Music, Opera and Cult Films – The Public’s Taste Hasn’t Changed All That Much Over the Past Century and a Half

I was at a garage sale today in Minneapolis, browsing the usual assortment of household stuff for sale.  You learn a lot about what's important to people by looking over their possessions, especially the things they decide to sell when they move.

On a sale table, there was a stack of opera orchestral scores.  The lady running the sale came over to me and asked if I like opera.  I replied that I've worked in opera orchestras over the years.  Then she asked if I've ever been to Bayreuth, Germany.

Bayreuth is the site of the annual Bayreuth Festival, a place where fanatic opera devotees make the pilgrimage to hear the works of the famous nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner.

To the general public, the mention of a Wagner opera conjures up images of large, blonde, pigtailed, big-breasted women in armor, carrying a spear and wearing helmets with horns sticking out of them.  Come to think of it, that image reminds me more of a Minnesota Vikings football crowd at halftime.

Wagner is best known for his operatic cycle, Der Ring Des Niebelungen.  In order to enjoy a Wagner opera, you have to be willing to stay awake for four to seven hours at a sitting, not an easy feat.

But to the loyal Wagner fans who attend the Bayreuth Festival, the sheer enjoyment they receive from listening to a Wagner opera is akin to the cult following that was enjoyed by the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a Wagner opera is filled with theatrical moments that are re-created over and over again, to the delight of its audiences.  There's a certain resemblance between the wild cheering of a cult film audience listening to "Let's Do the Time Warp Again" and the evident devotion that Bayreuth audiences have for "Siegfried's Horn Call".

Wagner's Ring is theater.  So is Rocky Horror.   Author John Culshaw, who wrote the book "Ring Resounding" (about the Solti recording of the Ring cycle with Birgit Nillson, Kirsten Flagstad and Joan Sutherland in the late 1950s and early 1960s) described how the producers and Solti went to great pains to reproduce specific sound effects, like the hammering of the Niebelungen dwarfs on anvils. 

I'm reminded of what Mark Twain said about the famous German opera composer.  When asked his opinion of the Ring, Twain replied, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds".

Okay, maybe it's irreverent to poke fun at Wagner's Ring.  But my point is that the Ring was the pop culture of the late 1800s, just as Rocky Horror or Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera is part of our contemporary popular culture.

Who knows, if the folks at Bayreuth had been able to cast Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon in Die Walkure, it might have turned out to be an even bigger hit than it was!