This blog's unwillingness to be very impressed by opera seems, according to the Guardian, to be having consequences:

You can't give tickets away for young people to watch opera, not even Wagner's rarely performed Ring, arguably the greatest event in the operatic canon. That appears to be the devastating conclusion of an embarrassing experiment at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Scottish Opera's ambitious complete Ring cycle sold out as long ago as October, but the organisers of the Festival held back one performance of Gotterdammerung for people under 27. Faced with frequent attacks that it was elitist, "out of touch", and aimed only at the "middle-aged upper middle class audience", the heavily subsidised Festival hoped that the free ticket offer would help to reverse its demographic.

But only 237 young people turned up for the performance on Friday, leaving a staggering 1,660 seats empty in the flagship Festival Theatre.

I've just been watching the Chereau Ring Cycle Gotterdamerung on DVD, and Hagen spent the whole of it dressed like a harassed librarian, i.e. in a crumpled suit and a tie, with his top shirt button undone. Yet despite his mundane costume, he spent the last act carrying a long spear, just like a real Hagen, which he used to stab Siegfried in the back. Very peculiar.

Then, by way of enlightenment, I listened to a CD of the English National Opera English language production of the last couple of acts of "The Twilight of the Gods" (i.e. Gotterdamerung in English), but because it was sung by opera singers instead of normal singers I couldn't make out a single word and it might as well have been in German for all the use it was.

Nevertheless, I would have attended that Edinburgh performance if I'd been within range of it. It was presumably in German, but without subtitles anywhere, but despite all that, I'd have got something from it. Nothing can dim the glory of this music. Wagner always wins in the end.