The famous Solti recording adds up to near fifteen hours of playing time. I personally dread to think how many operas Wagner might have required if he had included all the events of the Nibelungenlied that happen after Siegfried gets done in. Given that these days people are supposed to have attention spans lasting no longer than a few minutes, if even that much, this obviously seems absurd. Fifteen hours, even over a number of nights, is a lot of time to devote to something. The sheer length of it all has admittedly been one of the things which has proved most daunting in any of my other attempts to get a grip on Wagner. To sit and listen to Parsifal continuously for four and a half hours proved extraordinarily difficult when I tried it, and the first time I listened to Tristan I just couldn't do it and had to spread it over three nights, one act each night. This was also what I finally wound up doing with Siegfried and Gtterdmmerung, splitting each one up over a few days. The amount of mental preparation necessary even for that, to force myself to listen to them at all, was considerable. I say "listen" advisedly because I don't habitually watch operas. I've seen only one on a stage (an amateur production of Rigoletto) and seen a few more on TV. But normally I discover operas through recordings of them, and this is the case as well with the Ring (the recording in question being the 1958-65 Solti set mentioned above). Given what I've read about some of the more recent productions, especially some of the ones perpetrated at Bayreuth, I'm not sure that I even want to actually see a Ring production. Anyway, I like listening to operas and trying to visualise them for myself by listening and reading the text. What bothers me about some of these productions is a tendency many seem to share to dislocate the text from its proper mythical point in time. Patrice Chereau's centenary production with the Rhinemaidens in a hydro-electric dam and Faf...
