The Ring of the Nibelung is this huge epic. It's a four-night-long opera telling of the passing of the gods and the old order and the emergence of man as the supreme being on the Earth. There's literally nothing it's not about. The first part of the Ring of The Nibelung is called Das Rheingold, which is about the gold at the bottom of the river Rhine — the Rheingold — which is stolen by a very frustrated dwarf named Alberich. He's the Nibelung of the title of the whole epic. And he steals this pure gold from the bottom of the river, forges a ring out of it, which is the ring of the title, by which he intends to be master of the entire world. But it is cursed and everybody who touches the ring destroys themselves and everything they love. What I think Wagner accomplishes really uniquely are transitions, and the way one thing relates or doesn't relate to another. That's what's interesting about the Ring. In the orchestral transition from the first to the second scene of Das Rheingold, we go from the bottom of the river to the top of a mountain where Valhalla is being constructed as a fortress home for the gods. What we hear at the beginning is swirling chaos. There's also a sense of menace. You can kind of tell something bad has just happened. Things aren't going to be the same from now on. But now imagine a camera doing a pan shot from the bottom of a river. Coming up, there's a little bit of light. There's still a swirling and uncertainty of what's happening. But then the world of air and eventually mountaintops will emerge out of that. There's Valhalla, and everything has changed. We have Wotan, the king of the gods, dreaming about this house that he's had built. He imagines walking in with his wife and the other gods over a rainbow bridge. And they will be safe at last — he thinks. Now there's one problem. He hasn't quite figured out how he's going to pay for this. What we have is the original real estate crisis that will bring down the economy.