Last Remaining Seats: How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

That's right, boys and girls, it's time for another season of Last Remaining Seats, one of my favorite things about Los Angeles. If you've been keeping up with this long-winded blog, you'll know that Last Remaining Seats is a movie series put on for six weeks every May and June by the Los Angeles Conservancy, the local nonprofit that dedicates every fiber of its volunteer soul to preserving, protecting, restoring, and otherwise promoting historic commercial and residential buildings and neighborhoods throughout the eighty-eight municipalities that make up the County of Los Angeles. With such a vast purview, the Conservancy's got all kinds of programs and projects going on at any given time, from restoring a particular historic residence to trying to save a historic commercial building from demolition. My favorite Conservancy initiative, as I've said in previous posts, is Bringing Back Broadway (BBB), the aim of which is to do just that: Revive the Broadway district in downtown Los Angeles. The stretch of Broadway from Third Street down to Ninth is home to no less than a dozen movie palaces built before World War II. It's the single largest concentration of pre-WWII movie theaters in the country. Yes, L.A.'s Broadway was supposed to be the cinematic version of New York's Broadway, and for a long time it was. But for whatever reason--shifting demographics, the suburban explosion--Broadway L.A. started going downhill in the seventies or thereabouts. You've still got plenty of shops, some storefront churches and what have you, but quite a bit of it is derelict. Not surprisingly, the BBB program will take some time.

Last Remaining Seats is the Conservancy's way of promoting BBB while shining the spotlight on these gorgeous old theaters. When they show these old classic flicks, every Wednesday usually starting in mid/late May through June, they typically use the three most fully restored theaters: Los Angeles, Million Dollar, and Orpheum. The Palace Theatre is also fit for duty, but they haven't screened anything there since I became a member in early 2008 after reading the cover story about them and Last Remaining Seats in Westways, the magazine for the Southern California Auto Club.

Up to this point, I've only ever gone to these things by myself, which is what makes tonight extra special. My mom came with me! She lives in North Carolina and is visiting me the second half of May. Usually she visits me in August. Indeed, from 2001 to last year she never missed an August (I've lived in L.A. since '98). She retired earlier this year on her sixty-fifth birthday after twenty-five years of steadfast service to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For the last thirteen of those years she was the personnel manager. No, not one of the personnel managers, THE personnel manager for the entire university. Yes, it's just as daunting as it sounds, which is why there was never a good time of the year for her to visit. August was relatively calm, nestled as it is between the summer sessions and the fall term, but that didn't stop the work from piling up. Every August for the past decade, it's been the same routine: She abandons her station for ten days to visit me....and then flies back to the suck fest backlog. But now she's retired! The icing on the cake is that her state pension and social security add up to a few ducats more than what she made during the rat race. Yes, you read that right: She's taking in more retired than she was as a working stiff. Pretty cool, huh? We should all be so lucky.

At any rate, since she's retired, we decided she could visit during the second half of May instead of waiting for the ceremonial ten days in August. We were already pondering this visit last August when she was here and I was starting to get theater brochures in the mail. At this point, after twelve years in L.A., I've attended shows at my fair share of the city's venues. You only have to go once to end up on their mailing list. And since most theater seasons are structured like school years, from September to June, that makes August a busy month for my local USPS carrier. And it's become a ritual for my mom over the years during her August visits to peruse and salivate over the brochures while bemoaning the lack of such culture in her area. That said, though, her area of North Carolina, called the Triangle (Chapel Hill along with Durham and the state capital of Raleigh) is doing much better than when I lived with her in the late eighties (my middle school years). That they can't compete with L.A. just makes the Triangle part of a large club. A lot of the best actors live here. Lots of people move here to attempt a career on the boards, not to speak of film and TV. So of course we've got a ton of theaters here. Anyway, when Mom was here last August, she looked over all the brochures and saw several shows she was interested in seeing, all being staged in May. We didn't iron out anything, it was just talk at that point.

When I visited her during the holidays four months later, we sat back down to take another look and decided the second half of May would be ideal. By the time she goes home next week, we'll have seen four plays at four different theaters. One of the plays was this past Sunday: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Freud Playhouse on UCLA campus. When not being used by the students, Freud Playhouse is home to the Reprise! theater company led by Jason Alexander (George Costanza from Seinfeld). In fact, that one guy from Seinfeld who played J. Peterman, John O'Hurley, was in the production. He was a stitch as J.B. Biggley, the boss man who heads the World Wide Wicket Company. Rudy Vallee played him in the movie we saw tonight. This was the first time we saw John O'Hurley on stage, but it should've been the second. When Mom was here last August, we saw Spamalot downtown at the Ahmanson. John O'Hurley was cast in one of the main roles. I forget which one. It was either the role played by Eric Idle or Tim Curry in the original Broadway production. Unfortunately he was sick the day we went. We forgot about that soon enough, though. Spamalot was a side splitter. If it comes to a playhouse near you, get ye there post haste.

On our way to the movie tonight, I decided to take Mom to my favorite watering hole in all of Los Angeles: Ye Rustic Inn in Los Feliz. I have to admit I was vacillating about taking her there. It ain't exactly Spago. Or even The Cheesecake Factory. It's a hole in the wall in one of those nondescript stripmalls that seem to exist outside of time. The ceiling's low, the lighting's shitty, and the jukebox is jammin' with the best selection of tunes of any bar I've ever been to. It's just a really fun place. The vast majority of the barkeeps are young women aspiring to be actresses. Read: They're all adorable. Oh yeah, the drink selection is pretty good too. And the food menu's got great variety considering it's just a bar. Indeed, if you ever make it there, try the Buffalo wings. I work with this guy from Buffalo, and he's one of the daintiest, pickiest eaters I've ever known. Team lunches always promise drama when he comes along. His home town is of course the birthplace of the eponymous wings. And he says that Ye Rustic Inn has hands down the best wings of anyplace outside Buffalo. Considering his picky taste plus the fact that he visited many a spot during his touring musician days back in the eighties and nineties, that is extremely high praise. Mom and I got there just before Happy Hour, hence the vacant booth right in front of the bar. We decided to go the sampler route: Six wings, a few cheese sticks and some other stuff. If you're ever there and you want a hearty meal, try the Myrtle burger, named after the woman who founded Ye Rustic. I had that the first time I went there about five years ago. Taking Mom to Ye Rustic wasn't as awkward as I thought. She's a pretty cool and laid back kat. In hindsight my vacillation seems kind of silly.

So with our bellies full, we took the surface streets from Ye Rustic to downtown. It was the first time I'd taken this route, but I knew Wilshire Blvd. was south of Ye Rustic, and once you're on that, it's a straight shot east into downtown. We parked in that garage beneath Pershing Square, right in the heart of downtown. Since tonight's screening was at the Los Angeles Theatre, the closest Last Remaining Seats theater to Pershing Square, the L.A. Conservancy had volunteers outside the parking structure handing out validation stickers to slap on our parking machine tickets so that we'd only have to pay five dollars instead of the usual weeknight flat fee of six sixty. Not a huge difference, I know, but the Conservancy tries.

The Los Angeles Theatre is my favorite theater on Broadway. So far, anyway. A bunch have yet to be restored, but of the few that have been, this one's tops. It doesn't look like much from the outside. It's got a tall, thin, townhouse-type facade with glittering gold and red signage. But when you walk in, as the below photos attest, it's like, "Whoa!" Los Angeles is actually the "newest" of the twelve Broadway "cinema playhouses," as they were called in the beforetimes. It opened in January 1931 with the Chaplin movie City Lights, and when you go in, one of the first things you see on the wall is a photo of Charlie himself attending the City Lights premiere with Albert Einstein of all people. No joke. They're the last people you'd expect to be pals. Anyways, back to the jaw-dropping lobby, the first thing that strikes you about it are those grand, gargantuan chandeliers, right out of a period movie. You've also got mirrors, that crystal fountain up on the second level, and a sunburst motif that supposedly alludes to Louis XIV, France's so-called Sun King. The restrooms downstairs are humongous. If only all movie theater restrooms were that big. That might be another reason I prefer the Los Angeles over the other Broadway theaters. The other ones have much smaller restrooms. Lines are inevitable. Hey, this might be a fine point to you, but you're not the one with the micro bladder.

When the Los Angeles originally opened, it had all kinds of interesting features that hadn't been heard of before and for the most part haven't been heard of since. I'm guessing that's because movies just aren't the big events they obviously were in the thirties, so why spend all that money on something like an electric sign outside the auditorium that tells you how many vacant seats are left? Although I have to say that sounds incredibly convenient. I mean, even today I think people would appreciate knowing, as they hurry into the auditorium with their 'corn and soda pop, how packed the place is so they can brace themselves (or not) accordingly. That lower level where the restrooms are used to have a playroom for the kids, and what is now the ladies' room used to be much more posh, with sixteen private "compartments," as they used to say, each one finished in a different marble. You believe that? Another world back then, kids. But wait, it gets better. Let's say you had to get up to relieve yourself in the middle of a show. Have no fear, movie fan, because when you descended to that super lounge below, a periscope-type apparatus projected the film onto a smaller screen so that you could catch the action on the way to and from the restroom. Is that not awesome or what? Again, like the seat vacancy sign, that would be so bloody handy today. But I reckon that type of thing would only work in a single-screen theater. How the heck would you handle that in today's zillion-screen gigaplexes?

Interesting backstory about Mom's connection to How to Succeed in Business. She actually got to see the original Broadway production back in the early sixties. It was a smashing success and ran for several years. Mom's dad, the grandfather I never knew, died in September 1962. How to Succeed in Business opened about a year before, so she must have seen it in that window. Certainly not after her dad died. The family pretty much went to shit after that (more on that some other time, some other place). Anyway, tonight when we were at Ye Rustic, Mom said that their trip to New York to see the Broadway show was her introduction to the East Coast. They had such a great time that they came back just a few months later to see I Can Get It for You Wholesale, another successful Broadway show that starred an unknown nineteen-year-old named....Barbra Streisand. And just to show you that Mom's dad did okay for himself, on both of those trips they stayed at the St. Regis. You ever stay there? Unless you've got money to burn, probably not. What's more, Mom's family was from L.A., which makes such a trip all the more ambitious. I've been to the St. Regis a couple times to have drinks in the King Cole Bar on the ground floor. It's funny, the first time I went there, in 2005 or thereabouts, I had no idea the place had been Mom's East Coast home away from home. I only heard of it thanks to the James Bond novel Live and Let Die (1954). The plot of the novel, which bares only a skeletal resemblance to the 1973 film (Roger Moore's first outing as Bond), is roughly divided into thirds, and that first third sees Bond staying in New York to investigate the Harlem gangster Mister BIG. Well, when he arrives in New York at the beginning, he holes up in a top-floor suite at the St. Regis. After freshening up, he heads down to the ground floor to have drinks in the King Cole Bar with his American spy pal Felix Leiter. When I read that scene, I knew I had to get to the King Cole Bar somehow, someway.

Interesting how life brings you full circle, isn't it? Mom was tickled to death at seeing the play again as well as the film, both in the same week, back in her hometown. And the gravy, ladies and gentlemen? Before the movie started tonight, there was a Q&A up on the stage with the two leads from the movie: Robert Morse and Michele Lee. And conducting the interview was Matthew Weiner, the brain behind the TV show Mad Men. That makes sense, right? One of the reasons that show's all but critic proof is due to how well it evokes the sixties, the same era as How to Succeed in Business. Not that I would know. Neither my mom nor I have ever watched Mad Men, but it's cool the Conservancy got Matthew Weiner to host tonight's event.

I forgot to mention that the Conservancy started a new initiative this year called the Sixties Turn 50. They set up a whole website for it and everything, separate from their main laconservancy.org site. Tonight before the show, when I went down to use the restroom, I noticed over in that area between the men's and ladies' rooms, that spacious plot of wood flooring that was originally the kids' play area, the Conservancy's Modern Committee (or Mod Com, as they call it) had a bunch of tables set up with various pamphlets and brochures plugging the Sixties Turn 50. Standing around like robotic Conservancy volunteer greeters were those black kiosks, each with a flatscreen monitor looping footage of various sixties architecture around L.A. County. Last fall the Mod Com put on a sixties tour in L.A.'s South Bay area. I kind of wish I'd gone now after seeing the Mod Com's setup tonight. The tour was called "It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod City." I love that. Extra props for alluding to a popular movie...from the sixties! Anyway, the tour, as I later read in a recap in the Conservancy newsletter, took folks to sixties gems such as St. Jerome Catholic Church, the LAX Theme Building (I've always wanted to go in there!), IBM Aerospace HQ, The Proud Bird Restaurant, Imperial Terminal Flight Path Learning Center & Museum, and Northrop Grumman Space Park Campus. These were among the buildings being looped on the kiosks. Bravo to the Mod Com! It really was an impressive setup and a great use of all that space downstairs.

When the lights went down at 8pm, the first item on the program, as always, had Conservancy head Linda Dishman come out and welcome everyone and give a special thanks to the sponsors, the companies and wealthy individuals who sponsored both tonight as well as the Last Remaining Seats series as a whole. After that, she invited Matthew Weiner out to the stage to interview him for a few minutes.

The man in charge of one of the most popular shows on TV today, Matt Weiner is a humble, unassuming guy. He's in his mid forties and balding. He smiles easily, but you can tell he's a smart, serious guy as well. Linda asked him a bit about his background and particularly his interest in conservancy. Matt said that, while he's originally from Baltimore, he did a good bit of his growing up in L.A. When he was eleven (in 1976, the same year I was born), his family left Baltimore and settled in L.A.'s Hancock Park neighborhood. That right there tells me his parents must've done okay for themselves. He didn't mention what they did for a living, but Hancock Park is a beautiful historic neighborhood created in the 1920s by an oil magnate named George Hancock. It's 4400 acres of land George inherited from his dad, who in turn bought up the land when it was part of the larger Rancho La Brea. I know this thanks to the book Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles by Valley native--and sometime Book Fest attendee--Kevin Roderick. Hancock Park really is a gorgeous neighborhood. It's one of those neighborhoods you've probably seen in a movie or TV show, with those manicured lawns and palm trees lining the broad streets in perfect symmetry against the clear blue sky and, if you're facing north, the Hollywood sign off yonder. But seeing it on screen doesn't do it justice. When you're in L.A., it's definitely worth a drive-through and a look-see. Matt credited his growing up in Hancock Park with his interest in preserving historic architecture. It was during those years that he watched a lot of historic structures around L.A. fall into disrepair and decay. I reckon that makes some sense, sad as it is. The Conservancy wasn't founded until 1978, and of course it took them a while to find their legs. Until they came along, L.A. didn't have an organization to protect its history.

Even though Mad Men is set in New York, Matt said he shoots quite a bit of it in L.A. That's not exactly rare. CSI New York is shot entirely in L.A., the Valley specifically. That was why Gary Sinise agreed to do it. The producers wanted to shoot in New York, but Lieutenant Dan didn't want to be away from his family for big chunks of the year. CSI Miami, meanwhile, is mostly shot in Long Beach. So Matt's shooting here isn't unprecedented or anything, but it's nonetheless a very conscious decision on his part to support his adopted hometown's economy. He did share a New York shooting story, though. When he shot the Mad Men pilot in 2006, he used a building on Lexington St. When they returned the following year to shoot the rest of the first season, that building had been demolished. Suffice it to say he was indignant, not just from a producer's standpoint, but from the standpoint of someone who cares more and more about historic preservation as he gets older. I loved what he said when Linda asked him what the message of Mad Men was: "Stop tearing shit down." That got a lot of applause and no mistake.

Okay then, that brings us to the next item on tonight's bill before the movie started: Matt Weiner interviewing Robert Morse and Michele Lee. Matt and Robert already have a strong, friendly rapport from Mad Men. I didn't know until tonight that Robert Morse is on that show. He's been in nearly every episode apparently. For someone turning eighty next May, he sure has a lot of energy. He's still sort of like his character from How to Succeed, all smiling and friendly, but with a shade of mischief. I'm not sure why I say he's mischievous, although that gap-toothed grin sure doesn't help. He talked a little about how he fell into acting, and he certainly fell in early. He saw a play when he was a wee tot and knew acting was his calling. He studied with Lee Strasberg when he was still in high school(!) before scoring his first theatrical role in On the Town when he was eighteen. The only film work worth mentioning from those early years are roles that carried over from his theatrical gigs, playing a character he himself originated in the play on which the movie was based. We're talking flicks like The Matchmaker (he played Barnaby Tucker) as well as Say, Darling, Take Me Along and, of course, How to Succeed in Business. This is why Mom was so tickled to see him in person tonight and why tonight completes a circle of sorts. She saw him when he originated the role of J. Pierpont Finch, the role for which he won the first of his two Tonys (the second one didn't come until about thirty years later, for playing Truman Capote in Tru).

While Robert Morse is an East Coaster born on the New York stage, Michele Lee is L.A. born and bred. She's about ten or so years younger than Robert and looks even younger than that. Although I couldn't tell looking at her (Mom and I were only a few rows from the stage), I have a feeling she's had some work done. I could be wrong, she might just have awesome genes, but someone pushing seventy doesn't usually look so pretty. At any rate, she's definitely got class. While Robert's got the whole playful imp shtick going on, Michele is very composed and mature with a dynamite smile. Like Robert, she starred in the original Broadway version of How to Succeed. Unlike Robert, though, she didn't get her part until about a year into the run, after the original Rosemary dropped out. So Mom didn't get to see Michele Lee on stage. Another difference between her and Robert is that she didn't do much formal acting study. She said the best education she ever got was understudying Rosemary that first year and then playing Rosemary for the rest of the run. "Broadway was my education," she said. Her reprisal of the Rosemary character for the film was her film debut. She was in her mid twenties at that point, and there was no looking back. Her bread and butter didn't come from film, though, but from TV. She worked with legends like Danny Kaye and Dick Van Dyke. She even had her own eponymous show for a year or so in the mid seventies. But it was in the late seventies, when Michele was in her late thirties, that life, and TV, changed forever with the debut of a nighttime soap called Knots Landing. I never watched a single episode during its time on the air, and that's no small feat. You try avoiding one of the most popular shows on primetime that starts when you're three and ends a year before you graduate high school. Wow, that's hard to wrap my brain around. It was a spinoff from Dallas, another popular primetime soap from my youth. I'm not sure why they spun it off Dallas since Knots Landing, from what I've gathered, had virtually no connection in terms of plot or anything. The title refers to the setting, a coastal California town that's a fictional version of Malibu or some such place. It follows a bunch of couples and their various trials and tribulations. One of the couples is related to the Ewings from Dallas, and that's pretty much where the connection begins and ends. See what I mean? What was the point of the Ewing connection? Marketing purposes so people would watch the show? Dallas was pretty popular, after all. That "who shot J.R.?" episode still has some of the highest ratings TV's ever seen. Anywho, suffice it to say I didn't appreciate seeing Michele Lee remotely as much as my mom did, or as much as the older TV buffs in the audience. Michele Lee's a TV legend thanks to Knots Landing.

Matt's interview with Robert and Michele was the last item on the agenda before they started the movie. Pretty interesting stuff, huh? Events like this make living in L.A. fun. And I'm really happy Mom got to be here to see it. She was tickled beyond words at all the memory lanes she got to stroll down. Speaking of strolling, as we were strolling up the aisle after the show, she tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to our right. There was Robert Morse, smack in the middle of a throng of fans, chatting them up, flashing that signature gap-toothed smile. We slowed a bit, and for a second I thought Mom was going to elbow her way in to get Robert's attention. She didn't in the end. Too many people.

Ring Festival LA - At Burbank Library - Wagner vs. Tolkien: Who's the Real Lord of the Rings?

And the Ring Festival continues. I'm still six or so weeks away from seeing the Ring Cycle itself, and I'm still on target with the Ring Festival, the county-wide celebration of LA Opera's first-ever staging of the entire Ring. If you read my recent Getty or MOCA posts, you know all about the Ring Festival and my quest to do one thing per week from the Ring Festival guide. Last week, it was the Getty's thing on mythology. This week, it's the Burbank Library for a lecture on Wagner versus Tolkien.

Tonight after work I drove the couple miles from the Yahoo! office near Burbank Airport to downtown Burbank, one of my homes away from home thanks mainly to the AMC 16 Gigantaplex. The Burbank Library has three or four branches around this fair little city just outside L.A. Tonight's Ring Festival event was at the main branch. It's close enough to the AMC and all the other stuff downtown that I could simply park in the same public garage where I always park.

As soon as I entered the library and saw the middle-aged gals at the front desk, with the library proper on the other side of them, and the folks sitting at all the tables surfing the Web or looking up books or whatever, and the rows and rows of books further beyond them, I was immediately smitten. Not bothering to think how realistic it would be that I'd come back to check something out, since I usually just buy books I want to read, I went up to the desk and asked to become a member. This one gal was all over it. She gave me a brand new card, a copy of the May newsletter, and a little foldout thingee talking about how I can access their system from my home computer using the new PIN she wrote on the front. She also took my e-mail address so I could be on the mailing list for the newsletter going forward. They e-mail it out as a pdf attachment, she said. Awesome.

I almost forgot why I came tonight. Then I wondered where the LA Opera folks would have the room to put on an event here. The library was packed with folks of all ages, which I have to admit inspired me. I may not have much use for the library, but you should've seen this place. And on a Monday night to boot. Whoever says the library is dead obviously hasn't been to the Burbank Library.

The opera lecture was taking place in this big room they have on the second floor. It's one of those catch-all rooms you could use for lots of things. When the woman at the front desk told me how to get up there, she mentioned that it's the same room they use for movie screenings a few times a month. And if I was interested in that, a new movie schedule is published each month in the newsletter.

I was one of the first people in the upstairs lecture/screening room. Several rows of chairs with an aisle in the middle had already been set up. At the front of the room the floor is elevated maybe half a foot to create a sort of makeshift stage. The guy giving tonight's lecture was already there. John Spear is a sixtyish pudgy guy who works for the LA Opera Speakers Bureau as a Community Educator. He also volunteers for the Opera League of Los Angeles as an Assistant Committee Chair. John had already finished organizing his lecture materials, so he killed time chatting with the handful of us already there. He asked us if we had plans to see Die Feen (The Fairies) next month at the Pasadena Playhouse, produced by the Lyric Opera of Los Angeles. I probably won't see it, but that's not my point. With that one question, I could already tell John was a Wagnerite. You know he plans to see Die Feen, and he made sure we knew that.

It is sort of a big deal, though. Die Feen was the very first full-length opera Wagner wrote. And next month's production in Pasadena marks its very first performance in the United States, John said. Wow, really? We are talking about Wagner, right? The Ring Cycle guy? The man behind Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and a whole bunch of other legendary stuff? Well, I guess even Einstein can make lemons. But John insisted Die Feen's not a lemon. It may not be Tannhäuser or anything, but critics generally agree it's half decent. I doubt it'd get any attention at all if it wasn't by Wagner, so I suppose the appeal for folks like John is seeing, or rather, hearing, the kinds of stuff this mad genius wrote before he officially became a mad genius.

Wagner wrote the thing when he was all of twenty, but it was never produced in his lifetime. He subtitled it a "grand romantic opera," which tells you his ego was already in full bloom at that green age. It didn't have its world premiere until the summer of 1888, a good five years after Wagner's death. The opera company that finally took the big risk was Munich. That's not too surprising if you know anything about Wagner. Munich's the state capital of Bavaria, the southern-most state in Germany and the one that's pretty much claimed Wagner as their own ever since Wagner himself started the Ring Festival, THE Ring Festival, in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in August 1876. The festival's been held there every August since then except for a "hiatus" during World War II.

Anyway, it seems it's taken Die Feen a while to catch on. Not only is it just now reaching our shores, it only made it to France last year. That's kind of amazing considering how much closer France is to Germany and that opera's huge in France. While the opera itself is obscure, the overture's been doing pretty well as a standalone piece for orchestra. The New York City Opera was already performing it back in the early eighties. Suffice it to say any Wagnerite would be just as giddy as John about Die Feen's American debut next month.

Interesting trivia about Die Feen. Wagner gave the original score and libretto to Bavarian King Ludwig II (there we go with Wagner and Bavaria again). King Ludwig, by the way, was the guy who "invented" the Oktoberfest (not intentionally) when he married Elisabeth in 1810. After he died, the score and libretto were left to one person after the next and guarded very carefully. Finally, in the 1930s, about a hundred years after it was written, it was given to Hitler as a birthday present. For whatever stupid reason, he kept it with him in that underground bunker where he and his closest people lived toward the end of the war, when it was obvious they were going to lose and it was only a matter of time before the Allies showed up to blow Berlin to shit. And so the Die Feen materials went up in flames along with Hitler, his fellas, and their not-so-bomb-proof bunker.

On a roll with early Wagner, John moved on to the man's second opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love). John just saw the USC opera company produce it and thought it was awesome. Wagner wrote it right after Die Feen, when he was twenty-one. Based on Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure, this time Wagner didn't have trouble finding any takers. When he was twenty-three, the opera company in Magdeburg produced it. The first performance was a complete disaster. Indeed, it went down so poorly that the second night had to be canceled when the lead soprano's hubby got into a backstage fist fight with one of the lead tenors. By the time it was performed a second time, Wagner was already dead.

It's interesting with these earlier, not-so-great operas. Even though Wagner still had quite a ways to climb to reach his zenith, you can already see him exploring stuff that shows up in his later, much better operas. Stuff like redemption, long-winded expositions, mysterious strangers telling their lovers not to ask about their past, and people throwing themselves headlong into love without considering the consequences. That kind of stuff's all over the Ring Cycle, not to speak of Lohengrin and a bunch of other Wagner gems. John couldn't say enough about the USC version of Das Liebesverbot, especially the production values. He's convinced that if Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot were afforded those same production values when they were written, they would've fared much better with the public.

This led him to talk about the lack of Wagners in our own time. Or rather, classical music composers in general. My father, one of the biggest classical music buffs I know, talks about this every time I visit him, how we don't see any innovation in classical music anymore. Those who study classical music don't really contribute to it. Those who try usually compose stuff that's so atonal that listening to it could be hazardous to your ears. John said that as well, that those who do study classical these days don't seem to be fans of melody, of music you can hum to yourself after you listen to it. "Does anyone write melody today?" John asked. "Or want to?" He bemoaned how musicians who seem to have any interest in melody usually gravitate to movie soundtracks and pop music. He's got a great point. You want a composition that sounds like classical music and has a melody you can hum afterward? Hollywood, baby. This is not a new phenomenon either. If you read my post last month about the Opera League seminar on Die Gezeichneten, you would know that the composer of that piece, Franz Schreker, wrote music that we would today call cinematic. A lot of his pupils left Germany for Hollywood. Lots of European composers from the early twentieth century, including famous ones, came over to sunny L.A. to find work. Even Arnold Schoenberg came over. He taught at USC and UCLA and settled in the Brentwood section of the Westside. USC and UCLA both named a building after him. UCLA's Schoenberg Hall is one of the venues they use for the Book Fest.

As more folks trickled into the room, John switched from talking about the dearth of classical talent to discussing my single least favorite opera ever: Wagner's Parsifal. Actually, I'm not sure I should say it's my least favorite, but I'll say this: The one production I have seen, which LA Opera put on four years ago, was awful. From what I gather, the guy who directed that version, Robert Wilson, put such a unique stamp on it that it may not be accurate to say I don't like Parsifal. I just hated Robert Wilson "remake" of it. When I attended the Opera League's Backstage Magic seminar a couple months ago, I sat next to Ed Schaff, who volunteers as the League's communications manager. He told me that Robert Wilson basically threw out Wagner's libretto and wrote his own. Man, it sucked bad. The longest five hours of my life. John must be a hardcore Wagnerite if he liked it. He saw that production, understands it was on the slow side, but said it had its own strengths. He described watching it as a Zen experience. He actually had one benefit I didn't have: Before he saw it, someone told him to expect an opera with the pace of syrup in the North Pole. He also heard how LA Opera director Placido Domingo, who played the title character in that production, got all excited that he got to move an arm at one point. That, more than anything, tells you how ungodly slow it was. Not only did the plot not move, the singers didn't move, and when anyone moved so much as an arm, "Alert the media!"

I have to admit, though, that maybe Robert Wilson was onto something. Ed Schaff complained that opera has become a stage director's medium, but that's not Robert Wilson's fault. If you're a director and someone taps you to do an opera, especially if it's a reputable big city company like LA Opera, you sure as shit don't say no. If they approach you, it's safe to assume they like your vision. So what do you do? You stick to your vision. Robert Wilson did that, and he seems to have driven a wedge straight through the audience. It's been years since he did Parsifal, and folks are still talking about it. Tonight's event is like the third or fourth time in the last year or so where Robert Wilson's version of Parsifal came up in the conversation. If you're Robert Wilson, that must feel good.

Alright then. It was a few minutes past the hour. About twenty or so people had shown up at this point. John was ready to begin. He started out with some biographical tidbits. He's originally from Seattle, and one piece of Wagner trivia about him is that, of all the various versions of the Ring Cycle he's seen all over the world, he still hasn't seen the Seattle opera company's version. His first musical love was jazz. John was a jazz drummer in New Orleans in his "former life," he said. His initial entry into the operaverse was as a singer. John was a bass-baritone partial to Verdi operas. He retired from singing ages ago but still has a license plate that says "Verdi Lover." In his later years he worked on the administrative side of opera, eventually landing the role of general director of Long Beach Opera. They did the Ring Cycle under his leadership. John said to this day, LBO's Ring remains one of his favorite versions of the Ring. Well, I guess it would be, huh? Regardless of the version, John said his favorite Ring character is Wotan, god of the gods. He loves how mortal and flawed Wotan becomes over the course of the Cycle. How, by the end of the second one, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Wotan's become this broken-hearted dad forced by his own laws to imprison his baby girl Brünnhilde in a ring of fire atop a desolate mountain. Recall that John used to be a bass-baritone. Wotan, you won't be surprised to learn, is a bass-baritone role. Like all opera singers--well, performers in general--John likes those meaty, complex roles. Wotan's about as meaty and complex as they come.

In terms of tonight's theme, juxtaposing the Ring Cycle with The Lord of the Rings, it first occurred to John that such a theme would make good fodder for an opera lecture back in December 2001, when the first of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, The Fellowship of the Ring, came out. Today, after nearly ten years, John said he's got the lecture down pat. He's written and rewritten it to the point that it's now been published twice. He considered it a good sign when, soon after he finished the initial version in 2002, he got something like ten requests right away to give the Wagner-Tolkien spiel. The idea for this lecture should've occurred to him, he said, back in the seventies, when he left jazz for opera. It was around that time when he read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He's been a fan of Tolkien ever since.

To kick things off, John mentioned the obvious parallels between the two opi. Each work is split into four parts. Each was written out of order. Each consumed the life of its author for many years. Each author took long breaks while working on it. In Wagner's case, after he composed the score for act two of Siegfried, twelve years went by before he got around to act three. Tolkien, for his part, worked on The Lord of the Rings in fits and starts and could sometimes go years without touching it. It drove his agents crazy to the point that they became convinced he'd never finish it.

John saved the biggest parallel for last. Both the Ring Cycle and The Lord of the Rings take their themes and plotlines from three principle sources: The Edda, the Nibelungenlied, and, perhaps most of all, the Völsungasaga.

I remember the Völsungasaga (Saga of the Völsungs) being discussed at the Getty Center event I attended about a year ago called German Art and Opera. It's basically a great big huge novel. Similar in size to The Lord of the Rings, now that I think about it, the Völsungasaga is an epic tale of this very unfortunate family called the Völsungs. It's like their rise and fall, if you will, starting with Völsung himself. We start with him, and then follow his descendants. Völsung is killed by King Siggeir of Geatland. Recognize Geatland? If you read Beowulf, you should. Beowulf was from Geatland, an ancient kingdom in present-day southern Sweden. So anyway, Geatland's King Siggeir kills poor Völsung. Völsung's two kids, son Sigmund and daughter Signy, want to avenge dad. Sigmund eventually has a son named Sigurd, and it's Sigurd who eventually serves as the model for Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied and ultimately the Ring Cycle. Signy, meanwhile, just to make things incredibly complicated, marries her father's killer, King Siggeir, proving that the Icelandic bards were pretty good at juicy plots.

While this originally dates back to Iceland, the other Scandic and Germanic countries took the Saga of the Völsungs and made their own versions of it. In fact, the earliest drawings and carvings giving us a visual representation of the tale's eventual tragic hero, good ol' Sigurd (Siegfried), date back to Sweden. Speaking of which, the Beowulf connection to Völsung is greater than Geatland. The character of Völsung himself is, in fact, mentioned in Beowulf. Early on in the story, when all is fine in the state of Denmark, you've got a bard singing in the court of the Danish King Horthgar (the guy who eventually hires Beowulf and the Geatish warriors to deal with Grendel). Among other things, the bard talks about Völsung and his avenging son Sigmund. In the original Old English, Völsung is spelled Wæls.

The Völsung story also has the inspiration for the Ring Cycle's number one Valkyrie Brünnhilde. In the original Icelandic, her name's Brynhild. Wagner makes Brünnhilde a daughter of Wotan, the god of gods. In the old Icelandic story, she's the daughter of some other guy, but she still knows Wotan, or Odin, as he's called in Icelandic. Odin tells her at one point to help this one king kill another king, but Brynhild likes the other king better so she helps him instead, thus pissing off Odin. He exiles her to this castle behind a wall of shields on top of this one mountain in the Alps, where she has to sleep inside a ring of fire until someone with big enough cojones braves the fire to wake her up. Who do you think that is? Yep. Sigurd. It's clever how Wagner takes bits and pieces of this and melds them together. In the Ring Cycle, he makes Brünnhilde the daughter of Wotan, which makes things simpler and less hokey that they can talk to each other. And instead of messing up a fight between two random kings, Wagner has her deciding the fight between Siegfried's dad Siegmund and the husband of Siegmund's twin sister. Wagner, in other words, streamlines everything. Indeed, as long as the Ring Cycle is, Wagner had to leave out quite a bit of the Völsung story.

Now let's talk about the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). This baby is a huge epic poem like Beowulf. John called it the Iliad of Germany. The story is taken from a mishmash of stuff, fiction and non. It started with something that actually happened circa 400 A.D. or thereabouts, somewhere in present-day Germany, something that probably wasn't remotely as dramatic or interesting as the poem turned out to be. As people talked about the event(s) over the years, they naturally embellished and made stuff up. By the time the poet in question came along, the story was a rip roaring yarn. As for when the poem was written, scholars have nailed it down to sometime between 1180 and 1210. They're also fairly certain the poet was someone who worked at the court of this one bishop named Wolfger von Erla, who presided over this town called Passau in present-day southeastern Germany, right on the Austrian border. This was still a couple hundred years before Gutenberg, so they didn't have the printing press. If you wanted to make copies, you had to write everything by hand. Ouch, right? The oldest Nibelungenlied manuscript dates to 1230.

The plot overlaps somewhat with the Völsungasaga's plot. You've got a guy named Siegfried. He's famous for killing a dragon, just as Siegfried kills the dragon Fafner in the third Ring opera. You've got a woman named Brünhild, but she's not Siegfried's love interest. Instead, Siegfried's with this gal named Kriemhild. Brünhild, meanwhile, marries this other guy named Gunther, who I think is Kriemhild's brother. Unlike the Ring Cycle, this has a very specific setting, a kingdom called Burgundy. No, not the Burgundy of present-day France, but a kingdom over in present-day eastern Germany. As I said above, the Nibelungenlied is inspired by real events, and some of the characters are based on real people. For example, after Siegfried is betrayed and murdered and Kriemhild plots her revenge, she marries a Hun named King Etzel, who's based on Attila the Hun. Etzel helps her get back at the folks who killed Siegfried, which includes Kriemhild's brother Gunther. I'm skipping over huge chunks of time that include a lot of political wheeling and dealing between the two power couples. Suffice it to say the ending is a blood bath.

In case you're interested, the kernels of truth out of which the Nibelungenlied was born date to the Roman conquest of the Burgundians in the fifth century as well as a spat between this one queen named, yes, Brunhilda (c. 540-610) and another queen. Attila the Hun did marry a Burgundian woman, but it wasn't Brunhilda or anyone named Kriemhild. Anyway, as I said above, it was mostly boring stuff, but it was enough to light the spark. Those German poets took it and ran with it.

And finally we have the Edda, which I've saved for last because, according to John, it's the most important source we have today of Norse mythology and Germanic legends. The Edda's got a lot of that fantastical stuff we know and love from Tolkien, like orcs and what have you. The Edda actually comes in two parts, a Poetic Edda and a Prose Edda. Like the Nibelungenlied, they were written in the 1200s. And just as the Nibelunglied was taken from German oral traditions, the two Eddas were based on stuff the Icelandic people had been telling their kids at bedtime for hundreds of years. The Poetic Edda is not a single giant poem. It's a collection of poems. Some of the poems talk about how the gods created the world and then didn't get along with each other. Other poems talk about human heroes, including characters the Icelandic folks would've recognized from the Völsungasaga, like Sigurd and Brynhildr.

While no one knows who wrote the Poetic Edda, we do know who wrote the Prose Edda. It was this Icelandic scholar/writer/historian/politician named Snorri Sturluson. He wrote the Prose Edda in four volumes (a prologue plus three main books) around 1220. There we are with four parts again, right? Just like the Ring Cycle and The Lord of the Rings. The Prose Edda has less to do with humans and more to do with the Old Norse deities and all their drama. Snorri took it even further, though. Instead of having separate characters for the gods and the mortals, he combined them. Snorri posited that the gods we all know and love in Norse mythology were based on real people, kings and generals and whatnot. After they died, their followers and subjects started worshipping them. When they went into battle or faced some hardship, they would invoke the names of these dead leaders. They'd venerate them to such an extent that in due time they became akin to gods. And so, for example, when one tribe beat another in battle, the explanation was that the winning tribe's god beat the losing tribe's god in battle up in Valhalla.

This brings us back to Wagner and how he tried to make sense of that wealth of material. John told us about this essay Wagner wrote in the 1840s, when he was in his early thirties. In typical Wagner fashion, it was very long, and he wrote it in dribs and drabs over the course of a few years. It was called something like "World History Saga," and it focused on a conflict over a horde of gold. Other than that, John said most of it wouldn't make sense to anyone today. He said it wasn't historical fiction so much as a warped history. I'd guess in Hollywood parlance, the "World History Saga" would be considered a treatment for the eventual final product, or the first draft of a treatment. To me it sounds like Wagner had soaked up those three main source materials I talked about above, mixed them all up in his mental pot, and tried to give his own spin. He was bursting with story ideas but didn't know which direction to go in.

In the fall of 1848, by which point he'd been kicking around this mythological stuff for some time, Wagner sat down and wrote the first official Nibelung sketch. This was a more organized distillation of those ancient sources into a coherent plot outline for what Wagner thought would be just one opera called Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death). This is the opera that eventually became the fourth Ring opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

One interesting tidbit I didn’t know until tonight is that, in addition to the Siegfried/Sigurd character from the myths, Wagner also based his Siegfried in part on Frederick Barbarossa (officially Frederick I), a German king who ruled the Holy Roman Empire for most of the twelfth century. I first learned about this guy in high school German class. Mr. Wallace introduced him to us by explaining the Barbarossa nickname. It comes from the Italian for "red beard," which is what the Italians, a lot of whose territory was part of the empire, called him. Not to make fun of him, mind you, but because they were scared shitless of him. Fred's being German meant there was tension between him and the Italians almost by default. Ultimately the Italians were quite right to be scared of him, as his reign was defined quite a bit by the military campaigns he launched down there, and how he stole a bunch of sacred stuff from the Vatican.

The whole Vatican thing makes it ironic that Fred was a Crusader, as in the Holy Crusades. In fact, the particular Crusade he went on (there were several) coincided with the one Richard the Lionheart (Richard I) went on. Richard's the king you might remember from the Robin Hood stories. It was Fred and Richard and the king of France, all leading their armies into the Holy Land. Things went great for a while. Fred, like Richard, was a natural-born leader. But he was old at this point, pushing seventy. That's long in the tooth by today's standards, let alone back then. Almost a year into the Crusade, he and the men were crossing some river in present-day Turkey. It was sort of rocky, at one point the horse faltered or something, Fred fell off, and that's that. Like everyone else, he was decked out in heavy armor, which makes it impossible to get back up when you've fallen into deep enough water.

I wish John had gone more into what exactly Wagner was thinking when he connected Fred to Siegfried. On the surface, it's hard to see. Siegfried is basically a giant man-child who grows up isolated from society. In fact, think of Siegfried as the Arnold Schwarzenegger character from Twins. Remember how he was raised on that tropical island and becomes sort of a fish out of water when he ventures to the mainland to reunite with his twin Danny DeVito? That's basically how Siegfried is. He's a big strong guy who's very naive in the ways of the world. When he kills the dragon Fafner, it's not because he's brave, it's because he's an idiot who doesn't know that a massive fire-breathing dragon is generally to be avoided. So again, the question is: What are the parallels between Siegfried and Frederick Barbarossa?

His innocence aside, Siegfried is a natural-born leader, you could say. He's superhuman, charismatic, and knows how to whoop some ass. The same could be said for Fred. He, too, was a natural leader, had great charisma, and was indeed thought to be superhuman by his contemporaries. Most folks pushing seventy back then could barely walk. This guy strapped on armor, hopped on a horse, and led thousands of people across the continent to the Middle East. I should also mention that since Fred was a German king, and that he was phenomenally successful as a war leader/politician/all that stuff, folks in Wagner's time would've naturally clung to him as an ideal. As I've mentioned in other Ring-related posts, when Wagner wrote the Ring, the German states were riven with strife. Lots of war, lots of conflict, with people fleeing in droves. Those who stayed were very proud of their past. The period of Fred's reign, indeed the German Middle Ages in general, were viewed through very thick rose-colored lenses by Wagner and his contemporaries. So even if the parallels between Siegfried and Fred aren't obvious, the fact is, Fred was viewed as the ideal leader they were sorely missing in Wagner's time. And so in creating the character of Siegfried, Wagner was, in essence, creating this ideal heroic figure who literally didn't have "fear" in his vocabulary.

John added that Wagner also based Siegfried partly on Jesus Christ. I don't get it. What was Wagner thinking about specifically? How Siegfried dies tragically at the end, betrayed by those he thought were his friends? And how he's the offspring of gods? He's not Wotan's son, but he is his grandson. I dunno. It just seems that if you look at a lot of tragic heroes, one could argue they were all based on Jesus.

Speaking of sacrifice, John now jumped forward a good sixty-plus years, from mid-nineteenth century Germany in turmoil to the 1910s, when all of Europe was in turmoil with World War I. If you've studied that war for even five minutes, you know what a complete bloodbath it was, a total waste of millions upon millions of lives, young men in their prime being fed--no, stuffed, crammed, jam-packed--into a mechanized meat grinder. This was when Tolkien found his fantasy legs.

Tolkien was in college when the war broke out. England was feeling very full of herself at this point. No one had a clue about the coming nightmare. Men of all ages were enlisting in droves. Apparently Tolkien wanted to finish college first, which pissed off his parents because they wanted him to enlist right away. He finished college about a year into the war and spent the following year in training before being deployed to the continent in the summer of '16. Tolkien saw lots of action. Almost all his pals from childhood were killed. Eventually he got sick with what they called "trench fever," which meant he had lice snacking on him. And so he went back to England and got bounced from hospital to hospital.

This is when he started writing fantasy. Have you heard of Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales? It's basically a collection of short stories that, big picture wise, served as his initial exploration of Middle-earth, the same place where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place. The one story in particular he wrote during his convalescence was called "The Fall of Gondolin," about the rise and fall of this Elven city called Gondolin. It's quite dark. A whole bunch of the good guys die at the end after being betrayed by one of their own.


Like Wagner, Tolkien created mythological worlds with mostly non-human characters through which he could exorcise his demons. John told us about how, later on after World War II, scholars and critics kept looking for traces of World War II in Middle-earth. Tolkien was like, "Are you kidding? Wrong war!" When the second edition of The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien decided to write a preface to address the war question. "One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."

As for World War II, John talked about how the Nazis, including and especially Hitler, adopted Wagner as one of their own, even though Wagner died a few years before Hitler was born. Just as Wagner viewed the Middle Ages as the German ideal, so too did the Nazis. And since Wagner's operas had a lot to do with old German myths, the Nazis not only championed Germanic legends, they championed the man who championed Germanic legends. In fact, a lot of people actually think Wagner was, in fact, a Nazi, when of course simple chronology renders that impossible. Of course, it doesn't help matters that Wagner was an unabashed anti-Semite.

Tolkien himself weighed in on the matter. John told us that Tolkien wasn't surprised the Nazis appropriated Wagner and specifically the Ring Cycle for their sinister purposes. Tolkien was convinced the damage inflicted by their appropriation was irreparable. At the time, that may have seemed likely. The fact that Wagner is still omnipresent, though, speaks volumes about how awesome his music is. Say what you will about Wagner the man (and we all do), but you can't deny the man's artistic talent. In an Opera League seminar last year, one of the speakers said Wagner was "incapable of writing a single boring bar of music." True dat.

Just as they do at Opera League seminars, John played musical excerpts. The first two excerpts were from scene three of the first Ring Cycle opera, Das Rheingold. This is one of my favorite scenes in the whole Cycle. The dwarf Alberich, the Ring Cycle's arch villain (tragic hero?), ventures down into Nibelheim, the underworld where the dwarves live and work under the lashes of Alberich's whip. I love how LA Opera evoked Nibelheim. They do something clever with that huge stage rake to make it look like Alberich's going down. And all that hammering, the steady clanging, is integrated into the music. In terms of the plot, the point of the scene is to introduce Alberich's brother, Mime, the dwarf who eventually raises Siegfried in the woods between the second and third operas. Mime is the best of the metalsmiths. When we meet him, he's just finished making a magical helmet called the Tarnhelm. Don the Tarnhelm and you can either become invisible or change shape. Soon Wotan, god of the gods, and his lawyer/god of fire Loge show up. Now that Alberich has both the Tarnhelm and the all-powerful Ring, his ego has grown bigger than Valhalla. He tells Wotan and Loge straight up that he'll be taking over the world in due time. Loge, like any good lawyer, turns passive-aggressive. He pretends to doubt the Tarnhelm's power. Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to turn into a huge dragon. Loge's unfazed. Alberich then turns into a little toad. And that's when Loge and Wotan grab the little shit and whisk him up to Valhalla as their prisoner.


John's main point in playing this excerpt was to talk about leitmotifs. You know what a leitmotif is, right? Watch any movie and you've most likely seen it. Or rather, heard it. You know how in movies, when a certain character shows up, the same series of musical notes or the same part of a song plays? Like in Star Wars, composer John Williams came up with a whole slew of leitmotifs for most of the major characters. Princess Leia had that same little delicate tune. When Darth Vader or the Emperor or the storm troopers were approaching, you always heard that very sinister orchestral piece which has by now become ubiquitous. Sure, you know leitmotifs. Well, Wagner was the leitmotif master. John said he may not have invented the idea of a leitmotif, but with the Ring Cycle, he advanced the cause of leitmotifs by leaps and bounds. This excerpt introduces us to a few leitmotifs. First and foremost, you've got the "Ring" leitmotif. This is at the very beginning of the scene, when Alberich brags about having used the Ring to enslave the dwarves. That leads to the "Woe" motif. I remember that from the LA Opera production, how the dwarves don't sing so much as wail in response to the whip's lash. This takes us to the "Gold's Dominion" leitmotif, Alberich's response to the wailing. And finally the scene comes full circle back to the "Ring" motif when Wotan and Loge show up.

Before continuing with the excerpts, John talked about the stark contrast between how the two epics begin--Das Rheingold and The Hobbit--and how these beginnings tell us a lot about the two authors. He picked up the copy of The Hobbit he brought with him and read us the first page.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats--the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill--The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it--and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage...

I hadn't thought about it before, but John's dead on. When you look at how The Hobbit begins versus Das Rheingold, right away it seems Tolkien is the noon to Wagner's midnight. Of course it's more complicated than that, but anyways. John didn't play us the opening to Das Rheingold, but that's just as well. When he said the beginning of the Ring Cycle, he didn't mean the first page of the score. He meant the entire first opera. Whereas Tolkien was content giving us a quick rundown of Bilbo's house before diving into the plot with the arrival of the dwarves, Wagner snowed his audience under the complete portrait of the Ring's mythological origin. That's basically what Das Rheingold is: A one-hundred-sixty-minute exposition in four acts.

The next excerpt was the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" song from the beginning of the third and last act of Die Walküre. Even folks who know nothing whatsoever about Wagner or the Ring Cycle have heard "Ride of the Valkyries." It's in that one scene in Apocalypse Now when Robert Duvall leads a chopper attack. Otherwise, it's a pretty ubiquitous song. Seriously, if you think you've never heard it, go to YouTube and do a search for "Ride of the Valkyries." When you hear it, you'll be like, "Of course!"

In the context of act three, the song usually starts as a prelude. In the opera lexicon, a prelude is similar to an overture. Only, an overture is the piece they play before the opera starts. The prelude is what they play before act two or act three or whatever. Not to be confused with an interlude, which is played between scenes. Anyway, "Ride of the Valkyries" starts when the curtain is still down, but that's only for a few seconds. Soon enough the curtain rises to reveal the divine sisters. Not all of them yet. At first we've got four who've gathered on the mountain. See, what the Valkyries basically do in Old Norse mythology is, they fly back and forth from Valhalla and earth to collect heroes who've died in battle. Accordingly, each of these four Valkyries has a dead warrior in her steed's saddlebag. Soon enough, four more Valkyries show up with dead heroes of their own. Finally, they're joined by the ninth and final Valkyrie, Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde's sisters are shocked to see she's brought a human woman with her, Sieglinde, the gal from act one who fell in love with her long lost twin brother Siegmund. Gross, I know, but let's get past that. Anyway, what no one says in this scene, but what you would know if you've been following the Cycle from the beginning, is that Sieglinde is half-sister to the Valkyries. Right? The Valkyries are the divine daughters of Wotan. He had them with, I think, Freia or someone. One of the goddesses. But the twins Sieglinde and Siegmund? Wotan had them with a mortal woman. Despite this kinship, the Valkyries are totally against protecting Sieglinde even though she's pregnant with the third opera's title character. This is where Wotan shows up and gives Brünnhilde the third degree. The other eight Valkyries fly away. Most we never see again except for Waltraute, who figures more prominently in the fourth opera.

John mentioned another pop culture touchstone where you may've heard "Ride of the Valkyries": What's Opera, Doc? It's one of those Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd shorts from the fifties. You've got Bugs as Brünnhilde and Elmer Fudd wearing that Viking helmet and singing, with the same "Ride of the Valkyrie" notes: "Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit, kill da waaaaaaabbit, etc." John related seeing Robin Williams at the Hollywood Bowl several years ago. "Don't ask me why he was there," he said. It wasn't a one-man show but was part of a larger program. The Hollywood Bowl is primarily the summer home of the LA Philharmonic, and I'm guessing they must've played Wagner that night, perhaps even "Ride of the Valkyries." When Robin Williams took the mic, he said it was impossible to think of Wagner without thinking of What's Opera, Doc?

Part of John's point in playing "Ride of the Valkyries" was to introduce us to yet another leitmotif, called "Walkürenritt," which literally means "Valkyrie Ride." The end of act three, which is the end of the opera, sees Wotan stripping his daughter of her divine Valkyrie status, rendering her as mortal as her half-sister Sieglinde. Then he leaves her asleep and surrounded by fire, saying she'll be stuck there until someone's got the cojones to brave the fire. The way John described his relationship to the end of Die Walküre comes close to mine. It's very effecting, especially the way Achim Freyer stages it with the scrim. There's Brünnhilde, asleep in the fire, no longer a mighty warrior. And there's Wotan, just outside the fire, reluctantly turning his back and stalking away, from his daughter and from the audience. He too seems human. And to us, at that moment, he is. This isn't Wotan the god of Norse gods. It's Wotan the heart-broken dad, decreed by his own laws to abandon his baby girl. John said he always cries when he sees that. If I ever become a father, I'll probably cry too.

From Wagner we go back to Tolkien. Just as Wagner was part of a group of artists espousing the Medieval German and mythical German as the ideal, so too did Tolkien belong to a clique of minds like his. In this case, I'm referring to writers who promoted narrative fiction, especially fantasy. You know C.S. Lewis, right? The Chronicles of Narnia guy? Well, he and Tolkien were pals. They hung out at the pub every week. John talked about their being part of this group called the Inklings, a bunch of writers and professors who gathered regularly at this Oxford pub called the Bird. You had Tolkien as well as his son Chris, C.S. Lewis and his older brother Warren, and a whole bunch of others. The way Warren Lewis described it was: "Properly speaking, the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections." Right. It was like a Sunday book group or something. Only, instead of gabbing about a book they'd all just read, they'd talk about and read from books they were in the process of writing. This is where Tolkien read early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. Is that not awesome or what? To be a fly on the Bird's wall...

John went into how Tolkien used archetypes in The Lord of the Rings to prefigure some of the great cultural and historical events. So for starters, you've got Númenor as Atlantis, right? It was this island west of Middle-earth that basically sunk and killed most of the folks who lived there. Then you've got Aragorn kissing the hot elf Arwen when she's asleep, which alludes to Sleeping Beauty, of course. And finally, we have my most favorite allusion in The Lord of the Rings: The Crack of Doom. Tolkien's Middle-earth wasn't as overtly Christian as Lewis's Narnia, but the Crack of Doom is a glaring exception. In the Christian mythos, the Crack of Doom is when they play the trumpets announcing the Day of Judgment. Well, Tolkien took the Crack of Doom and made it literal with Mount Doom, that volcano in Mordor where Sauron forged the Ring. That's where Frodo has to get to to destroy the Ring. He has to venture into the bowels of Doom and drop the Ring through the literal crack in the floor so that it'll fall into the lava. Those are but three of several examples of Tolkien alluding to stuff in our culture. John said Tolkien, in plotting the Middle-earth timeline, drew from archetypes residing in the British subconscious and made them conscious.

This led John to talk about a lecture Tolkien delivered in 1936 called "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." He was in his mid forties at this point and had been teaching Anglo-Saxon at Oxford's Pembroke College for about ten years. The Inklings were in full swing. The Hobbit was a year away from publication. Tolkien was on a roll. The gist of the lecture was that Tolkien was taking to task the majority of Beowulf critics, who insisted on viewing the epic poem purely as a historical document, to be used for studying Norse life while completely ignoring the fantasy elements. Like, say, Grendel. And the dragon. Both of whom constitute a fairly significant portion of the story. Scholars also used the poem as a vehicle for studying Old English. Don't get Tolkien wrong, he was definitely a language man. He invented Elvish for Pete's sake. And of course he had nothing against history. Dude invented the most comprehensive history imaginable for Middle-earth. His point was that the critics shouldn't stop there. Beowulf, he said, has tons and tons to offer from a fantasy and artistic standpoint. He said Grendel and his mom and the dragon were totally key to the poem and that the writer was using them as an allegory for human destiny. "Beowulf is among my most valued sources," Tolkien said.


This lecture was a watershed for Beowulf scholarship. It's been reprinted and republished innumerable times. The first I heard of it was in the summer of 2000 when I read Irish poet Seamus Heaney's then new and very well-received translation of Beowulf. In his introduction, he cited and praised Tolkien's lecture for drawing everyone's attention to the poem's literary qualities, validating its inclusion not just in history classes, but in English lit classes as well. Suffice it to say Beowulf's influence is fairly stark in the Middle-earth stuff. In 2003, the same year The Return of the King came out, they found literally two thousand or so pages of Tolkien's handwritten notes about, as well as his own translation of, Beowulf, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, thus revealing the extra dimension of his fandom (fanaticism?).

The Beowulf critics Tolkien was taking to task reminded John of one of his English teachers, who apparently missed the point of Poe's "The Raven." Of course, "The Raven" is much shorter and less complicated than Beowulf, so I'm not sure how anyone could screw it up. But apparently John had a teacher who was more interested in "The Raven" for strictly linguistic and historical purposes while completely ignoring the horror and fantasy aspects.

With the next pair of excerpts, John compared and contrasted the scene in The Hobbit when Bilbo first meets the dragon Smaug versus Siegfried's meeting the dragon Fafner in Siegfried. He picked up The Hobbit and flipped open to chapter twelve ("Inside Information"). Chapter eleven ("On the Doorstep") ends with Bilbo going down into the Lone Mountain. John started reading about two or three pages into chapter twelve. Bilbo's been venturing deeper into the mountain and has now reached, as Tolkien wrote (and about where John started reading):

...the great bottom-most cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain's root. It is almost dark so that its vastness can only be dimly guessed, but rising from the near side of the rocky floor there is a great glow. The glow of Smaug!

There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; a thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.

Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed. Behind him where the walls were nearest could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed.

To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.

And then Bilbo, invisible thanks to the One Ring, steals a cup or something, which Smaug soon detects when he wakes up and "smells" the fact that his horde is now less one cup. Bilbo and the dwarves haul ass out of the mountain as Smaug rips shit up. Our heroes spend the next few pages camping and debating their next move. Bilbo, who at this point in the adventure has become the group's undisputed leader, proposes to go back down there, invisible, to see if he can find a weakness with Smaug that they can exploit. This time Smaug only pretends to sleep as the invisible Bilbo enters his chamber. Smaug smells him and starts talking to him. The conversation they have is hilarious, although I'm not sure how much of that hilarity is intentional. It's just the way this huge scary dragon talks like a very proper Englishman. Here's an excerpt, starting toward the beginning of the conversation.

"No thank you, O Smaug the Tremendous!" he replied. "I did not come for presents. I only wished to have a look at you and see if you were truly as great as tales say. I did not believe them."

"Do you now?" said the dragon somewhat flattered, even though he did not believe a word of it.

"Truly songs and tales fall utterly short of the reality, O Smaug the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities," replied Bilbo.

"You have nice manners for a thief and a liar," said the dragon. "You seem familiar with my name, but I don't seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?"

"You may indeed! I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen."

"So I can well believe," said Smaug, "but that is hardly your usual name."

"I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number."

"Lovely titles!" sneered the dragon. "But lucky numbers don't always come off."

"I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me."

"These don't sound so creditable," scoffed Smaug.

"I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider," went on Bilbo beginning to be pleased with his riddling.

"That's better!" said Smaug. "But don't let your imagination run away with you!"

This of course is the way to talk to dragons, if you don't want to reveal your proper name (which is wise), and don't want to infuriate them by a flat refusal (which is also very wise). No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it. There was a lot here which Smaug did not understand at all (though I expect you do, since you know all about Bilbo's adventures to which he was referring), but he thought he understood enough, and he chuckled in his wicked inside.

"I thought so last night," he [Smaug] smiled to himself. "Lake-men, some nasty scheme of those miserable tub-trading Lake-men, or I'm a lizard. I haven't been down that way for an age and an age; but I will soon alter that!"


You get the idea. Now let's compare that to when Siegfried confronts Fafner in act two of his eponymous opera. If you've followed the Cycle from the beginning, you know that Fafner was one of the two giants who built Valhalla in Das Rheingold. And then at the end, in a squabble over the Ring, Fafner kills the other giant, Fasolt. Now we get to see what Fafner's been up to. He's taken the Ring and the Tarnhelm and found this cave where he can guard them in the form of a dragon. As I said above, Siegfried's an innocent kid in a man's body. He's not a courageous hero in the traditional sense. While waiting outside the cave, he forgets about the dragon and fiddles around with his reed pipe. He tries and fails to mimic the song of a bird in a nearby tree. The racket wakes up Fafner. The ensuing fight is very short. Siegfried takes his sword Nothung (yes, even swords have names here, as they do in The Lord of the Rings) and stabs Fafner in the heart. Just before he expires, Fafner warns Siegfried about people who will betray him to get the Ring. When he tastes the dragon's blood, Siegfried can suddenly understand the bird he'd been trying to imitate. The bird tells him to go get the Ring and the Tarnhelm.

One obvious difference between the two scenes is that, in The Hobbit, we get some insight into Smaug's thoughts. Smaug is also friendlier, even playful. He loves that riddling talk. Fafner, meanwhile, has no humor whatsoever. It's all gloom and doom with Fafner. Also, Biblo's confronting Smaug is a clear act of bravery. He uses both his courage and his wits to get Smaug to lower his guard. He's got no choice, right? He's a tiny little hobbit. Certainly he can't rely on brute strength like the borderline idiot Siegfried. This makes the Smaug scene a tête-à-tête filled with both humor and suspense. Night and day from Siegfried versus Fafner.

John switched gears to talk about Fafner from the point of view of stage design. He said that if the stage designers aren't careful, the Siegfried-Fafner scene can turn into a Chinatown parade, with the dragon looking more hokey than threatening. This is when he brought up Stacy Brightman, PhD. Stacy's head of LA Opera's Education and Community Programs. Among other things, she's the one who partners with schools and volunteer groups to promote LA Opera. She's also an adjunct professor at USC's music school, specializing in the music industry, arts management and education and community programs. John told us that when she was getting her doctorate at UC Davis in theatre research, half the work she did was on Wagner. From Stacy's point of view, Wagner changed stage design forever when he wrote the Ring Cycle. That's why he started the festival in Bayreuth, right? Specifically because, in his opinion, there didn't exist at that time any theater on earth that could handle it.

John went a bit more into the differences between Wagner and Tolkien as people. Well, mainly he talked about Wagner, telling us stuff that I've by now heard at just about every Ring-related seminar or lecture I've ever attended: Wagner was an asshole. "Despicable" was the word John used. He "ruined a lot of people." And, of course, as I've heard umpteen times by now, Wagner was an egomaniac. "Exhibit A: Bayreuth," John said. "Exhibit B: Every Wagner society on Earth was created by Wagner." Then he talked about Wagner as the bold-faced anti-Semite and womanizer. Among many other affairs, he slept with this one woman named Cosima, who was the daughter of Franz Liszt and wife of Hans von Bülow, one of the greatest pianists/composers/conductors of his day. Wagner and Cosima had two kids before she finally divorced Hans so she could marry our man here. This is all smothered with irony since Hans was a big promoter of Wagner's work and did quite a bit to get the work known. Even after Wagner stole his woman, Hans didn't hold a grudge, and was even sad when Wagner died. Cosima ended up in charge of the Bayreuth festival and ran it for another thirty years after her husband's death (she was twenty-five years younger than him). Hans wasn't the only ironic supporter of Wagner's. John told us that even Jews stood by Wagner and supported his work.

Now and again throughout his lecture, John talked about the centennial Ring Cycle production at Bayreuth in August 1976. I remember one of the speakers talking about it at a recent Opera League seminar. It was the one directed by a thirty-two-year-old prodigy named Patrice Chéreau. Patrice's vision for the Ring came from George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite, a book-length essay wherein Shaw talks about how awesome Wagner is, especially the Ring Cycle. He posited that the Ring Cycle is an allegory about Communist revolution. The dwarves are the workers who are oppressed, tormented, and motivated to keep going only by the "invisible whip of hunger" and the chance that their rich bosses will free them someday. Shaw looked at Wotan's family as representing capitalism. So just as Wotan's family eventually implodes from greed and jealousy and betrayal, so, thought Shaw, would capitalism, due to its "internal contradictions." He said the Ring Cycle shows "the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today."

And so when they tapped him to direct the centennial Ring at Bayreuth, Patrice, drawing inspiration from The Perfect Wagnerite, set the story during the Industrial Revolution. The gods and goddesses were factory bosses in business suits. The dwarves were the workers. The Rhine River was a hydroelectric dam. John referred to Patrice's Ring as the "Red Ring." Adding to the fun was the casting of European rock star Peter Hoffman to play Siegmund. Hildegard Behrens, a German soprano who just passed away last August at 72, played his twin Sieglinde. She eventually won a Grammy for Best Opera Recording for Die Walküre at the Met. As you can imagine, audiences were a little perplexed at first by Patrice's vision, but it worked. The Bayreuth organizers called Patrice back four more times. At the final performance in August 1980, the audience gave a ninety-minute standing ovation.


When someone in the audience asked John about character development in the Ring Cycle versus The Lord of the Rings, John referenced Patrice Chéreau's production yet again as a great way of seeing how Wagner developed character. He specifically referred to the way Patrice staged the last scene in act two of Die Walküre. This is when Wotan, at the behest of his wife Fricka, lets his own son Siegmund get killed by Sieglinde's husband Hunding. Fricka was mad at the twins for having sex because A) It's adultery, and B) It's incest! Here's how Patrice staged the scene. After Hunding cuts down Siegmund, Sieglinde kneels on the ground next to him and wraps a sheet around him several times to create a makeshift shroud. He'll be dead any minute. With what little strength he has left, Siegmund says he won't go to Valhalla without her. Sieglinde stops winding the sheet abruptly. And then Siegmund expires. "Well, at least he gets to see Valhalla now," she says. Watching all of this play out, Brünnhilde sees true human love for the first time. "Brünnhilde's world is rocked," John said. This is more than just character development. This is what Wagner liked to do: Develop character while at the same time forever altering the course of the story due to the character's new trait/new way of seeing the world.

This is when John talked about different singers he's admired in the role of Wotan. He specifically called out this fortysomething Welsh bass-baritone named Bryn Terfel. Bryn has apparently specialized in Mozart stuff since his first big break twenty years ago. But he's branched out and done other stuff, including Wagner, Strauss, and Puccini. This fall he'll be tackling Wotan again at the Met in a brand new Robert Lepage version of the Ring Cycle. The best Wotan John's ever seen was a German bass-baritone named Hans Hotter, a suitable surname, I reckon, since this guy's practically a legend to Ring fans. He lived almost a hundred years, from 1909 to 2003. In the early sixties he sang the role of Wotan in the first-ever commercial recording of the Ring. You can also hear live recordings of him as Wotan from Bayreuth in the fifties. John said it was not only his powerful voice but incredible height that gave him that god of gods quality. Hans epitomized the concept of stage presence.

John talked about this timeshare he's got in Hawaii where he's been going every summer since 1980 or thereabouts. Originally this timeshare was next door to a bar called Tom Bombadil's. And next to that was a bookstore called Middle-earth. Both bar and bookstore were owned by the same guy, and both went belly-up about seven or eight years ago. John still has Tom Bombadil's T-shirts that he jogs in wherever he goes. At this point the shirts have been all over the country, including New York City. This tells you what a hardcore Tolkien fan John must be. Only the true fans know who Tom Bombadil is.

Speaking of true fans, John told us that Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh have read The Lord of the Rings twice a year every year since they were fourteen. They truly love the language of the books, which made them the perfect couple to make the films, I now see. While John loves the films (he's seen them many times and has all the special editions), he's worried people will lose access to that language. When they want to experience The Lord of the Rings, they'll skip the books and go straight to the awesome movies. He told us that Amazon.com and the magazine Bibliophile cited The Lord of the Rings as the most important fiction of the 20th century. Here's hoping that'll keep the books on people's radars.

He ended the lecture by coming back to LA Opera's current Ring Cycle. He's seen all four productions and thinks Achim has done a terrific job. He also loves how candid Achim is about the work. Some artists do stuff that's really clever and artsy fartsy and open-ended, and when you ask them what the hell it all means, they refuse to say. Of course, sometimes it's because they don't know. Achim knows, though. John said that when someone asked him about the weird light that changes colors at the beginning of Das Rheingold, Achim was like, "Oh, that? That's just my way of showing Loge being born." If you think about it, John said, Achim's got two separate productions going on here: Singing and painting. The constantly moving elements add up to a series of paintings, inhabited by the singers and accompanied by the gorgeous music. The painting angle makes sense. Achim Freyer is first and foremost a painter. That's pretty cool how unpretentious he is. In fact, genius artists who are straightforward and down to earth seem very rare.