Music: Of Carrousel Horses and Claws

Ever since Richard Wagner first staged his Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876, producers, directors and set designers have been trying to figure out how best to present his sweeping 16-hour cycle. Wagner set the first production in timeless, mythic German prehistory. In his revolutionary postwar interpretation, the composer's grandson Wieland emphasized the influence of Greek drama on Wagner's aesthetics. French Director Patrice Chereau detected a 19th century Marxist dialectic at work with his controversial 1976 Bayreuth staging, while Set Designer Pet Halmen and Director Nicolas Joel used aspects of Kabuki drama in their recent Wiesbaden production.

The ambiguities of the Ring, however, are what make it so irresistible, and lately there has been something of a Ring boomlet in America. The San Francisco Opera unveiled its splendid Ring last summer; the Dallas Opera has produced all four segments in the past five years; there is a production under way at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y. Next month the Metropolitan Opera begins its new Ring with the second opera in the cycle, Die Walkure. Yet for sheer audaciousness, none of these companies are likely to rival the Seattle Opera, which opened a new Ring last week to an invigorating chorus of lusty cheers and outraged boos. Long coddled by safe, representational operatic productions, the American public is getting a chance to see what directorial interpretation, so common in Europe, is all about.

The Rhinemaidens frolic in Victorian bloomers. Fricka ascends to Valhalla by means of a balloon gondola. The Valkyries ride off to war aboard carrousel horses suspended in midair. Wotan puts Brunnhilde to sleep in what appears to be a cluttered attic, full of ungodly bric-a-brac, and she awakens in a starry mausoleum. Siegfried slays the dragon Fafner by chopping at a gigantic crab's claw and then pushing over a flimsy set of painted flats. The forest bird who guides the hero to Brunnhilde is a taxidermist's specimen, carried aloft on a stick by a highly visible soprano.

The seeming naivete of Swiss Director Francois Rochaix and American Designer Robert Israel, however, is the result of a thoughtful and ultimately respectful examination of the sense of the piece. Rochaix and Israel are not the first to note the parallels between Wagner's life and his works, but few have ever acted on them so explicitly. Central to understanding the Seattle Opera's Ring is the notion that Wagner and Wotan are cognates, and that just as the composer uses leitmotivs, or musical symbols, to weave and bind his sprawling tapestry, so should Wotan employ theatrical symbols -- props -- to underscore the unity of the world he has created. The universe of the Ring is an illusion, a necromancer's house of cards, that must finally come crashing down.