Pyramid Sellers is listed as playing the valkyrie Gerhilde in the 1990 Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner's Die Walküre. It's the only reference to her I can find on the web. Pseudonym? One would hope ( Read more... )

Well, there's a subject-line practically guaranteed to make calimac shudder.

Whether or not Wagner's Ring Cycle had any direct influence on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, I've found some interesting analytical comparisons of the rings in the two works. The best thing I've read so far is Jamie McGregor's Two rings to rule them all: a comparative study of ( Read more... )

Wagner's opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, is the fourth version of this story (or parts of it) that I've read or seen. The first version I read was Nibelungenlied, which is an anonymous medieval epic poem that I read in a prose translation published by Penguin. I remember that I really enjoyed it, along with Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal, ( Read more... )

I'm not sure I have anything coherent to say about this -- the third opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle, which I saw last night -- but I'm going to put down some notes in case I want to write about the whole shebang at some point. I went into Siegfried with the idea that it might be the least interesting of the four Ring operas, so is it a surprise that ( Read more... )

The past week has been quite a dose of culture. Last Tuesday Samuel R. Delany gave a reading at the downtown Seattle Public Library as part of this summer's Clarion West festivities. Delany is a terrific reader, and he was in fine form for this. He read from his latest novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and he also read from Phallos ( Read more... )