ries Blackadder where Blackadder describes just how evil the Germans are: they have no word for "fluffy" and their operas last three or four days. The first example is slightly exaggerated perhaps (say hi to the word flaumig, Edmund), but in the case of Wagner's Ring der Nibelungen, the gibe is cruelly true. The whole thing really does last for four days (or evenings, at least). This is what I mean by excessive. Granted that the Ring is of course a series of four operas, not one, it's still too much. I've written before about how I don't like Mozart much, and one of the things I said then is that the sheer volume of young Wolfgang's output is one of the things that defeats me when I approach it. Wagner's excesses are in the opposite direction; he wrote relatively few operas but they were almost all mind- and arse-numbingly long. I don't think any of them (other than perhaps The Flying Dutchman) clock in below three hours and most go over four. Way too much to handle for me. Still, I've actually made an effort to get a handle of Wagner. A semi-proper effort too, not the half-arsed surface scratch job I did on Mozart. In preparation for this here bit of writing, I've done a bit of reading and also some more listeningnotably, finally listening to the whole of the Ring for the first time. Way back when I did music at UNSW in 1993 I heard the first two operas in the cycle, Das Rheingold and Die Walkre, then never heard them again for nearly six years (except for an old Bruno Walter recording of Walkre Act I at Bowen Library) until I picked them up again a few weeks ago, and I'd never heard the other twoSiegfried and Gtterdmmerungat all before now. This naturally had a rather grievous effect on my perception of the whole work, and really it wasn't until I started preparation for this thing here that I even realised really what the story was. So I think I've come to a better appreciation of what Wagner was trying to achieve with the Ring, and ...
