Initially conceived in a roundtable of the elite of Los Angeles's high culture to include a cornicoupia of cultural and performing arts organizations all based in LA and officially announced by members of LA County's board of supervisors, an intensive two-month tribute will be paid by America's second largest city, not to the works of a local heavyweight composer such as John Williams, but of a favorite son of Leipzig, Germany: Richard Wagner.
Prophesied to be "a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles" by the Los Angeles Opera's General Director and internationally renowned operatic tenor Placido Domingo, Ring Festival LA, which is slated to begin on April 15th and run through June 30th, 2010, will feature special exhibits and performances, symposia and other events all focused on the Los Angeles Opera's presentation of Wagner's four-epic opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen.
According to Domingo, the aforementioned discussion between officials including himself and leaders of the LA County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Getty Trust, among others, led to a consensus that such a broadly concerted treatment of an outsider like Wagner would highlight the city's "distinctively 'Angeleno' identity [and its] world-class cultural organizations."
Eli Broad, a prolific Los Angeles-based philanthropist whose $6 million donation to the LA Opera allowed the organization to produce its edition of Der Ring, agreed with beneficiary Domingo, stating that "Ring Festival LA will bring worldwide attention to our city and attract an increasing number of visitors."
Successful or not, the festival, or perhaps just the Opera's undertaking, will force the city to demonstrate its ability to marshall a vast collaboration between visual, literary, and performance artists in order to do the Ring cycle justice. Wagner himself engaged in a painstaking examination and interpretation of Norse mythology to come up with the story for his late-in-career creation, which involves a battle of Gods, valkyries and humans for control of a ring that grants power to rule the world (if this seems to bear any relation to a certain multi-part epic [and later enormously successful film series] later conceived by British novelist J.R.R. Tolkien, it's because both Tolkien and Wagner had the same Norse epic poem, the Nibelungenlied, as the basis for their respective stories). Written over the course of a quarter-century and presented (in its entirety) over five years, the fifteen-hour cycle had its own theater designed by Wagner, which is considered to have some of the best accoustics in the world, in order for singers' voices to naturally match the volume of the expanded orchestra required by his complex compositions. The German Romantic saga has usually required two years of preparation work on the part of the opera houses around the globe that have presented it in the past, including the Royal Danish Opera and the English National Opera. That may be part of the reason why the announcement of Ring Festival LA has come so early from its chief organizers and financiers.
However, already more than fifty cultural, artistic and educational institutions have signed up to participate in or contribute to the festival's proceedings, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the USC Thorton School of Music, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
A complete schedule of the Ring Festival's program will not be available until January 2010.
However, early bird types can purchase tickets right now, and also find more information about the festival, by going to LAOperaRing.com, or by calling (213) 972-8001.
