Bing's Ring

The Metropolitan Opera's Rudolf Bing is a fastidious Viennese who has little use for the Teutonic excesses of Richard Wagner. But this season he bravely buckled down to putting on Wagner's complete 15-hour Ring cycle (Das Rheingold, Die Walkuere, Siegfried, Goetterdaemmerung) for the first time in six years. Somewhat to Bing's surprise, it was a smash hit. The Wagner-starved public queued up for tickets: "It was as if Callas were singing Lucia''' Result: the Met decided to follow up the two scheduled Rings with a third cycle starting next week, the first such three-Ring circus in any regular season in Met history.

Same Old Dragons. All that the Ring has lacked at the Met, according to Wagner fans, has been heroic-voiced singers to fill its gargantuan roles. But the present Ring succeeded with sporadically fine singing and occasional bursts of orchestral brilliance. For the occasion, Bing imported Bayreuth's Martha Moedl (as Bruennhilde), Wolfgang Windgassen (as Siegmund and Siegfried), and Marianne Schech of the Munich Staatsoper (as Sieglinde and Gutrune). All three gave occasionally fine performances, but no one of them dominated the stage in the spacious manner of a Kirsten Flagstad, a Helen Traubel or a Lauritz Melchior. The most consistently good performances, both vocally and dramatically, were supplied in the supporting roles--Norman Kelley as Mime, Blanche Thebom as Fricka and Waltraute, Jean Madeira as Erda. What really held audiences, however, was the Wagnerian power of the Met's orchestra, conducted once by Dimitri Mitropoulos (Walkuere) and the rest of the time by the Met's Wagner veteran, Fritz Stiedry.

In the staging department, the present Ring is freighted with virtually the same visual improbabilities that burdened it in the past. Ponderous gods and goddesses lumbered clumsily toward one another across the gigantic stage. Papier-mache dragons belched steam, dwarfs disappeared in clouds of vapor, magic fires raced across the sky at the wave of a wand. For reasons of economy, the Met made no effort to replace the worn sets originally designed and constructed for the Ring nearly a decade ago. A complete restaging, estimates Manager Bing, would cost a prohibitive $300,000. Though he refuses to go to Bayreuth because of its Nazi associations, Bing admires Bayreuth's modernistic, bare-stage productions, but does not think that they would save the Met any money: "There is nothing so expensive as an empty stage."

Imported Singers. The trouble with the Ring, says Bing, is that it requires as much time and money to prepare as seven operas of the scope of Madame Butterfly. Even with its present success, it plays to only a fraction of the total audiences that the Italian operas draw (while three Ring performances are extraordinary, a popular repertory opera can be put on from eight to a dozen times each season, thereby making investments in rehearsal time and sets worthwhile). Moreover, the Ring requires the importation of singers most of whom sing only Wagner and hence appear a mere dozen or so times in a 160-performance season.

Nevertheless, the Ring cycle will continue to be a periodic, if not an annual, part of the Met's repertory. "After all," says Bing, "Wagner was one of the great geniuses of his age. So it does not matter whether I like him or not."

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