A Note from the Guest Editors

Abstract

The inspiration (and provocation) for this issue was the production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen by the Canadian Opera Company (COC) in September 2006. This was a first in a number of ways, locally and internationally. It was the first Canadian Ring cycle ever, and it inaugurated the new opera house, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, in Toronto. The man who was responsible for the house, the orchestra, and indeed the entire company, Artistic Director Richard Bradshaw, was in the pit. Sadly, within a year, he would be dead at the age of sixty-three, but he left behind him a legacy that was more than just a local one. It was his vision, his determination, and his sheer talent that made this Ring happen. And what kind of a Ring was it? As always, it was a “conductor's Ring”: we speak of the Barenboim Ring, the Solti Ring, and so in this case it was certainly the Bradshaw Ring, with reviewers from around the world commenting on both the nuance and the power of the orchestral interpretation. “Bradshaw demonstrated supreme command of the score,” his brisk tempi serving “to shape the larger paragraphs,” observed Barry Millington, while Anthony Tommasini wryly noted that although the performance was at times “curiously reticent (a touch of British reserve?), [Bradshaw] mostly drew a shimmering and assured account of the 16-hour score from the orchestra. To judge from their playing, the musicians sounded elated to be working in their acoustically vibrant and intimate [by MET standards!] 2000-seat new home.”1 And yet, Toronto's “many-splendored Ring” might well have been the first true “designer's Ring.” Regieoper (director's opera) is a well-known, if not universally appreciated, phenomenon, but with Michael Levine acting as designer of all four nights of the cycle, and making his directorial debut with Das Rheingold, something new happened, thanks to Bradshaw's vision. As the collaborative creation of Levine and three other directors—Atom Egoyan, François Girard, and Tim Albery—this Ring offered unity in multiplicity. Unlike the disparate Stuttgart Ring Project initiated by Klaus Zehelein in 2000, in which four different casts, production teams, and dramaturges performed the cycle under the single baton of then Music Director Lothar Zagrosek, the COC Ring was a thematically and visually cohesive whole whose successive parts traversed a century or so in time. And this cohesiveness arose from Levine's overarching concept and design—a conceptualization that brought two film directors into dialogue with what many feel to be Wagner's “cinematic” Gesamtkunstwerk. (This turned out to be utterly fitting because the Ring conveniently coincided with the Toronto International Film Festival.) In this issue, Helmut Reichenbächer explores some of the issues that arose from what David Levin, in “Four Directors, One Ring: Bringing the Tetralogy into the 21st Century,”2 called a convergence of aesthetic proclivities and talents marked by the COC Ring, bringing music drama into dialogue with some of the most interesting and adventurous work in contemporary art.