Flagstaff Is The Site Of Arizona Opera's 'Bayreuth in the Pines.' By Margaret Regan THE PAIR OF tourists stepping off the bus in Flagstaff had all the characteristics of the typical Wagner fans flooding the town for Arizona Opera's first-ever Ring Festival. They were gray-haired, moneyed, and most telling of all, German. Typical characteristics can be deceiving, though. "No, we are not here for the Wagner Festival," the man said politely in impeccable English, heavily accented by German. "Wagner is too difficult for us. We are here to see your Grand Canyon." Wagner, the hero of 19th-century German culture, is difficult, if not to the ears then to the rest of the body. The massive Der Ring des Nibelungen is a four-opera work that totals about 14 1/2 hours, not counting intermissions. Performed in four separate concerts spread out over six days, Arizona Opera staged the Cycle twice, in the original German, at Northern Arizona University in the first two weeks of June. First-time Ringer Donna Candrell of Sedona confided, "I've never seen an opera this long. I'm wiggling like a kid in my seat." Stiff necks and numb derriéres notwithstanding, hardcore Ringheads came from all over the United States and several foreign countries to immerse themselves in the festival that Arizona Opera hopes will push it out of the regional-arts category once and for all. The highest-elevation Ring ever, performed at 7,000 feet, the production required some 28 principal singers plus a chorus of 51 and a Wagnerian-size orchestra of 90 musicians. The singers came up to Flagstaff on May 15 to accommodate themselves to the thin, dry air, and tanks of oxygen were provided backstage for singers finding themselves short of breath. For tenor George Gray, who as Siegfried sang in almost every scene of the opera of the same name, it was a "saving grace to come off stage and breathe pure oxygen" in between scenes, said Monica Barrows of Arizona Opera. Though there were a few dissenters in the audience, including one man who raged apoplectically during a Götterdämerung intermission against the "lack of genius" among the singers, the Cycle got wildly enthusiastic bravos. Gray, soprano Karen Bureau as Brünnhilde and bass-baritone Edward Crafts as Wotan drew the most tumultuous standing ovations. The production also garnered good reviews from the regional papers; but apart from the major opera magazines, it failed to attract the hoped-for national press. Nor did it sell out, though 70 percent of the tickets to the 1,500-seat Ardrey Hall were sold to people buying four-opera cycle tickets, Barrows said. That wasn't enough to recoup the total costs of the Cycle, which amounted to about $2.2 million over four years. Arizona Opera general director Glynn Ross, who's always prided himself on running the group in the black, took to the stage before one performance to beg money from the audience. Without some major donations, he said, the first Arizona Ring may well be its last. "We now have a deficit," he said. "Hopefully, we'll do the Ring again next year. Financially, right now we're not capable of doing it." A PREMATURE END would be bad news to Wagner groupies, who go to see the Ring again and again, whenever and wherever it's performed. "Hi, I'm Dimitri and I'm an addict," Dimitri Drobatschewsky told a symposium audience in the second week of the festival. "But unlike those in Twelve-Step programs, I don't do aything to cure my addiction. This is my 22nd Ring." Drobatschewsky is the retired classical music critic for the Arizona Republic, so his high Ring score may not be unexpected, but lots of the layfolk attending stand a good chance of someday matching his record. A 30-ish church organist and music professor from suburban Pittsburgh said Flagstaff made the 12th Ring he's seen since 1980. A 40-ish French speaker from Montreal saw Chicago Opera's production last March ("a work of genius") and an earlier one at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Sonia Cohen, an East Coast retiree now living in Scottsdale, said this was the 10th Ring for her and her husband. An English-born UCLA professor of political science, Roy Pateman, was on his seventh. Like the Cohens, Pateman had been to the Ring in Bayreuth, the Bavarian town where Wagner had a theatre constructed exclusively to play his works. Both the Cohens and Pateman pronounced the Arizona Ring among the best they've seen. Some of the most devout Ringheads in the audience donned the garments of Walhalla--a helmet with horns, in one case--or those of the German forest. One fashionable woman arranged a branch of Wotan's world ash tree across her bosom. What attracts a contemporary audience so passionately to a tale based on ancient German myths about the downfall of the gods? What do they see in an allegory full of magic, warrior goddesses, heroes, dragons, dwarves and that cursed golden ring? Partly, or maybe mostly, it's the music, full of melodramatic orchestral crescendos and delicate, haunting leitmotifs, and the kind of virtuoso singing only mature vocalists even attempt. But the story has many interpretations. The writer George Bernard Shaw saw the work as a parable about the greed of 19th-century industrial capitalists, who valued money above all else. Adolf Hitler, a devotee of Wagner and especially of the Ring, faithfully attended the annual Bayreuth productions. After the war, the lingering memory of swastikas draping the Bayreuth stage--coupled with Wagner's well-known anti-Semitic writings--caused the Ring to disappear from theatres worldwide until 1953. One can speculate about what attracted Hitler to the work--its German national myths? Wagner's "man of free will"? But its association with Nazism has transmuted to the extent that some now see the Ring, especially the great fire at the end of Götterdämerung, as a foreshadowing of the Nazi cataclysm. Stage director Claus König, a 32-year-old wunderkind from Munich, who's making a double life for himself in the U.S. as a director and computer wizard, says he can understand the pain the old Nazi association can trigger. But for him the opera is about important moral values at odds with German National Socialism. "The values of love and compassion in Wagner are antithetical to Nazism," he said. "The Ring describes the conflict of power and love, which we have to compromise about every day in life." König disapproves of Rings full of technical gimmickry and such settings as outer space or a nuclear power plant. He likes to call his austere Arizona Opera version the "humanistic" Ring, which emphasizes the personal relationships at the story's core. In fact, Der Ring des Nibelungen speaks to different people in different ways at different times. San Diego businessman Thomas T. Laskoski, a Ring enthusiast for years, put it this way: "I keep coming back again and again, and I learn something new every time." Time and money will tell whether he can learn it again in Flagstaff, in what Glynn Ross calls Arizona Opera's "Bayreuth in the Pines." For those who like their opera shorter, lighter and in translation, UA Opera presents Cosi Fan Tutte June 20 through 23 at UA Crowder Hall. Call 621-1162 for reservations and information.

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