Arizona Opera's Der Ring des Nibelungen By Margaret Regan THE RHINEMAIDENS WERE hot, and no wonder. They were nowhere near the cool, flowing waters of Germany's Rhine River, where their maker, Richard Wagner, had sensibly put them. Instead, they found themselves in the parched Sonoran desert, deep within a gaping, curiously un-air-conditioned Tucson rehearsal hall, where one day last week they were doing a first runthrough of a scene from Götterdämerung. "It's stifling in here," Rhinemaiden Woglinde (Rebecca Ravenshaw) good-naturedly told her director, Claus König, as they took a break from a scene whose setting Wagner had prescribed as "wild, wooded and rocky." But luckily for Woglinde and the dozens of other characters in Wagner's massive four-part Der Ring des Nibelungen, it would be only a few more days before Arizona Opera transported them, white robes, painted foam Rhine gold, horned helmets and all, into the cooler climes of Flagstaff's green mountain forests. "It will be Bayreuth with pine trees," the company's general director, Glynn Ross, chuckled after rehearsal, in what's obviously a well-practiced line. Bayreuth, for those uninitiated into all things Wagnerian, is the German town that every summer puts on a Ring Festival, staging performances of all four operas in the cycle, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, which Wagner created over 20 years beginning in the 1860s. Flagstaff, Ross hopes, will be a kind of New Bayreuth. The northern town will host Arizona Opera's Wagner Ring Festival, an ambitious first for the state. The four Ring operas will be performed in succession the week of June 3, and repeated the week of June 10. They'll be sung in the original German, with English surtitles (they're overhead). The concerts will be at Northern Arizona University in Ardrey Auditorium, where the orchestra pit is being enlarged to accommodate the 100-piece orchestra Wagner requires. Wagner lovers flock to Bayreuth from all over the world every summer. Outside of Europe, complete performances of the cycle are sufficiently rare that Ross says his ticket office is getting calls daily from all over the world. "You don't go to one Ring in your life," Ross explains. "You join the disciples." Ross successfully put on a Ring Cycle for 10 years in the late '70s and early '80s, when he was general director of the Seattle Opera. When he was en route to the Southwest for a job interview with Arizona Opera in 1983, he got the idea to do a Ring Festival here. "The plane was flying over the Grand Canyon. I thought, 'God has done so much for the state it was time for people to to do something for Arizona of lasting value.' I decided to do the Ring." The exalted circumstances of this decision--the flight over one of the natural wonders of the world, the reference to the deity--mesh well with the elaborate story of the Ring. Wagner based the work on an ancient poem, and it's full of warring gods and giants, dwarves and maidens, human heroes and a magical golden ring. It weaves classic themes of greed, lust, love, duty into a tale full of mythological import. "Wagner deals with the subliminal, the subconscious," Ross said. "You go to the Ring to experience something that has to do with archetypal history." You also go to the Ring to hear singers tackle some of the most demanding parts around. Though some critics complain that the whole thing is overlong (Götterdämerung typically runs five hours with intermissions), outdated and overblown, Larry Day, a UA professor of voice, said that the operas nevertheless present "a real challenge to singers. They love doing it. The work requires very dramatic singers with big voices who are able to sustain long periods of singing. It's beautiful music, uplifiting." Seasoned Arizona Opera buffs have already heard the music over the last several years. To gear up for the festival, the company staged one of the operas in turn in each of four recent seasons. With a few exceptions, the same singers have returned to the state to reprise their parts. Those productions demonstrated Ross' preference for the the traditional staging for Wagner, who prescribed timeless, vaguely mythological costumes and settings. Ross believes it's a mistake to give up the trappings Wagner dictated. "So many of the Rings lately tried to come up with gimmicks," he said. "They're entertaining but they detract from its depth. The Chicago Opera had bungee-jumpers for the Rhinemaidens!" Don't expect to see bungee-jumping in Flagstaff. Woglinde and the other Rhinemaidens will be in flowing white robes; the Walküre will be in their shiny horned helmets, and all will be Wagnerian in Ross' Ring world. Arizona Opera's Der Ring des Nibelungen will be presented June 3 through 8, and June 10 throuh 15 at Ardrey Auditorium, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. Festival tickets allowing admission to all four operas range from $200 to $525. Single ticket prices are $55 to $130. Tickets are available through Dillard's or Arizona Opera at (602) 266-7464. A note of caution: Flagstaff is popular in the summer. Operagoers should make hotel reservations as soon as possible.

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