San Francisco's Ring

For four weeks box-office keepers at the San Francisco Opera House have been patiently explaining that there are no more seats available. For four weeks inside the house preparations have gone on at fever pitch. This week begins the most ambitious undertaking in San Francisco's opera history: the presentation of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, that mighty tetralogy which, 26 years in the making, includes the operas Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung.

San Francisco has heard the complete Ring only twice before, once by Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera when it visited there in 1900, once by the itinerant German Grand Opera in 1930. The German company had singers who were either worn out or third-rate. The scenery was shoddy, the orchestra ragged. For its first home-grown Ring, the San Francisco Opera is spending $80,000, importing such peerless Wagnerians as Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, Tenor Lauritz Melchior, Baritone Friedrich Schorr. Some $40,000 has been invested in scenery alone. There is a horrible, life-like dragon and a special new cloud machine which projects photographs of actual clouds on the backdrop.

The imported singers are so sure of their Wagner that they needed little rehearsing. But the San Franciscans who sing the smaller roles have been drilled tirelessly all autumn. More difficult still has been the task of training an orchestra which has never before played the Ring. Five players had to be brought on from Manhattan, four to play the special Wagner tuben, one the drums. To start the spadework a month ago, Conductor Artur Bodanzky sent two of his assistants from the Metropolitan Opera. For the past fortnight he has been on the job in person, rehearsing as much as 16 hours a day, shouting at his horns for greater force and clarity, pleading with his strings for more true feeling, reminding each & every player that for Wagner the orchestra must be as eloquent as the singers.

Few of the musicians ever had such a determined taskmaster as the lean, satanic-looking Austrian who has been the Wagner specialist at the Metropolitan since German opera was revived after the War. Last week Bodanzky admitted that Wagner operas sometimes bored him. "But, mind you, only when I think of them. . . . The minute I take up my stick in the opera house I become transported."

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