Rating: 
Summary: I got iniciated to Wagner through this (!)
Review: When I watched for the first time this DVD (well, it was a Laserdisc, for that happened prior to the release on DVD) I knew the music of the Ring for 6 years (more or less) and I hadn't yet seen any other production. I have to confess that it was watching it that I had for the first time a feeling of understanding not only the music but the drama. Since then my relation with Wagner's music and drama changed completely and he became one of my great musical loves along with Puccini. As time has passed I have also my regrets to this production (the dullness of the image) but I still love it. That cannot say in the same degree about the other operas of the cycle, specially about boring, with nothing to say 'Siegfried'. I'm not a fan of Boulez conducting Wagner operas. I also think that his axionatic 'return to the truth' when conducting this Ring in Bayreuth in the 70s and his negative to accept tempi acquired by tradition was an out-of-place extrapolation of the phenomenological principles that guided him in composition (that's to say, to do music as if one had been born out of the world, had no bias derived from tradition and had to invent the laws of music from zero).
Nevertheless, although I'm opposed to almost all of Boulez's ideas about music, I feel confortable with much of his music and sometimes also with his conducting. This is the place with this Götterdämmerung, the highest peak of an irregular and overall not very satisfactory Ring cycle. With a disciplined, a little constrained and in some sense modern orchestral sound, with the help of excellent actor-singers achieves some moments of such profound tragicness that I cannot forget while hearing any other recording. These are my irrepetible moments: - Act I: Scene between Brünnhilde and Gutrune. I will never forget the tragic accents, the description of the end of an old world, by Gwendoline Killebrew and the sober response by Brünnhilde 'Welch banger Träume Mären meldest du mir". Also excellent her downfall minutes later when Siegfried comes in disguise and submits her. - Act II almost in its entirety. Haunting first scene between Hagen and Alberich, frightening, almost nazi scene of the vassals, heartbreaking realization of the downfall of the Gods through Hagen's manipulations when Brünnhilde holds her violent agonistic scene with Siegfried, scandal of the people, and final bloody vendetta trio. - Acto III. Full expresionistic final scene from the moment in which Gutrune (Jeannine Altmeyer) cannot sleep due to nightmares, the murder of king Gunther (great actor Franz Mazura, also excellent Schön/Jack the Ripper in Boulez's Lulu and Moses in Solti's 'Moses und Aron') by his brother for the possesion of the ring and appearance of apocalyptic Brünnhilde in a final monologue for which I haven't words enough. Ok, this Götterdämmerung has not a brilliant funeral march or a Siegfried singer to compete with many others (althogh here he is much more inspired that in his boring rendition of the role in 'Siegfried'), but it has the Brünnhilde that made me understand the deepest feeling of this work (Gwyneth Jones, and I mean the Ring complete cycle) and I still have to listen to it when want to remember the true sense of this metaphore of the world's destruction by the greedness of the powerful. Sorry for my English. Rafael Fernandez
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