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Music

Circling the ‘Ring’

The Machine under the microscope: Wagner’s masterpiece at the Metropolitan Opera.

Life of a 'Salesman'

May 18Wrapping the 'Ring'

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Katarina Dalayman as Brunnhilde in Wagner's “Götterdämmerung” at the Metropolitan Opera. The Met’s three cycles of Wagner’s “Ring” ended last weekend.

The Metropolitan Opera’s three cycles of Wagner’s “Ring” ended last weekend in the house with a final “Götterdämmerung.” On Saturday, the concluding Encore HD broadcast of “Götterdämmerung” will be shown in movie theaters throughout North America. So, the time has come to wrap up our “Ring” blog, which, speaking just as a Wagner buff and a Times reader, I enjoyed immensely.

The range of passionate, informed and articulate comments suggests how central the “Ring” is to the musical lives of opera lovers. And I cannot think of another operatic production that has been analyzed, picked apart, defended and lambasted as much as Robert Lepage’s staging for the Met. Love it or hate it (or, like many, including me, love it and hate it), this is the production the Met will keep offering for the foreseeable future.

But Wagner fans have only to wait until later this year to see it again on television, when PBS broadcasts all four operas in close proximity. (The dates will be announced shortly.) Next season, of course, the “Ring” returns to the Met’s stage for three more cycles. For all the complaints the production elicited from opera enthusiasts and critics, every performance I attended was packed and drew big ovations for individual singers, the great Met orchestra and the conductor Fabio Luisi.

The Met’s official video document of the Lepage “Ring” has Mr. Luisi conducting only the final two operas: “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung.” James Levine, while he was still healthy enough, conducted the first two, “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre. Mr. Levine is a preeminent Wagnerian, and Mr. Luisi brought his own lighter, lucid approach to the scores. Ideally, to be effective as an entity, a “Ring” needs one conductor. If roles that recur during the four operas are taken by different singers, though not desirable, this can work and is not uncommon.

But in terms of conductorial consistency, the low point was the Met’s third cycle. Mr. Luisi conducted only the first two operas, with Derrick Inouye taking over “Siegfried” and John Keenan leading “Götterdämmerung.” Though Mr. Luisi withdrew from gigs elsewhere to assume the “Ring” when Mr. Levine took ill, he could not cancel every commitment.

For PBS broadcasts, which are taken from the HDs, the roles that really matter, thanks goodness, are sung throughout the cycle by the same artists: Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde, Bryn Terfel as Wotan, Eric Owens as Alberich and, the biggest surprise of the Met’s cast, the hearty, youthful-sounding tenor Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried.

May 11Video Artistry in the 'Ring'

By ROBERTA SMITH

Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Bryn Terfel as Wotan and Katarina Dalayman as Brünnhilde in a scene from “Die Walküre.”

Video is so central to Robert Lepage’s new production of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera that he divided it among three “video image artists,” to use the Met’s term. Boris Firquet, who made his Met debut in 2008 with the video designs for Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust” — another Lepage production — was responsible for those in “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre.” Pedro Pires made his Met debut with the videos for “Siegfried,” and Lionel Arnould made his with those for “Götterdämmerung.”

Although Mr. Lepage was clearly in charge, there are discernible differences of sensibility. The opening of “Das Rheingold” and its wonderful pebbles aside, Mr. Firquet seems responsible for some of the flashier moments in the “Ring,” like the veritable light show of stripes that play on the drawbridge to Valhalla at this opera’s close. And in “Die Walküre” he twice layers video atop video. In Act I, while Siegmund tells Sieglinde and Hunding about his childhood on the run in the forest, a rather too hysterical (and too Disneyesque) shadow play of battling and fleeing loincloth-wearing figures flits across the wood-grain planks. In Act II, when Wotan recounts to Brünnhilde the story of the theft of the Rhinegold, the making of the ring and Alberich’s curse — which set the cycle in motion — the gist of the action appears in fuzzily expressionistic scenes on an immense eyeball-like orb. Evoking everything from Bosch to Munch to the German Neo-Expressionist Jörg Immendorff, the imagery was beautiful, if slightly distracting because I couldn’t always rectify it with Wagner’s narrative.

Mr. Pires seemed to favor a relatively straightforward realism, opening “Siegfried” with an immense, greatly magnified close-up of the forest floor, full of tree roots, slithering worms and creeping bugs that brought a particular Germanic, Dürer-like attention to detail to mind. Act II is set against a wonderful forest of white birches and features a video bird that flies credibly from limb to limb, warning Siegfried about danger; at one point it even lands in his lap.

Mr. Arnould made greater use of abstraction; he filled in some of the orchestral passages in “Götterdämmerung” with radiant, gently pulsating moiré patterns, often lavender, that for some reason (the intimations of Ben-Day dots?) reminded me of Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art reprises of Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. But realism is not absent: witness the documentarylike vistas of tree-topped rocks and close-ups of water as Siegfried (and his horse) take their raft journey.

Other scenes hover between abstraction and representation. One of the best moments of the Lepage “Ring” over all, as Anthony Tommasini noted in The New York Times, is the stark expanse of orange-tinted wood grain that denotes the hall of the Gibichungs, Siegfried’s hosts on the Rhine. A large central circle in the grain suggests both a cathedral’s rose window and a target, which seems appropriate to the place where Siegfried is tricked into betraying Brünnhilde and where his burning funeral pyre signals the fall of Valhalla. As the flames rise, the wood grain acquires livid tints of turquoise and turns ravishingly painterly. Then the cleansing waters of the Rhine return, and for the first time since the opening of “Das Rheingold,” the planks of the machine undulate gently, suggesting waves.

Several times the musical and psychological action of Wagner’s epic is underscored by unexpected action in the video. In the final scene of “Die Walküre,” when Brünnhilde pleads with Wotan to forgive her, the machine assumes a kind of craggy, Matterhorn shape and is projected with textures suggesting gray, icy rocks; as Wotan repeatedly rejects his daughter, recurring avalanches of white snow cascade silently downward, reiterating the way he steels himself against her.

Similarly, after Siegfried is murdered by Hagen beside a rushing mountain stream — which is projected onto a broad, central swath of the machine — his weaker half-brother, Gunther, who also wanted Siegfried dead but is shocked to see him killed, rinses his hands in the stream. The entire stream quickly turns red, and this gorgeous flood of color reinforces our sense of Gunther’s growing guilt and horror.

These are not, perhaps, subtle effects, yet they sharpen your understanding of what’s going on in the moment, unfolding as the music and the drama, so inextricably entwined, also unfold. In a sense they function similarly to the seat-back titles: they enrich meaning and make it more accessible. And they bring the eye into the already complex interaction of mind and ear that Wagner’s art so lavishly stimulates.

May 11'Ring' Heads

Sean Patrick Farrell/The New York Times

The Wagner Society of New York holds a meet and greet for an international group of "Ring" cycle fans attending the new production at the Metropolitan Opera.

May 10Projecting an Epic

By ROBERTA SMITH

Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

A scene from “Das Rheingold” at the Metropolitan Opera. The world of the “Ring” operas is largely created by HD video projections.

I am not a Wagner buff. I love opera, but my taste, such as it is, runs to Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and anything Italian. Until two weeks ago my experience of Wagner’s “Ring” was largely limited to two cycles of the Metropolitan Opera’s retired Otto Schenk production. Luckily, my second encounter occurred after the advent of seat-back titles, which greatly enhanced my grasp of Wagner’s genius as a musician and storyteller.

And now I’ve seen the whole of Robert Lepage’s contested new production for the Met, performed in front of, beneath and atop the shape-shifting 45-ton behemoth known as the machine, layered with video projections. Mostly I loved it for its psychological intensity and musical clarity, despite the machine’s occasional clanking sounds and, even worse, the distracting use of body doubles.

Speaking as a neophyte, I feel that with this production I “got” both the musicality of the “Ring” and its tragic, nearly Shakespearean magnitude as never before. Maybe it was simply a case of the third time being the charm. But sometimes it seemed that I was not alone in my enthusiasm. This was suggested by the audience’s engulfing roar of approval after Act I of “Die Walküre” on Monday — with Eva-Marie Westbroek and Stuart Skelton as the doomed lover-twins Sieglinde and Siegmund, and Hans-Peter König as the brutal Hunding — a sound almost as memorable as the music itself.

As an art critic I have suffered through more than my share of generic video art, so, heading in, I probably dreaded the video more than the machine. But I found myself for the most part won over by the way video softened, elaborated and to some extent ultimately justified the machine. Without video, the machine would be nothing; the opposite is not quite as true.

Anthony Tommasini has already noted in The New York Times that this apparatus — which often resembles a kinetic sculpture — may be at its best when quietly stationary, functioning foremost as a video screen, and he may be right. The structural flexibility of the machine should not be overlooked. Whirling and flipping, rising and falling, in unison or separately, its 24 big planks approximate the sometimes steep, sometimes gentle banks of the Rhine and Siegfried’s raft as he rides down it; the mountain keeps of Wotan and Fricka and the walls and drawbridge of Valhalla; the Nibelung underworld and other caves; an assortment of dense forests; a castle on the Rhine and a house deep in the woods. But for the most part they only approximate: it is video that clinches these illusions, defining the machine’s abstract forms with colorful, textured, often hyper-realistic skins.

The Lepage “Ring” is really an orgy of video, carefully sequenced and impeccably presented, relayed by 10 HD projectors, and aided by sparing use of motion sensors and even voice-activated imagery (the bubbles rising behind the Rhinemaidens as they dangle, singing, in front of the machine's vertical face projected with watery blue waves). There is even a live-action projection or two, as when Siegfried, gazing down into a quiet mountain stream, is greeted by a reflection that matches his every expression and gesture.

Video adds scintillating expanses of pebbles to the banks of the Rhine that scatter and cascade whenever the dallying Rhinemaidens touch them, or Alberich, desperate for love, clambers up or is pushed back down. It creates swirling clouds and jagged spikes of lightning in the realm of the gods; rock textures in various realms; torrential, flowing, trickling or gently pooling water; several varieties of tree trunks and quantities of fire. Flames dance around the feet of Loge, the fire god and Wotan’s right-hand man. Flaming lava flows between the rocks when Wotan commands Brünnhilde not to aid Siegmund in his battle with Hunding.

And of course flames, projected onto the jutting planks of the machine, form the ring of fire with which Wotan surrounds Brünnhilde when, as her punishment for disobeying him and trying to save Siegmund, he strips her of her godly powers and puts her to sleep. This fire-ringed mountaintop figures in three of the four operas and becomes a bit tedious; its animated cracklings start to suggest an unusually large version of fake logs while also dwarfing the singers.

What I saw at the Met was not so much video art as a very advanced, dazzlingly mutable version of stage-set painting, which is perhaps even better, or at least more useful. Video’s light-filled immateriality and the ease of scene-changing seem especially suited to the way Wagner’s narrative roams through time and space — to spheres both natural and imagined — with little regard for logistics. At times the mutations themselves are riveting to watch. At the beginning of “Die Walküre,” for example, the gray flat-sided planks rise to the vertical and as they go, video projections turn them into round, soaring tree trunks seen through drifting snow, then they flip inward at the bottom to become the sloping ceiling of Hunding’s house in the forest and in a twinkling are transformed into milled beams.

It is in some ways simply old-fashioned stagecraft, but it is seamlessly fluid, happening before our very eyes and, momentarily, breathtaking. Most of all, it seems modern; unobtrusively, it brings a touch of newness to a familiar art form.

May 8Video: Walking Sideways

Gabe Johnson and Daniel J. Wakin/The New York Times

Acrobat stunt doubles walk the Metropolitan Opera’s elaborate set in Robert Lepage’s staging of Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

May 7Analyzing 'Wagner's Dream'

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

“Wagner’s Dream”: a loaded title if ever there was one. Implicit almost throughout Susan Froemke’s documentary film of that name — when it is not explicit — is the notion that Wagner, frustrated with limited 19th-century staging techniques, could only have dreamed of something like the high-tech machine Robert Lepage has used to stage the “Ring of the Nibelungen” at the Metropolitan Opera.

“When you look at this,” Georges Nicholson, identified as a Wagner historian , said, watching an early stage of the machine’s construction, “you feel like this is finally the ‘Ring’ that Wagner would have wanted all along.”

“We are actually having the vision that Wagner had when he was composing,” Mr. Nicholson added.

“Wagner’s Dream,” directed by Ms. Froemke and edited by Bob Eisenhardt, had its premiere last month in the Tribeca Film Festival. It will be shown on Monday evening in theaters around New York and throughout the United States and Canada as prelude to screenings of the original HD presentations of each of the individual operas: with, that is, James Levine conducting “Rheingold” and “Die Walküre” from the 2010-11 season and Fabio Luisi the rest from this season.

The film, though a bit overlong at 1 hour 52 minutes (would Wagnerites have it any other way?), is beautifully made. There is — like the production or not — quite a tale to tell, full of its own drama, including serious mishaps in performances as well as rehearsals, all accounted for here.

But the tone is basically adulatory apart from a few skeptical notes sound by ticket buyers and audience members. Mr. Lepage and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, cut heroic figures in an epic adventure.

Mr. Gelb, having collaborated with Ms. Froemke in the making of earlier films, clearly trusted her and granted extraordinary access behind the scenes. There were “no limits,” Ms. Froemke said in introducing the premiere.

Seen up close, the 45-ton machine and its workings look terrifying, and it is fascinating to see some of the singers work out their panic (or not). “It’s not a dangerous set,” Mr. Lepage says at one point. “It’s a very, very kooky, articulate set.”

The leading soprano Deborah Voigt, for one, was not buying euphemisms. Having fallen off the machine in her entrance in the first “Walküre” in 2011, she refused to climb aboard in later presentations. (It was noted in a panel discussion among the principals after the film’s premiere that Mr. Lepage had coaxed her back onto the machine for the performances this spring.) By the time of rehearsals for “Götterdämmerung,” Ms. Voigt was described as desperate, and she looked it.

The soundtrack revels, of course, in Wagner’s music. It provides an amusing moment when the production moves from its origins in Canada (the Ex Machina studios in Quebec and elsewhere) to New York, overlaying the clanking “Rheingold” music for the descent to Nibelheim.

All in all, the film is an entertaining and informative watch even for this unbelieving critic who would prefer that it had ended with a line of the text it started with: “The quest to produce a perfect ‘Ring’ remains opera’s greatest challenge.”

May 2A 'Ring' That Tells Rather Than Untells

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris.

This is my fifth complete Wagner "Ring" production in 36 years, and it's much the most conservative. Where else did a modern "Walküre" have Fricka actually arrive in a chariot drawn by rams? As for a stage that tilts, rises, falls and rotates, all that occurred, albeit in different ways, in the 1976 Götz Friedrich "Ring" at Covent Garden. I’ve been used to “Ring” productions that are science-fiction or abstract or deconstructionist: some good, some ghastly. Robert Lepage’s gods and heroes belong to storybooks: partly refreshing, partly just quaint.

Mr. Lepage, whose work in theater and opera I’ve seen over 20 years, can be much more exasperating than this – or much more imaginative and revelatory. Here some of his conservatism is a welcome relief.

Above all, I’m glad to see a “Ring” that tells rather than untells Wagner’s tale. Unlike the Met’s “Sonnambula” or “Traviata,” it doesn’t condescend to either opera or audience by imposing a different story. And it even tells the “Ring” in ways that sometimes connect to the “Lord of the Rings” movies. (The Wanderer in “Siegfried” resembles Gandalf, and in “Walküre” a ball of fire arises like the Palantir.)

No, it’s not serious or beautiful enough; some of its visual effects are certainly trite; but several of the performances (notably Robert Brubaker’s as Mime and Jay Hunter Morris’s as Siegfried) are as good as any I’ve seen. (Too bad Jonas Kaufmann was unable to sing at the April 30 “Walküre.”) With Fabio Luisi conducting, plenty of the score sounds new.

And Bryn Terfel, in the current second cycle (which started on April 26) has been the best riveting, imaginative Wotan of my experience. Some of my previous Wotans were rightly celebrated; I don’t forget Norman Bailey (English National Opera, 1976) or John Tomlinson (Covent Garden, mid-1990s), and I have Wotan recordings going back to 1907. Yet I can’t think of any of those while I’m hanging on Mr. Terfel’s every word.

The speaking placement of his voice is wonderful: he doesn’t heave into a note, he just seems to lodge it directly in your ear. The quality of sheer utterance in every word, the range of color and volume in the phrasing: I’ve never known these equaled. And there have been three crucial final words – “Eid” (“oath”) to Fricka, “Geh” (“Go”) to Hunding and “Wurm” (“Dragon”) to Fafner – that he has uttered with such amazingly chesty inflections that they’re simply among the greatest (and most eloquent) noises I’ve ever heard.

May 2'The Ring' in HD

By ZACHARY WOOLFE

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

A scene from "Die Walkure."

The final two Wagner “Ring” operas, “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung,” were on the agenda as I traveled around the country over the last six months watching the Metropolitan Opera’s 11 “Live in HD” movie theater broadcasts. I saw “Siegfried” in Farmingdale, N.Y., way out on Long Island, back in November, and “Götterdämmerung” at the tiny theater a few blocks from the New Jersey Transit station in Cranford, N.J., in February. There was a particularly congenial, we’re-all-in-this-together spirit to the HD afternoons with these Wagner works. After all, it’s rare to find yourself in a room with a group of people for five or six hours at a time. People were a bit more talkative than usual, sharing their snacks as they settled in for the long haul. But I found the broadcasts themselves puzzling. Given that Robert Lepage’s “Ring” is the signature production of Peter Gelb’s Met, I was surprised at how ill-suited both “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” were for the HD series, Mr. Gelb’s signature initiative. These broadcasts did, at least, give support to Mr. Gelb’s assertions that Met productions are not conceived with HD in mind.

Mr. Lepage’s production is based around video projections. Anyone who has ever made a home movie that involves shots of a television set knows that filming film doesn’t turn out well. It tends to look pixelated and unconvincing. So it was with “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung”: projection effects that were impressive at the Met looked blurry, cheap or both in HD. This was especially problematic in “Siegfried,” which had the most detailed and naturalistic projections in the cycle.

On HD the projections also posed a problem I hadn’t noticed when I saw the operas live: the projected images tend to fall on the singers, who are, after all, coming in between the projector and the machine onto which they are shining. So Siegfried, supposedly walking out of the Rhine River, is covered head to toe in bluish light. In a recent interview Mr. Lepage indicated that this problem was being addressed. In any case it’s a minor point, but it’s cumulatively quite distracting, and it wouldn’t matter so much if there were more to think about or look at it in Mr. Lepage’s productions.

Those productions, which often seemed empty and aimless in person, get a degree more tension from the closer focus of the HD broadcasts, especially in the harrowing, intimate domestic dramas that make up much of “Götterdämmerung” and were now framed more tightly. In HD it was somewhat easier to care about the characters.Beginning on May 9 (after a showing of the documentary on the making of the Lepage “Ring,” “Wagner’s Dream,” on Monday) and at irregular intervals, the Met will rerun the four “Ring” HD broadcasts in movie theaters, a true “HD Ring.” What have you thought about these Wagner broadcasts? How has Mr. Lepage’s vision translated to cinema?

May 1'Ring' Criticism, Rescinded

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.

WQXR pulled a blog posting critical of the Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle last month after the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, personally complained to the radio station’s top executive.

Laura Walker, the president and chief executive of WQXR’s parent, New York Public Radio, said in a telephone interview on Monday that the post “wasn’t up to our high standards” and was already under review when she heard from Mr. Gelb.

She said the station’s editorial staff made the decision to pull the item from its Operavore blog, and she backed them up. Ms. Walker added that she had told Mr. Gelb that WQXR would “not shy away from criticizing the Met and anything they do,” while making sure such pieces were fair and accurate. Ms. Walker said the piece did not go through the usual chain of editors. “Somebody decided erroneously that speed was better than proper vetting,” she said. “It was a breakdown in the process.”

The posting, by a regular contributor to Operavore, Olivia Giovetti, summarized a New York Times interview with Mr. Gelb that was published on April 3. It was online for less than a day before it was pulled, according to a WQXR spokeswoman. Ms. Giovetti did not respond to an e-mail or to several phone messages.

Ms. Walker, without stating what her specific objections to the piece were, said it was not a review and “not exactly opinion either,” and after it quoted from the Times interview, “goes on without any substantiation or reporting.”

Mr. Gelb confirmed that he had called Ms. Walker to complain sometime after the item was posted.

“I told her I thought it was objectionable,” Mr. Gelb said. “It was an awful and nasty piece, which in my opinion was totally unjustified.” He declined to say whether he specifically asked Ms. Walker to withdraw the posting. Mr. Gelb added that he has on occasion complained about unfairness or factual errors to other publications (including The New York Times) but generally refrains from doing so.

“I have to have fairly thick skin to exist in this job,” Mr. Gelb said.

The Met has invested enormous amounts of money, energy and time in the $16 million production by Robert Lepage, which has received mixed reviews.

Ms. Giovetti introduced her summary by quoting the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross as writing of the “Ring” production, “Pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.” She said one of the production’s chief problems was failing to live up to the hype that had preceded it.

Some of her comments were also directed at Mr. Gelb. “Like any good marketer,” she wrote, “he firmly believes in his product, even if no one else does.”

Ms. Giovetti – referring to Mr. Gelb’s statement that he functioned as the “director of productions” – wrote that the Met under him “bears the mothball-like scent of an oligarchy.” She also implied that Mr. Gelb had worried more about the noises from the production’s huge rotating set than about the safety of the performers.

The Met is now presenting the four operas of the “Ring” in complete cycles. Ms. Giovetti reviewed individual productions in a sometimes critical tone on the Operavore blog.

The Met has a small sponsorship arrangement with WQXR, which for decades has broadcast live Met performances on Saturdays.

May 1A Last-Minute Siegmund

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Frank van Aken, with his wife Eva-Maria Westbroek, filled in for a major role in Wagner’s “Die Walküre” on Saturday.

The Dutch tenor Frank van Aken certainly got more than he had bargained for on his first trip to America. He had come to New York to hear his wife, the soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, sing Sieglinde in Wagner’s “Walküre” at the Met.

But he never got his chance to cheer her on from the audience. Instead, Mr. van Aken was drafted as an 11th-hour replacement after Jonas Kaufmann, the intended Siegmund, had withdrawn from Saturday’s matinee because of illness.

Wagner got more than he had bargained for as well, Peter Gelb noted wryly from the stage while announcing the cast change, with a husband-and-wife team singing the incestuous siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde.

Mr. van Aken has sung the role before at major houses (and indeed, has sung it with his wife); he was also a last-minute replacement at La Scala in December 2010. But he hadn’t sung the role since then and had only a few minutes to try out his voice on the main stage at the Met before the Saturday matinee. So it was hardly surprising he sounded rather unsteady.

His wife, who sounded radiant and sang expressively throughout, also had a rocky Met debut: because of illness, she dropped out midway through a performance as Sieglinde at the Met last year.

The glitch-prone set was well behaved on Saturday, and fortunately none of the Valkyries, who sang beautifully, tumbled off during their rodeo ride on the machine. The only people who seemed in imminent danger were the pit musicians, almost impaled by Wotan’s runaway spear.

April 25Considering the Cycle

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Stephen Gould in Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” at the Metropolitan Opera. On Tuesday night the Met concluded the first of three complete cycles of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” this spring.

Well, after all the talk, the hype, the initial malfunctions of the machine (the 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks) and the $16 million price tag, the Metropolitan Opera finished its first presentation of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s “Ring” performed complete as a four-opera cycle. And you truly cannot assess a “Ring” production until you see it as an entity.

Except for one funny glitch involving videos (and a wayward image of the Windows logo), the machine worked and everything went smoothly. There was great singing. And the conductor Fabio Luisi led lucid, vibrant and intelligent performances of these towering scores.

So how effective, finally, is the Lepage production? I reviewed all four shows individually as they were introduced. Here are my thoughts after seeing the first cycle complete, which ended on Tuesday night with “Götterdämmerung.” (There are two more cycles to come, beginning on Thursday evening.)

Mr. Luisi is a distinguished conductor. But James Levine, at his best, drew more weight, urgency and awe from the “Ring” operas. I wonder how this “Ring” might have turned out had he been a healthy and fully engaged music director through the entire project? What do you think?

April 20Robert Lepage on His 'Purist' Critics

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

From left, Richard Croft, Bryn Terfel, Robert Lepage, James Levine and Stephanie Blythe after a performance of “Das Rheingold” at the Met in 2010.

“I don’t read the critics” ranks close to “The check is in the mail” as a frequently heard phrase that produces half-smiles of skepticism.

Nevertheless, Robert Lepage, the director of the Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle, said in a recent interview that he truly had not perused reviews of the four-opera work now going through its paces at the Met. But he acknowledged having heard from others about the many negative comments, which fall into two broad categories: his giant set overpowers the singers and distracts from the music, and he has failed to put an interpretive stamp on either the work’s message or the characters on the stage.

“No, I’m not affected by them,” Mr. Lepage said of the critiques, adding hastily, “I haven’t just heard nasty things, first of all.” But he readily took on the critics, saying they were purists who failed to appreciate spectacle and the idea of a “Ring” reduced to its essence.

He called criticism of his 45-ton set, a machine of rotating planks that morph into different settings with the help of projections, “a false debate,” given that the idea of a giant transforming set has been used elsewhere.

At the Met, “the times will catch up with that concept,” he said. “People are very protective,” he added of Met audiences.

He defended the set’s size as appropriate to the vast environs of the house. “You’re in a place where things have to be huge and echo what the singers are trying to convey,” he said.

Negative comments about the large set often come from people focused only on the music, Mr. Lepage said, adding that he was was also trying to cater to those “who love the spectacle of opera, who love the magnifying of the ideas you can’t see in the eyes of the singer.”

“But you have a bunch of purists who say, ‘We don’t want those people because they don’t know what opera is,’" he continued. "I don’t refute what specialists say, but I also have to entertain 4,000 people. It’s all about storytelling.”

He said that cranky operagoers who sit “with the score on their laps” and never look up hear a creak in the set, “and they get all — ” Mr. Lepage finished the sentence with a lemon-sucking face. “These people — go see a concert version of the ‘Ring.’”

Mr. Lepage acknowledged flaws in his “Ring,” but said there was also “a lot of great stuff.”

He said a major aim of his “Ring” staging was to strip away modern interpretations. “The first ‘Ring’ in Bayreuth was about the poetical world, the mythological world,” he said. In many recent productions, he added, “it’s always dipped in these layers and layers of socio-political stances.

"People in Europe," he said, "have to try to get even with Wagner: ‘He said all these wrong things about the Jewish people in his days. One of his greatest fans is Hitler.’ We know all that. Europe is trying to get even with him.

“I said, ‘That’s all your stuff. Let’s strip all of that from the 20th century and go back to the 19th century.’”

Referring to his vision of the “Ring,” Mr. Lepage acknowledged that some people “might find it thin,” because he did not want “to make a statement on Wagner.” He also said critics had unfairly focused on the set.

“We spent hours and hours talking about the characters, arguing about visions, where they should move,” he said. “I spent so much time guiding singers.”

Regardless of the production’s reception, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is bringing Mr. Lepage back for at least two future productions, Thomas Adès’s “Tempest” and Messiaen’s “St. François d’Assise.”

“You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not,” Mr. Lepage said good-naturedly as he walked out of the room and headed to rehearsal.

April 18Staging a Cycle

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Deborah Voigt, center above, in a scene from “Die Walküre” at the Metropolitan Opera.

No more sliding god entrances. Siegmund and Sieglinde interact closer to the audience. Follow spots have been moved to keep projected scenery off costumes. And the creaking quotient has been reduced.

The Metropolitan Opera is now mounting complete cycles of the four operas that make up Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, after individual performances over the last two years. The director of the production, Robert Lepage, has made changes throughout, now that the works are being presented as Wagner originally intended them: together, or roughly so.

The operas are being performed consecutively in three cycles through May 12.

Mr. Lepage said that now, after focusing on them individually, he can more easily envision the whole work, more than 15 hours of music drama.

“If you see each increment, they all mean something different,” he said in a recent interview in a barren office at the Met. “But when you see them as a package, it’s like connecting Christmas tree lights. Suddenly the energy of one bleeds into the other, and a lot of stuff starts to make sense. For me, that was interesting, how the whole the thing shines.”

Mr. Lepage said that he had restaged “a lot of stuff” for the cycle, but that the changes amounted mostly to details. A few examples:

In Wotan’s monologue in Act II of “Die Walküre,” a giant projected eye contained images evoking later events. Those images have been made more specific, Mr. Lepage said, using elements from the productions that followed. “It was much more impressionistic,” Mr. Lepage said. “It’s all now much clearer and closer to the story. It accompanies very specifically what Wotan sings about.”

During the long scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde in “Die Walküre,” the couple now spend more time downstage than in the earlier version. “You want them to be more present,” Mr. Lepage said. Their movements have also been revised in closer connection to the score, he said.

The conductor, Fabio Luisi, who took over when the music director James Levine withdrew for health reasons, became involved in those decisions, Mr. Lepage said. “It’s a more surgical approach,” he added.

April 17Seeing the 'Ring' in 'Ka'

By ZACHARY WOOLFE

Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

The resources of Cirque du Soleil allowed Mr. Lepage to create something of Wagnerian scale in “Ka.”

Before The Machine, there was “Ka.”

In 2005 Cirque du Soleil hired Robert Lepage to create and direct that new franchise in its worldwide empire of extravagant, semi-clothed acrobatic spectacles. The company reportedly spent over $200 million producing “Ka” for Las Vegas, even building a 2,000-seat theater for it inside the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino.

The same year, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, asked Mr. Lepage to direct a new production of the “Ring” cycle. Despite the differences between the gymnastic circus and Richard Wagner’s magnum opus, the productions can be seen as companions. The Met’s “Ring,” like “Ka,” focuses on a flexible, shape-shifting stage and interactive video projections that respond to the performers’ movement.

When I went to Vegas to see “Ka” last week, I found that the two works, circus and opera, also have in common remarkably smooth, elegant transitions between scenes. More depressingly, they share a deadness at their centers: when the sets stop moving and it’s time for reflection, or character, or emotion, Mr. Lepage seems at a loss. If you think the “Ring” is about crowd control and logistical challenges, “Ka” would have convinced you that Mr. Lepage is your man. But if you think it’s about philosophical complexities and dramatic nuances, the idea of handing it to the creator of “Ka” is just silly.

Have you seen Mr. Lepage’s Cirque show? His “Ring”? Both? I would love to hear your sense of their similarities and differences.

April 13Leitmotifs in the 'Ring'

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Ken Howard

Bryn Terfel as Wotan and Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde in Act 2 of Wagner’s "Die Walküre" at the Metropolitan Opera.

One of the fascinations of the “Ring,” of course, is Wagner’s use of leitmotifs: short tunes that are often manipulated and blended to give a musical subtext to the psychology and drama spooling out on stage. The rwagner.net site gives MIDI versions of the leitmotifs. The Met produced its own video feature on the subject. There is a superb catalog of the leitmotifs for those who read music, along with synthesized audio samples. You can sort by scene or subject. (Ring, Curse, Nature, Rhine, Woe: take your pick.) There is also a primer that uses actual sound recordings.

The “Ring” can be read in many ways – an allegory of 19th-century society, a contemplation of the nature of power, a poem in music – but it is above all a family drama. When the Los Angeles Opera produced a cycle several years ago, The Los Angeles Times offered a superb interactive graphic on the characters and their relationships. The costumes are completely different, but it is worth resurrecting for the Met production.

April 12The ‘Ring’ Throughout History

Gabe Johnson and Daniel J. Wakin/The New York Times

Daniel J. Wakin discusses various stagings of Richard Wagner’s epic opera cycle.

April 6The Met Begins ‘Ring’ Cycle

Emily B. Hager and Daniel J. Wakin/The New York Times

Daniel J. Wakin, a classical music and dance reporter for The Times, discusses the Metropolitan Opera production of the "Ring" cycle.

IntroCircling the ‘Ring’: An Online Discussion

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Bryn Terfel and Deborah Voigt in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011 production of “Die Walküre,” on the machine, the 45-ton set of movable planks.

“What is it, glossy ones, that so gleams and glistens there?”

Alberich the homely dwarf poses that question to a trio of Rhinemaidens at the outset of Richard Wagner’s four-work cycle, “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

The answer is gold: the devilish root of 16 hours of opera that is unlike any other work of art in Western culture in its ability to hold the interest of each succeeding age, its musical exploration of human psychology, its monumental architecture, its sheer length.

Gold fuels the story of love, power, redemption and renunciation in the worlds of gods and heroes, dwarves and giants, Valkyries and mortals.

The Metropolitan Opera is presenting three complete cycles of the “Ring” production conceived by the Canadian director Robert Lepage, starting on Saturday and ending on May 12.

The “Ring” and its mythically based libretto, written by Wagner in the middle of the 19th century and then put to music over the next quarter century, is a fruitful mine of interpretation. Every era has found its reflection in it. There has been a Marxist “Ring,” a fairy-tale “Ring,” a post-nuclear war “Ring,” a symbolist “Ring,” a multinational corporate “Ring,” an Old West “Ring.”

Wagner himself saw it as “a political parable on the use and misuse of power,” wrote John Louis DiGaetani, a Hofstra English professor, in a collection of essays called “Inside the Ring” (McFarland & Company, 2006). It was also, Mr. DiGaetani continued, “a dialectic on the inevitable corruption of capital, an environmental warning against the rape of nature and a philosophical manifesto on the need to remove oneself spiritually from worldly entanglements.”

Mr. Lepage’s conception is neutral and traditional, with one gigantic exception: the 45-ton set made up of rotating planks on an axis that rises and falls, a balky, creaky leviathan called “the machine,” which also serves as a backdrop for sophisticated video projections. It has drawn much attention from music critics and from audience members either impressed by its maneuverings or wondering if something will go wrong before their eyes.

For the next five weeks, reporters and critics and video journalists at The Times will be weighing in on the Lepage conception, on Wagner himself, on the story and the music and the spectacle. Here, readers will find practical information about the “Ring” experience, journalistic insight into the production and a wide range of aesthetic judgments.

Please join the conversation. How does the “Ring” apply to our times? What are the themes and ideas that touch us the most today? What “Ring” memories do you have to share?

Add your thoughts to the comment section at right. And if you haven’t already, take a look at a related piece by our chief classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, from this week. Mr. Tommasini, who has already reviewed the individual productions of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, will save his final thoughts on the full cycle for later.