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The lust for power, the lure of gold, the sacred beauty of nature, the destructive impulses of man: These timeless themes dominate both American history and Wagner's Ring.
Provocative parallels are promised in Artistic Adviser Francesca Zambello's imaginative new staging of the massive, four-opera cycle, which begins with this mythic tale of mountaintop chicanery. This co-production with Washington National Opera uses imagery from various eras of American history—including, in this first installment, the California gold rush and the Roaring Twenties. Donald Runnicles conducts a cast headed by three great American singers: mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore and baritones Mark Delavan and Richard Paul Fink.

The lust for power, the lure of gold, the sacred beauty of nature, the destructive impulses of man: These timeless themes dominate both American history and Wagner's Ring.
Provocative parallels are promised in Artistic Adviser Francesca Zambello's imaginative new staging of the massive, four-opera cycle, which begins with this mythic tale of mountaintop chicanery. This co-production with Washington National Opera uses imagery from various eras of American history—including, in this first installment, the California gold rush and the Roaring Twenties. Donald Runnicles conducts a cast headed by three great American singers: mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore and baritones Mark Delavan and Richard Paul Fink.

Scene 1
The three Rhinemaidens, guardians of the river’s golden treasure, laugh and play, scarcely noticing the Nibelung Alberich. The lustful Alberich tries, with no avail, to catch the Rhinemaidens as they dart through the waters, taunting him. Suddenly sunlight illuminates the river’s treasure, the Rhinegold. The Rhinemaidens explain that this gold is all-powerful: if fashioned into a Ring, its wearer would rule the world. But, they insist that the gold is safe, since whoever would steal the treasure must renounce love. Hearing this secret, Alberich renounces love,and escapes with the Rhinegold. The waters are plunged into darkness as the Rhinemaidens lament their loss.

Scene 2
As the sun rises, Fricka and Wotan are asleep on a mountaintop, while their new home, the fortress Valhalla, gleams in the distance. When they awaken, Wotan hails Valhalla as the fulfillment of his dreams. Fricka reproaches her husband for having promised her sister Freia to the giants Fafner and Fasolt as payment for constructing the fortress. Wotan replies that he never meant to keep his word, and tells her that Loge will help the gods solve their dilemma. When Fafner and Fasolt arrive to claim Freia, Wotan protests that he made the pact in jest, informing them that they must settle for another fee. But, Fasolt, smitten with Freia, balks. Fafner, aware that the gods would lose their eternal youth and power without Freia's golden apples, decides to abduct her. As the giants drag Freia away, her brothers Froh and Donner attempt to thwart them. Wotan intervenes, reminding them that all treaties are guaranteed by the writings on his spear. Denied Freia's golden apples, the gods begin to weaken and age.

Loge, who helped Wotan draw up the contract with the Fafner and Fasolt, arrives and suggests that the giants might find the Rhinegold an acceptable substitute for Freia. He then relates how Alberich stole the gold, forging it into a Ring in order to gain world dominance. Wotan is enthralled by the absolute power the Ring imparts; Fricka is intrigued by its power to keep a philandering husband faithful, so she urges Wotan to obtain it. Loge suggests that Wotan steal the gold, as Alberich did, and restore it to the Rhinemaidens. Fafner, desiring the gold, advises Wotan to use his wits to gain the treasure. The giants leave, taking Freia hostage until evening, when they will return to claim the Nibelung's gold as ransom. Wotan asks Loge to accompany him to the nether world to seek Alberich's treasure.

Scene 3
In the dark underground caverns of Nibelheim, Alberich's slaves clang their anvils as they work on his gold. Wearing the all-powerful Ring, Alberich torments his brother Mime. Alberich tries on the Tarnhelm, the magical helmet Mime has forged, which transforms the wearer into any size or shape. Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to make himself invisible, thrashes Mime, and then vanishes to torment his slaves.

Wotan and Loge arrive and encounter Mime, who confesses that he had hoped to regain the Ring he forged by using the Tarnhelm. Wotan and Loge offer to help the Nibelungs free themselves from Alberich’s tyranny. Alberich returns, driving slaves bearing mounds of gold. He suspiciously questions Wotan and Loge, warning of his plan to overthrow the gods and rule the world. When Loge asks Alberich what would happen if someone stole the Ring while he slept, the Nibelung extols the powers of the Tarnhelm. Loge asks for a demonstration, and Alberich transforms himself into a large serpent, then back again. Loge asks whether the Tarnhelm could also transform him into something small—a toad, for instance. When Alberich demonstrates this, Wotan traps him and Loge seizes the Tarnhelm. Wotan and Loge bind Alberich and drag him to the surface of the earth.

Scene 4
Back on the mountaintop, Loge and Wotan tell Alberich that they will free him only if he yields his gold. Alberich feels sure that the Ring will replenish his fortune, so he orders his slaves to surrender the gold to Wotan. Alberich asks for the return of the Tarnhelm, but Loge says the gods will keep it. Wotan also demands the Ring as part of the booty, reminding Alberich that it was not rightfully his. Though Alberich replies that Wotan is as much a thief as he, Wotan tears the Ring from Alberich's finger. As Loge frees Alberich, the Nibelung places a curse upon the Ring: until it returns to him, trouble, envy, and death will befall all who possess it.

Alberich leaves as the other gods approach, followed by the giants with their hostage, Freia. Saddened at losing Freia, Fasolt agrees to accept the Nibelung gold only if it will hide Freia from his view. When all the gold is piled in front of Freia, Fafner complains that he can still see her hair, and demands that the Tarnhelm be added to the pile. Fasolt then complains that he can see the gleam of Freia's eye, so Fafner demands the Ring, now on Wotan's finger. When Wotan refuses, the giants begin to seize Freia. Erda, the earth goddess, suddenly appears and warns Wotan to yield the Ring, which spells doom for the gods. Wotan then surrenders the Ring, and Freia is released. Fafner and Fasolt quarrel over their booty, and Fafner kills Fasolt, claiming the Ring, the Tarnhelm, and the hoard for himself. Alberich's curse has taken effect.

Fricka urges Wotan to turn his thoughts to their new home. Donner summons lightning and thunder to form a rainbow bridge to the fortress. Noting how the setting sun gilds it, Wotan tells Fricka their abode is called Valhalla. Wotan leads the other gods—all except Loge, who claims that they are doomed—across the rainbow bridge. The Rhinemaidens, in the valley below, lament their lost treasure.

(courtesy Washington National Opera)

In early 19th-century Rome, an idealistic artist, a celebrated singer and a corrupt police chief engage in a fierce battle of wills in this tempestuous tale of cruelty and deception. With its themes of political intrigue, sexual intimidation and official hypocrisy, Puccini’s great melodrama is anything but dated. Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, praised by The New York Times for her “lushly beautiful sound and poignant vulnerability,” makes her Company debut in the title role. Baritone Lado Ataneli (Scarpia) has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as possessing “one of the healthiest, roundest, most mellifluous voices on the planet.” Honey-voiced Italian tenor Roberto Aronica makes up the third side of this fatal love triangle.

The house lights dim as before any other opera. But the familiar ritual always seems to be charged with an added jolt of anticipation as the silence deepens at the start of Das Rheingold. When the double basses begin to intone their sustained low E-flat, the music sounds inevitable, like it has always been there - the sonogram of an entire universe about to be born. Yet Wagner spent years thinking about the cycle this moment sets into motion, sketching ideas, synthesizing a Babel of sources from myth and folklore, and spinning out theoretical arguments about the way to reform opera. At this turbulent midpoint of the nineteenth century, in his most revolutionary phase, Wagner was determined more than ever to create a new operatic form that would resist being consumed as another source of entertainment but instead become an agent of social change. (While this attitude is often assumed to stem from the composer's notorious megalomania, Wagner also echoes a more widespread aesthetic idealism expressed, for example, in Shelley's proclamation from decades before that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Ironically, the principle of politically engaged art would become a central tenet for such anti-Wagnerian detractors as Bertolt Brecht in the twentieth century.)

The years spent pondering were fallow ones, musically speaking. From the moment he had completed the score of Lohengrin in April 1848, Wagner had been unable to compose anything of substance. A weakness in musical inspiration was in fact precisely what helped prompt the train of creative logic that led to the very idea of the Ring as a sequence of four operas. In an earlier phase of its conception, when the project still involved a single grand operatic tragedy titled Siegfried's Death (what we now know as Götterdämmerung or "Twilight of the Gods"), Wagner's musical impulses had run aground as he attempted to sketch out the Norns' scene. He sensed that the drama and the music could produce the weighty impact he intended only if both were given the larger dimensions necessary to pave the way for the climax. To do this Wagner would need more than "exposition": He would need to show the story unfolding in each of its crucial stages.

Comparisons have been made between the Ring cycle's expansion into four separate but interconnected operas and a series of Hollywood prequels. These are not only facile, they're mislead- ing - though there are certainly a number of legitimately intriguing parallels between the Ring and various epic film cycles. Wagner was not adding more characters and episodes merely for the fun of it, as arbitrary extensions. He lucidly describes the intuition that led him to enlarge the scope of his project: "A work of art - and hence the basic drama - can only make its proper impression if the poetic intent is fully represented to the senses in every one of its important moments."

It is useful, incidentally, to remember that Wagner himself always thought of the Ring as a trilogy - Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung - preceded by Das Rheingold as a "prelude." In addition to the issues inherent to the Ring that made him decide to unfold it over successive evenings, Wagner consciously modeled the cycle after the pattern of ancient Greek tragedy, with its festival-setting performances of interlocking trilogies such as Aeschylus's Oresteia. (At one point, he even contemplated presenting a festival on the banks of the Mississippi for a performance that would unleash, Woodstock-style, a blissful spirit of change among its participants.) One of the many aspects that makes the Ring so extraordinary is that it encompasses a self-reinforcing, organic unity over its enormous span (some fifteen to sixteen hours of music, not counting intermissions), while at the same time the four operas inhabit separate worlds of their own, each possessing what Verdi might call a distinctive tinta or musico-poetic coloration.

Entrée into an Epic World

We can certainly recognize this facet in Das Rheingold, the only opera in the Ring in which both humans and a passionate love story are entirely absent. This is also the part of the Ring that comes closest to the self-imposed restrictions of Wagner's newly evolving theory of the music drama (which essentially involved his interpretation of the age-old dilemma of the proper relation between words and music). The result at times has a certain austere character, above all in the predominance of recitative-like settings of the text, intended to imitate natural speech patterns. It also means no old- fashioned arias (there are moments that are, however, facsimiles), no glorious ensembles such as trios or quartets - not even the sort of "cheating" or bending of the rules that happens as the Ring progresses, until they're basically relaxed in Götterdämmerung.

But this opening night offers more than enough to compensate. Das Rheingold unforgettably introduces us to the epic range that is the world of the Ring, from the low rumble at the beginning of time and the peaceful, primordial waters where life originates to the lofty - and, as will become clear over the cycle's span, illusory - heights of the gods' splendid new castle-fortress Valhalla. We also journey to the depths of the mines where the Nibelungs are forced into slave labor by one of their own. Wagner lays out a geography that is cosmic, elemental, and protean - embracing the four elements. But it is also a space in which powerful psychological forces hold sway, where we see the gamut of motivations that will play out over the entire Ring cycle - from absolute greed and nihilistic despair to creative hopefulness - begin to take shape.

Moreover, Wagner makes it clear from the opening measures of his prelude that the orchestra itself will be a central character in his epic. As the music buds and germinates, the orchestra seems to voice a deep, primordial unconscious; later it will sound out the fuller psyches of the Ring characters, to which their verbal utterances are often but tips of the iceberg. At the same time Wagner will use his orchestra as an omniscient master-narrator, weaving together the multihued strands of his epic story to reinforce a coherent network.

Surging Vitality

The years of incubation in Wagner's own subconscious are perhaps what give the music of Das Rheingold its surging sense of vitality and prowess. Consider how daunting the prospect of tackling the score must have seemed to the composer, who had just turned forty and published all four librettos of the Ring in a bound edition. The project had grown in proportions far beyond his original expectations (although at the time Wagner still predicted he would be able to finish the entire Ring within a few years, little suspecting almost a quarter-century would pass before his dream was finally realized in performance).

But he also had not been able to compose seriously for over five years. It all sounds like the perfect recipe for a deadly case of writer's block, doesn't it? Yet a breakthrough finally came in late 1853. Wagner penned a famous description of the moment as inspired by a dream of himself nearly drowning (scholars, however, treat this report with skepticism as a typical instance of Wagnerian self- mythologizing). It hardly seems fanciful, at any rate, to hear in the joyously rushing flood of music that ensued the musical equivalent of waters bursting a dam and spilling over in a torrent. Wagner sketched out the entire first draft of Das Rheingold in less than three months (orchestrating it for his unusually expansive forces was another matter and required several more months of diligent effort).

What is striking about Das Rheingold's score is not just its vigorous, harnessed energy but the novelty and staggering confidence it exudes. This music marks a leap forward in style that has always reminded me of the stride made by Beethoven (one of Wagner's musical models, particularly in the Ring) between his Second and Third Symphonies. It is as if Wagner had grasped in one sweeping intuition what was needed to establish a whole new world in sound. And indeed, the opera sets in place the basic motifs that will help sustain the enormous structural network of the cycle (which is not to downplay the fact that the musical style of the rest of the Ring varies considerably as it continues to evolve - particularly in the break between the second and third acts of Siegfried and in the dark ripeness of Götterdämmerung).

Take just the prelude for a moment. That famous long E-flat seems to sound without pulse, with the bassoons eventually adding on a B-flat, like a supporting pillar. This lays out the foundation from which eight horns, subtly interlaced in a round-like chain of repetitions, sound out the Ring cycle's very first leitmotif. It is a primal theme that will be associated variously with innocent nature, water, even evolution itself. Wagner allows us to hear this theme evolving through a kind of time-lapse as it speeds up - but all within the home key of E-flat for an unprecedented 136 measures with no modulation. This is the very antithesis of musical evolution in the classical Western sense. Wagner's genius is to set off a subtle tension between restful stasis and the process of change - a microcosm for the tension at the heart of the Ring as a whole.

Original Sins

Wagner invested a huge amount of energy researching and theorizing about his mythological sources, particularly what he perceived as the "intuitive truths" they encoded - what the psychological twentieth century would come to see as projections of essential human desire or a structure for the collective unconscious. Yet for the core motivating actions that set Das Rheingold (and the entire Ring) in motion, Wagner ended up devising his own myth, revolving around an idiosyncratic version of original sin. Alberich is goaded on to his fateful decision to curse love and make the ring that will avenge his rejection by the Rhinemaidens' behavior. "Love" is of course one of the two pivotal ideas on which the entire cycle turns - the other, "Power," is always intimately bound up with it, as in the opening scene, as the contrasting antipode - but continually changes its connotations as the Ring progresses, reflecting its creator's own shifting world views.

But here, in this beginning scene, Wagner takes care to show that the Ring's original sin and loss of innocence is triggered not by sexual love, but by its denial. Emphasizing this point in a letter, he writes that "it is wrong to regard this love [i.e., sexual love between a man and a woman] as only one manifestation of love in general, and to assume that other and higher forms must therefore exist alongside it." Sexual love is the real thing. Notice how Wagner musically illustrates this in the Rhinemaidens' three successive rejections of the dwarf. Flosshilde's is the most elaborate and musically appealing - so much so that it actually transforms Alberich for a brief moment in which he shares the beauty of her musical line. Flosshilde even sings a fragmented cadential figure where I sometimes hear the opening shape of the "redemption" motif that ends the entire cycle. The Rhinemaidens take a cruel pleasure in mocking and thwarting this natural desire.

Alberich's choice to forswear love in favor of the gold's power, moreover, has its counterpart in the parallel plane of the gods. There are many profound moments of symmetry in the Ring, and they usually have to do with more than structure, foregrounding important symbolic elements as well. The dramatic shift from Das Rheingold's opening opacity to the bright light of the shimmering gold is immediately repeated as the waters dissolve into a haze of clouds and then day breaks splendidly to illuminate the freshly built Valhalla. Musically, the leitmotif signifying the ring morphs before our ears into the solidly harmonized brass motif for Valhalla.

The rest of Das Rheingold - from the giants' demand for just payment to the tricking of Alberich and his curse on the ring - explores and questions this disturbing, implied alliance between Wotan's great project and Alberich's new power. Wotan has of course been far luckier in love than his arch-rival, but he has not found fulfillment: "Whoever lives loves change and variety" is how he rationalizes his philandering to Fricka. However enlightened a ruler Wotan genuinely intends to be, his own power is flawed at its core.

The god himself experiences a combination of humiliation over his miscalculation with Freia and a resulting lust for power to restore an illusion of order. More importantly, it sets up a pattern of fear and consequent disappointment that resounds through the entirety of the Ring. He and Alberich are shadow images of each other (an idea Wotan directly invokes later in the Ring when he refers to himself as Licht-Alberich - "Light-Alberich" - in contrast to Schwarz-Alberich - "Dark-Alberich," or the dwarf in all his power).

A New Wring on the Ring

What makes the Ring so endlessly fascinating? Part of the answer has to do with how Wagner managed to synthesize an extraordinary miscellany of sources - along with his private pantheon of favorite literary artists and composers - into a language and vision completely his own. He developed these into an idiosyncratic vehicle that could somehow contain not only his own ceaselessly changing preoccupations - the Ring, he told Liszt, was "the poem of my life and of all that I am and feel" - but those of later generations. For the Ring seems to compel us to make sense of it from our own point of view.

It hardly seems a coincidence that at roughly the same time as Wagner was embarking on the Ring, an American novelist was similarly expanding what had originally been intended as a riveting yarn about the hunt for an aggressive whale into a grandiose metaphysical rhapsody. In The Perfect Wagnerite, his path-breaking interpretation of the Ring as a socialist allegory (with Das Rheingold as the cornerstone), George Bernard Shaw drew attention to the simultaneity of the California Gold Rush in Wagner's conception. This hunger for experience and the understanding of it is at the root of the Ring as an artistic enterprise.

How does all this affect the opening installment in the new San Francisco Opera Ring, directed by Francesca Zambello (and the first Ring of General Director David Gockley's career)? The core impulse of this "American" Ring is to scope out the striking parallels between Wagner's mythic universe - which can seem distant and contrived to contemporary audiences - and, as dramaturg Cori Ellison explains, "the trajectory of American history and mythology. We share a history of idealistic leaders but also a blemish at the beginning - both in the exploitation of African- and Native- Americans and in the ravaging of the land. It is not meant to be a trendy 'updating' but to achieve a visceral, personalized connection to myth that would be equivalent to what Wagner was seeking for his audience. We're trying to evoke what would have a similar emotional memory and weight for Americans."

A parallel, complementary aspect to this idea is a kind of feminist awareness. "Francesca sees this as a story in which the plight of women is prominent," says Ellison. "Women are represented as victims until Brünnhilde breaks out of that pattern and makes the sacrifice that will allow the slate to be wiped clean. In Das Rheingold, we see how Fricka has her power not outright, but from Wotan: She has to retain him to retain power. In the Ring, the more independent women are in terms of self-determination, the more power they have."

Long before J.R.R. Tolkien, George Lucas, or the Wachowski Brothers (inventors of The Matrix) - not to mention Freud, Jung, or Joseph Campbell - Wagner grasped the enormous potential of evoking the emotional truths underlying fantastic mythological narratives. This ability to tune in to the universal while addressing issues raised by his specific historical context is part of what gives the Ring its tremendous range and flexibility. Every generation - indeed each individual audience member - comes to grapple with the Ring on their own terms. Fascinatingly, these do not cancel each other out but coexist, revealing multiple levels of a truly fathomless art work.

"Wagner's heritage must not be mummified and reduced to an exhibit in a museum, through misconceived loyalty," wrote director Wieland Wagner. "His timeless vitality must be realized afresh at every new staging." Indeed, it was Wieland himself who more or less single-handedly revolutionized the staging traditions of his grandfather's music dramas by breaking the stifling stranglehold that had been imposed by his grandmother Cosima. (As Cosima commented to her son Siegfried, "Was this not how Papa did it in 1876?") When Wieland and his brother Wolfgang reopened the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, after the Second World War, it was under the bold banner of the "New Bayreuth" style. This reinvention was viewed by many as the Wagner brothers' attempt to scrub Bayreuth clean of the Nazi taint of their mother Winifred Wagner, a strong supporter and close personal friend of Adolf Hitler who had famously delighted in using Wagner's works as Nazi propaganda tools.

Though there's more than a grain of truth to that theory, the "New Bayreuth" style was also a crucial, influential, and enduring artistic manifesto. Influenced by the pioneering Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia, Wieland Wagner stripped his grandfather's stage works of their chauvinistic and historic elements, replacing slavishly "naturalistic" stagings with his minimalist modern productions. On his self-styled "invisible stage," Wieland felt that music, words, and ideas could emerge in more vivid relief, allowing the audience to experience the full impact of the drama.

With these interpretive floodgates open, a work as rich as the Ring cycle went on to inspire as many looks and concepts as there were designers and directors to take it on. Perhaps the best- known and most influential has been the "Post–New Bayreuth" Ring staged in Bayreuth in 1976 by Patrice Chereau. Often labeled Marxist or Shavian (for its indebtedness to George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite) it was a striking allegory of the Industrial Revolution and an indictment of capitalism, fusing nineteenth-century visual symbols with contemporary and mythological images. Since Chereau's Ring, we have witnessed stagings Brechtian (the bleak post-apocalyptic Harry Kupfer Ring, Bayreuth, 1988-92), naturalistic (Stephen Wadsworth, Seattle 2001; Otto Schenk, Metropolitan Opera, 1990s), abstract (the post-Wieland minimalism of Pierre Strosser, Paris, 1994), avantgarde (Richard Jones, Covent Garden, 1994-96), driven by science fiction (Götz Friedrich, Berlin 1987; Nikolaus Lehnhoff, Munich, 1987), and "new romanticism" (Peter Hall, Bayreuth, 1983-86, based on Wagner's own stage directions), to name but a few. All can point to one justifying passage or another from Wagner's extensive prose writings, which can prove either reductive or revelatory, depending on its application.

In our new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, director Francesca Zambello and her creative team have decided to filter the mighty tale through a uniquely American lens, mining our own American "mythology" for an organic visual language that both suits the Ring and its symbols and enables American audiences to feel the same visceral immediacy that Wagner and the Greek dramatists he emulated sought to provide.

Certainly, ours won't be the first Ring to reference capitalism, industrialization, and the resulting plunder of nature. But it may well be the first to probe the extent to which America's unique history and destiny have sprung from its lush natural resources, the fine moral line between their use and their exploitation, and the consequences of their abuse. This firm American framework will allow, we hope, the Ring's apparently limitless and universal themes - love, nature, politics, psychology, race, class, feminism, etc. - to blossom with particular immediacy.

"It's an overview of America, beginning with its heady youth in the mid-nineteenth century, continuing with the twentieth century, and pointing toward the future," said Zambello. "It's a cautionary tale, showing where we started, and where we're headed if we continue on a reckless road."

"And it's not a monolithic America we're depicting, it's a diverse America," she continued. "It has room for each individual and each audience to be personally struck by different elements and images. In Washington, D.C., I felt they related most strongly to the power aspect. Here in San Francisco, David Gockley and I think the 'green' aspect may be most deeply felt. The land of the Gold Rush, where our Ring begins, is in our own backyard. The pristine landscape ripe with natural beauty, the treasure from the earth itself, it's all right here." In gathering our visual imagery, we focused on the contrast between the purity of that nature and the destructiveness of human constructs. We were inspired by the contrast between breathtakingly Romantic vistas of America's wilderness with unvarnished images like news photos of prospectors, underage miners, capitalists, and wage slaves, and scathing cartoon depictions of robber barons.

This imagery is invoked in Michael Yeargan's sets, expertly lit by Mark McCullough, which conjures familiar landscapes that pull us closer to the story and its characters. "We recognize Valhalla as something like one of those embryonic, technically ingenious 1930s skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, as well as the mess left in the wake of its construction," observed Zambello.

"Nibelheim looks like a coal or gold mine, staffed by members of a lower, exploited class," she continued. "Valhalla is shining above, while Nibelheim underneath is dark, like a sewer in a big city. And, later in the cycle, the nouveau-riche Gibichungs live in a sort of 'McMansion.'"

We're also right at home with Catherine Zuber's vividly costumed characters. "We first meet the Wotan family in 1920s cocktail attire, as if they're on their way to Newport. They're a big expansionist American family - Give them any dynasty name you want," commented Zambello. "Wotan is a building tycoon, an optimistic, opportunistic shyster who thinks that his wealth makes him a god, and that gods are above the rules."

In this Ring, Zambello's vision and the designs of Yeargan, Zuber, and McCullough are tied together by the powerful and relatively new theatrical art of video projections. Harnessing the resources of ever-evolving, ever-improving technology, our projection designer Jan Hartley achieves effects of which Wagner could scarcely have dreamed but that he would surely have heartily embraced.

Employing an arsenal driven by a state-of-the-art media server loaded with software that allows her to project images on 3-D objects, Hartley controls the design, the image production, and the technical realization of a volume equal to that of a feature-length film.

Hartley's job may seem purely technical, but her process begins and intersects with the artistic discussions among the rest of the creative team: director, designers, choreographer, and dramaturg (who helps to research, shape, focus, unite, and edit the work of the whole team). In lengthy meetings, "the director will have ideas as to what kinds of images should accompany a moment," said Hartley. "From there, I'll do my research, and I'll come up with my own ideas, too, looking through my huge library of 'copyright-free' images I've licensed over the years."

"And I do a lot of my own photography, too," said Hartley. "In this Ring, you'll see majestic redwoods from Northern California and freeways in L.A., Portland, and New York, all original images I photographed. I'm always looking. My camera's with me and ready at all times."

Hartley then creates a visual storyboard, seeking to transform the group's artistic vision into a well-organized projection script which normally continues to evolve until opening night. During "tech week," she and the entire creative team spend countless hours in the theater, tweaking, editing, fine-tuning, and adjusting their work to the musical timing.

"Moving images help magnify the intense emotion that music creates," Hartley asserted. "My work in this Ring is really of two types: There's the scenic imagery that sets the backdrop for the narrative storytelling, and there's the abstract imagery that complements and helps visualize the orchestral interludes - both specific tone-painting like the music of Siegmund being chased through the forest in the prelude to Die Walküre, and fantasy scenarios like the creation of the universe heard in the prelude to Das Rheingold."

The Ring cycle's long and distinguished tradition of allegorical interpretation begins with Wagner himself: While drafting the Ring music dramas during the late 1840s, he drew analogies between Frederick I (Barbarossa), the twelfth-century Hohenstaufen emperor of Germany, and the Nibelung horde in an essay, Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage. Our hope is that somewhere in our new Ring, you may recognize yourself, discern what unique role you personally play in the ongoing saga of America, and make some important decisions based on that.

• Tue Jun 3 2008   8 pm
• Fri Jun 6 2008   8 pm
• Sat Jun 14 2008   8 pm
• Thu Jun 19 2008   7:30 pm High-definition video projection screens will be featured on the balcony level for this performance.

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• Sun Jun 22 2008   2 pm High-definition video projection screens will be featured on the balcony level for this performance.

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• Sat Jun 28 2008   8 pm High-definition video projection screens will be featured on the balcony level for this performance.

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