Impossibly epic in its ambition to depict a universal tale of money, love and power, the series is the ancestor of such current distant relatives as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and even (bear with me) The Sopranos.
Die Walküre, the individual opera, is the original source of the "Ride of the Valkyries," one of the most overused pieces of music in the history of media. Besides serving as the background for countless commercials, it is perhaps most famous as the score behind the helicopter attack sequence ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning") in Francis Ford Coppolla's Apocalypse Now.
Working without collaborators, Richard Wagner wrote every word and every note of music in the Ring operas. Despite his philosophical and egomaniacal shortcomings, he created a vast and pioneering work that will last for millennia. And the Lyric Opera production is as great as the ambition behind the opera. James Morris as the god Wotan and Jane Eaglen as his warrior daughter Brünnhilde radiated loyalty, affection and power both dramatically and musically. Sublime.
Much more than any other work of art I can recall, The Ring is an immersive experience, not unlike being lost in a foreign country or taking LSD. Even a wonderful book you can speed up or slow down. Not so here – Wagner controls the tempo. You have to let go and allow the opera to take you where it wants to, and if you do you might be rewarded. As an enormous meditation on money, power, family, lust, war, ambition, and finally love, The Ring is among the most mature entertainments the world has ever known. The only other contemporary entertainment that dissects love and power among the endomorphs quite so dramatically is, or course, The Sopranos.
The best recommendation I can give is that I've attended this particular production twice before (did I mention that the opera is five hours long?) and that I will see it again in a couple of years when Lyric Opera mounts the whole Ring series at once. Seventeen hours of opera in a single week. Seventeen glorious hours. Hojotoho!
