The Further Adventures of Jim Horne

Notable Puzzles of 2011

Every December I look back on the year of NYT puzzles, highlight some that caught my eye, and pick my Puzzle of the Year. There’s little suspense for the Outstanding Achievement of 2011 but read on anyway. There is much to celebrate this year.

Grids

As usual, I start with a few statistical observations. The biggest is that 2011 was not particularly a year of groundbreaking technical accomplishments. Joe Krozel had the least inky grid of the year with 24 blocks but that’s six more than his record set just last year. Seven puzzles had 25 blocks, including two by Patrick Berry. Mr. Krozel did manage to blow through the old record for most blocks in a 15x grid with 56. Julian Lim had the lowest word count (58) but again, well off the record. Only one grid managed a Scrabble Average over 2.0. For the second year in a row, we had two puzzles with two quad stacks of 15-letter answer words but no new stacking arrangements appeared.

Records were broken for most C’s and most R’s in a 15x grid, and records were tied for most M’s, P’s, and V’s. I call this one the official record for most T’s. There are 51 T’s in that grid, every answer contains a T, and every clue starts with a T.

Creativity

Grid records may not be falling but this has been a strong year for grid creativity. David J. Kahn gave us our first schizophrenic puzzle in nearly five years. Read the JNote on this crazy grid by Jeff Chen. Jonah Kagan has a sophisticated math/science theme. Jeremy Newton and Tony Orbach had us traveling around the grid by opening doors we had to find ourselves, and this Yin/Yang grid is simply gorgeous.

Each group of three consecutive black squares formed a BAR in this puzzle and then Mr. Kahn followed up with his own BAR hopping theme. Jeremy Newton included a familiar melody from Beethoven. Brendan Emmett Quigley tipped us off about his impending fatherhood. Within hours of the announcement of the death of Steve Jobs, Kevin G. Der created this tribute puzzle.

My favorite NYT crossword tradition is the year-end Elizabeth C. Gorski visual theme puzzle. If it weren’t for the diabolical genius of the eventual winner, this would have been my puzzle of the year.

Answer words

After going a bit out of fashion last year, ERA regained its spot as the most popular answer of 2011. TEN was, surprisingly, in the top three. New words introduced this year include BLOODLUST, ELENAKAGAN, USUALSUSPECTS, GROUNDEDFORLIFE, SIDVICIOUS, HANNIBALLECTER, BLINGBLING, MEH, NAPOLEONCOMPLEX, ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM, GETAROOM, BATGIRL, ACMECORPORATION, CHEFBOYARDEE and about 3,000 more. Oh yeah, including UPTHEWAZOO. Surprising debuts include not just MOLTENCHOCOLATE but plain old CHOCOLATE too.

New constructors, and a few gone missing

Congratulations to the 38 constructors who debuted this year. In order, they are David Hanson, James Tuttle, Chris A. McGlothlin, Jessica A. Hui, Victor Barocas, Steve Salitan, Albert R. Picallo, Robyn Weintraub, Erik Wennstrom, E. J. Masicampo, Gareth Bain, Michael Farabaugh, Nina Rulon-Miller, Jeff Dubner, Alex Vratsanos, Angela Olson Halsted, David Steinberg, Kelsey Boes, Milo Beckman, Joseph Samulak, Tom Baring, Paul Johnson, Johanna Fenimore, Caleb Rasmussen, Ellen Leuschner, Kurt Mueller, Janie Smulyan, Parker Lewis, Dana Delany, Kay Anderson, David Gray, Ben Fish, Dan Feyer, Barry Franklin, Sara Kaplan, Rolf Hamburger, Timothy Polin, and Louis Zulli.

A few constructors fell off the radar in 2011. The great Manny Nosowsky may well have published his last NYT crossword. Even so, his lifetime Shortz-era total of 246 puzzles including 29 Sundays is not going to be eclipsed any time soon. The other heavy hitter missing from the 2011 list is the frequent mentor Nancy Salomon. Richard Silvestri had at least one puzzle every year from 1993 but not this year. Sarah Keller had an 11-year streak end and one of the most creative constructors, Karen M. Tracey, was absent in 2011 as well. Beloved bloggers and podcasters Brian Cimmet and Ryan Hecht hung up their microphones and shut down their website.

The most prolific constructors were, as usual, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon who had an acrostic published every second week plus three cryptics. Ignoring variety puzzles, the clear winner was Patrick Berry with 19, including six in a row. The only others in double digits are Peter A. Collins with 12 and Ian Livengood with 11.

The rise of conservatism

Why do grids seem less ambitious this year? It could be just coincidence or merely the pendulum swinging back. It could also be that loud voices in the blogosphere inveighing against gimmick puzzles are changing the trend. The respected puzzle critic Amy Reynaldo often zeroes in on the least lively fill, marking down any grids with too many overused, obscure, or crosswordy answers. I mean this literally – she grades each puzzle. Extreme grids or complex themes almost always mean an above average level of junk in the fill.

Personally, I can tolerate all kinds of junk fill in the service of a delightful theme but mine seems to be a minority view. Some of my favorite puzzles are built around the craziest gimmicks; connect the dots, fold the paper, constrain the available letters or use them all, stack the 15s, shade the circles, reorder words in the clues – it’s all good. My hope is that Will Shortz continues to encourage innovation. We need both the crossword Brahms continuing to polish the classical forms and the crossword Stravinsky breaking all the rules and upsetting the critics and allowing a little (or even a lot of) dissonance along the way.

The Puzzle of the Year

The counter-argument, of course, is that it’s possible to both be highly creative, even gimmicky, and still be smooth. The Patrick Berry “Cross” Word Contest is Exhibit A. Of course it’s my Puzzle of the Year, but even Mr. Berry had to resort to EEL, ITAL, LAIC, ENNUI, ASTI, ASEA, ARE, ORR, ETTA, TAR, EMTS, IDI, EGAD, and so on to pull off his masterpiece.

Let me be absolutely clear about my level of enthusiasm for this six-day challenge. It’s the best word puzzle I have ever done. If somehow you missed it, don’t worry, I haven’t and won’t give away anything important.

If you have a NYT puzzle subscription, go to this page to download the set. You want to print these out so either download the PDFs or download the Across Lite files and then print them. One puzzle, the Friday, is only available as a PDF (although I have a proof-of-concept web-based solving page that sort of works.)

If you don’t have an NYT puzzle subscription, these puzzles alone are worth signing up for it and then you’ll get access to eight new puzzles a week plus the archives going back to 1996.

What makes this set of puzzles so good? Remember, it’s a “Cross” word contest. Each of the first five puzzles brilliantly introduces a variation on the “Cross” theme. On their own, they are outstanding puzzles. By the time you solve number six and realize how everything fits together, check your jaw. If it hasn’t dropped, you haven’t yet figured out all the levels.

Update:

Looking for another opinion? Deb Amlen and some guy named Will Shortz have now posted their own separate year-end retrospectives on Wordplay. Mr. Shortz may have included even more stats than I did.

Acrostics vs. Electric Cars

Which is harder to create from scratch?

At the New York Times, acrostics are those rectangular Second Sunday puzzles that appear on alternate weeks in the magazine. Most crossword solvers summarily ignore them but acrostics have a loyal, even fanatical following. The passion and, yes, smugness of the fans reminds me of those annoying people who drive electric cars. That naturally raises the question, which is harder to construct?

At first, building an electric car sounds difficult, but Elon Musk proved it’s a piece of cake. With exactly as much background in the automobile business as I have, he was able to put together a little roadster that some hail as the beginning of the end of the ICE age. ICE, as in Internal Combustion Engine. Here’s how he did it. Follow these same simple steps for your own electric vehicle.

Elon noticed right away that batteries are heavy so everything else had better be light. No problem. He found a French company willing to build some carbon fiber body panels that weigh next to nothing. Next, he convinced an English company to slap them together to make a car body, add some details like seats and a steering wheel, and then ship that shell (car nuts call it a glider) to California. Now all he needed were the bits to make the machine actually go – a battery and a motor. He had to build his motor himself, but how hard could that be? Make one about the size and shape of a watermelon and wrap it around the rear axel. Easy. There are about 10,000 parts found in normal cars that you don’t need.

The battery seems hard because there’s all that chemistry and stuff but stuff turns out to be the answer. Build a box and stick it right behind the seats. Then jam it full with 6,000 laptop batteries. That’s it. Finis. I have no idea what to do with all those battery-less laptops but perhaps you can sell them on Craig’s List. This video contains a few more details.

How do you know your car works? Jump into the driver’s seat, switch on the flux capacitor, and press the gas pedal. Hmm, we better call it the accelerator pedal. Take note of how long it takes you to reach 60 mph. If your stopwatch says 3.7 seconds, you’ve built a Roadster rival.

(I’m skipping over the part where you finance it all by starting PayPal first and then selling that for hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Making an acrostic

Acrostics, on the other hand, require a little more imagination. In case you’re not up on the art form, let me explain how it works. Each puzzle has up to 26 crossword-like clues. Maybe they’re more like cryptic crosswords clues. Most, I have to say, are hard. On the first pass through, you might only get one or two of them but don’t worry, that’s by design.

Each letter in each answer word maps to a specific location on a 8 by 27 grid that, when filled in, will contain a quote from a book. It’s laid out in such a way that you can see the word breaks but not the punctuation. (Hyphens are the exception, you see those.) You don’t even know where sentences end.

In a normal crossword, you can make progress two ways; by looking at Across clues or Down clues. That’s what puzzle insiders mean when they say that each square is checked – it’s part of two clues. Acrostic squares are checked too. There’s the 26 or so clues, but there’s also the quote. You make progress either by solving clues, or by looking at the quote and using sentence logic to guess likely letters. Lone squares are probably A or I, since those are the only one-letter words in English. (Careful, though, the quote might be designed to trick you!) T followed by H followed by one more letter is probably THE. And so on. The usual experience is that it’s a big struggle until you get a few consecutive quote words and then the puzzle tends to fall rather quickly after that.

So far all this sounds like an unusual but not necessarily magical experience. Ah, but here’s the kicker. There’s yet another check on some squares. If you read the first letters of each answer in order, it spells the author and name of the book the quote is from. Now we’ve gone from moderately impressive to completely amazing.

Can you see the problems for the acrostic constructor? First, you need a quote that’s the right length, close to but not exceeding 216 squares, including spaces. Not just any quote, though. It needs to be one that includes all the letters used to spell the author and title. This constraint alone means that most quotes you’d like to use are simply impossible. Then you need to scramble all the letters into words, each one starting with one of those author or title letters. (Remember, no more than 26 of them!) Then you need to come up with a set of brilliant clues.

If that isn’t amazing enough, there’s yet one more level to this magic trick. Often, many of those answer words or clues are related somehow to the theme of the quote.

Yikes. You’re better off trying to build an electric car.

How can I try one?

If you mean how can you try an electric car, they’re now easy to find. Everybody is making them now. Ask for a test drive.

If you mean acrostics, I can help you there. The downside of acrostics is that the paper-and-pencil method of transferring letters between answers and the quote grid is error-prone and, well, boring. Computers make it fun. The NYT website lets you do them online. My XWord Info site always lets you solve the most recent NYT acrostic here. Each Times acrostic is constructed by the brilliant team of Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

It turns out Hex, as they’re collectively known (for reasons that escape me) aren’t the only regular acrostic constructors. I also urge you to check out American Acrostics by Cynthia Morris. Click on “This Week’s Puzzle” to try one. The setup and constraints are slightly different but the central idea is identical. The over-arching theme is American History. That sounds like yet another big constraint but since Americans keep making more history, she’s unlikely to run out of material any time soon.

Viewer mail

I no longer work for the New York Times but I’m often asked, ok I’m sometimes asked, ok I’ve been asked three times, if I’m still going to write my annual year-end wrap up of notable crossword achievements. Uh. Ok. Sure. Coming soon.

The NYT Crossword Crisis

I used to write about crosswords for The New York Times at a blog called Wordplay. That job ended today so, of course, it’s not too soon for my first tell-all exposé that will blow the lid off that whole operation. Here’s the key question:

How early did I get access to the puzzles?

NYT Crosswords are typically published at 10pm Eastern time and Wordplay posts go live moments later. How is that possible? Some of the more clever commenters have suggested that I must get early access and I’m often asked, '”How early?” The full explanation is more bizarre than you can imagine. The surprising answer, and I swear this is true, is that the posts are written two to three months ahead of time, well before the crosswords themselves are constructed. Let me explain.

Budget cutbacks

Times at the Times were particularly tough in 2008 when Will Shortz got hauled in front of NYT’s Supreme Budget Committee to hear the bad news. The lavish “puzzle lifestyle” was over. Costs had to be slashed immediately and the first cuts were to be in the admittedly well-padded construction budget. One of the junior accountants, a kid named Bumfry, had downloaded a demo version of the Crossword Compiler software with the Grid Generator plug-in. He noticed a button called “Auto-fill” and asked the obvious question: “Why can’t we just use that?” Shortz was taken off guard. He tried to argue using vague concepts like “quality” and “innovation” but made little progress until he blurted out, “What if I could come up with a solution that would slash costs but actually improve the puzzles? I have a radical notion but I need two weeks to pull it together.” He was given three days. The race was on.

The free-market solution

Most people know that Shortz did graduate work at Indiana University on Machiavelli and Adam Smith, but few also know he co-owns three key eBay patents and one more that underpins Google’s auction-based adwords business. If only there were some way to apply that same thinking to crosswords.

Then he got an idea. An awful idea. The Shortz got a wonderful, awful idea! My phone rang immediately. Was I in? The concept was so wild, so crazy, so utterly insane, that I immediately agreed.

Constructor competition

Here’s how it worked. I wrote my posts describing each crossword and those descriptions were electronically distributed to constructors through a secret network code-named CRUCIVERB-L. Each post was attached to an interactive web page where constructors bid on how cheaply they could produce a puzzle that exactly fit those specs. It was brilliant.

So, for example, when budgets were particularly tight, I would write something along these lines: “This Tuesday puzzle has only three theme answers and displays little cleverness in the surrounding fill.” Veteran constructors would pass right over that one, knowing that competitive bids would drive the price down to just a few dollars. It was a godsend for newbies, though, who could try their hand at finally getting published without having to compete with Patrick Berry on the same day.

That saved enough money that, from time to time, I could be a little more creative. Sometimes, I admit, I was even cruel, using phrases like: “seven theme answers” or “every answer in this grid contains at least one B” or, in one particularly nasty case, “quadruple pangram.” It was great fun watching constructors struggle with how low they could bid on that one.

Reaction from puzzle authors

Immediate reaction from the constructor community was negative. Hostile, even. When I emailed Will Shortz to tell him the constructors were revolting, his quick response was, “Aren’t they, though!” I should have seen that one coming, I suppose. Many constructors dropped out in protest.

Those who stayed on came to appreciate the new system. Art thrives within constraints and crosswords had never been so thoroughly constrained. Although the average payment was substantially lower than before, pay for some of the more ambitious grids actually increased.

I sometimes got accused of playing favorites, particularly with visual elements in the grid. Descriptions like “connecting the circles in alphabetical order generates a reasonably recognizable portrait of Beethoven” became known as “Gorski Gimmees” because nobody but she even bothered to compete. Liz made out like a bandit on those ones. Quadruple stacks and record-low block counts weren’t nearly as lucrative, since Kevin Der and Joe Krozel kept outbidding each other. In other words, the system worked!

Puzzle of the year

There’s a particularly funny story about the crossword that I eventually named my 2010 Puzzle of the Year (Across Lite, XWord Info solution, Wordplay.) Francis Heaney apparently misread my blog description and, thinking it was a more straightforward normal rebus, opened the bidding at a ridiculously low $1,000. Of course, nobody else would touch it and he was on the hook to somehow put it all together.

The fact that it worked and ended up being such a wonderful puzzle completely validates the Shortz Strategy, as it has come to be known. Once again, free-market capitalism proves to be the answer to every question.

Interview With a Blogger

I rarely grant interviews, but how could I say no to a student researching blogs and blogging, especially when the student is Shay Troy. It turns out that after blogging regularly for three years now, I do have some thoughts on the subject. Here are Shay’s questions and my answers:

 

Q. Why does the New York Times crossword need a blog?

A. It’s interesting that you asked, not why does the NYT need a crossword blog, but why does the NYT crossword need a blog. A strength of blogs is their ability to create and nurture community, and that’s just what the Times wanted. Solving crosswords is usually something you do by yourself. A blog provides a way for anyone who loves crosswords to share their passion with likeminded solvers. If blogs help reach out to younger people as well, that’s a bonus.

 

Q. What do you personally bring to the blog?

A. I’m neither a crossword constructor nor a great solver, so that’s a good question. I suppose one answer could be that I bring the perspective of someone who’s neither a constructor nor a fast solver – which describes most people who do the puzzles every day. I happen to be curious about a lot of topics and every crossword is crammed full of a such a wide range of subject matter that there’s always something I’m interested in commenting on.

Truthfully, though, my main job is to spark discussion and to provide a place for others who enjoy crosswords to participate. That happens almost no matter what I happen to talk about each day. So that’s what I personally bring. I’m there, saying something.

 

Q. How do you think blogging is affecting the world today?

A. Blogs, like most other inventions, are both good and bad. We used to get all our political news, for example, from newspapers, but newspapers have their own prejudices and agendas. Now, bloggers often break political stories, without the filter of the established press. That sounds good, and it is, but the price is that bloggers can also be undisciplined in ways that newspapers cannot. They might publish rumors as fact, they might purposefully distort information, they might just make things up. That might happen in the press too but in their case, there are consequences. They lose their reputation, they get sued, and so on. The professional editorial voice of the mainstream press does provide value. So do blogs.

I think of it this way. In the same sense that the press provides checks on those who wield political power, blogs, at their best, can provide checks on the press. At their worst, blogs can fan the flames of ignorance or even, say, recklessly incite violence.

Most personal blogs aren’t involved in anything so dramatic, of course. These blogs change the personal world of the bloggers and their friends in smaller ways. If you have a hobby or special interest, a blog is a great way to have a virtual community based around that interest. Again, that could be good or bad. The interest might be knitting or crosswords or skinhead racism.

 

Q. So, anyone can create a blog, does that mean they should?

A. The easy answer to that question is “no” and the deeper answer is also “no” but it’s a different kind of no. There are lots of ways to benefit from blogging and whether your blog is a “success” or not depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Commercial success is rare. Most readers are loathe to pay to read a blog since most of the Internet is available for free. Some blogs run ads but unless you get something like 20,000 readers a day -- extremely rare -- it’s pretty hard to make a living at it. (One easy way to support your favorite blog is to click on ads that appear there.)

Maybe your goal is to change the world by influencing public opinion. Since most blogs (although not this one based on TypePad) are free, it seems like the easiest and cheapest way to do that, but again, attracting an audience in a world with millions of other blogs is tough.

Lots of other goals are easily achievable, though. Maybe you want to keep your friends up to date with your current thinking on important topics. A blog is much more organized for that than something like Facebook. Maybe it’s more like a diary where you’re sharing deep thoughts and it’s just a bonus if others happen to read it too. Maybe you want to practice the discipline of writing every day. All those are possible with blogs.

 

Q. What makes a strong blogger?

A. You probably think the answer is something about strong writing skills or an engaging style or a fascinating range of topics. All that is important, of course, but the most critical attribute of any successful blogger is simply persistence. Writing every day is hard but it’s also what makes you better and what keeps readers coming back.

To persistence, add opinions. You have to have something to say about a topic people care about. Many of the most popular blogs are characterized by very strong, even outrageous opinions. Reasoned discourse is fine and might make you respected in your community of friends, but rabid polemics draw the big crowds – both those who agree with your extreme views and those who want to call you an idiot. Not everyone can do this. I can’t – I don’t have it in me. But think about who the most popular radio talk show hosts are. Those same qualities exist in many of the most popular blogs.

 

Q, How do you feel about large companies like The New York Times taking part in the blogging world?

A. A blog at the Times is much different than a personal blog. On Wordplay, I operate under various restrictions. I can have whatever opinion I want – the NYT was very clear when they hired me that they didn’t want to influence my thinking – but I have to write in a way that is consistent with the Times. They have a style guide that I must follow. They have a reputation to uphold so I can’t just make up facts, for example.

There are legal restrictions too that apply to all blogs but personal bloggers never have to worry about because they’re much less likely to be sued. I can’t libel people by calling someone a criminal who has never been convicted, say. I can’t just steal photos from random websites; I need to make sure we have the legal rights to any photos I use, and so on.

That said, big corporate blogs like those at the Times allow companies to communicate with their customers in more informal ways that are more appropriate in blogs than in standard newspaper articles or other formal corporate communications. That can help soften the image of the company.

Finally, blogs are a great way for large companies to get lots of unfiltered feedback directly from customers. This kind of data is gold for any corporation.

 

Q. Any thought on where blogs will go, or how they could possibly evolve?

A. Blogs have already evolved considerably since they started just a few years ago. They’ve had to evolve because of one fatal flaw – they’re too much work for most people. The dream was that anyone in the world could bypass the complicated and expensive machinery of the publishing industry and publish their thoughts directly to their audience around the world. That’s true but, as I said, it’s also hard. In fact, you have to do two hard things: writing about something is difficult but coming up with something to write about is just as hard for many. (This is the beauty of blogging about crosswords – the topics get handed to me each day in the newspaper!)

Consider how two spin-offs, Twitter and Facebook, have taken the basic idea of blogging and made it easier. You might think that by restricting Twitter “micro-blogs” to 140 characters, that would make the whole idea less attractive, but that constraint turned out to be a huge advantage. You don’t have to think about writing an essay or even a paragraph. You might not have enough space for a whole sentence. Art thrives within constraints, and so does personal communication, apparently.

Facebook took a different approach. Rather than restricting by length, they focus on friends and relationships, something everyone cares about. You’re not blogging to the world, you’re chatting with your peeps, mostly about each other.

Where blogs go from here is anyone’s guess but it seems likely that the next steps will be attempts to continue to make blogging even easier. Tumblr has a focus on sharing media so maybe that’s the future but I expect that’s too much work too. The ideal blogging environment might be one where you never have to think about blogging at all. You just live your life and your activities and even your thoughts get automatically posted.

Another sure bet is that there will be ongoing arguments about ease of use vs. privacy. We’re just beginning to figure out what’s appropriate to share electronically. The blogging system that really nails that tradeoff, might just be the next big thing.

 

Q. Any other thoughts on blogging?

A. If you’re curious about blogging, try it. There are lots of free options. It’s a real kick when you get your first comment, start your first on-line argument, or get quoted on another blog.

The New Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera

A Personal Review of Das Rheingold – I’m Not Completely Impressed

In the world of opera, no event is more anticipated than a new Ring production. The Met has been planning their new cycle for years and Part One, Das Rheingold, has already opened. The rest will unfold over the next couple of years before we’ll be able to see all four operas as Wagner intended – within a single week.

The Ring is so massive and, let’s face it, so important, and Wagner’s vision was so sweeping and so completely impossible that any production, anytime, anywhere, will ultimately fail to meet expectations, but that’s part of the fun. Even so, this new Das Rheingold fails on a number of levels, most importantly in its most touted feature, the production design by Robert Lepage.

First, I owe you a confession. Unlike the previous Met production which was the first of many I’ve seen live, I caught this one on an HD broadcast at a local movie house. That’s not the right way to see any opera but for those of us far from Manhattan, I live near Seattle, it’s a wonderful service. Last year’s Doctor Atomic is an opera I may never get to see live so HD is the next best thing. Opera is designed to be seen on a stage and, while the close ups and odd camera angles are interesting and necessary to compensate for the elements that are missing in the personal in-house experience, they make the art form seem even more artificial. We’re not meant to see the globs of stage makeup or the visible set rigging. We want to believe that Rheinmaidens can swim but seeing the terror in their eyes as they get hoisted skyward dampens the effect.

The HD production has logistical problems for the audience as well. Any Wagner opera, and the Ring in particular, requires careful bladder management. Rheingold is two and a half hours long without an intermission. (It gets tougher. That’s just the first act of Götterdämmerung.) The HD experience increases the degree of difficulty. Before the opera starts, there is a half-hour behind-the-scenes presentation that, unfortunately, gives away far too many moments that would have been nice surprises, without contributing anything useful. So, show up a half-hour late, right? Sorry, no. Even with ticket in hand, these events are so popular that you need to arrive at least a half hour before that so you’re not stuck in the front row, an hour if you want a decent seat. Don’t drink even a drop of water for at least 72 hours before curtain time. That’s the only possible strategy.

Finally, the lights dim and Maestro Levine sneaks onto the podium. There’s a downbeat, and that famous low E-flat rises out of the darkness. Unlike in the previous production that began at such a lethargic tempo (I liked it, actually) this Rhine music bubbles right along, and we’re off. And then we see it. The set. Oooh. Ahhh.

Huh?

I can imagine exactly what happened. It started in the first production meeting. The creative team is sitting around a table tossing around suggestions. “There are no bad ideas in brainstorming,” someone cheerfully says. Sometimes there are. “Imagine a stage full of silver plank thingies that undulate up and down to make waves or assemble themselves into mountaintops or twist and turn to become underground caverns. Wouldn't that be cool?” It would, if the laws of physics didn’t intercede. In order to carry the weight of all that scenery, not to mention singers, the planks became huge and the effect is more like a giant Dr. Seuss piano keyboard or a bad science-fiction starship than any sort of magical transformation. The result is that every set looks approximately the same and no single set looks remotely right. It’s beautiful, in a weird Metropolis kind of way, but it makes no sense.

Back to that fateful meeting. Here’s the next great notion: “You know, out in Seattle, the Rheinmaidens fly around the stage while they sing and, I don’t know how they do it, but they really look like they’re swimming. Let’s show them how we do things here in New York. Everyone will fly!” (A round of cheers.) “And if not fly, then they can walk up walls like Spiderman!” Yes, they walk up walls. As Anna Russell famously said, “I’m not making this up.”

This one magic trick is cute in the opening scene, but turning Loge into a Marvel superhero is painful to watch. Richard Croft spends so much time wall walking that he has to play the whole opera in what looks like a giant iron diaper. The costume designers do their best to disguise it by making all the Houdini-like straps appear to be decorative, but if you’re hoping for a mischievous Loge leaping around flame-like, you’re out of luck. He sure does walk up and down walls, though. Very. Very. Slowly. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t trust that apparatus either. Here he is standing behind Gerhard Siegel who is absolutely delightful as Mime. They look equally uncomfortable, and one is a miserable slave while the other is a semi-god, supposedly with a sense of humor.

None of this is important for Wagner purists, though. Only three questions matter: How is the singing? Is the orchestra any good?  And is the dragon scary?

The good news is that the Metropolitan Orchestra is magnificent and the singing is splendid. I never thought I’d see a Wotan who could compare with James Morris. Bryn Terfel is rougher, far less regal, but with a powerful, compelling voice that still make his foibles believable. Here’s another example where the HD experience detracts, though. Rather than wearing a patch over his missing eye, a lock of curly black hair seems plastered to one side of his face. It seems wrong to me and, up close, it’s very distracting.

Anyway, he seems promising. Much of the success of the story will hinge on whether we believe the complex relationship between Mr.Terfel’s Wotan and Deborah Voigt's Brünnhilde, but we have to wait for Die Walküre to know how well that works.

The other voices are fine as well. Eric Owens makes a creepy Alberich, although I wonder if the fact that he’s called Black Alberich at times in the libretto affected the casting choice. Stephanie Blythe is imposing as Mrs. Fricka Wotan – clearly not a force to be taken lightly. (The big question next opera might well by why it takes Wotan so long to accede to her demands.) The gods are godly and the giants are giant.

Speaking of the giants, they and Freia are involved in the loveliest moment of the production, and the goofiest. Wendy Bryn Harmer is perfect as the Girl of the Golden Apples who gets traded to the Giants to pay for the construction of Valhalla. Fafner and Fasolt are kin but they don’t see eye to eye on the value of the pretty blonde. For Fafner, she’s the key to robbing power from the gods, but Fasolt is a gentler soul. When it looks like he might be losing Freia, Fasolt sings of his rough giant love for this girl who is, let’s face it, way out of his league. In a beautiful piece of stage direction, Freia, who has probably never heard such a pure declaration of love, turns to him and, for just a brief moment, sympathizes. More than that, she’s visibly affected by this show of affection, and even takes a step towards him. It choked me up.

All that is forgotten during the piling-up-the-gold scene, though. This is always problematic in any production. The treasure has to be piled high enough to cover Freia’s beauty. Her hair is visible over the top so the magic helmet must be tossed into the bargain. Finally, only her eye is still visible to love-struck Fasolt through a small chink in the heap, and the Ring is pried from Wotan’s finger to fill that final gap. It’s a nice metaphor but staging is a nightmare. The Metropolitan solution is to throw Freia into a hammock and pile gold on top of her. It looks ridiculous.

Finally, what about the monster? Is it a realio-trulio dragon? Wagner’s stage direction calls it only a serpent so many productions simply give us a big snake, saving the real fire-breathing dragon for Siegfried to battle later on in the cycle.

This one is somewhere in between. It has a big dragon head but it’s more stylized (like the set) than realistic (like the costumes.) In fact, it looks more like a float on Chinese New Year. It wraps around the back of the stage, supposedly, which is a nice touch, but it’s not remotely frightening. They should just show us the machinery that operates the set. That’s got to be terrorizing.

So, that’s it. I’m not completely impressed but, I hope I’m making this clear; I loved every moment of it. I can’t wait for the sequel, and I’ll be there, standing in line with my print-at-home Fandango ticket. I hope I can see the production live before it shuts down. The previous one lasted 20 years, so perhaps I have a little time.