Work of the Week - Lorin Maazel: The Ring without Words

Earlier this month, Oslo’s stunning new opera house was officially opened. The building is already a landmark of the Norwegian capital and is a fitting venue for Lorin Maazel’s The Ring without Words, a grand symphonic synthesis of Richard Wagner’s musical dramas. Maazel will be conducting the Den Norske Operas Orkester on Saturday 19 April.

In the fifties, the stage director Wieland Wagner, Richard's grandson, put to torch the breast-plates, spears, swans-on-rollers, Teuton-togas and other baggage of nineteenth-century Prop-ery of Grand Olde Opery so cherished by comedians as material for skits lampooning Opera. Fitting snugly into such stage properties were the corpulent Brünnhilde, the triple-decker Siegfried and the incontinent horse. Wieland waved it all away. His staging concepts evoked characters at once hieratic, pedestrian, arcane, pathetic, regal and roguish, sheathed in raiments vaguely royal, religious and unearthly, the slimmed-down singers moving amongst asteroidal rings and lapislazuli cosmoramics. Wieland Wagner was also a word person, sensitive to the etymological and historical rootage of Grandad's texts. He sculpted entire roles over resilient vocal chords, forming the first new-wave generation of Wagnerian singers. So I was surprised to see this man of the theatre seated with assorted Wagnerphiles drinking in the sounds of a singer-less orchestra rehearsal I was conducting of Lohengrin in the restaurant-cum-rehearsal-room in Bayreuth (1960).

"Why?" I asked.

"The Orchestra — that's where it all is — the text behind the text, the universal subconscious that binds Wagner's personae one to the other and to the proto-ego of legend..." or words to that effect. During the many years of working together (a memorable Tristan and Isolde at La Scala, 1966) he often referred to his theory of the Wagner Orchestra as the Ultimate Source. Not until 1965, when it became my task as Artistic Director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper to bring the "Ring" back into its repertory — it had not been presented there since before World War II at the time when my predecessor, Bruno Walter, was still in charge—that I fully grasped the profundity of Wieland's view, especially as it applies to the "Ring": its orchestral score is the "Ring" itself, coded in sound. Decoded, it becomes story, legend, song, philosophy in countless cosmic overtones and human undertones.
Of course, the "Ring" is conceived as a music-drama, to be staged, sung and played. For those, such as myself, who have been privileged to conduct the "Ring" at Bayreuth and elsewhere, every dot of this Gesamtkunstwerk is inviolable.

I was intrigued by the challenge: could a symphonic synthesis of the "Ring" reveal the essentials of its code? I bolted the following list of criteria to my drawingboard:

The synthesis must be free-flowing (no stops) and chronological, beginning with the first note of Rheingold and finishing with the last chord of Götterdämmerung .

The transitions must be harmonically and periodically justifiable, the pacing contrasts commensurate with the length of the work.

Most all of the music originally written for orchestra without voice must be used, adding those sections with a vocal line essential to a synthesis and only where the line is either doubled by an orchestral instrument, "imaginable" or in the rare instance, when it can be reproduced by an instrument.

Every note must be Wagner's own.

Thus, we begin in the "greenish twilight" of the Rhine, float up to the home of the gods, fall amongst hammering dwarfs "smithying” away, ride Donner's thunderbolt, crawl with the thirst-crazed Siegmund to the haven (temporary) of Sieglinde's hearth and solace (here a shadowy flute echoes her "Labung biet' ich dem lechzenden Gaumen: Wasser, wie du gewollt" — literally: "Comfort I offer to the languishing palate: [here is] water, as you wanted" (!)). In the sound code, we "see" his loving gaze, their flight, Wotan's rage, the calvalcade of Brünnhilde's sisters, Wotan's farewell to his favorite daughter, Mime's fright, Siegfried's forging of the magic sword, his wanderings through the forest, his slaying of the Dragon, the Dragon's lament, day breaking 'round Siegfried's and Brünnhilde's passion, Siegfried's Rhine journey, Hagen's call to his clan, Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens, his death and the funeral music, Immolation.

Though no conscious attempt was made to include all the Ring's motifs, most of them do surface in one form or another.

- Lorin Maazel