I took Annie Wagner with me last night to the opening of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Seattle Opera. We both enjoyed the wine and “peppered nuts” in the press room. We both loved the sets, one of which put the entire stage (floor to ceiling) under water, and another of which had a forest of trees covered in what seemed to be real lichen and moss. I, perhaps revealingly, loved the divas; Annie, perhaps equally revealingly, loved the Nibelheim midgets. And we both agreed that the climactic rainbow staircase to Valhalla, if it had to be a rainbow, could at least have been a little less technicolor.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle, an epic of epic proportions, will take four days to perform; last night was just part one. Tonight it’s part two, “Die Walkure,” which, as Annie informed me by reading the program in the car on the way home, features lots of incest. It’s four and a half hours long with two intermissions, and my date, arranged long ago, is my mother.