The Golden Ring (1965) (NTSC)

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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Booklet Audio-Only Track-Audio Highlights From The Ring
Rating
Year Of Production	1965
Running Time	86:38 (Case: 88)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Humphrey Burton
Studio Distributor	Decca Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Sir Georg Solti Birgit Nilsson Wolfgang Windgassen Gottlob Frick Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Claire Watson John Culshaw
Case	Flexbox
RPI	?	Music	Richard Wagner

    Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring Des Nibelungen has claims to be the greatest single work of art ever created. The vast canvas of this mammoth work is spread across four operas that have a combined running time of around fifteen hours. Little wonder then that little or no attempt was made to record these works in the studio until the LP era.

    In the early 1950s several abortive attempts were made to start a recorded cycle. The great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler was slated to record the four operas for EMI, but died in 1954 after making a single recording, of Die Walküre. Clemens Krauss was also another conductor considered to conduct the Ring in stereo, but he also died in 1954. Eventually a much younger Hungarian émigré living in Britain was chosen by the Decca company for the first studio recording: Georg Solti, who was 46 by the time Das Rheingold was recorded.

    The project took seven years to complete, and the cycle that resulted under the producer John Culshaw is still regarded as one of the finest recordings of this work. It is a viscerally exciting series of performances that reflect Solti's own approach to music performance, and while perhaps for the purist live cycles by Böhm and Krauss take pride of place, this is probably the safest recommendation for someone approaching the Ring for the first time. Culshaw later wrote a book called Ring Resounding that goes into detail about the lengthy production.

    For the final ten recording sessions of Götterdämmerung in late 1964, the newly created BBC2 sent a film crew with director Humphrey Burton to Vienna to make a documentary about the project, and it is this documentary that we have on this disc.

    The documentary is essentially a Sixties version of one of those "making of" documentaries that get added as extras to DVD releases. In this case the material is sufficient to comprise the contents of a DVD by itself. The bulk of the film is taken up with the five principal singers recording sections of the opera in Vienna's Sofiensaal, and interviews with all of the main players in the production. The principal singers here are the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson (Brünnhilde), the German heldentenor Wolfgang Windgassen (Siegfried), the bass Göttlob Frick (who would have been a frightening Hagen on stage), baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Gunther), and the American soprano Claire Watson (Gutrune), who had also sung Freia in Das Rheingold.

    Played in full or nearly in full are the trio that ends Act Two with Brünnhilde, Hagen and Gunther plotting Siegfried's death, Siegfried's funeral march, the Immolation scene that ends the opera and Hagen's Summoning of the Vassals, a tricky scene to record because of the use of offstage stierhorns which approach the listener.

    There is considerable footage of the recording engineers (including the renowned Gordon Parry) setting up the control centre, adjusting the levels of recording, discussing various aspects of the production and smoking cigarettes. A break in the middle of a recording session is described as a "cigaretten pausen". There is a Pythonesque moment when one of the engineers is revealed as a tram spotter, holding forth on the Viennese tram system to fellow obsessives in an obviously staged sequence. And you get to see the frog-in-a-blender conducting style of Solti. After the end of the Act Two trio, I expected to hear applause, but Solti just quickly packs up his score and leaves the podium, obviously satisfied with the take.

    This is a fascinating and gripping documentary about a famous recording, which made me want to listen to the entire cycle again. In fact, I did just that. While this is great stuff and one of the best music documentaries ever made, it still saddens me a little to realise that singers of the calibre of the five soloists are scarce nowadays, if they exist at all. Also, the cost of making new opera recordings, combined with the financial problems the major labels are experiencing, means that a new studio Ring cycle is unlikely in the foreseeable future. Ring aficionados will have to make do with reissues of older cycles.

    EMI have even decided to produce opera recordings only for DVD in the future. TDK have released a recent live Ring from Stuttgart on DVD, but sadly it is appallingly staged and not very well performed. There are good older cycles on DVD from Bayreuth and the New York Metropolitan, though neither is perfect.

Video

    The documentary is presented in black and white in the original aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and is of course not 16x9 enhanced. Like most of Universal's music DVDs, the television format is NTSC.

    The video quality is not very good, which is due to the source materials rather than a problematic transfer. The material was shot on a combination of media, with the rehearsal sequences on videotape and the interviews on film.

    The film sequences suffer from the usual problems of antique film, like dirt, black spots, scratches and so forth. There also appears to be some distortion of the image noticeable when the camera moves, possibly due to the source being a kinescope rather than the original film. The videotaped sequences are a little better, although they are not very sharp. There are almost continuous analogue video tracking errors showing as brief horizontal black lines. There is also some interference which displays as a pattern of white spots across the screen, as well as the occasional instance of severe distortion of the video image.

    There is also plenty of low level noise, ghosting, comet trails and just about every other video artefact you can think of.

    Unfortunately there are no subtitles for the rehearsal sequences, so unless you know the story or have a libretto handy (or speak German), you don't know what is being sung. The same applies for the instructions Solti gives the orchestra. The accompanying booklet contains translations, but these are for the audio highlights included as an extra, not for the main programme.

    This is a dual-layered disc with the main programme on one layer and the extras on the other, so there is no layer change.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are two audio tracks, both in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, which accurately reflects the original source. There is no surround encoding. The original English language version is supplemented by a German language track. The former is not simply dubbed, as the interviews with Solti are conducted in German.

    I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the sound as far as the music is concerned. The music sounds very loud and full, with little distortion or lack of body. There is a pleasing amount of bass. It appears that the audio was restored for this release, and a good job was done. While it is not of the quality of the original version on CD, it is still very listenable.

    There are some problems. Some of the audio in the control room is shrill and harsh-sounding, and there is some high-pitched feedback from time to time. Dialogue is generally satisfactory although it is sometimes hard to understand Solti's thick accent. During the interview sequences there is a high level of background noise - for example, you can clearly hear traffic sounds during the interview with Fischer-Dieskau.

    The music score is by Richard Wagner and is quite good, actually.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Booklet

    The 48-page booklet contains track listings for the main feature and the audio extracts, with cast listings, synopses for the extracts and texts in German and English. There is also one photo of the conductor and a reminiscence by Humphrey Burton of two and a half pages.

Audio Highlights From The Ring (69:05)

    Nearly 70 minutes of highlights from the Solti set remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1. On the face of it, this sounds like a superb extra. Unfortunately though, the remastering into surround is not a complete success. The audio is not quite as crisp and vibrant sounding as the CD equivalent, although it is still quite good. The selections include Entry of the Gods into Valhalla from Das Rheingold, the Ride of the Valkyries and the Magic Fire music from Die Walküre, the Forging Scene and Forest Murmurs from Siegfried, and Siegfried's Funeral March and the Immolation from Götterdämmerung .

    It is a pity that Hagen's Summoning of the Vassals was not included in these highlights, as the work with the approaching stierhorns and the use of a chorus in this scene would have lent itself to some nice surround effects.

    According to one review, the Region 1 release has surround encoding. However, I believe that the disc is identical in all regions, so this seems to be an error.

    A fine documentary, this should be in every serious music lover's library.

    The video quality is not good, but allowances have to be made for the source material.

    The audio quality is excellent.

    The extras are nice in theory but in practice not quite so good.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall