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  • RB

On my first evening of the last Ring to be produced by outgoing Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins, there’s a happy bubbly crowd on the plaza outside McCaw Hall—adult versions of the (mostly) kids who lined up at midnight before the new Harry Potter books were coming out. There are Wagner fans quivery to be among their kind and newbies like me and my wife who are slightly nervy about losing their complete-Ring-cycle cherries.

There’s also a hugely distorted anamorphosis painting by Marlin Peterson, but instead of one point at which you are supposed to stand to see correctly, there are three points, each marked according to the height of one of the fictive “races” in the Ring cycle. What you see depends on where you stand.

There’s an embarrassment of riches of great stuff to see in this Ring. The three sets from this “green” Rhinegold are GOR-geous. You know how recent adventure movies start with the crashes and gunfire and noise that they used to lead up to? This Rhinegold begins with flying ladies. The three Rhine Daughters (shimmering, shiny, aquatic females in blue mermaid-ish costumes) fly or swim or something up in the air. When I was little I dreamt a lot of flying. I flew, in my dreams, the way the mermaids last night were, arms out in front and pulling like through water. I also dreamt of breathing underwater and they were, too.

These swimming, flying, breathing-under-water Rhine daughters are also elegant, pretty, beautiful. No wonder the poor lumpy schmoe, Alberich, falls in love with them. They’re high; he’s low. They’re pretty; he’s not. He lives in the mud at the river bottom while the beautiful girls, who know they are beautiful, flirt with him and lead him on then laugh at him and tell him they were teasing. Wounded by their cruelty, he vows to deny love and pursue power and money instead. He then forges the gold that has lain peacefully at the bottom of the river into the powerful, envy- and corruption-inspiring Ring.

The next sets are amazing too—a lush, Northwest-inspired forest, then a dark, fiery mine. Against these sets, the plot unfolds with the same kind of inevitability of a horror movie. Impossible love, inevitable betrayal, the knowledge that you can’t stop someone else from doing something truly horrible, the hating yourself for loving them anyway and hating yourself for doing things you know aren’t right. All these, however hugely distorted and exaggerated, are in the story of the Ring.

The Ring cycle premiered about 150 years ago. Modern Ring cycles tend to demand more acting from singers than previous eras did. This year’s cast has a few real standouts. Watch mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe (Fricka, betrayed by husband Wotan, and afraid her sister will be carried off forever by two burly giants) through your binoculars. Even when she’s not singing, her face conveys anguish, anger, pain. And relief. Mezzo-soprano Lucille Beer (Erda, Earth goddess) is tender and grand at once, both in the space of a very short appearance near the end of the final act. Tenor Mark Schowalter is spiky and wily at Loge. (If he tells you he has a great line on some stocks, don’t believe him.) Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley is woefully believable as the husband/in-law who would sell his mother—I mean, sister—down the river to make a down payment on his house.

My wife and I once had fantasies, inspired no doubt by the Elmer Fudd cartoons of our youth, of seeing a Ring populated by very large ladies in helmets with horns and very large, well-padded breastplates. Because this Ring is not satisfying in that regard, my wife saw fit to construct the Fricka and Wotan Lego figures that accompany this diary entry. Seattle Opera's Ring, however, satisfies in terms of beauty, meaning, truth.

I'm looking forward to part two, the Valkyrie, tonight.