When the curtain rises on Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Dusk of the Gods), three Norns are spinning the dark threads of Wotan's fate. During the next four and a half hours Siegfried is speared in the back, his half-divine wife follows him onto the pyre and all Valhalla collapses in flames. Because Götterdämmerung is the longest and most difficult opera in Wagner's Ring, it is sung more rarely than the others. People squeezed into every available inch of standing room one afternoon last week when Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera gave Götterdämmerung the first of its...
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