Two hundred and fifty

... days until the start of the Ring Cycle in the new Toronto Opera House (I refuse to call it by its corporate-sponsorship name) and I am starting to get excited. It'll be my 6th Ring, God willing (New York, Amsterdam, New York again, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Toronto); and while that may sound like a lot to non-opera-goers, for the cognoscenti it marks me as a rank beginner. Many of the operatour crowd have seen a dozen or more Rings, and we met a man in Baden-Baden who claimed to be seeing it performed live for the forty-third time.

The Ring is a sheep-from-goats-sorter of the highest order, one knows within minutes whether one will love or hate it and there really is no middle ground. Personally I love it (obviously), I think it contains some of the most marvellous music ever written (e.g. the very beginning, as the curtain rises on the Rhinemaidens). Parts of the Ring have colonised my life: every time I'm on a train that goes through Hagen, I sing (sotto voce) Alberich's "Schläfst Du, Hagen mein Sohn?" from Götterdämmerung; every time I gather up the dirty laundry I hug it to my belly, kick up my heels, and cry "Hee hee!" in imitation of Graham Clark as Mime, gleefully brewing up poison in the Amsterdam Siegfried.

The story is full of minor absurdities, as is true of most operas, but is still dense enough that it remains interesting after repeated hearings. At every Ring I have felt that I heard some piece of music, or understood some aspect of the story, for the first time.

I'll admit that there are a few parts that you can safely sleep through; but that is true of many things - even of Proust. A Ring Cycle is hard work for performers and audience alike, sixteen hours of music over four nights, so many people do nod off. The Baden-Baden Ring in the Winter of 2004, a touring production from the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, was the only case yet where I stayed awake for the whole Cycle, a mark of its excellence. The Baden-Baden Ring was superbly sung, played and staged (brilliant design by George Tsypin) but two years later I remember how good it was rather than any specific moments of goodness.

I wasn't very impressed by the Stuttgart Ring at the time, although it did have its moments (among them Angela Denoke as the finest, most believable Sieglinde I have yet heard); I found that there was an awful lot of wilful cleverness on the part of the directors, often at the expense of the story; but in retrospect it is one of the productions that I remember most fondly. My favourite Ring memory is of the final moments of the Stuttgart Götterdämmerung: in contrast to the usual mob scenes, Brunnhilde dismisses the chorus and surviving singers one by one, gently waking the dead Siegfried who looks around with the innocent wonder of a child before she sends him off, to finish up alone at the front of an empty stage as if on the edge of a cliff, singing out into the auditorium. Magnificent.

I wonder what the Toronto Ring will hold?