There Stands the Glass

I persuaded one of my houseguests to watch Bayreuth Festspielhaus’ 2022 production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen with me over the holidays. Doing so required signing up for a free trial of Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage Plus streaming service.

The decision was wildly unpopular with those who might have preferred to view sports and holiday movies on the single television monitor in my compound. After all, Wagner’s cycle is a notorious test of endurance.

Powering through the outrageous updates of Das Rheingold (154 minutes), Die Walküre (234 minutes), Siegfried (244 minutes) and Götterdämmerung (274 minutes) took more than 15 hours. I loved it, but I’ll admit to growing restless during the twilight of the gods.

Contemporary elements such as using humans to represent the titular ring thrilled me. Yet a scene featuring the famed soprano Lise Davidsen in Das Rheingold is so jarring that I literally ran screaming from the room. I’m still shook. Here’s The New York Times’ review of the production.

Stage Plus’ video and audio quality is superb. And the lifelike fidelity of the Dolby Atmos version of Peter Gregson’s Quartets Three & Four gave me goosebumps. I’d rather pay for Stage Plus than Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Disney+ and Hulu. So why did I cancel the service before I was billed $149 for a full year? There’s a glitch.

While I could access everything Stage Plus offers on my laptop and phone, only about a third of the video options were accessible on AirPlay. Here’s Stage Plus’ response to my concern about the matter: “we are already aware of the problem and our developers are currently fixing it.” Yet the issue remained unresolved six days after my objection.