Nutcracker Season

The opera season just ended, and San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle won't come around until next summer. I'll be spending the next six months looking behind the scenes when I can, and watching other music, theater, and dance performances. There are wonderful overlaps in the arts, especially in the Bay Area. But this post may be the first time anyone has linked the fearsome Richard Wagner with the Nutcracker.

That's because my French-horn-playing friend Bill performs with both the SF Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras. Two days after the season-ending opera, he began playing for the ballet's beautiful Nutcracker, which runs through December 27. I see it, live or on public television, almost every year.

I first met William Klingelhoffer when I went to the opera house to ask him about playing Wagner, whose operas are the world's longest (see August 3, 2010 post). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. As I explained a while back, Wagner demands eight French horns for the Ring--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos.

But a ball player sits in the dugout a lot. With Wagner, the horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "You have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You need something in reserve; I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes by itself."

So the two-hour-long Nutcracker is a piece of cake or candy (easy for me to say), although Bill knows how to challenge himself. "You know how a baseball player hits 'for the cycle,' meaning he hits a single, double, triple, and home run in the same game? Last year I played Nutcracker for the cycle: I played all four horn parts--first, second, third, and fourth--on various days in the same run!"

Bill says he's up to about 700 performances of Nutcracker all told. And you gotta keep things interesting. But he's sticking with first horn this year. "I'm imagining a more Zen approach: Nutcracker as meditation. Ohhhhhhmmmmmmmm....."




Nutcracker photo c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet
Photo of Bill: me

How Happily My Heart Breaks

I saw Placido Domingo as Cyrano de Bergerac recently. What a thrill. Not that I'm star-struck; I've seen too many stars and been struck by how little they measure up to the hype. But it really is something to see a true superstar perform. Someone like Domingo brings such presence and charisma to the stage, you feel it immediately. The excitement is there before he ever opens his mouth.

And that Sunday at the War Memorial Opera House, it was certainly there afterward. As the stage went dark, people began moving down the aisles. At first I thought they were planning to throw bouquets--a now frowned-upon sign of enthusiasm that I haven't seen in years. There were too many people for that, though, and they were all holding up cell-phone cameras, not long-stemmed roses. The rest of us were applauding and cheering, and Domingo really looked happy, not at all like someone who--after singing 134 different roles in nearly 3,500 performances, more than any other tenor ever--might understandably be a tad jaded. As the curtain fell, he leaned down and out to the side as if to get one more look at the audience. Even if it was to give the audience one more look at him, it was a sign of enthusiasm you rarely see in a star.

For myself, I was still trying to reel in the tears I shed during the last scene, when Cyrano comes to see Roxane for the last time, and he reads aloud the final letter sent her by, she thinks, her long-dead husband. We all know that Cyrano wrote that letter, and that he remembers every word. When the perennially unobservant Roxane wonders how he can read anything now that it's dark, we see the letter lying in his lap as he speaks. Oh, the heavenly sorrow of (someone else's) unrequited, obsessive love!

After Jon Carroll, my favorite Chronicle columnist, saw the opera, he wrote about viewing a play or an opera for the first time--in this case, Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac, on which the opera is based, with his daughter. Having learned from movies and TV that the hero never dies, she was emotionally walloped by the ending. His column reminded me of the time I was watching the final scenes of a classic opera that does not end well for the principles. (Not that that's a clue.) Noticing the tears streaming down my cheeks, the woman next to me leaned over and asked softly, "Is this your first Tosca?"

And yet, as with Madama Butterfly or La Boheme, I still cry at the end of Tosca. With Cyrano, play or opera, I think knowing how it ends--not just knowing that all the words that made Roxane fall in love are Cyrano's, and that he has nobly kept the truth from her all these years, and that even now he is disregarding a fatal head wound, just to see her one more time--well, it makes that last scene unutterably more poignant. You might call it sentimental, and hyper romantic, and you could be right; but you'd still believe if you saw someone like Placido Domingo in the role. I could cry just thinking about it.

Music: Scenes from San Francisco Opera's Cyrano de Bergerac

My Afternoon with Domingo

I met Placido Domingo a couple of days ago. Wait, let me rephrase that. A couple of days ago, I met Placido Domingo! He is in San Francisco to sing Cyrano de Bergerac, by the undervalued Italian composer Franco Alfano. (Why this 1936 opera is performed so infrequently is a post in itself.) After rehearsal one afternoon, San Francisco Opera had a little "press chat" with Domingo in the red-and-gold mezzanine lounge at the opera house. SFO general director David Gockley did a fine job of interviewing him, both sitting on high stools against a long wall, our plush chairs in a semicircle around them.

Gockley reminded us of the heroic role Domingo played at the 1983 gala opening night. He'd been in Manhattan that day, preparing to sing at the Met; but when SFO's Otello lost his voice, Domingo was asked to step in. I just learned some of these details. The man was recently arrived from Europe yet. A helicopter took him to SF billionaire composer Gordon Getty's Lear jet, which happened to be in New York; Domingo flew across the country; the audience heard reports of his journey up the freeway (in a green Jaguar with police escort); and the show went on, just a few hours late.

Gockley told us that, in the '70s and '80s, Domingo sang in San Francisco about once a year. His appearances became more sporadic after he became general director of the Washington Opera and, now, Los Angeles Opera. He last performed here at a special tribute evening about 10 years ago, during which he sang one act each from Fedora, Samson et Dalila, and most wonderfully, Otello, one of his signature roles.

This week, I had a chance to remind Domingo of something unforgettable he did that evening. As he was taking his bows, the singers, some SFO luminaries, and several backstage staffers gathered soundlessly behind him. He did an impressive double-take when he saw them. And then, when Domingo noticed his longtime dresser, a distinguished-looking older man named Joe Harris, he brought him forward and introduced him. Harris was stunned and touched, and so was I.

When I shared this memory, Domingo looked at me sadly and said, "He died," and he squeezed my hands. "I know," I said. "I thought of you when I read his obituary."

When Domingo was here last, he received a San Francisco Opera medal, awarded from time to time to great performers, conductors, and others who've been important to the company. When Harris, who died three years ago, retired in 2004 after 44 years with the opera, he was presented one, too.

Music: Placido Domingo sings "Nessun Dorma," from Turandot.

Miners, Music, Machines

Not long ago, I went with San Francisco Opera French horn player Bill Klingelhoffer to A and G Music in Oakland--specifically to its vast downstairs repair shop, Best Instrument Repair Co. That's where I met Dick Akright, "a giant in the field of horn-crafting repair," according to a long article former San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ken Garcia wrote about Akright and his realm several years ago. At one point, Akright had a side business with trumpet player Doc Severinsen--that's right, the guy who led the Tonight Show band when Johnny Carson was the late-night king. Dick and Doc created custom Bel Canto trumpets.

Bill and I were there to pick up the orchestra's two Wagner tubas (see previous post). Not every score calls for a Wagner tuba, so while Bill and the SFO orchestra were performing Aida, Werther, and The Marriage of Figaro lately--with Bill on co-principal horn, as usual--the Wagner tubas were getting the spa treatment in Oakland.

Lucky for me, only one of them was ready, because I got a great before-and-after view. One looked shiny and new. The other...you know how copper turns green when exposed to the elements? Brass turns orange with use, and the beautifully tarnished Wagner tuba that Ian Siverly showed us was solid tangerine around the valves and halfway down, trailing off into a scatter of paler fingerprints near the bell.

Siverly and his colleagues push something like a small metal balloon into the bell if they need to press out any dents, and use a soldering torch to fix broken braces. The cool thing, though, was seeing how these guys get the tarnish off instruments made of brass or a nickel-silver alloy: with an ultrasonic bath and a scratch brush. The bath entails filling a waist-high, rectangular metal sink with a gallon of biodetergent-acid concentrate and 90 gallons of water, then pulsing sonic waves through for a minute or two, max. "You could climb in there and get rid of all your gallstones," the deadpan Siverly said while showing us how it worked.

If the sonic bath is a kind of Jacuzzi, the scratch brush is the massage. It's a special mass of fine brass wire on the end of a long metal rod set in concrete; when you turn on a motor, the brush spins and buffs the brass instrument.

As I write this, the last miner has just emerged from that half-mile-deep pit in the Chilean earth. It's been amazing to see the technology developed to save these 33 men, especially that skinny steel pod and the pulleys used to lower it and haul the men up into sun- or moonlight. It's been so heartening to see how hard so many people have worked to save them. The human mind is shockingly adept at thinking up ways to inflict torture and death. But it can also create such beautiful, soul-healing art and such ingenious machines. Right this moment, I'm thinking of Wagner's operas, the unique musical instrument he envisioned, and the creative techniques someone invented to clean it. Not to mention an awe-inspiring rescue capsule that may--we hope--never be used again.

Background music: From Das Rheingold, Entry of the Gods Into Valhalla

The Music Goes Round and Round

It seems a little oxymoronic, putting Richard Wagner's name in front of a brass instrument associated with marching bands and Octoberfest. But as the people at wagner-tuba.com will tell you, the name of "one of the least well-known orchestral instruments in the world today" is "colourful yet ambiguous and causes confusion as to its true identify." In his operas, Wagner wanted to hear something bridging the tone between a French horn and a trombone, a smaller tuba that would integrate with the new (1835) bass tuba and better blend the sounds of the brass section.

When I tell you the Wagner tuba uses a French horn mouthpiece, you may--if you've been reading this blog and have a good memory--think of Bill Klingelhoffer, the San Francisco Opera's co-principal horn player (see August 3 post), who's the reason I'm writing this.

When a company performs the four operas in the Ring Cycle over the course of seven days, as SFO is doing next summer, the demands on the musicians seem almost unbelievable--especially when you multiply it times two more weeks. So you can imagine my lack of surprise when Bill told me that when he performed the Ring here before, the principal horn players divided the work. Bill played Das Rheingold, the other principal played Die Walkure, and they split up Siegfried and Gotterdammerung.

These days, though, Bill's co-principal is 20-something Kevin Rivard, who's so excited about playing his first Ring, says Bill, he wants to do the whole thing, with only an assistant to help out by...well, that's something I plan to talk to Kevin about. What will Bill be doing? Yep, he'll be on Wagner tuba.

So I guess you've figured out what's in the photographs. In the big one, you're looking at the intricate valve section with its seven tuning slides, each needing a separate adjustment. You have to take the whole thing apart to overhaul and clean it, and each tuning slide needs to be labeled first. The orchestra's two Wagner tubas have been getting spiffed up lately at A and G Music/Best Instrument Repair Co., "which, from its popularity over the years," the SF Chronicle noted a few years ago, "apparently lives up to its name." When Bill drove over there to pick them up, I went with him, and it was an unexpected glimpse behind the scenes.

Background music: Das Rheingold, Prelude-Act I

Mozart, a Maid, and Dave Matthews

So I was at the opera house one afternoon, watching a dress rehearsal for The Marriage of Figaro, when I saw someone emerge from the wings far downstage--just a step or two. I assumed he was going to sing, until I noticed his jeans and polo shirt. He quickly adjusted one of the props, but that was it: This was the final run-through before opening night, so there were no dramatic glitches or performance-stopping do-overs, just pure entertainment at less than the price of a standing-room seat. (See August 31 post.)

I was sitting amid a group of high school students from the city's School of the Arts, who whooped and cheered after every aria and laughed heartily at all the funny bits. Figaro is the great sit-com of the opera world--all multiple deceptions and misunderstandings, as the servants Figaro and Susanna try to marry while avoiding the lecherous Count Almaviva, who wants to bed any maid he fancies, while breaking the Countess's heart--all to Mozart's wonderful music.

Later, students from this school and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music met with the woman who sang Susanna, soprano Danielle de Niese. You want to hate her: absolutely beautiful, lovely voice, fine comic actress ("You don't play the character from the neck up"), and she can't be much over 30. When she came into the room, she was so up. For one thing, she'd heard all that whooping and whistling. "Your response was just stunning," she exclaimed. "The premiere audience won't be like you guys. Now we're spoiled."

De Niese told her audience that Figaro is a great "starter opera," because "it's so funny" and, she did not say, light. It can be warm and human and even moving, but it's far less taxing for an audience than any of Wagner's librettos. It's a noticeable workout, though, for anyone singing Susanna, who is onstage for all but about 30 minutes: "When I took off my wig, I had the sweatiest hair ever! You're always singing at top soprano; you're in almost every ensemble; and your aria is at the end. I try to set up some timing where I can jump offstage and swig some water. I'm always looking for new ways to pace myself, new ways to rest."

Someone asked De Niese how she warms up. "Some people don't like to use their voice before they sing," she said, "but I talk to my parents all morning." (The woman is so vivacious, it was truly no surprise to hear this.) "Before a performance, I would like 45 minutes to focus.... I listen to my iPod and hum along"--to Dave Matthews Band, Coldplay, Beyonce, Katy Perry's new album--"Music is the thing that punctuates emotion. It's important to be open to music."

"It drives my dressers crazy," she added, "because I always have my earbuds in."

Background music: Scenes from SFO's Marriage of Figaro

Unforgettable

The first time you see any great opera is memorable, I think. It's like coming into Paris or Stonehenge or the Andes for the first time. No matter how often you return, how much you feel your love or admiration deepen, you can only experience that initial reaction once.

And sometimes, not often, it makes a story worth telling. Andy Ross, an Oakland-based literary agent, told me, "I'm the perfect Wagnerite." He's seen Wagner's operas countless times, and that includes five complete Ring Cycles. But his favorite production of any Wagner opera was his first. "It was Die Walkure at the Met in 1966 or '67," he says. "My uncle gave me a ticket. It turned out I was in the front row, center, about eight feet from the conductor, Herbert von Karajan. All the Wagnerites were offering to pay me for my seat. I found out why when someone told me that the elderly woman sitting next to me was Madame Maria Jeritza, the greatest Sieglinde of the 1920s [pictured above in her prime]. She whispered along with the role and was very impressed with the production."

Sieglinde is a big, expressive role: She must convey resignation and fear (of her husband, Hunding), dawning hope and love (for Siegmund, that opera's hero), strength and fortitude as she learns she carries Siegmund's child and must carry on without him. It's so moving to picture the aged soprano, so many years after the spotlight dimmed, singing in a whisper with Regine Crespin, one of the reigning sopranos of her era. Many consider Crespin the greatest French Wagnerian soprano of the century. The other outstanding Wagnerian sopranos were from Scandinavia--like Birgit Nilsson, whom Andy saw as Brunnhilde--Germany, Austria, or the U.S.

No wonder Andy never forgot his first Die Walkure. What I want to know is, what is the difference between a Wagnerian and a Wagnerite?

Background music: Regine Crespin as Sieglinde.

Super Days and Nights

It strikes me that being a supernumerary in a small role can be the best job at the opera. You're not just a face in the crowd, but you're not the scene's focus, and of course, you don't have to sing. In his five roles so far with San Francisco Opera, Christopher Smith (see end of August 31 post) has had a super career.

He had "a great role" in the June 2009 production of Puccini's Tosca, for instance. The opera's villain is Baron Scarpia, the corrupt chief of police of Rome, and the entire second act takes place in his quarters, as Scarpia tries to learn the whereabouts of an escaped political prisoner; has Tosca's lover, Cavaradossi, tortured offstage; and attempts to seduce Tosca in exchange for Cavaradossi's life. Christopher was one of Scarpia's six henchmen: "My job was to look mean in the background." (Though he doesn't look so mean above, in the foreground, right).

And then, toward the end of Act III, he was in the firing squad for the "mock" execution.

That summer, Christopher also played a policeman in a rare staging of George and Ira Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess (not to be confused with the movie). The seven performances sold out, and "there was so much excitement with that opera, onstage and in the audience." I can vouch for that. The hum and buzz continued after the curtain dropped and we we left the opera house: The staging, acting, singing, and dancing were stellar. I want to mention that the director was Francesca Zambello, because she is directing next summer's Ring Cycle as well.

Oh, and Christopher may well be performing in at least one of the four operas, reprising his roles in Die Walkure, the opera that started all the excitement--I mean my excitement--this past summer. (See July 22 post.)

By the way, from now on when you click on a link to an opera--here, it's Tosca, Porgy and Bess, and Die Walkure--you'll open onto a YouTube clip from a performance. So: music!

I Second That Emotion

I took a walk with my friend Kelly Powers the other day, and as usual, we talked about books: what we've read lately, what we recommend, what we've thrown across the room. This time, we discussed the act of reading itself, and what a welcome refuge it can be. In that sense, all engrossing reading is "escapist," and hurray for that. Coincidentally, I had just finished Let the Great World Spin, which won last year's National Book Award for fiction, and had even typed up the quote below, in which a character from my escapist novel describes her own great refuge: opera.

Colum McCann's beautiful novel takes us into the worlds of several vastly different people in 1974 New York. One of them is Gloria, who lives in a god-awful housing project in the South Bronx (across from where several other female characters ply their trade), mourning the loss of her three sons, in Vietnam. It eased my heart, toward the end, to read how she had found respite, over the years, from such stress and pain. She doesn't need an orchestra seat, or even to be in the opera house, she tells us. All she needs is the balm of a resplendent voice:

"Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound. I took to listening on the radio every Sunday and spent whatever extra grief money the government gave me on tickets to the Metropolitan. I felt like I had a room full of voices. The music pouring out over the Bronx. I sometimes turned the stereo so loud the neighbors complained. I bought earphones. Huge ones that covered half my head. I wouldn't even look at myself in the mirror. But there was a medicine in it."

Yes, and there are years accumulated in a sound. I hope you've been playing these "selected scenes" from the 2007 Madama Butterfly (see August 25 post) as you've been reading this.

Word of the Day: Supernumerary

Those of you who don't think opera overlaps with popular culture have not been watching Mad Men. Or am I the only one who remembers a conversation Don Draper had in an elegant restaurant in the first of this season's episodes, when he was on a blind date with a young woman who told him she was a supernumerary at the Met? She explained that her task was to help fill the stage. "I do a lot of mock drinking," she told him. "I've been a wench, a courtesan, part of a harem.... I love the costumes and the music." In other words, she's part of a crowd and doesn't sing.

When she asked if he'd ever been to the opera, he said, "Only for business, so I've never enjoyed it." (So Don Draper: does he enjoy anything?) She invited him to a performance, of course, saying although they don't get paid, "they give the supers tickets."

At San Francisco Opera, the supers do get paid, a bit: $6 for each "out-of-house," or staging, rehearsal; $11 for every onstage dress rehearsal and performance. For Aida, the season opener, the supers will attend about ten staging rehearsals and five onstage rehearsals, and they'll be in 12 performances. That means the 19 men and 14 women who fit the costumes (that's how supers are usually selected) will earn about $250 each, plus two tickets to the final dress rehearsals for any operas they are in.

Aida is surely one of the operas that gave rise to the more colloquial name for supernumeraries, which is: spear carriers. (The local supers' newsletter is at spearheadnews.com.) You always see plenty of exotic-looking spear carriers in Aida's famous processional scene, with its stirring music and more or less Egyptian-style costumes. British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes created the sets and costumes for this "eye-popping production," from Houston Grand Opera. Just scroll back and look at the photo.

Christopher Smith, a super I met at the Werther casting call (see August 17 post), will be the one in the jackel-head, or Anubis, costume. He tells me supers usually get to wear two costumes per opera. For Aida, he says, he's "mostly in miniskirts and body paint"--not all that different from what he wore a few years ago in his first SFO production, Mozart's Idomeneo. In other words, "I feel mostly nekkid." (He's from Kentucky, and every once in a while exhibits a bit of a twang that sounds like the characters' in the FX channel's Justified.) But that's OK, because at least in the processional scene, "we come in real quick and we're off." Costume change!

Butterfly Tears

When I tell non-aficionados that I'm blogging about the Ring Cycle, opera, and the other arts, they rarely say, "Oh, I don't like opera." More often, they reply, "Ooh, opera is so expensive." Well, yes--and no. There are certainly other ways to see a production than paying for an orchestra seat.

You can buy a cheaper seat or a standing-room ticket; in San Francisco, you can even see a simulcast at the ballpark! Sometimes you can catch an HD-filmed production at a movie house that has good sound, like my little neighborhood theater in Larkspur, the Lark. Occasionally, you can watch a filmed production on TV. For instance, if you live in the Bay Area, public television station KQED recently showed several productions from San Francisco Opera, including the Madama Butterfly that my friend Sandy Cutler and I saw in San Francisco in 2007. If you've never seen an opera, this is an excellent way to begin: stretched out, feet propped on the ottoman, instead of sitting upright with a hard-back seat in front of you; table with popcorn and beer (or cheese, fresh sourdough, and wine, or whatever) at hand. Plus, you can stretch when it's not intermission.

Madama Butterfly, by Giacomo Puccini, is one of the most engaging and accessible operas, both musically and narratively, you'll ever see. (And it's not Wagner: about three hours long.) Set in imperial Japan, it is the story of a young geisha who falls in love with the callous Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton, whom she weds in a sham ceremony. (She doesn't hear Pinkerton toasting to the "real American wife" he will marry someday.) When he sails back to the States, she is already pregnant, and planning to wait for him until he comes back "un bel di."

She's given up her religion and family for Pinkerton and now lives in poverty with her little son and her servant, Suzuki. Pinkerton never writes until just before he finally shows up again--three years later--bringing with him an American wife. Needless to say, the story does not end well for poor Butterfly.

This season, San Francisco Opera is presenting a new-to-us production with Svetla Vassileva and Daniela Dessi as Cio-Cio-San, or Butterfly. Sandy and I saw Patricia Racette in her "incendiary performance" as Butterfly and Zheng Cao as the faithful Suzuki. They both had me in tears...but then, with this opera, I always weep: It doesn't matter who is singing about that fine day when Pinkerton will return, or picks up her father's dagger at the end.

I'm not the only one like this, either. Dana Gioia, whom I mentioned earlier, once wrote something like, "We go to the opera to cry." At intermission, I handed Sandy a bunch of napkins, saying, "You are going to cry, for sure." Oddly enough, she did not. But for some of us, the never-failing equation is Emotional scene + gorgeous, mournful music = tears.

Body Double

The other night, I went to a rare casting call in San Francisco Opera's ballet studio, a mostly bare room with a scruffy wood floor, two tables and some chairs along one long wall, a mirror covering the opposite wall. Just a handful of men showed up, but then, the call was pretty specific: for someone who looked similar to Mexican tenor Ramon Vargas (5'10", dark hair preferred; no singing, dancing, or speaking required) to appear in a couple of scenes toward the end of Jules Massenet's Werther, the season's second opera.

A few glam head shots of Vargas were taped to the mirror, and the ten or so contenders lined up next to them, like a police lineup on the wrong side of the one-way window. In their jeans and khakis, T-shirts and pullovers, they looked--OK, not like criminals, but as if they were on the stage crew, or maybe had stopped by to pick someone up. Not one had a vibe that said "actor."

Once director Francisco Negrin had culled the obvious non-Vargas types (the shortish African American man, the too-tall and the older, plus-size gray-haired men, the bald man), he asked the four remaining to walk toward him a couple of times. (Have you ever noticed how normal normal people look when they walk?) Then he asked two of them to lie on the floor on their backs and, when the other two approached and took their places, to get up and move away like a spirit departing the body. "Can you show me something more interesting now, give me some emotion?"

Eventually, he selected two men. But just after almost everyone had left the studio, Luis Javier Hernandez, who works in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, showed up: slim, dark-eyed; he even speaks Spanish. When he did his leaving-the-body moves, he rose and moved backward rather quickly, stumbled, and almost fell; but he regained his balance and continued out. A good recovery or good acting? "It was planned," he told Negrin. Either way, he'll be onstage with Vargas in September, too.

You Put Your Lips Together and...

One of the many things Wagner is known for is the length of his operas: A typical opera will last well over four hours; his longest is more than five. By comparison, Puccini's La Boheme is a bit more than two hours, and Verdi's Aida, less than two and a half; Beethoven's Symphony no. 9, his longest, is a little over an hour. The four operas in the Ring cycle run a total of 18 hours. If it's a good performance, of course, the time flies by when you're sitting in the audience. But what if you're in the orchestra pit?

I went to the opera house lately to discuss this with William Klingelhoffer, whose name is a Wagnerian mouthful in itself (though far be it for me to titter over a multisyllabic German surname). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. For the Ring, Wagner demands eight French horns--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a large section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos. And the first horn in a Ring orchestra is like a Tim Lincecum with his repertoire of pitches. Over the course of these operas, the French horn evokes the river Rhine, a rainbow after a storm, the interior life of a hero, a blast on the hero's horn bold and brassy enough to wake a dragon.

Of course, a ball player sits in the dugout from time to time, while a horn player has little respite when performing Wagner. The horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "It takes physical strength to sit there and blow a French horn for three or four hours. You have to be sure you're doing your aerobic exercises." (Bill says he tries to walk for an hour each day; one of his favorite walks is up 300 steps to Grand View Park, just east of 19th Avenue in San Francisco's Sunset district, and back down again. Oy.)

"And you have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You want to make sure what you're playing is exciting, but you can't get excited yourself. You have to remember that you need something in reserve for three hours from now. I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes just by itself. That's longer than a whole concert the symphony performs."

In this small town, San Francisco Symphony performs just across the street from the opera house, and Bill's wife, Jill Brindel, plays cello with that orchestra. "They're wimps over there," Bill says with pride and a good-natured laugh. "We're playing Wagner."

Genius and Jerk

The general public knows two things about Richard Wagner. One, he was a great composer. Two, Hitler loved him. Some have even commented that his was the background music to the Holocaust, which isn't quite fair, since Wagner died in 1883. And according to some sources, he wasn't even Hitler's favorite: Verdi was. Wagner was right up there, though, as was Beethoven; the Nazis played music by both at their rallies. But Verdi and Beethoven didn't publish theories as to how, for example, the music of Jewish composers could never be great art, because, as aliens or "freaks of nature," they had no access to "the genuine spirit of the Folk." You can see how that thought would resonate with Hitler.

If he'd known how famous he would become, and for how long, Wagner might have thought better of publishing essays such as "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Jewishness in Music"). This was originally published under a pen name, in a newspaper called Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, in 1850--but he republished it as a pamphlet, under his own name, almost 20 years later, and he wrote other anti-Semitic essays as well. Wagner did have Jewish friends. He just thought they all should convert to Christianity and, for God's sake, blend in! He seemed to want to see the end of Jewish culture, not of the Jews.

In any event, Wagner is a poster boy for the question Can bad people create good art? It seems to me now that one has little to do with the other. I remember how surprised I was by how much the cold-hearted protagonist of Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata, loved ballet. In my young mind (I was about 20 when I read the novel), I equated love of the arts with sensitivity. It was wasn't much of a leap, then, to link sensitivity with empathy. But clearly, you can adore ballet and opera and hate humanity, or the Jews.

So a "bad" person can have good taste. But can he or she have the depth of feeling that underlies great art? My favorite literary critic, the late Malcolm Cowley, once wrote, "No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence." Some people think he was saying that bad people are incapable of creating art, or even of stringing words together well. I think he meant that if you can craft a fine sentence--perhaps he should have said "create a great poem"--then you cannot be a thoroughgoing cad.

Speaking of empathy and depth of feeling, Cowley also said, "Be kind and considerate with your criticism.... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book." And perhaps more apt, getting back to Wagner: "Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you."

A Year in the Ring Cycle (not to be confused with the spin cycle)

As you set out to read, I hope, this year-long blog, I can hear you wondering: Who are you? And possibly, if you're not an opera buff, What is the Ring?

To get things squared away right away: The Ring refers to Richard Wagner's magnificent cycle of four linked operas, The Ring of the Nibelungen, which can be--and usually have to be--enjoyed by themselves, like stand-alone episodes in a TV series. I'm a writer and editor based in the Bay Area, and one of the great experiences of my life was seeing all four operas performed, one after the other, over the course of a week in San Francisco, in 1998. Why am I telling you this? Because, yay: In June 2011, San Francisco Opera is presenting the entire cycle again, with different sets and singers, of course. It's a mammoth undertaking, involving both other opera companies and SFO's brand-new production of Gotterdammerung, the final opera. It'll take months to come together, and I'll be following it all.

Believe me, you don't have to be an opera lover to love the Ring. The story has everything: love, sex, greed, gold, dragons and giants, magic spells, heroes and villains, gods and goddesses, family strife, even the end of the gods' world--a grand moral and mythological tale conveyed through thrilling and accessible singing and orchestral music, usually with cool sets. Wagner not only composed the music, he wrote the libretto (story and lyrics) as well. This is rare.

In the summer of 1998, when the Ring opened in San Francisco's gilded opera house, I had just become the senior editor for culture at San Francisco magazine. Jerry Stark (my husband) and I went to opening night--on a Thursday evening, I think; then we went to a Saturday matinee, a Wednesday night performance, and finally a Sunday matinee. Each time, we drove in from Marin County with our new friend Dana Gioia, a poet and lecturer who wrote about classical music for San Francisco until he moved to Washington, D.C., to head the National Endowment for the Arts. (Could I make that up?) We sat amid the same Ring-loving people at each performance, discussing the previous opera as we settled into our seats.... We soldiered on with our day jobs, but with the music, the characters, and the epic tale constantly hovering on the edge of my attention, the Ring became the theme and focus of the week. I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd experienced and what was to come; everything else felt like a distraction. That Sunday, as I applauded the cast for the last time, I felt a little bereft.

Now, not only do I get to see the Ring again, I'll be watching the preparations. I'll be at the opera house as technicians tweak the lights for a dramatic scene in Siegfried (opera #3), for instance, and in the costume shop as new boots for the giants in Das Rheingold (#1) and costumes for the gods in Gotterdammerung are created. I'll be talking with conductor Donald Runnicles and some of the musicians about, for instance, maintaining the stamina to perform four long operas in one week. (Last time, I remember, some of the horns were sounding a mite ragged toward the end.) I'll catch up with some super Ring buffs, who, like solar-eclipse fanatics, fly to the site of their passion every time there's an occurrence. I'll also be blogging about SFO's other operas this year, beginning with Aida in September, and about Wagner (a genius and anti-Semite, so: controversial), and... and.... From time to time, I'll blog about other events in the ring of Bay Area arts as well.