OPERA NIRVANA FOR `RINGHEADS’ ARRIVES AT LYRIC

For as long as five years, a dedicated band of international opera fans has circled this month on their calendars and Chicago on their maps, and now they’re arriving to take part in a ritual unlike any other.

Call them “Ringheads,” the operatic version of rock music’s “Deadheads.” Like those tie-dyed, marijuana-toting souls who followed Grateful Dead concerts with almost religious fervor, the “Ringheads” are willing to travel to the ends of the earth to fix their gaze on Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle, “The Ring of the Nibelung.” Some have seen it dozens of times.

For, you see, there is opera, and there is the “Ring.” There are opera-goers, and there are “Ring” disciples.

The first complete “Ring” in the history of Lyric Opera is big news, drawing Wagner fans from 22 nations and all 50 states. Some have targeted March 1996 since 1991, when Lyric first announced it was joining Bayreuth, Munich, Vienna, New York, Seattle and San Francisco as a port of call for the “Ring.”

Wagner’s “Ring” is not for everyone. It takes unusual desire, stamina–and money. But the 10,700 Wagnerians who will attend Lyric’s three “Ring” cycles can’t wait for conductor Zubin Mehta to lower his baton Monday night and ignite 15 1/2 hours of music.

The opening night “Das Rheingold” is over in a relatively snappy 2 1/2 hours. But “Die Walkure,” “Siegfried” and “Gotterdammerung” all take more than four hours to perform. In fact, Act One of “Gotterdammerung” is longer than all of Puccini’s “La Boheme.”

About the only event that runs as long on American soil is one of college football’s commercial-laden bowl games.

Among professions, doctors appear especially well-represented among those holding tickets to the three weeks of cycles. Wagner critics might argue that it takes someone hardened to human suffering to withstand the ordeal of four nights of Germanic and Norse mythology.

But Herbert Zenker, a doctor from Munich, thinks Wagner, far from an ordeal, is a reason for living: “Orthopedic surgery is not enough.”

One Chicago doctor gets so excited about the “Ring” that he can’t sleep after a performance, and an ophthalmologist from Los Angeles will be attending his 39th “Ring” cycle.

For some listeners, even one Wagner performance is more than enough. But for “Ring” enthusiasts, the full cycle–a timeless, mythic saga of gods, giants, dwarfs and mortals jockeying for unlimited power, surrounded by some of opera’s most powerful music–can be a musical and dramatic experience like none other.

At the annual festival of Wagner’s operas founded by the composer in 1876 in Bayreuth, Germany, people regard even a substandard performance of the “Ring” as they would regard the Holy Grail–as an object of veneration.

By comparison, Chicago’s $6.5 million “Ring” is positively populist. Attendance at Lyric is far more a musical devotion for hard-core opera lovers than Bayreuth’s social-religious ritual for moneyed aristocrats.

Besides, the price is right, relatively speaking. In a major opera house such as in Vienna or in London, seats for a complete “Ring” cycle can run to $1,000 or more. At Lyric, the cheapest “Ring” packages fetch $120, the most expensive $499. Little wonder all 42,756 seats were snapped up between late May, when they went on sale, and the end of August.

(A limited number of turned-back tickets may be available for individual performances, through March 30.)

If the Chicago “Ring” public won’t be rubbing elbows with European princes and princesses, it can boast its own “celebrity” list. Mayor Richard Daley is expected to attend a performance of “Das Rheingold,” and President Clinton has sent a letter of good wishes that will appear in the “Ring” souvenir book.

So why are this many people, and not just the self-advertised Wagner cognoscenti, attracted to the “Ring”?

Many are drawn by Wagner’s often intoxicating music, which seems to emerge from the orchestra in sonic waves. Others are interested in how the stage director will bring a 120-year-old masterwork into the late 20th Century. Still others will enjoy watching some of the best singers of our time testing their artistic mettle against the heavy demands of Wagner’s vocal writing and huge orchestra.

Directors of opera tours say their Chicago “Ring” excursions filled up the quickest. “Ring” tours in general, with costs for air fare, ticket prices and hotels, run up a tab of $2,000 to $4,000. (For overseas-based tours, the cost went even higher.)

“You hear so much more in a week; it just becomes overwhelming,” said Dr. Whitney Addington, president of the Chicago Board of Health and a veteran of two previous “Ring” cycles in Europe. “It’s a different experience that is absolutely breathtaking. It gets so that you can’t sleep at night.”

Sleeping probably seemed like a good idea to Chris Clark, president of the New York-based Great Performance Tours, when he heard his first “Ring” opera.

“It was a shock. I hated it. I thought it was too long and too static,” said Clark, recalling that long-ago performance of “Die Walkure.” “I was wondering, how can the audience be screaming (in approval) and loving it?”

But the advent of supertitles, which simultaneously translate an opera’s lyrics to English on a screen above the stage, helped convert Clark. When he saw San Francisco Opera’s “Ring” with supertitles for the first time, it was an eye-opener: “It really made the operas come to life for me as dramas.”

As Clark leads 42 tour members to Chicago this week, he will be attending his seventh “Ring.”

Zenker, the professor of orthopedic surgery from Munich, is a huge fan of August Everding, the director for Lyric’s “Ring.” He has seen 67 opening-night performances of Everding operas.

Noreen Maher, who has seen three “Rings,” is leading a group of 30 from one of the few places where a full “Ring” has never been performed–Australia. Her group’s two previous “Ring” stops were in Europe.

“The singers are the main attraction, especially James Morris (who sings Wotan). To the best of my knowledge, he has never sung in Australia,” said the Melbourne tour leader.

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The “Ring” can be viewed through a variety of prisms– political, social, psychological.

Typical of this latter type of hard-core “Ring” maven is Paul Humphries, a psychology professor from New York and a University of Chicago graduate, who has attended nearly a dozen “Rings.” He also teaches a course on the “Ring” at The New School in Manhattan. Over the years he has become increasingly interested in Wagner’s text.

“It’s a fascinating psychological exercise,” he said. “I used to see it more in political terms. Recently I’ve seen it more as a family dynamic.”

(Fair enough. Director Everding himself describes his Lyric production as, essentially, a “domestic drama” about the dysfunctional relationship between the power-mad Wotan and his extended family.)

The thousands of “Ring” buffs descending on Chicago through the end of March also will not have to look far for their fix of Wagner between opera nights. Lyric has scheduled more than 30 “Ring”-related activities involving the company and other Chicago arts institutions. These range from lectures and symposiums to radio broadcasts of Wagner recordings and recitals of Wagner operas transcribed for piano. (Phone 312-332-2244 for a schedule).

Perhaps no audience member enjoys a more intimate theatrical relationship with the “Ring” than Dr. Sherwin Sloan, the ophthalmologist who is attending his 39th cycle. In June he goes to his 40th “Ring,” in Flagstaff, Ariz., and in the summer he will hear his 41st, in Bayreuth. The Chicago native already has reserved a place at Australia’s first “Ring,” in Adelaide in 1998.

A visit to the Seattle “Ring” in the late 1970s changed his life, said the 1955 graduate of Austin High School on Chicago’s Far West Side and the founding editor of Opera Quarterly.

“Wagner just sort of swept over me,” Sloan recalled. “When I came back from Seattle, my children said, `Something’s wrong with Dad; he’s just walking around in a daze.’

“The music is the principal attraction, but now that I’ve seen the `Ring’ so many times, it’s fun to see different concepts. I saw a Frankfurt `Ring’ when the Valkyries were all on motorcycles with leather whips.”

Sloan, who is chairman of the Wagner Society in Los Angeles, said it helps to have “nice associates” who cover for him at his medical practice, allowing him to also run Adventure in the Arts Opera Tours. He is bringing 35 tour members to Chicago, including some from Germany and Australia.

Chicago’s Addington can’t match his West Coast colleague in Wagnerian house calls, but he will attend two of Lyric’s three cycles this month.

“If I went to all three, I’d be certifiable,” laughed the Lake Forest native. “At a cycle, you get to know the people around you, even in Bayreuth, where most of the people don’t speak English, and I don’t speak German. But you become bonded.”

Addington recalled one Bayreuth listener who timed each act of the cycle with a stopwatch. The man, moreover, knew the act timings for every “Ring” conductor over the last 50 years, and Addington said he jeered conductor James Levine because he thought Levine’s tempos were all wrong.

Such is the devotion of the “Ring” fan.

“Someone once said the `Ring’ is the most written-about work of art,” Addington said. “I don’t know if that’s the case, but there is certainly an enormous amount about it. You can live to be 200 and never get to the bottom of it.”