The Ring

Interrupted by a bitter and irrelevent crescendo of musketry, the music of Richard Wagner ceased, in 1917, to be heard at the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan. This winter has been revived The Ring of the Nibelungen-famed cycle which includes Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung. Between the date of interruption and the date of this revival, a number of Wagner operas have been presented at the Metropolitan. Die Walkure was revived with eclat in 1921, Siegfried in 1924. Yet these performances have been isolated in the flood of Italian melody: Lucia, Aida, Tosca, Rigoletto. Now among such pretty pieces comes Wagner like a Titan, mightily marching.

To present the Ring, In toto is a stupendous task even for a company of as vast resources as the Metropolitan. Director Gatti-Casazza had at hand a conductor who was capable and famed as an interpreter of Wagner, Mr. Artur Bodanzky; yet singers had to be enticed from here and there, choruses marshaled, great scenes built. These difficulties were mastered.

Operagoers, meanwhile, rehearsed in their memories the mythology upon which Herr Wagner built his cycle—his grim gods warring upon each other, loving, reveling, cursing; his goblins, heroes, witch-women.

Das Rheingold. To the river-nymphs who lodge in twilight on the Rhine’s green bottom, comes Alberich, a dwarf, whose ears have been pierced with the sweetness of their music and whose eyes have been dazzled by the gold over which they watch. In mockery they tell him that, if he forswears love, he will have power to steal the Rheingold; that if he steals the Rheingold, he will “own the world and all its mighty power.” Alberich scrambles to the gold, curses love, vanishes. He has his brother Mime hammer the gold into a helmet which makes him invisible, into a magic ring. Wotan, father of the gods, needs the gold to pay a ransom, seeks out Alberich, takes ring and helmet from him. “Cursed is he who wears that ring,” cries Alberich. Then lovely Erda, mother of the Norns, appears to Wotan. “Twilight shall come upon the gods,” she says; “their proud towers will crash down. Woe to Wotan.” Shaken by this awful utterance, Wotan gives the ring to the Giants, forthwith leads the gods over a rainbow to Walhalla while through the brassy progress of his going rings a sound of far despair-the cry of the Rhinemaidens who lament, with sad throats from the depths of the river.

Die Walkure. Wotan shivered in Walhalla, fearful of his enemies who possessed the ring. Therefore he dressed like a man and, suiting his behavior to the part, begot some descendants (The Race of the Walsungs) one of whom, he determined, should regain the ring.

Siegmund, the Walsung, loves his sister, Sieglinde. Hunding, husband of Sieglinde, fights Siegmund. Wotan sends Brünnhilde, his favorite Walkyrie, to turn the fight for Hunding. (Fierce are the Walkyries; they bear the shields of the warrior gods, and whir before them into battle).

Brünnhilde disobeys. Wotan himself breaks Siegmund’s sword with his spear so that Hunding may win. Brünnhilde trembles-how will Wotan punish her? He deprives her of her godhead, causes her to fall into a magic sleep. He lays her upon a rock, sets her helmet to guard her head, her shield over her breast. He compasses the rock with flames, leaping, writhing, running. “Let her sleep until a hero wins through the flames to wake her with a kiss,” he says. Offstage, Sieglinde gives birth to a child, Siegfried.

Siegfried. Couched on the little bones of dead men, with claws like the ribs of a ship, tusks like inverted steeples, there lives a dragon, one Fafner, glaucous-eyed, fire-belching. Nearby resides Siegfried who has been fostered by a deformed smith named Mime. This Mime is a villain at heart. He is gentle to Siegfried only in the hope that one day the youth will prevail against Fafner. Siegfried, finding that no sword but the sword of Wotan is stout enough for him, mends the weapon, goes to do battle with Fafner. After a terrific combat, he succeeds in puncturing the dragon’s larynx, thus effecting its demise. He notices a little dragon blood on his finger, licks it off, finds that he can understand the language of the birds. A bird points out the ring to him, tells him about Brünnhilde and leads him with sweet cries to the fiery circle through which, without fear, he passes, to sing an immortal duet.

Götterdammerung. The Norns’ thin thread breaks in their spinning; doom gathers about the gods; Alberich, busy at his machinations, has begot Hagen, who is destined to slay Siegfried. Brünnhilde is betrayed by Siegfried into marrying one Gunther; she curses her lover, though he does not know what he has done. Says Hagen to Siegfried, “You who know the language of the birds, do you understand the raven?” Turning to answer, Siegfried is impaled. His companions build his funeral pyre. Brünnhilde herself sets the torch to it, mounts her warhorse, Grane, spurs into the flame. The Rhine climbs from its bed; the pale Rhine-maidens snatch the ring from Brünnhilde’s finger. Across the heavens is scrawled the glare of burning Walhalla; twilight has fallen upon the gods.

“W” “Here was the old sky-shouldering Wagner, undiminished, matchless for power and passion and felicity,” wrote Critic Lawrence Gilman. Other critics expressed similar conclusions in less facile language. They remembered how, when Der Fliegende Hollander was produced in Dresden in 1843, certain brothers of their cloth uttered pronunciamentos of pain, amazement; how these individuals continued to lift their eyebrows in the press at Wagner’s “aboriginally,” thus writing themselves down as dolts who could not believe a great prophet when he stood revealed to them. These same dolts, however, brought on a reaction which, 20 years ago, raised Wagner to godhead, so that persons who professed sensibility to the concord of sweet sounds were expected to genuflect at the mention of the great composer’s name. Now, a generation nourished on the chill cacophonies of Stravinsky, the floating, gauzy discords of Debussy, the scrawls of Scriabin, do not find so alarming Wagner’s revolutions in harmony. Composers imitate his method, borrow his ideas, leave him his music and his genius; critics call him “The Titan”; deaf people pronounce the W of his name like a W.

Editor. At the Metropolitan, Wagner finds adept interpreters. Conductor Bodanzky has been famed for many years as a student of the composer. A tall, gaunt man, he looms out of the shallow pit like an evening-coated Prince of Darkness; fire sleeps in his baton; when he calls for a kettle drum or a sudden blare from the brasses, his body, as if elongated by concealed springs, thrusts itself half across the orchestra; when the score reads pianissimo, he shrinks into his shirt and trembles like a dervish, supplicating softness. Often a brazen-throated Siegfried stands rocking with melody on a property rock, heard but unheeded, while the audience turns its eyes upon Bodanzky; often, after the singers have taken their curtain calls, the house claps and claps until Bodanzky takes his own ovation. He does not seek to impose a latter-day cleverness upon the barbaric and forthright mu sic he is reading, but conducts as if Wagner himself leaned, with fiery countenance, over his shoulder.

Voices, In the regular Metropolitan Company are a number of singers familiar in Wagnerian roles: Michael Bohnen and Clarence Whitehill who sing Wotan; Rudolph Laubenthal, Sicg-mund; Curt Taucher, Siegfried; Fred erick Schorr, Gunther; Gustav Schuet-zendorf, Alberich. Signor Gatti-Casazza procured, however, two new stars —Mmes. Nanny Larsen-Todsen, Maria Müller.

No operagoer can hear a new Brünnhilde without peopling the stage with the dulcet-voiced, the slim, the heroic or the rotund ladies who have taken the part in past times —Ternina, Gadski, Walker, Matzenauer, Nordica, Litvinne. In Mme. Larsen-Todsen they heard a singer whose voice suffers little by comparison with any of these memorable artists; she sang richly, at times thrillingly, with power and control. Her figure, like her voice, is rich, full; her acting is never equal to Conductor Bodanzky’s.

Scheduled to make her debut earlier in the season, she was rehearsing with Grane, famed war horse, when she became tangled in its lead-string; there was a moment’s scuffle, the horse stepped upon Mme. Larsen-Todsen. Mme. Muller, a 23-year-old soprano from Czecho-Slovakia, was loudly and justly applauded when she made her first U. S. appearance in Die Walküre.

No Critics

Ernest Newman, writer on Music for The New York Evening Post, told in cipient “journalists” of the Columbia School that “there have never been, there is not today, of the music critics, one who can be called a real critic.”

Thereupon Deems Taylor, writer on Music for The New York World, col-umnized, saying:

“An active contemporary critical fraternity that includes in its ranks such contributors to the permanent literature of musical comment as Lawrence Gilman, William J. Henderson and Ernest Newman, cannot be said to be utterly destitute of real critics.

“Broadly speaking, though, Mr. Newman is absolutely right-certainly so far as concerns the newspaper critics. I sometimes wonder whether, strictly speaking, we have any right to be called music critics at all. At least nine-tenths of our time and energy is spent in writing appraisals of performances. The music, most of it, is not new, and what we write, when boiled down, amounts to but little more than saying that it was performed better or worse than it was the last time we heard it. Reduce any average newspaper music critique to its lowest terms, and you will arrive at something like this: ‘The Symphar-monic Orchestra gave a concert last night in Carnegie Hall. Mr. Damfurt-berg, this week’s guest conductor, gave a perfectly terrible performance of Weber’s Oberon overture, and a very good one of those Handel concerti grossi. He took the first movement of Chykovsky’s* Fifth Symphony faster than he should, sentimentalized the second, was too slow in the third and was superb in the fourth. The concert ended with the Tannhauser overture as usual.’

“The kind of criticism Mr. Newman is talking about cannot be done on a newspaper. For a critic is essentially a person who feels and thinks; and though feeling may, on occasion, be swift enough to catch the third edition, thought takes time. The weeklies might manage some real criticism, only they don’t.”

*The famed Russian composer’s name can be spelled in a variety of ways; Tschaikowsky is the chosen of TIME.