Valhalla: Row H, Seat 9
It’s Wednesday, so it must be Rheingold. In an unlikely logistical triumph, I have managed to build my week around the second cycle of the Ring at the Royal Opera House — and quite something it is, too. As much as I might aspire to be George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Perfect Wagnerite’, I am still very much a novice in the world of neurotic gods, Niebelungs, giants, Walsungs, dragon music, stolen gold, sacred spears and Rhinemaidens. So the privilege of attending this amazing event — an unalloyed triumph for Tony Hall and his team at the ROH — feels all the greater (for expert opinion, see Michael Tanner’s review on page 75). There is a cultural camaraderie in the air that I have only experienced once before, at a rare showing of Abel Gance’s six-hour epic film, Napoléon. The lady sitting next to me has come all the way from Cardiff to see Sir John Tomlinson’s magnificent Wotan, Plácido Domingo’s Siegmund and Antonio Pappano’s command of the whole cycle. As Max Boyce would say: I was there.
We are outpatients, we Ring-goers, so the rest of the week is spent in a strange limbo between the forests and the bubbling Rhine on the one hand, and daily life on the other. The trouble is that the music and the drama are so mesmeric, so all-consuming, that one can think of little else. When I get an email from Helen, my producer at Radio 4, to remind me that I am supposed to be interviewing a Mr Rheingold at 6pm, I confess to a moment of Wagnerian confusion.
Mr Rheingold’s first name is not, as it transpires, Alberic, but Howard. And he is, as all webheads know, one of the great authorities on the political and social implications of the internet and mobile technology.
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