AMD 3

For my AMD project I decided to learn a little more about Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, which in German is called Der Ring des Nubelungen. This is a cycle that has been mentioned numerous times to me in the past few years. I was expecting to be able to watch the cycle before I turned in this blog post. This is not possible, however, due to the fact that the playtime for this cycle is roughly 15 hours. I did listen to some excerpts however and did note the fact that I could understand basic words. I managed to find a you-tube video that had English subtitles along with it and found following along with the German more enjoyable than I had with other subtitled works before I started German. I found that I actually started connecting the German and English words together fairly well. The general synopsis of the cycle is that there is an epic struggle between gods and heroes over a ring that has the power to control all of the earth. This is eerily similar to J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. Parallels have been drawn between the two before, but Tolkien denies that he took any inspiration from Wagner's work. Still this is very interesting.

This is the link to the particular production of Das Rheingold that I watched.