The Metropolitan Opera's Rudolf Bing is a fastidious Viennese who has little use for the Teutonic excesses of Richard Wagner. But this season he bravely buckled down to putting on Wagner's complete 15-hour Ring cycle (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung) for the first time in six years. Somewhat to Bing's surprise, it was a smash hit. The Wagner-starved public queued up for tickets: "It was as if Callas were singing Lucia''' Result: the Met decided to follow up the two scheduled Rings with a third cycle starting next week, the first...
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