Robin Holloway

Buried treasure

The newly available recording of the 1955 Bayreuth ‘Ring’

issue 28 April 2007

The newly available recording of the 1955 Bayreuth ‘Ring’

Unlike my fearless and indefatigable colleague, I visit the opera with reluctance, expecting the worst and usually finding it. The almost universal betrayal in recent decades of this most complex of genres by hideous design and perverted production is never so sheerly ghastly as with the works of Wagner: among these the Ring offers the widest scope for traduction.

I love and revere this colossal yet human monument so deeply (whatever passing moments of reservation or resentment) that witnessing its trials by mockery, malignity, ineptitude, inadequacy, tears a fibre from the brain like a six-lane motorway over a sacred landscape or a shocking demolition in a fine city centre.

Why suffer so? It’s easy enough to stay away! Yet not to experience this supreme drama in the theatre where it belongs is to contract the spirit.

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