By HEATH LEES
When Wagner wrote his gigantic opera cycle The Ring it took him nearly 28 years and he finished up with a cycle that plays for four nights and a total of 16 hours.
Alan Platt, who lives on Waiheke Island and works in a renovated, underground cellar in Newmarket, is doing a version of this mammoth operatic work which will take only 28 minutes.
Platt is New Zealand born and bred, but for nearly 30 years he has worked in London making animated films for children — very successful ones too, mostly to do with science and music.
Through BBC TV and Channel Four's educational television programmes he has scooped up an armful of awards for his imaginative skill with fascinating images that rivet the attention of children, drawing them into subjects and ideas that once were boring.
After a runaway success called Fourways Farm, Channel Four TV editor gave Platt and his design associate Max Stewart a free rein for the next idea.
"It was like a dream," Platt says. "We could choose pretty well what we liked and put serious money into it."
After much soul-searching, Platt, who admits to being a Wagner fan all his life, proposed the half-hour meltdown of The Ring, with full orchestral soundtrack and animated models to enact the mythic tale.
"I could see all the problems of course," he says, "but children never get to hear much music other than pop and rock music nowadays and this was a chance to bring a great piece of music-theatre to them.
"Besides, I've always been a Wagner freak. I love the work so much I was just itching for the opportunity."
But the problems became too great. Orchestras, rehearsal spaces and recording fees all cost a fortune in London, and Wagner's music — even 28 minutes of it — demands well over 100 players, more than a dozen first-class solo singers, and a large chorus at the end.
Impossible.
Only one thing saved it all. Platt had already been planning to follow his hectic professional life overseas with semi-retirement on Waiheke Island, and somebody suggested he might do the film in Auckland. So out he came.
Asking around, Platt found things falling into place as if by magic. "The Auckland Philhar-monia Orchestra was enormously keen and obliging," he says. "Their rates were manageable and the dates fitted.
"They have an excellent on-site music arranger in Robert Johnson and their contacts with Concert FM meant that recording the music at a professional level would be no problem."
In London, Platt sold the Kiwi part of the idea to Channel Four and began to reduce Wagner's huge music-drama to 3 per cent of its length.
"It's for children of between 7 and 11," he says, "so it has to grab them straight away. No verbal signposting, no chorus, in fact no singing parts at all. It's just the orchestral music that tells the story. But then that was Wagner's approach too — he called the orchestra 'the real teller of the tale' and that's what it becomes in our film."
Platt loves the intensely gripping quality of Wagner's storybook characters and he thinks this makes them work beautifully for his animated film techniques.
"Wagner would have loved it too," he says confidently. "We can make the giants appear enormous against the tiny, evil-looking dwarves. Instead of the usual cumbersome Wagner soprano we can have a beautiful, sexy heroine. And the fiery dragon has all the exaggerated horror of the old picturebook fairytales."
Platt knows all about Rossini's famous joke that Wagner's operas have lovely moments and terrible half-hours.
"Yes, there's lots of times when nothing much really happens," he says, "so we simply cut it. Sieg-fried appears as a baby, then in the next minute he's a 12-inch high giant with rippling pectorals and a magic sword. In the real version that takes 90 minutes.
"The story goes down to its essentials beautifully. There's this tricky god Wotan who steals a ring that becomes cursed, and Siegfried has to atone for this misdeed and set the world right again. Basically it's a story of redemption, and I think this film captures that central simplicity."
Inevitably, Platt has people asking if a 28-minute animated film for children will not miniaturise Wagner's enormous work out of existence.
He remains firm. "Not at all. I thought a lot about that. I love this work. I revere it — oh let's admit it, I really worship it, so I had to convince myself that this was good to do. But now that it's nearing completion, this version makes me love it all the more. I'm sure others will do so too, specially the children it's aimed at.
"I want this to open doors for them into this music and get them to feel how wonderfully transforming it all is. If they ever try to get a bit closer to the real thing one day in the theatre I'll be delighted. It will have been 28 minutes of their lives well spent."
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