My One-Item Bucket List

I've never really maintained a formal bucket list. It's just not my style. Oh sure, there are things I'd like to experience and places I'd like to go. Maybe they'll happen and maybe they won't. I don't get too bent out of shape about it. Que sera sera, that's what I say. And I have already done some bucket-worthy things and gone on some bucket-worthy trips, so it's not like I'm deprived or anything.

But secretly, I do have ONE item on my bucket list.

I would love to see Wagner's operatic epic Der Ring des Nibelungen (usually referred to as "the Ring Cycle") performed live. It consists of four very long, very German operas based on Germanic-Norse folklore that is massive in scale and epic in subject-matter. The Ring Cycle concerns nothing less than Greed, Betrayal, Heroism and the Downfall of The Gods. Tolkien stole its basic plot to write The Lord of the Rings but left out all the gods and stuck in wizards and hobbits instead.

Yes, I've seen various Ring Cycle productions on film or heard recordings of them. And they're great! But I'd love to see a live production, which is not terribly easy to do without paying for major travel and tickets purchased often years in advance.

However, The Gods (or someone like them)* have smiled on me recently! My city's own Edmonton Opera has decided to stage a Ring Cycle! There will be one opera of the Cycle performed each year over the next four years. The operas will be scaled-down versions, with a lot of the blah-blah-blah parts omitted, but still with the basic plots and all the famous musical parts intact. This will make the operas easier and less expensive to stage and at the same time, more palatable to the Younger Audience (Millennials and Gen Z, not us old Boomers) that the Opera Biz is trying so desperately to attract for the future.

Hey, that's good enough for me! I often say anyway that the Great Classics of every old art form usually need a serious editor (I'm looking at YOU, Shakespeare, Dickens and Melville) so why shouldn't Wagner be subject to some judicious pruning as well?

In May, Edmonton Opera performed the first opera of the Ring Cycle -- Das Rheingold.  I'll tell you about it in my next post. I know you will all be on pins and needles until then, right? Right?

But in the meantime, here's a question for you. Answers on a postcard please**

*   phrase shamelessly stolen from Dr Spo of Spo-Reflections

** phrase blatantly stolen from John Gray of Going Gently