This is our last day of The Ring Cycle and I’m going to miss it so much. It feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity. We kicked this adventure off a year ago and today we will finish this sixteen hour epic.
The Met feels like our Valhalla.
Gotterdammerung is incredible – it is everything and could become a mere wall of sound in lesser hands but through wagners punctuation and pauses and interwoven familiar themes and variations on those themes and emotions and still 6 harps with timpani and horns is just an overwhelming experience, but also intimately communicative. When Siegfried dies and the orchestra goes through all the leitmotifs from his father to the forging of the sword and on and on referencing all that led us here, it left me breatheless.
We exit into a blustery spring wind and reach the sidewalk of a bustling New York where a polished older gentleman in a business suit confidently bellows, “I love your hats!” I squeeze Chaltin’s hand and we blend into the city crowded with memory and story like Wotan and the Gods before us.
I’m going to miss wearing the horns, though my elementary school teachers would say I was born with them.
I never think about clothes other than a guard against the weather, but this hat with its ridiculous horns has made me feel extremely confident and appreciate the power of fashion. The hat is like a lightning rod that focuses peoples attention to something I choose while obfuscating my insecurities. I have chosen what they notice first about me and I like that. I also feel like an ambassador or advertisement for this amazing event we are all participating in. I wonder if now that it is over if I should buy red or blue eyeglasses or something with a little more punch for my day to day audiences. Would it look cool or like a midlife crisis?
The highlights from tonight would be as endless as the applause: The white ropes of fate against the black background. The chorus who almost bring down the roof, the rheinmaidens sliding up and down the planks, and…
Gotterdammerung begins with the Norns weaving their rope of destiny predicting the end of the Gods. Siegfried and Brunnhilde return and she protects only the front of his body with a spell because she knows he will never turn his back in battle. She also gives him the ring and sends him to earth to do good deeds. Unfortunately, he runs into Albrechs family who give him a potion that makes him forget Brunnhilde and he goes and marries Gutrune. A jealous Brunnhilde not realizing that he has been given a potion reveals he is vulnerable at the back and he is stabbed by Hagan. Fighting over the ring Hagen also kills Gunther. Brunnhilde returns, takes the ring and lights a funeral pyre by the water for Siegfried then she runs with the ring into the fire that collapses into the water returning the ring back to the rhinemaidens and the water rises up pulling down Hagan while Valhalla is swallowed in flames. The fate of the ring and the gods are wrapped up in a crescendo of leit motifs.
Notes on the production
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Composer……………………….. Richard Wagner
Alberich……………………….….. Tomasz Konieczny
Brunnhilde……………………….. Christine Goerke
Siegfried…………………..………. Andreas Schager
Gunther…………………………….. Evgeny Nikitin
Hagen…………………………….…. Eric Owens
Gutrune…………………………….. Edith Haller
Waltraute………………….……… Michaela Schuster
Woglinde……………………..…… Amanda Woodbury
Wellgunde………………….…….. Samantha Hankey
Flosshilde…………………….……Tamara Mumford
Conductor……………………..…. Philippe Jordan
Stage horn solo…………..…… Joseph Anderer
Metropolitan Opera
4/27/19