Daily Blague

What a loser I am. It's Saturday night, and I'm home - finishing up a Ring cycle. As though it were some sort of casserole, I suppose. I had no intention of listening to important music two weeks ago when I put on Das Rheingold. I love the sound of Das Rheingold, and one thing leads to another. So I did listen to the Ring, all of it, on the impromptu, pretty much as if it were pulp fiction, which is really the only way to hear this incredible drama. "Greatness" needs to scraped away from it - but then who will listen?

Kathleen came home at the end of Act II of Götterdämmerung- the moment when Verdi and Wagner, what's the phrase, get close, as planets - and she said to me, as though I were having my teeth extracted, "What are you listening to!?"  Only the greatest act of opera that there is.

Is there anybody else out there for whom the "Immolation Scene" - as the last bit of the Ring used to be known - is a cleansing bar of soap? Something that makes you feel really pure afterward - the opposite of what Tristan und Isolde does.