August 17, 1876: Richard Wagner Completes His "Ring Cycle"

August 17, 1876, 150 years ago: Götterdämmerung premieres, as part of the opening festival of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany. It is the 1st performance in the final part of Richard Wagner's operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

Born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Saxony, Richard Wagner (pronounced "REE-kard VOG-ner"), 61 years old at the time of the opening, had the concert hall designed to his specifications, and, in a 5-day stretch, it produced all 4 parts of the "Ring Cycle":

* August 13: Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold). Premiering in Munich in 1869, it tells the story from Norse mythology of Alberich, from the race of dwarves known as the titular Nibelung, stealing gold from the Rhine River in Germany, and making an all-powerful ring from it. Wotan (usually written as "Odin"), king of the Norse gods, steals the ring, and Alberich puts a curse on the ring and its possessors. (J.R.R. Tolkien wouldn't publish The Hobbit until 1937.) 

* August 14: Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). Premiering in Munich in 1870, it tells of the valkyrie Brünnhilde, who saves the lives of the unwittingly incestuous couple Sieglinde and Siegmund, and of the retribution of the gods that each of them must face.

* August 15: A night off.

* August 16: Siegfried. As with Götterdämmerung the next evening, this was the 1st performance of this opera.

* August 17: Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods -- in Norse, Ragnarök). A final battle occurs, and the world as the Norse gods knew it is destroyed, and humanity must start over without them.

Wagner Festspielhaus

The Cycle was one of the greatest successes in the history of classical music, and, despite its length (about 18 hours if played straight through) and its elaborate costuming, remains popular today. This is in spite of the familiar jab, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." This is one of many quotes attributed to Mark Twain. Of course, many quotes attributed to Twain actually came from other people, and he properly credited another humorist of that time, Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye. (He was not related to the later Bill Nye the Science Guy.)

It is also in spite of the fact that it has led to the association of horned helmets with the Norse gods and Viking warriors. Such headgear would be ridiculous, because it would give an opponent something to grab onto, and hold a fighter in place. Still, football teams named the Vikings, including the NFL team in Minnesota, with its large population of people of Scandinavian descent, have renderings of horns as their helmet logo.

It's also given rise to the image of Brünnhilde as a fat woman wearing armor and a horned helmet, and the stereotyping of female opera singers in general as fat. As Brünnhilde is the last character to sing in the Cycle, it led to the expression, "The opera ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

The Cycle's continued popularity is also in spite of the fact of Wagner's recorded anti-Semitism, and thus his music's embrace by the Nazis over half a century later, particularly by Adolf Hitler himself. Since the story ties ancient Germany to the Norse mythology (however dubiously), Hitler once gave a speech saying that Wagner's works "glorified the heroic Teutonic nature." He ordered that Wagner's music be played at many Nazi events.

(Not all Nazis liked it, though: Hanns Johst, a poet approved by the Nazis, said, "When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun." That line is usually misattributed to Hitler's second-in-command, Hermann Göring.)

Act 3 of Die Walküre begins with an orchestral piece titled Ritt der Walküren, or Ride of the Valkyries. Lasting only 3 minutes, it is Wagner's best-remembered composition, and has been used in many films and TV shows, sometimes in parody.

D.W. Griffith used it for his silent film epic Birth of a Nation in 1915 (as if Wagner hadn't been connected to bigotry enough). Francis Ford Coppola used it for a helicopter scene in his 1979 Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now -- although, in the Ring Cycle, it's Götterdämmerung that is the apocalypse.

In 1957, Warner Brothers made the Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Opera, Doc? in which Elmer Fudd, wearing a Viking "magic helmet," claims, singing to the tune, that he wants to "Kill de wabbit, kill de wabbit, kill de wabbit!" And he does, and yet is remorseful over it. The movie ends with Bugs coming back to life, breaking the fourth wall, and saying, "Well, what did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?"

Because the field of play for boxing is known as a ring, even though it is square in modern times, the Rocky films have also been nicknamed "The Ring Cycle."

Wagner died on February 13, 1883, at age 68, still a big musical star by the standards of the era, but before any of this legacy was cemented.

Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of Richard, a great-great-granddaughter of Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, and a noted opera singer and director in her own right, is the current director of the annual Bayreuth Festival. She had previously co-run it with her much-older half-sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, who retired in 2010.

Katharina Wagner

In 2010, she announced that she was going to visit Israel, to invite the Israel Chamber Orchestra to come to the 2011 Bayreuth Festival, in the hopes of reconciliation between her ancestor's music and the people it indirectly harmed. The angry response of Holocaust survivors led her to cancel the visit, and Wagner's works are still banned in Israel. In 2015, she had the concert hall, now named the Richard-Wagner-Festpielhaus, renovated to modern standards of safety and comfort.

March 3, 1875: The Premiere of "Carmen" & The 1st Indoor Hockey Game

Georges Bizet

March 3, 1875, 150 years ago: Carmen, an opera by French composer Georges Bizet, premieres, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. It is based on the 1845 novella of the same title, by French writer Prosper Mérimée. He died in 1870, and so did not live to see the opera.

The opera is not comic: It is set in southern Spain in 1820, in the wake of the country's devastating defense of itself against Napoleon in the Peninsular War, and with the loss of its Latin American colonies in progress.

Don José, a naïve soldier, is seduced by the wiles of the fiery Romani woman Carmen. (She is referred to as a "gypsy," but that term for the Romani is now considered a slur.) He abandons his childhood sweetheart, and deserts from his military duties, but loses Carmen's love to the bullfighter Escamillo, after which José kills her in a jealous rage.

The depictions of proletarian life, immorality, and lawlessness, and the tragic death of the main character on stage, broke new ground in French opera, and were highly controversial. It has become part of the trope that every opera is a tragedy, which is far from true.

Bizet died just 3 months after the premiere, on June 3, 1875, at 36, from a lingering fever and 2 heart attacks.

Just as most 20th Century Americans came to know "The March of the Swiss Soldiers," the end of the the Overture to Gioachino Rossini's 1829 opera William Tell as the theme from the 1949-57 TV show The Lone Ranger, many Americans came to know the songs "Habanera" and "The Toreador Song" from their inclusion in the 1976 baseball film The Bad News Bears.

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On the exact same day, across the Atlantic Ocean, but also in a French-speaking city, the first recorded indoor ice hockey game took place.

Just as a young man named James Creighton was the 1st great pitcher in baseball, before a bizarre injury took his life at the age of 21, another James Creighton organized the 1st indoor hockey game. He put it together at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, between a local team and the Victoria Skating Club, a team captained by Creighton.

The game featured 9 players on each side, as opposed to the modern 6. And here is the entire report of the game, from the next day's Montreal Gazette -- originally a single run-on sentence, but I've added paragraphs for easier reading, although this writer uses the term "shinty" instead of the more common "shinny":

HOCKEY – At the Rink last night a very large audience gathered to witness a novel contest on the ice. The game of hockey, though much in vogue on the ice in New England and other parts of the United States, is not much known here, and in consequence the game of last evening was looked forward to with great interest.

Hockey is played usually with a ball, but last night, in order that no accident should happen, a flat block of wood was used, so that it should slide along the ice without rising, and thus going among the spectators to their discomfort. The game is like Lacrosse in one sense – the block having to go through flags placed about 8 feet apart in the same manner as the rubber ball – but in the main the old country game of shinty gives the best idea of hockey.

The players last night were eighteen in number – nine on each side – and were as follows: – Messrs. Torrance (captain), Meagher, Potter, Goff, Barnston, Gardner, Griffin, Jarvis and Whiting. Creighton (captain), Campbell, Campbell, Esdaile, Joseph, Henshaw, Chapman, Powell and Clouston.

The match was an interesting and well-contested affair, the efforts of the players exciting much merriment as they wheeled and dodged each other, and notwithstanding the brilliant play of Captain Torrance's team Captain Creighton's men carried the day, winning two games to the single of the Torrance nine. The game was concluded about half-past nine, and the spectators then adjourned well satisfied with the evening's entertainment.

Artist's depiction of the game

What the Gazette didn't report was that there was a fight after the game -- not between players, as would become so common in the sport, but between the players and the fans, as some members of the Skating Club didn't like that their rink, so used to the leisure of skating, was being used for a competitive sport, and causing damage to the ice.

Creighton went on to become the law clerk for the Canadian Senate in Ottawa, and lived until 1930. 

The Victoria Skating Rink opened in 1862, on a block bordered by Drummond Street, St. Catherine Street, Stanley Street and Dorchester Boulevard (now Boulevard René-Léveseque). In 1886, it became the home of the 1st amateur hockey league, the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada. In 1894, it was the location of the 1st Stanley Cup Playoff games. (The Cup was a challenge trophy, and when the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association won the AHAC title in 1893, no champion of another league challenged them, so there was no playoff that 1st season.)

Moving the sport indoors forced, for the 1st time, a standardized rink size, which became 200 feet long by 85 feet wide. On March 3, 1925, 50 years to the day after the 1st game, the last game was held there, a tournament semifinal for an amateur league. But times had changed: The Rink was in bad shape, and, a mile to the west, the Montreal Forum had opened the previous November. The Rink was soon demolished, and a parking garage was built in its place. The garage still stands.

No, it doesn't look much like a historical site. But, while not the place where hockey was "invented," it can legitimately be called "the place where hockey as we know it was born."