Ring a ding ding

What was he thinking? Welsh opera superstar Bryn Terfel looks loopily divine in his gloriously OTT get-up as king of the gods Wotan in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Wagner's Das Rheingold.


And that, Mr Gnome and I confess, is precisely what we love about opera: its unique ability to create a co-existence of the insane and the inspirational, the nutty and the numinous, barking madness and heart-piercing magnificence.

I guess I caught the opera thing at a very early age - and from a bizarre source: a childhood viewing of the Marx Brothers' classic A Night at the Opera, though it was to be years before I felt the visceral impact of a live performance.

Stage 2 infection (the Wagner thing) came in my mid-thirties. Welsh National Opera was performing its Ring Cycle in Bristol. I coughed up for all four shows, and turned up with minimal expectations.

What happened over the course of one short and three very long evenings?

Very, very hard to explain.

Something to do with the coming together of a powerful storyline (earthily human and wildly archetypal) with the music...

The music. Wagner's music. Describing the 'Wagner difference' would take a cleverer pen than mine: soaring, surging, most of the time far quieter than many imagine, earthy, airy, fiery - an irresistible river of sound.

Let's just say that it gets into the bloodstream. And you're never quite the same again.

Like a vampire? Er, I hope not.  Hyper-irritating Tristan and Islode, for example, and dreary old Parsifal leave me cold.

It's a Ring thing. Tragic, strange, funny, complicated, intensely human...

I'll be at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, this weekend, to start the journey all over again. Hello Wotan, hello gods, dwarfs, dragons and wild, whooping valkyries....

(All via the magic of HD digital broadcast to UK cinema screens.)

High praise

More than ten years ago, kind friends invited me to a performance of a Handel opera. As it turned out the evening brought surprise that led to rare and lasting pleasure.

During the first act a tall young man strode on to the stage, portraying one of those hard-done-by exiled monarchs, usurped by an evil brother/uncle/cousin, who are two-a-penny in the deliciously dippy world of eighteenth-century opera.

And then he sang.

For me, the clarity, purity and manly strength of that voice brought one of those rare experiences of being unable to tell the music from the music-maker - so perfectly did the one complement
the other, in this outpouring of yearning and loss.

The dodgy storyline, the bizarre posh-Goth makeup, the faux classical setting - none of these mattered in comparison to the music.

Time stood still.

The singer is Andreas Scholl.

And, of course, this may not be your 'thing'....

Mr Gnome scrubs up

On drab winter days Mr G cheers himself up with memories of his summer ramblings, which this year included an August outing to the Glyndebourne opera festival.

He relished the tea room (top notch), the restaurant (spiffing), and the glorious gardens with their artful air of laid-back carelessness that belies year-round labour.

In fact he enjoyed every aspect apart from the music.

The opera was Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, in a production that had the reviewers salivating as they dished up the superlatives.

In the past, Mr G has throughly enjoyed the epic, surprisingly tuneful journey of Herr W's Ring Cycle (sounds like something from Hotpoint?), which comprises buckets of human interest and quite a few laughs along the way.

Tristan is, by contrast, a chuckle-free zone - and a massively long sit-down. The few passages of gorgeous music are separated by hours of doomy musings by the desperately un-engaging eponymous lovers. 'Oh, get on with it!' Mr G was tempted to mutter.

Worst of all for cheery, positive thinker Mr Gnome, the show is saturated in negativity: death, doom and desperation are its key themes.

Mr G hopes to return to Glyndebourne one day - possibly for an invigorating dose of Puccini....

For Mr G's video experiment, go to archive and check his very first post....