Ragnarøkkr

And so to the Town Hall, Leeds Town Hall to be precise, for Götterdämmerung, the culmination of Opera North's four season run through Wagner's 'Das Ring des Nibelungen'. It was performed there rather than at the Grand Theatre because like the whole series it was a staged concert, meaning that the singers perform in evening dress (except for the chap playing Siegfried who appeared to share a stylist with Meatloaf) with orchestra on stage and with the surtitles expanded into full audio/visual splendour, full of rippling Rhine and blood coloured flames.

Anyway it was good stuff with the band being in spectacular form as they have been throughout the whole affair. It's a good venue too and was referenced to in "Untold Stories", the Alan Bennett play I saw a couple of weeks ago. The author recounted his introduction to classical music had come from the cheap seats on stage behind the double basses: "like watching the circus from behind the elephants". For this performance these seats were for part of the time occupied by the chorus. I myself have been gradually working my was backwards over the years since 'Das Rheingold' and was on this occasion at the end of the back row thus enabling a quick getaway to the pub for the second interval. (The whole performance lasted six and a half hours and featured two intervals; the first was spent in Wagamama with my daughters in an early Father's Day celebration.) I arrived in the Victoria Hotel ahead of my fellow audience members, but still found myself in a queue for service behind the said chorus whose exit had been even speedier and who were now lubricating their vocal chords prior to the final hour and a half. Don't worry though, I did manage to get a pint of London Pride in.

The story makes no sense whatsoever of course and, as an aside, I can't for the life of me see why the Nazis were so keen on it; apart from anything else the hero is out-witted and then killed before fulfilling his destiny to become ruler of the world. Virtually all the characters are unsympathetic and behave appallingly (perhaps that's a clue as to why Hitler approved). Following Siegfried's death towards the end, Brünnhilde performs suttee on his pyre to demonstrate the intensity of her love for him. Now call me pedantic ["You're pedantic!"], but if I've got the chronology right she'd only known him two days. And while I would normally have no truck with bourgeois morality, I find it hard to see beyond the fact that she's his aunt; that's just wrong.