Quite a German day

Last updated on: October 22, 2016 at 11:31 pm by Dan Peterson

Quite a German day 2016-10-22T23:31:44-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Loge (aka Loki) and the Rhine maidens, by Arthur Rackham
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)

My wife and I had lunch with my long-time friend Scott Woolley today, at the Berghoff, which has been something of a Chicago institution for over a century. I haven’t come to Chicago all that often, for some reason — apart from what used to be frequent plane transfers at Chicago O’Hare — but, whenever I do, I have German food at the Berghoff. It takes me right back to the Vaterland. Or close to it, anyway, since my real base is in German-speaking Switzerland. Usually Wienerschnitzel, though the Rahmschnitzel is tempting. And the appetizers are . . . well, appetizing.

I’ve known Scott Woolley since pre-mission undergraduate days at BYU. And then he ended up serving his mission in Beirut, Lebanon, under the auspices of the then Switzerland Zürich Mission, in which I served (though, after an initial period of uncertainty about where I would be assigned, I spent my time among the Alps rather than on the Mediterranean). He and his family later introduced me to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, in Oregon, which I enjoyed so thoroughly that I vowed to try to do an annual Shakespeare festival myself when I was in a position to do it. (My eventual marriage to a theater major helped massively in the fulfillment of that vow — and Scott was at our wedding.)

Tonight, my wife and I attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold — the first of the four operas in his famous “Ring Cycle” — at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a short walk from our hotel. (The Lyric plans to perform one opera annually from the tetralogy, and then to stage them all together at the end. If things go well, my wife and I hope to see the entire Chicago staging of the cycle.)

It simply doesn’t get more German — for good and, in some ways, for ill — than Wagner. (See my earlier blog entry, here.)

I’ve seen the complete “Ring” once before, in San Francisco. It was done with pretty traditional staging and costuming, which I liked. This one was very modern, in many ways. And my reaction is mixed. Some of it was quite ingenious, and it worked. The Rhine maiden costumes were timeless and very beautiful. At other places, though, it was just a bit silly — the costumes seemed to be roughly eighteenth-century French or British, although Erda was dressed a bit like Queen Elizabeth I on a bad day — and the audience laughed at a few places where I’m quite confident that Wagner would not have wanted them to laugh. (Alberich’s dragon and toad were designed to amuse, which seems to be profoundly mistaken.) But the performance was strong. It’s a great work.

See a roughly one-minute video summary here:

https://www.lyricopera.org/concertstickets/calendar/2016-2017/productions/lyricopera/das-rheingold

Fortunately, being at the opera spared me the necessity of hearing my beloved Dodgers send the Chicago Cubs off to the World Series — though Wotan, king of the gods of Valhalla, announced the results of the game to the audience during the curtain call. This city is really excited. First World Series, I’m told, since 1945. And they haven’t won the World Series for 108 years.

Posted from Chicago, Illinois

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