Studying up on the Ring

Well, seeing I am on my way to 15 odd hours of Wagnerian opera in a few months time, I should probably start getting a better idea of what its about and how it's been interpreted over the years, and why it seems particularly appealing (according to this very interesting article) to politicians (and not just Nazi ones.)   I didn't know GBS was a fan, for example:

...the first point to make is that Wagner’s music has inspired political interpretation since it was first performed. The 35-year-old anarchist who befriended Bakunin and took part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849 was 63 when the Ring cycle was first performed. By then, Marx felt able to mock the former firebrand as a “musician of state”, a court composer remote from the social realities of the age; deaf to the first whispers of modernity. Yet the notion that the Ring is essentially a critique of capitalism has always had its adherents – most obviously George Bernard Shaw, whose The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) declares the Ring to be a dramatised allegory of “shareholders, tall hats, white-lead factories and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view”. In this scheme of equivalence, Alberich is the wicked capitalist and Nibelheim his industrial Hades. Siegfried shimmers into being as an avatar of Bakunin, the great rebel whose struggle for freedom ends in defeat.

Well, given it went on to become a Nazi favourite, it's a wonder they haven't been duels in the street over conflicting interpretations.  (Actually, I suspect there may have been.)

On the perhaps more mundane matter of staging, the production I am (hopefully) going to see is said to be a "digital" production:  

Towering, moving digital panels create an immersive virtual world. Astonishing costumes and props imagine an unknown future.  

Given that the QPAC performance space is not the largest on the planet, perhaps that will work well, but I would be curious to see a more traditional production, too.  This article goes into detail about the history of its staging, with this amusing bit:

From 1896 on (when Bayreuth finally mounted its second Ring ), critics took issue with the fixed, semaphoric style of acting Cosima imposed there, which many thought more forced and unnatural than what her late husband's actors had done twenty years before. In 1889 Shaw wrote, "Bayreuth has chosen the law of death. Its boast is that it alone knows what was done last time, therefore it alone has the pure and complete tradition, or, as I prefer to put it, that it alone is in a position to strangle Wagner's lyric dramas note by note, bar by bar, nuance by nuance ." In 1896, he judged the Bayreuth style of acting to be an amateurish display of tableau-vivant attitudes, the striking of stupid poses by singers who were often little more than "animated beer casks." (From earliest days, Ring tourists mocked the girth of "youthful" Siegfrieds and "enchanting" Brünnhildes. Romain Rolland, at Bayreuth in 1896, described "the vast padded bulk" of a Sieglinde: "From bust to backside she is as wide as a city wall.")