dfan says

Previously: ranks 9 through 7

6. Siegfried, Act One. Probably the act for which my opinion most greatly exceeds the general consensus. Maybe people aren’t big fans because the hero, Siegfried himself, is kind of a fratboy asshole, and Mime is perceived as a nasty Jewish stereotype. Leaving aside the question of how intentional either of those is on Wagner’s part, the music is excellent, and both characters have lots of great things to sing. Going through these operas again, I find that one of the things that really makes an act for me is the overall structure of it. This feels like a symphony – Scene 1 being the opening allegro, Scene 2 an intermediate slow movement (and I love that Wanderer chord sequence enough that I actually like the trademark Boring Wotan Recap in this opera), and Scene 3 the triumphant finale, which even includes an honest-to-god catchy song (sing along, you know you want to) in Siegfried’s forging scene.

5. Siegfried, Act Three. This act has a reputation for being nothing but Siegfried and Brünnhilde bellowing their love at each other, but there’s really a lot of great stuff in here before we even get to that point. The introductory music is kick-ass; you can practically hear Wagner being psyched to pick up the project again. Even Erda’s scene is pretty interesting, and the tension gets heart-poundingly ratcheted way up as Wotan confronts Siegfried (this of course is another one of the climactic moments of the Ring, as the gods give way to man). Finally Siegfried discovers Brünnhilde, and the heart-stoppingly expansive music as she wakes is one of the most beautiful passages in the whole cycle. Finally, yes, they do bellow their love at each other for a bit too long, but I can cut them some slack, they’re in love.

4. Die Walküre, Act One. A great arc from beginning to end with no real weak spots — the storm and Siegmund’s arrival, the smoldering glances between him and Sieglinde, Hunding’s swagger, Siegmund’s tale (usually when someone sings his backstory in a 10 minute monologue, it’s bad news, but not here), the sword, all culminating in a glorious lyrical love duet. It’s not surprising that this is the one act of the whole Ring most likely to show up being performed by itself, and if you made this list by taking a poll of fans, this would probably end up in the #1 spot.

Next: ranks 3 through 1!

I am a sucker for ranking things, especially artistic things. I know that it goes against everything art stands for, but as long as you don’t treat it as a search for objective truth, but rather as a tool to help collect your thoughts about a variety of works, it can be a lot of fun. And it’s great fun to read other people’s lists and say “You put what as #7?” As I recently made my nth journey through Wagner’s Ring cycle, it occurred to that it might be fun to rank its constituent parts.

The rules: each opera is broken up into acts, except for Das Rheingold, which is broken up into scenes, since that’s all it has. Prologues and interludes are considered part of the following act (or scene). Here, therefore, spread out over four nights in homage to the original, are the 13 parts of the Ring cycle, from worst to first:

13. Siegfried, Act Two. How can an act featuring a battle to the death with a dragon be boring? Somehow Wagner has managed it. First you get Alberich and Mime bickering for a while, then Siegfried finally shows up and (spoiler alert!) duly dispatches the dragon in a disappointingly brief scene, then we are subjected to an interminable “comic” scene as Mime repeatedly attempts to poison Siegfried despite the fact that Siegfried can read his thoughts by virtue of tasting the dragon’s blood. At least the Forest Bird scene provides a few moments of desperately needed relief. No wonder Wagner took a twelve-year break after composing this act before continuing.

12. Götterdämmerung, Prologue and Act One. There is plenty of good music here, but it is just too damn long. If I recall correctly Wagner even had second thoughts about the length afterward. I actually like the Norns’ scene and am generally happy to listen to any scene with Hagen in it, and the climax with Siegfried and Brünnhilde is great, but it takes so long to get there. I always think we’re really close to the end and then Waltraute shows up and I realize how far we still have to go, argh. At least you get to snicker at “Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt”. My advice when listening is to break it up into two or three chunks. Of course in a live performance you don’t get that luxury.

11. Das Rheingold, Scene Two. It’s surprising how undramatic this scene feels given that it consists almost solely of gods (and giants) yelling at each other. For one thing, none of them are particularly sympathetic (of course, this is an issue throughout the whole cycle). There are a few bright spots in the midst of the relentless exposition (the Valhalla theme emerging out of the mists as Wotan wakes, the giants’ heavy metal walk-on theme) but they’re the exception.

10. Das Rheingold, Scene Three. This edges ahead of Scene Two by virtue of the awesome intro 9/8 anvil music. Once we actually emerge into Nibelheim it’s not all that interesting, and the trick by which Wotan and Loge trick Alberich is eye-rollingly stupid, but at least it doesn’t last all that long, and the Tarnhelm theme is pretty cool.

Coming up next: ranks 9 through 7!

These are the first two books of Abraham’s fantasy series The Long Price Quartet; the final one was just published last month.

They are technically fantasy, as I said, but it’s more fantasy in the style of Guy Gavriel Kay; they’re normal human character-driven stories set in a vaguely Asian-style culture that doesn’t happen to exist in reality. Although the existence of the supernatural is important for the culture (largely for economic reasons), the use of magic very rarely enters the plot itself.

These books are excellent in a fairly quiet way. There’s a lot of thinking relative to the amount of doing, but it’s quality thinking. The plot moves at a deliberate pace, but that gives everyone time to react to it instead of being carried along by it as it hurtles to a climax. The characters are well drawn, react believably to the situations they find themselves in, and change interestingly over the course of the books. Some of them have more moral fiber than others, but no one’s purely good or evil, and the “bad” ones have some redeeming qualities while the “good” ones have real and believable weaknesses.

Fifteen years pass between the first and second book, and my understanding is that there are similar gaps between the others. As I said when I reviewed The Judging Eye, I like this approach, as it keeps the plot from getting bogged down too much as the author feels the need to continue every thread left over from the previous book. The later books have just as good reviews, if not better, as the earlier ones, so I will definitely finish the series out.

Well, that’s what I’m calling them, anyway, although it’s kind of fruitless to try to pin down the style of even one record here. This is the last group that Zappa called the Mothers (and the last group that he named after anything other than himself) and it shows; you get the feeling this is a real group of musicians creating music together and not just a bunch of session players. It’s a lot of fans’ favorite lineup and so far (I’ve actually listened through 1981) I agree.

With Over-Nite Sensation (1973), Zappa discarded the big-band jazz style of his previous two records and made pretty much straight-ahead rock music. The “pretty much” hides the fact that even in the most straightforward tunes here there is often some surprising stuff going on in the background or the breaks. When I first heard it I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t more out there but it’s grown on me a lot (you will hear this sentence again in the future).

Apostrophe (‘) (1974) is a bit more interesting, with more of the prog tendencies that I named this period after. These two albums were his biggest sellers to date, and I like them fine; a few more wrinkles would be nice, but they are really well done.

The wrinkles come out in full force with Roxy & Elsewhere (1974), a double live album with lots of overdubs (a format Zappa used a lot). Even the regular rock tunes have a bunch of twists, and there are some really interesting instrumentals; side 2, which is mostly sophisticated instrumentals, is my favorite side of his since the second side of Absolutely Free. It manages to be superbly virtuosic while still being sweaty and down-to-earth, not bloodless at all. There are a few missteps (a swollen overweight remake of “Trouble Every Day” from Freak Out typifies everything I dislike about how music progressed from the 60s to the 70s) but there’s an amazing amount of good stuff here.

One Size Fits All (1975) just about rounds out this period. It’s lots of people’s favorite Zappa album, and I can understand that. There’s a great mix of rock, funk, and prog, capped off with two versions of a winkingly pompous anthem. I certainly wouldn’t mind if he had managed to make a few more albums in this vein.

Bongo Fury (1975) was made with Captain Beefheart and is pretty much the last gasp of this ensemble. I love Beefheart, and the first track, “Debra Kadabra”, really got my hopes up for some gonzo greatness, but in general it feels like Zappa and Beefheart compromised on some common ground rather than going all-out weird. In my opinion they both made better records on their own.

Some of the musicians in this group (Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke, Ruth Underwood, Bruce and Tom Fowler, Chester Thompson) made guest appearances later (and given Zappa’s penchant for using old material for new albums, more music from this period would show up), but his next album was made almost solo, and after that he picked up a new bunch of musicians and the overall style changed again…

After Mnemosyne reawakened my interest in Esperanto, I googled around a little and found that this book had been published just a few weeks ago and had gotten some good press. (By the way, someone has to do something about the “decent title: entirely too long subtitle” phenomenon; the full title of this is In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. All it’s missing is an “and the Women Who Love Them“.)

It was really good. I read it in about two days, laughing out loud many times, and then when I handed it to Liza she did too. It is not at all an exhaustive study of the subject; it is mostly a bunch of case studies with just enough connective tissue to link them together, and is aggressively first-person, in that she brings to the foreground her personal experience studying, learning, and meeting with the users of these languages. The actual linguistics and history were very interesting, and the personal experience of “I am really excited about this subject, but I kinda wish that the other people who are really excited about this subject were a little more mundane on the whole” resonated with me personally.

Looking around on some forums, I saw some Esperantists take a little offense to her characterization of the language and movement, but I think she is more than fair. Most of the time Esperanto seems to be portrayed either as a punchline to a joke about incomprehensibility or as a practically perfect tool that could save the world and bring about world peace if only people would take it seriously. The truth is somewhere in the middle (its user base has never grown as much as hoped, but there is an active and vibrant if relatively small community whose lives are undoubtedly enriched by the language, and a strong literary tradition), and she presents a balanced picture of it.

Anyway, this is exactly the kind of book I love: lots of interesting information on a subject I’m interested in, with a good level of lightness vs. depth and a very entertaining authorial voice. I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone with the slightest interest in the subject.