in legitimate versions) include John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s pioneering synth-driven score for Big Trouble in Little China, Alex North’s aggressively atonal score for Dragonslayer, and James Horner’s score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (all of which appeared in complete versions). Film Score Monthly and Retrograde Records have now followed up their release of Star Trek II with a two-disc edition of Horner’s score for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. This is my favorite of the TOS-era film scores (as much as I also like the work of Jerry Goldsmith, Leonard Rosenman, and Cliff Eidelman), and this reissue, which reproduces the score in its entirety, is an amazing piece of archival work.

[Read more—spoilers for ST3 inside, obviously]

The final act of the final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle takes us, appropriately, back to the very beginning. Remember the Rhinemaidens? They’re back, and just as they were in this company’s staging of Das Rheingold, they’re submerged to their waists in tanks of water. (In case this hasn’t been made clear from previous postings, this version of the Ring cycle is notable for how grueling it must have been for its singers, who have been dunked in water, whipped through the air on cranes, and hung upside-down). Here they’re singing of their lost gold, envying the sun for having the light that once belonged to their dearest possession, when along comes Siegfried, on the hunt that’s been organized by Hagen. He’s lost the trail of the game and ended up here instead. (His appearance here is a composite of the wild man of the cycle’s third opera and the dandy in the tailored suit of Götterdämmerung, Act II.)

Again, this scene recalls the first scene of Das Rheingold, except that Siegfried is a much better flirt than poor Alberich, taking the Rhinemaidens’ taunts with good humor and giving back his own in return, eventually taking the Ring from his finger and dangling it in front of them. At this, the Rhinemaidens become uncharacteristically serious and threatening, saying that the best course of action is actually for Siegfried to keep the Ring until he finds out how evil it actually is, the better to be relieved at the Rhinemaidens’ offer to take it off his hands. Siegfried, of course, ignores them.

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Act II of Götterdämmerung is full of intrigue—the deceptive plans laid in Act I start to unravel, and the arcs of most of the characters move in deliberately discomforting directions.

The act opens with Hagen on stage alone, and in this staging, we’re in pure retrofuturistic territory: the video screens in the background display tangled contraptions made of whirling gears and pistons. Through this cycle, that kind of imagery has been associated with Alberich, and indeed, here he comes, via jetpack (granted, the singer is held up by cables, and he’s just got a couple of tanks strapped to his back that squirt smoke from a nozzle, but it’s still a cool effect). It turns out that Alberich has taken a page from Wotan’s playbook, having fathered Hagen (who shares a mother with Gunther) primarily to serve his own ends. Speaking to Hagen, who is in a twilight sleep, Alberich urges Hagen to acquire the Ring and bring it to him; Hagen, however, will agree only to acquire the Ring for himself. Alberich, resigned to this, exits (or, in this particular case, floats away) and the lights come up as Siegfried returns, having removed the magic helm, resumed his original form, and switched places with Gunther (who is now with Brünnhilde, and on his way home with her).

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Act I of Götterdämmerung is the strangest act of all the operas in this version of the cycle, as far as its staging goes. It takes place in the hall of the Gibichungs—the three characters on stage are Gunther, his half-brother Hagen who’s a sort of advisor figure, and Gunther’s sister Gutrune. All three of these characters are figured as greedy capitalists here: Gunther’s and Hagen’s suits are covered with currency symbols, and their faces are painted white, with more symbols painted over them in black and red. (This has the unfortunate effect of making them look like the unacknowledged capitalist exiles from Insane Clown Posse, but we will pass that by.)

Gutrune, on the other hand, does not have a painted face, but does have her own personal Death Star, which is lowered from the ceiling with her inside when she’s introduced. It’s just large enough to hold a person, and we see Gutrune sticking her head out of the hole where the Death Star’s superlaser should be, waving cheerfully. (I mean—that is the Death Star, right? You don’t look at a sphere shaped like that, with a large circular hole halfway above the equator, and not think it’s the Death Star.) I like the idea of SF tropes and iconography cropping up in other works of art, one of the reasons I got into watching this revisionist version of the Ring Cycle in the first place, but at this point I cannot help but feel I am perhaps being made fun of. I’m not really sure what’s going on here.

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I’m back to blogging my way through the La Fura Dels Baus staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle—I’ve now reached Götterdämmerung, the last of the four operas and the longest (clocking in at 280 minutes).

The structure of Götterdämmerung is slightly different from the two operas that precede it—instead of just three acts, here we get a prologue to begin things. This prologue itself begins with an overture that refers back to the opening notes of the prologue to the entire cycle, Das Rheingold. Similarly, the three Norns, who are daughters of Erda (are who are comparable here to the three Fates of Greek mythology) recall the three Rhinemaidens in the cycle’s opening, who once guarded the gold from which the Ring of the Nibelung was forged.

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 The final act of Siegfried makes up for the relatively light comedy of Act II with three fairly complex conversations: one between the Wanderer and Erda; the second between the Wanderer and Siegfried; the third between Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

The first begins when the Wanderer wakes Erda from her sleep beneath the earth—remember Erda from the end of Das Rheingold, and her warning that events in that opera would lead to the end of the gods. Erda is also the mother of the Valkyries from Die Walküre (and Wotan is their father); note that Wotan’s wife Fricka, who we last saw castigating Wotan for his philandering, is nowhere to be found in this opera.

The Wanderer is deeply troubled, and asks Erda for knowledge of the future. But Erda seems confused and perhaps terrified—she has no counsel for him, and so Wotan decides that he has had enough of the old order of things. The twilight of the gods will be brought about by the twin forces of human love and free will, and Wotan eloquently reconciles himself to this, asserting that this new world will be more glorious than the one before, while still making a last defiant statement against the forces of fate that will inevitably sweep him and his kind aside.

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Wagner has a reputation for being heavy going—five-hour operas; complex music; libretti that deal with the nature of free will and the end of the world—but with Act II of Siegfried he takes a welcome if temporary detour into farce. This act isn’t flat-out comic opera, but it may possibly be the funniest act in the Ring Cycle, and the La Fura Dels Baus staging makes the choice to play it broadly.

The act begins with poor, pathetic Alberich standing watch over the entrance to Fafner’s cave, the current home of the Ring he forged himself. It so happens that the Wanderer from Act I shows up to stand vigil with him, and Alberich immediately identifies him as Wotan, refusing to be tricked by him again as he was in Das Rheingold. There is a bit more recapping of previous events here, detailing the reasons why neither of them can just walk into the cave and get the Ring for themselves—Alberich is obviously too weak, and Wotan is bound by the contract engraved on his spear. Alberich also boasts about his plans for ruling the world once he somehow gets his hands on the Ring again, and Wotan, with a sense of playfulness, offers to wake Fafner for him.

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I’m now back to blogging my way through the La Fura Dels Baus staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, starting up again with Act I of the third of four operas, Siegfried.

As mentioned in the introduction to this series of posts, this is a non-traditional staging of the Ring, with imagery lifted from SF rather than high fantasy. When we’re introduced to Mime at the beginning of this opera, the dwarf who first made his appearance as Alberich’s maltreated brother in Das Rheingold, the design appears to be heavily influenced by David Lynch’s gorgeous adaptation of Dune: with a balding head, and a face covered in strange growths, and a coat decorated with an array of plastic tubes, Mime seems like a smaller version of Lynch’s Baron Harkonnen. Unfortunately, Siegfried, the character with whom Mime shares the first scene of the act, resembles nothing so much as the alien villains of the film version of Battlefield Earth, and for those who’ve encountered that movie, it’ll be hard to look past this similarity without experiencing traumatic flashbacks.

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After the labyrinthine plotting of Act II, Act III of Die Walküre streamlines the narrative down to its bare essentials: the conflict between Wotan and his wayward daughter Brünnhilde.

First, though, we have the part you paid your hard-earned money to hear, the Ride of the Valkyries, the “kill the wabbit” part, the Apocalypse Now part.* During this sequence, the eight women singing the Valkyrie parts all appear to be having the time of their lives. Brünnhilde shows up late to the party, however, with Sieglinde in tow, and the joy of the Valkyries turns to consternation when they find out what she was up to in Act II.

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In short, Act II is where things get crazy.

As it begins, Wotan and Fricka have returned, their storyline picking up where we left off at the end of Das Rheingold. As in the production of the first opera in this cycle, their godhood is signified by the fact that the singers who portray them are suspended in the air by cranes.

Here Wotan is figured as the lord of treaties, while Fricka is the lord of wedlock, and Fricka’s angry because of the adulterous goings-on between Siegmund and Sieglinde in Act I. She is willing to call their incestuous relationship by its name and is horrified by it, whereas Wotan, rather shiftily and expediently, suggests that love in all its forms is stronger than mere law and taboo, and so Fricka’s handwringing is unjustified.

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 After a week’s hiatus, I’m back to blogging my way through Wagner’s Ring cycle, picking back up with Act I of the second opera, Die Walküre.

If Das Rheingold is in part about gods whose will is circumscribed by inviolable contracts, Die Walküre begins with men who have their hands tied by the laws of hospitality.

We begin with Siegmund, pursued by unidentified enemies, requesting refuge in the home of Hunding and his wife Sieglinde. In the original libretto the house is built around a giant ash tree, and the production plays up with symbolism of the ash tree as Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse myth. Throughout the act the tree is projected on giant screens at the back of the stage, shifting its color in response to the mood of the music; at one point the tree becomes completely transparent, and we can see twirling strands of DNA climbing up its trunk.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m blogging my way through a viewing of the La Fura Dels Baus staging of Wagner's Ring Cycle, starting with the prologue, Das Rheingold. Das Rheingold is made up of four scenes with no intermission: it runs a total of a little less than three hours, and it’s the prologue to the three operas that make up the bulk of the cycle.

I went into this thinking that this particular staging of the Ring shouldn’t work. The design is a hodgepodge of twentieth-century SF influences: the underground chamber where the dwarf Alberich forges the Ring recalls the factories of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; the costumes of the singers are a cross between those of 1950s B-movies and David Lynch’s Dune; Loge, the trickster figure of the opera, zips around the stage on a Segway, chased by a red spotlight. Performers sing while submerged to their necks in water or suspended from the ceiling by cables. Dozens of acrobats in spandex suits writhe and cavort across the stage in all manner of strange ways. It shouldn’t work, but (at least for me) it does, very well.

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Over the next couple of weeks, if I have the stamina, I’m planning to blog my way through a viewing of Richard Wagner’s four-opera Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen). I’ll be watching the recent Blu-ray release of a performance staged by the theater troupe La Fura Dels Baus, with an orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta.

The Ring Cycle has a reputation for being one of the longest and most difficult operatic works in existence—if performed as its composer intended, it adds up to about fifteen hours of music stretched out over four evenings—but there are some reasons that fans of fantasy and science fiction will probably have an easier time with it, even if they’re not opera fans.

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I’m being serious here. Kind of.

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A couple of weeks ago a terrific rainstorm hit the town where I live—it was nowhere near as bad as the occasional hurricane I lived through when growing up in Florida, but it was still strong enough to rip down dozens of trees and sever power lines. Much of the neighborhood was without electricity for a while—it took four days for the power to come back on in my apartment, and in the meantime the only lights you could see at night on my street were from flashlights wielded by people who wanted to find their way home while avoiding debris and the occasional live wire.

Now, as soon as the power went out that Saturday afternoon, I knew what to expect—it’s a well-known tenet in SF that technologically advanced civilizations that are stripped of their technology without warning will revert to a crazed state of nature, sometimes within days, or hours! 

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