Something extraordinary is about to happen in Brattleboro this summer, and you should know about it.
Tundi Productions - a musical-theatrical troupe founded by two Brattleborians, soprano Jenna Rae and conductor Hugh Keelan - will present its second Wagner in Vermont Festival this August at the Latchis Theatre, centered around two performances each of the operas Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.
As a longtime Wagner fanatic and as an admirer of these audacious artists, I'm very excited. And as a Wagner evangelist, I want to pass that excitement on to you.
What's so exciting? In short, Wagner is the best. (His operas, in any case, if not the man himself.) If you already know, you know.
But if you're one of the not-yet-initiated, here's an introduction.
Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a German composer, poet, author, conductor, impresario, stage director, musical and theatrical theorist and reformer, polemicist, amateur architect, and social revolutionary. He was, without question, one of the greatest artists who's ever lived - in that select company with Homer and Shakespeare and very few others.
Even if you've never been within a hundred miles of an opera house or a symphony hall, you've heard his music. The helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now? “The Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre. “Here Comes the Bride”? The Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin. These are just a very few examples of many.
But Wagner was a lot more than his greatest hits, so to speak. In his lifetime he wrote - both music and text - 13 major works, of which 10 are core components of the standard repertoire and several stand at the absolute pinnacle of the art.
At his best, he combined some of the most stirring and moving music ever written within the Western tradition with penetrating psychological insights into his characters - insights that anticipated by decades the works of Freud and Jung.
His “dramas” or “music dramas,” as he called them, are all vast in scale and epic but at the same time stunningly intimate and personal. It's potent stuff, Wagner's work - intoxicating and illuminating. It's no wonder that it's inspired such adoration in some, or that devotees will fly in from all over the world for this or that performance. I certainly have, and I'll probably die cash poor because of it.
But you, you lucky people of Brattleboro - you're about to be gifted two of his very best operas (for a reasonable admittance) right in your own town.
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So what are these two operas?
The first thing you should know is that they're the first two in a huge four-opera series or cycle (or perhaps “Wagnerian Operatic Universe”): “Der Ring des Nibelungen” or “The Ring of the Nibelung.”
We commonly referred to this collective work as the “Ring Cycle” or just “the Ring.” (Wagner devotees like me who travel around for “Rings” are sometimes called “Ringheads,” and some of us make Deadheads look like mere dilettantes in their fanaticism.)
Together, these operas tell one very long philosophically and aesthetically complex Germanic mythological story about a number of gods, humans, dwarves, giants, mermaids, and even a dragon or two contending to possess a vastly powerful magical golden ring. (If this sounds vaguely familiar, Tolkein did a bit of thievery.)
It all begins near (but not quite at) the Beginning and ends pretty much at the End - though it's arguably a new Beginning. In between, there's the whole human experience - love and hate, sex and death, greed and selflessness, exultation and despair, the will to power and the urge to renunciate, the corruption of the world and its eventual redemption.
It's a remarkable work, an inexhaustible work. A work that's always new, always relevant, always of the moment.
For some, it's a fairy tale with really good music. For others - like George Bernard Shaw or Tony Kushner - it's an allegory of socialism. (Wagner was an associate of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and he spent time on the revolutionary barricades in the 1840s, just as he was beginning work on “Ring.”) For still others, it's a feminist drama, or a story of a family in crisis (most of the characters are related to one another) or even an environmentalist parable.
In truth, it's all of these and much more - and likely unlike anything you've experienced before.
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The story begins with Das Rheingold, which shows how the dwarf Alberich, embittered and unlucky in love, forswears love forever and steals the titular sacred gold from the Rhine and forges from it the Ring of Power, which is eventually stolen from him by Wotan, chief of the Gods, who uses it to pay a dishonorable debt, thus beginning a cycle of treachery and violence that takes three more long operas to sort out.
Die Walküre is about Wotan's attempt to indirectly regain control of the Ring by means of a “free hero,” and it introduces his daughter, who eventually turns out to be that free hero(ine), the Valkyrie, the warrior goddess Brünnhilde. Act I is a perfect self contained love story, albeit a rather perverse one. Act II is about Wotan's domestic troubles and ends with Brünnhilde's shocking defiance of her father. Act III begins in spectacle with the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” but quickly becomes a long, intense, utterly heartbreaking father-daughter farewell scene - one that, when done well, makes it very easy to forget to breathe. (It's happened to me.)
The author and personality Timothy “Speed” Levitch once spoke about art that “grabs you by your lapels and incinerates your life.” That is certainly the effect of most of Wagner and especially Die Walküre - in the best possible way.
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Tundi's Wagner is worth not only your attention but also your support.
Never mind that normally you would have to travel to a big city with a major opera house to experience Wagner - that wouldn't mean much if what they were putting up was not worth attending.
I was lucky enough to be one of maybe 1,000 people in the whole world to witness Tundi's first festival in 2019, when they put on two performances of Tristan und Isolde, arguably the greatest single opera ever (and, incidentally, the source of the troupe's name).
A fellow Ringhead had shown me an advertisement she had come across on Facebook; I was intrigued - who ever heard of a major opera, one notoriously difficult to perform, being put up in a tiny theater in a small town? It just doesn't happen. I decided to take a chance on it, more or less as a lark.
It was a stunning success, one of my most memorable nights in the theater ever, one of the very best Tristans I've seen - ever - and far superior to one I had seen just a week earlier at Wagner's own theater in Germany, directed by his great-granddaughter.
Not only was it well-sung and well-played, it was exceptionally well-staged; it worked not just as music, but as deeply affecting, intimate music drama. The critics who saw it raved. I ended up writing about it at length myself.
Unexpectedly - to me, at least - Jenna Rae, Hugh Keelan, and their associates on stage and behind the scenes had proved to be world class. Leaving the theater that night, I had to restrain myself from asking other audience members on the street: “Do you understand what you just saw? That was really good.”
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In the 1870s, Wagner built his own theater specifically to stage the “Ring” in what was then a small town in Bavaria. To this day, only his 10 canonical works are ever performed there, and it's the center of the Wagnerian universe.
Each year thousands of devotees make their way to the “Green Hill” in a sort of semi-religious pilgrimage. Tickets are expensive and are legendarily difficult to obtain. I've managed to attend twice. And even though I've had severe criticisms of most of the productions I've seen, it's an experience unlike any other that I wouldn't trade for anything, and the next time I can go back, I will.
Every so often, some new venue gets touted as the “New Bayreuth” or the “American Bayreuth.” It's, of course, too early to anoint Brattleboro but it would not be at all an inappropriate spot for an American version of the Festival.
“Richard Wagner did not want his works interpreted amid the hustle and noise or the distractions of a large city,” his son Siegfried wrote in the 1930s, “he sought a place remote from the usual theatrical world where it was so quiet so that the hearers could concentrate their whole attention on the work offered, and could in the pauses refresh themselves in natural surroundings.”
Brattleboro fits that description perfectly.
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On the heels of the first festival, Die Walküre was supposed to follow in 2020, but then came the pandemic and two years of silence in the theater. But Tundi is back now with, if anything, an even more ambitious program. What this troupe has already done has been astonishing.
And there's the promise - the seed has been planted and is trying to germinate - of something very, very special to come. They deserve your support.
I will be attending on Aug. 26 and 27 and will be up in the balcony - where true opera fans sit. I hope to see you there (come and say hello) because, to quote Stephen Fry, “If you've never heard the music of Richard Wagner, if you've never encountered his dramas, I would urge you - because we're only on this planet once - to give it a try. I still believe, as firmly as I believe anything, that his work is important and is on the side of the angels. It is, fundamentally, good.”