Happy Birthday to the ‘Ring’ Master

It was May 1996, and the Wagner Society of Southern California’s annual birthday party for the 19th century German composer was imminent. Dr. Sherwin Sloan, the society’s chairman, went to pick up the cake, asking that it be inscribed “Happy Birthday, Richard”--and, he told the young clerk, he’d like three candles: a “1,” an “8” and a “3.”

“His mouth dropped open,” Sloan recalls. He’d never done a cake for anyone that old before. Sloan explained that the 183-year-old Richard was dead.

“Oh,” said the clerk, “I’m so sorry to hear about your father.”

Friday was the 185th anniversary of Wagner’s birth, and today about 80 society members will celebrate at Sloan’s home in the Hollywood Hills. There will be Wagner music and Wagner lore.

And, once again, the bronze bust of Wagner given to the society by a member who brought it home from Nuremberg after World War II will have been brought up from Sloan’s garage--where it shares shelf space with the overflow from his owl collection--and given the place of honor on the bar.

Now, if you’re a true Wagnerite, you don’t show up only for this once-a-year occasion. Like Sloan, a recently retired ophthalmologist, you go to the ends of the Earth to hear performances of the “Ring” cycle or “Tristan und Isolde” or “Tannhauser.”

Indeed, for about six months of the year Sloan leads Wagner groupies on tours to opera houses around the world. A youthful 61, he retired in January to devote more time to his passion--opera. And, in particular, to Wagner.

Why Wagner? Sloan acknowledges that about 75% of opera lovers rate sitting through a Wagner opera right up there with a root canal or an IRS audit. “There are so many people who can’t tolerate Wagner. It’s too heavy. It’s too long.”

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Leave them to their Puccini. “We have real Wagner crazies,” says Sloan, who places himself squarely among them. “When there’s a ‘Ring’ anywhere in the world, performances sell out.”

For those who have never ventured beyond “Madama Butterfly,” the “Ring”--”Der Ring des Nibelungen”--is a cycle of four operas--”Das Rheingold,” “Die Walkure,” “Siegfried” and “Gotterdammerung”--about 18 hours of musical drama.

Early in June, Sloan will take a group to Flagstaff for the Arizona Opera’s “Ring.” “It’ll be my 48th ‘Ring,’ ” he mentions. In August he’ll take a group to Bayreuth in Bavaria for the annual Wagner Festival. “That will be 49.” In November he’ll take a group to Adelaide, Australia. “My 50th ‘Ring.’ ”

“Someday,” he says, L.A Opera will do the “Ring.” “Of course, Wagner is difficult. The singers are not easy to come by. Everything is more expensive. It’s a colossal undertaking.”

Does he never tire of hearing it? By way of saying no he replies, “Once I went to a ‘Ring,’ which takes a week, and I stayed and saw it all over again.” That was in Munich. It was also in Germany that he saw his weirdest “Ring.” The Valkyries rode motorcycles, wore leather and carried whips.

Sloan is, in short, an opera nut. “One day I went to three operas in one day.” He managed the triple-header by taking in a dress rehearsal of the five-hour “Siegfried” at the Met in the morning, a New York City Opera matinee and an evening performance at the Met. “And I didn’t fall asleep.”

Sloan became hooked on opera when, as a high schooler in Chicago, he discovered the Met’s Saturday morning radio broadcasts. But truthfully, he says, “I wasn’t really interested in Wagner at first. It took some getting used to.”

His interest wasn’t piqued until 1975, after he’d moved west. Learning that Seattle Opera planned to do the “Ring,” he spent a year studying the scores--”I almost knew it by heart.” It was his first “Ring” and, he says, “I was enthralled.” When he returned from Seattle, “My children said, ‘Dad, there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t spoken to us in three days and you seem to be walking around in a sort of trance.’ ”

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Today, Sloan is on the boards of both L.A. Opera and the Opera League, which honored him at its annual luncheon earlier this month. In 1983 he and his then-wife, Irene, founded the scholarly Opera Quarterly, now published by Oxford Press. The same year he founded the Wagner Society of Southern California, which he still chairs. “I’m kind of a benevolent dictator.”

While in private practice in Ventura and Encino, Sloan served as president of both the Los Angeles Society of Ophthalmology and the California Assn. of Ophthalmology, was chief of ophthalmology at Sepulveda Veterans’ Medical Center and an adjunct professor at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute. Then, after 28 years, he decided on early retirement. Now he’s so busy he wonders how he ever had time to practice medicine. He surfs the Internet on his new computer in the office of the Owl’s Nest, his 1940s pink house under the “D” in the Hollywood sign. The computer shares office space with shelf after shelf of books about, and by, Wagner and his kin.

Sloan can tell you that Wagner suffered from a skin disorder and wore only silk. And that his penchant for high living, together with his “grandiose ideas about productions and costumes,” kept him constantly in debt. And he can tell you about Wagner the innovator--that he designed the Bayreuth opera house with its superb acoustics and covered orchestra pit. “And Wagner was the first one who turned the [house]lights down and the first to have the curtain part in the middle instead of going straight down.”

Did you know, he asks, that only Jesus has more books written about him? That Wagner was the favorite composer of both Adolf Hitler and Zionist Theodor Herzl?

Although Wagner and his second wife, Cosima, a daughter of Franz Liszt, were ardent anti-Semites, the Wagner Society of Southern California counts numerous Jews among its 300 members. Says Sloan, “One must separate his ideas from his genius.”

Still, he appreciates the Israeli position--Wagner’s works are not performed publicly in Israel--especially considering that the Nazis “had Wagner’s music piped into the gas chambers at the concentration camps.”

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The issue of anti-Semitism has caused a deep rift among Wagner descendants of the composer, who died in Venice in 1883. Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried--whose 79-year-old father, Wolfgang, runs the Wagner Festival--”still accuses the Wagner family of being Nazis” and chooses to live in Italy. “Gottfried has spoken to our Wagner Society twice, not saying very nice things about the Wagners.”

Wagnerites never tire of debating the “facts” about the composer’s life. Was he the womanizer some writers have made him out to be or were those affairs, Sloan asks, “just all his fantasies”? Was Ludwig Geyer, who wed Wagner’s mother nine months after his father died, his true biological father? Was Wagner anti-Semitic because Geyer was Jewish?

Says Sloan, “It’s never ending because Wagner’s so controversial. You could never go on with societies forever with any other composer.”

He adds, “His personality was pretty terrible. We have meetings about that.”

But his genius was such that the first Wagner Festival, in Bayreuth in 1876, attracted an international who’s who of arts and letters, from Johannes Brahms to Mark Twain. Sloan tells of Twain later reviewing the performance of the “Ring” for an American newspaper.

He wrote, “Wagner’s music is not as bad as it sounds.”

At Sunday’s gathering, starting at noon, party-goers will be driven by van from the parking lot of the Beachwood Market to the Owl’s Nest, where there will be a social hour, potluck and a program with three singers and a pianist. “It’s a members’ participation day,” Sloan says. “People can just sit there and listen, or play an excerpt of a favorite Wagner recording and tell us why it’s a favorite, or they can read something from Wagner and tell why it’s a favorite.”