Last night was at Opera Holland Park's great production of Verdi's La Forza del Destino (see the review). Extra spice was added to our evening by the fact that we were in the second row, about three feet away from the trombone section and eyeball to eyeball with them, since the setup at Opera Holland Park doesn't have an orchestra pit.

Classical music has been credited with many wondrous properties, whether it's relieving depression or improving the intelligence of your baby in the womb. Apparently, it's now contributing to the well-being of the sleep-deprived. In an, er, "innovative" piece of branding, hotel chain Travelodge has hosted a "Sleep Concert", in which guests were invited to a small concert hall to attend a performance of music specifically chosen to help them to nod off for a lunchtime catnap. Travelodge point to Sleep Concerts as being a roaring, if that's the right word, success in Japan.

Yesterday evening saw us at a rather posh corporate hospitality bash at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. It's my first time at the Summer Exhibition, and I was well impressed. Like most modern art, there's only about 20% of it that I like - but out of that 20%, there was some really fantastic stuff that appealed to me enormously, not least the life-size King Kong made entirely out of wire coat hangers. I suspect it's the same with everyone, but most probably with a different 20%.

Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen has many hard core devotees. If you’re one of them, there’s a fair chance that it’s not just the music that attracts you: there’s something deeply intoxicating about the “Gods, heroes, dragons and curses” themes of Nordic mythology. My latest sight of this came from an unlikely place, a birthday present from my son of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, the latest posthumous publication of one of J.R.R. Tolkein’s creations, edited by his son Christopher.

Tolkien's vivid creative imagination didn’t only find expression in The Lord of the Rings and its associated mythology. He was first and foremost a linguist and scholar of Old Norse and Old English poetry (his students remember his magical readings of Beowulf). The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a pair of long epic poems on the same stories of the Völsungs that form the basis of Der Ring des Nibelungen, written in modern English but using many of the devices of Old Norse poetry.

For better or for worse, the Norse myths remained an oral tradition for many centuries longer than their Greek equivalents. As a result, while most variants of the Greek myths are fairly self-consistent, the Norse ones are not, with each poet in each country creating his own interpretation - many of which are wildly different. As Christopher Tolkien’s introduction explains, Wagner was following in this path, starting with the original Norse sources and creating his own artistic vision on top. Tolkien did something similar, albeit in a smaller scale medium and staying somewhat closer to the originals.

It made me wonder to what extent Ring fans know the original sources, and I thought it would be interesting to put together a brief reading list.

The definitive source is the collection of poems known as The Poetic Edda deriving mainly from the Icelandic manuscript Codex Regius, written in the 13th century (most editions include a small number of poems from at least one other manuscript). The poems are believed to be much older than this, but no-one really knows which parts come from when. The covers most of the characters and some of the events in Der Ring, although the names are different: Sigurd for Siegfried, Odin for Wotan, etc.

A little easier to read is the so-called Prose Edda, a sort of guide to writing skaldic poetry containing many worked examples, put together around 1220 by the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson. No-one is terribly sure how many examples are original or whether they were edited or even written by Snorri. This contains another chunk of the stories that ended up in Der Ring, for example the attempt to cheat the giants out of their payment that is central to Das Rheingold.

A somewhat later manuscript containing the same legend is the late 13th century Volsunga Saga (a.k.a. The Saga of the Volsungs, a prose rendering which includes the story of Sigurd and Brynhild (a.k.a Siegfried and Brunhilde).

Strangely, (according to Christopher Tolkein’s introduction), the most complete version of the Nibelung legend appears to have been little used by Wagner, namely the Nibelungenlied, an epic poem from Germany of around the same time and of uncertain authorship. The events in the Nibelungenlied are substantially different from those in the Wagner cycle: for example, a central character is Gunther’s sister Kriemhild and a central event is Hagen stealing the dragon’s hoard from Kriemhild and throwing it into the Rhine, where it becomes the Rhinegold.

Clearly, if you share Wagner’s fascination with Norse poetry and legend, there’s plenty for you to read. Here are some links to get you started:

If you're interested in the libretti of Der Ring, you can download some excellent shareware versions from this link. 9th May 2010

Our May Day week-end was spent in Sussex at the wedding anniversary party of some friends who are very much into the folk music scene. The dance band for the occasion was an all-female group by the name of JigJaw, who were great and had fifty or so people dancing away happily to their stuff. All ordinary enough, until you realise one thing: JigJaw don't play any instruments: their music is 100% a cappella voice. And although there was a P A system, there weren't any beat-box style microphone tricks either.

One of the good things about anniversaries is that they occasionally tempt you to go things you wouldn't normally consider that turn out to blow your socks off. Which is precisely what happened to us at Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, where the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment treated us to Claudio Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin ("Vespro della Beata Vergine" in Italian). We were tipped off by a friendly choral expert that it's a fabulous work, and that it's been rarely performed recently.

Mozart's La Clemenza Di Tito was written in the last year of his life around the same time as Die Zauberflöte, the Clarinet Concerto and the Requiem, when Mozart was at the height of his powers. Which is just as well, because he wrote the vast majority of it in a little over two weeks, finishing with just a week to spare before the event for which it was commissioned: one of the coronations of Emperor Leopold II. While Mozart's status as an infant prodigy is well remembered, to produce a full length opera of such quality under such time pressure seems an even more extraordinary feat.

I don't often go to the Royal Opera House, in spite of living a mere five miles away from it and having strong pretensions of being an opera fan (as you'll have figured out if you read most of these blog entries). The main reason is the ticket prices: £140 for a ticket in the stalls just feels like too much (and it can be more - £195 if you want to see Dessay and Florez).

Modest Mussorgky's Pictures at an Exhibition is one of the best loved piano suites of all time: its musical imagery seems so vivid and tangible. It has spawned any number of adaptations, ranging from the frequently performed orchestration by Ravel to the 1971s synthesizer-heavy progressive rock version by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Every performer and arranger of the work superposes their own interpretation of the pictures that Mussorgsky tried to depict in the music.

We've just had an "interesting" experience failing to book tickets for a heavily oversubscribed festival (not classical, as it happens). Tickets went on sale at 9am today, with several authorised outlets available. At 9am, we were online attempting to log in to various websites while at the same time trying the phone numbers.