The Ring Disc: An Interactive Guide to Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle (Media Cafe)
Welcome to the Cyber Age, Brunnhilde.
With London Decca preparing to reissue Georg Solti’s classic audio recording of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” this fall to herald the maestro’s 85th birthday, a company called The Media Cafe has gone ahead and stolen their Wagnerian thunder by releasing the entire Solti “Ring” — all 15 hours of it — on a single CD-ROM.
But that’s not all. Because “The Ring Disc” is designed to help the average listener make it alive through the convoluted saga of gods, giants, dwarfs and superheroes, anyone with the right computer equipment can access a wealth of visual information along with the music. Synchronized (more or less) to the music is a running commentary, piano-vocal score and German-English libretto.
More, upper and lower toolbars on your screen make it easy to navigate through hundreds of essays, pictures, leitmotifs and other musical examples. The upper toolbar allows you to jump between any act or scene in the tetralogy, rewind or fast-forward. All that’s missing is a continuous video performance — and don’t think some computer genius isn’t working on that possibility for the millennium.
Drawbacks? The CD-ROM is designed to work only on Pentium computers running Windows 95 or Windows NT; the staggering amount of aural and visual data compressed on the disc demands the extra power. Also, on the disc submitted for review the audio track was not always in absolute synch with the commentary, score and libretto. An engineer at Media Cafe said the degree of synchronization will vary from computer to computer, depending on the size of your screen, the power output of your system and other factors.
All things considered, however, “The Ring Disc” is a brilliant, endlessly informative means of digging below the surface of one of the great landmarks of Western music drama. It will afford Wagnerites many, many hours of happy exploration: the “Ring” as home theater and classroom combined. Wagner’s epic never had it so good. The disc retails for $99.99 and may be purchased at local software stores or by phoning 1-888-746-4347.
