You might feel, after the 5 1/2 hours of Twilight of the Gods, or Goetterdaemerrung [literally, "getting darker of the gods"], the 4th and last opera in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, that it ends in this fine Washington National Opera production with a whimper not a bang. The production of course is non-traditional, and is itself a critique of the detritus and destruction left by our modern industrial society, so dealing with Wagner's stage directions for the final scene are going to be difficult in any case.
He called for the Rhine to overflow its banks and the world, especially Valhalla, home of the gods, to crumble. I've seen at least three previous productions of this opera, two of them quite traditional, and they only could approximate those demanding orders. I do remember getting a charge out of buildings coming down, either onstage at the Met or Covent Garden in London. Brunnhilde brings about the redemption of the world as she rides her horse, Grane, into the flames of the fire started to burn Siegfried's funeral pyre. The Rhinemaidens drag the chief villain, Hagen, to his death by drowning as his final cry warns everyone else to keep their hands off the Ring.
The staging of this scene was not too close to any of those overwhelming objectives: no overflow, no crumbling buildings, and no horse. So to me, it fell a bit flat although I enjoy seeing new conceptions of most operas, including The Ring operas. And this cavil should not obscure my conclusion that Francesca Zambello's production (co-produced with San Francisco Opera) is the best-staged Ring I've ever seen.
Catherine Foster was a glorious Brunnhilde and Daniel Branna a fine Siegfried, as well as Eric Halvorson playing Hagen as well as anyone I've seen.The other singers were also excellent, in their acting as well, including Jacqueline Echols as a Rhinemaiden and she was the Forest Bird in the preceding opera, Siegfried, and Jamie Barton, an up-and-comer who was one of the Norns as well as one of the Rhinemaidens. She won the Met national auditions a few years ago.
Hearing the leitmotifs, or themes, associated with each of the characters or ideas or moods makes these operas as wonderful musically as they are. The most famed leitmotifs are Siegfried's, Valhalla, the Valkyries', the Sword, the Ring, the Spear, the Nibelungs, and Siegfried's Horn Call and Funeral March, the last a great orchestral piece itself from Goetterdaemerrung as well as Siegfried's Rhine Journey in the first act.
One unusual aspect was that the first acts of these last two operas, which tend to be slow, as is the first act of Die Walkure, the second opera, played very well and held my attention dramatically as well as musically, although one very accomplished musician whom I ran into at this last opera pointed out that drama is not a terribly strong point in these operas, even if they are often referred to as music-dramas. The final acts of the last two operas instead seemed to drag a bit, despite their rather dramatic content: Siegfried's awakening Brunnhilde from her deep sleep in Siegfried and the death of Siegfried and subsequent end of the world as we know it in tonight's opera.
And lastly, one judge friend I encountered suggested that the big problem of the opera tetralogy and for Wotan, the king of the gods and the main character in the first three operas, is lawyers. Wotan somehow had made all kinds of treaties and contracts that are imprinted in runic letters on his spear and these circumscribe his ability to take actions as he sees everything leading toward the end of the world as he knows it.
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Dragons and Compacters
You don't usually hear even passionate Wagnerites carry on about the third opera in The Ring of the Nibelung: Siegfried. This is a long opera without much of the excitement of Die Walkure and the amazing music in the final opera, Goetterdaemmerung. But Francesca Zambello's amazing production for Washington National Opera injected some energy into this often-lagging interlude--if you can call a 5 1/2 hour opera an interlude.
We first meet Siegfried, the hero of heroes but also a classic Wagner innocent, in what looks to be a beat-up trailer he is inhabiting with Mime, the dwarf who for reasons unclear was the one who raised him after his parents were gone: Siegmund in the great battle with Hunding that was the start of the downfall of the gods, and Sieglinde, after giving birth to Siegfried. He is rightly suspicious of Mime, who is only caring for him so that when he fights Fafner, now a dragon, and recovers the ring and its accoutrements, Mime will be on hand to relieve the not-so-smart Siegfried of the spoils.
But the only characters whose plotting is more unsuccessful than Wotan's or the gods' generally are the Nibelungs, the dwarves. Alberich stole the Rheingold, forged the ring, lost it through trickery to Wotan and Loge, and still turns up in this opera aiming to get it back. Mime, too, is short-sighted. These characters, as it happens, also are perhaps one of the most serious pieces of evidence that looms, albeit unclearly, of Wagner's anti-Semitism at work. His descriptions of them as ugly, misshapen, greedy, less than human--even in the somewhat cleaned-up surtitles, does for a moment make you think you are hearing Der Sturmer brought to life. And add to that their role as the thief of the sacred Rheingold and using it to forge a ring that will enable them to rule the world.
But no one has ever said that Wagner is an unmitigated blessing. I do think too of Deems Taylor's short chronicle--The Monster--of all the miserable aspects of his personality and his behavior and then the inspired conclusion that the glory of his music means that everything in the indictment doesn't really matter.
Zambello's envisioning of the dragon as a huge trash compacter is superb, and when Siegfried kills the dragon and Fafner, now returned to his original status as a giant, falls out and has a death scene, you start to sympathize for the not-so-smart giant, who craved the gold when Wotan refused to yield the beauteous Freia to him, and is now dying as the last of his race.
The forest bird whose chattering Siegfried understands after tasting the dragon's blood is played in a charming manner by Jacqueline Echols. In my vinyl recording of the Ring, no less than Joan Sutherland played the role. Wotan's encounters in the last act with Erda and Siegfried were also better than I had recalled from previous productions--the old Met traditional production of the late 20th century by Otto Schenck and the recent cumbersome mechanical one by Robert LePage.
The singing quality has been high throughout but the biggest disappointment to me after what had been an amazingly enjoyable Siegfried was the famed last scene where the title character finally reaches Brunnhilde after charging through the ring of fire (not seen). Usually the tenor is exhausted from his hours of singing while the soprano is fresh as she has been waiting all this time. After the famous laugh line by Siegfried: "This is not a man!", the scene really dragged. Brunnhilde obviously needs some time to awaken after 18 years asleep but coming after all this anticipation, the scene fails to live up to expectations.
We first meet Siegfried, the hero of heroes but also a classic Wagner innocent, in what looks to be a beat-up trailer he is inhabiting with Mime, the dwarf who for reasons unclear was the one who raised him after his parents were gone: Siegmund in the great battle with Hunding that was the start of the downfall of the gods, and Sieglinde, after giving birth to Siegfried. He is rightly suspicious of Mime, who is only caring for him so that when he fights Fafner, now a dragon, and recovers the ring and its accoutrements, Mime will be on hand to relieve the not-so-smart Siegfried of the spoils.
But the only characters whose plotting is more unsuccessful than Wotan's or the gods' generally are the Nibelungs, the dwarves. Alberich stole the Rheingold, forged the ring, lost it through trickery to Wotan and Loge, and still turns up in this opera aiming to get it back. Mime, too, is short-sighted. These characters, as it happens, also are perhaps one of the most serious pieces of evidence that looms, albeit unclearly, of Wagner's anti-Semitism at work. His descriptions of them as ugly, misshapen, greedy, less than human--even in the somewhat cleaned-up surtitles, does for a moment make you think you are hearing Der Sturmer brought to life. And add to that their role as the thief of the sacred Rheingold and using it to forge a ring that will enable them to rule the world.
But no one has ever said that Wagner is an unmitigated blessing. I do think too of Deems Taylor's short chronicle--The Monster--of all the miserable aspects of his personality and his behavior and then the inspired conclusion that the glory of his music means that everything in the indictment doesn't really matter.
Zambello's envisioning of the dragon as a huge trash compacter is superb, and when Siegfried kills the dragon and Fafner, now returned to his original status as a giant, falls out and has a death scene, you start to sympathize for the not-so-smart giant, who craved the gold when Wotan refused to yield the beauteous Freia to him, and is now dying as the last of his race.
The forest bird whose chattering Siegfried understands after tasting the dragon's blood is played in a charming manner by Jacqueline Echols. In my vinyl recording of the Ring, no less than Joan Sutherland played the role. Wotan's encounters in the last act with Erda and Siegfried were also better than I had recalled from previous productions--the old Met traditional production of the late 20th century by Otto Schenck and the recent cumbersome mechanical one by Robert LePage.
The singing quality has been high throughout but the biggest disappointment to me after what had been an amazingly enjoyable Siegfried was the famed last scene where the title character finally reaches Brunnhilde after charging through the ring of fire (not seen). Usually the tenor is exhausted from his hours of singing while the soprano is fresh as she has been waiting all this time. After the famous laugh line by Siegfried: "This is not a man!", the scene really dragged. Brunnhilde obviously needs some time to awaken after 18 years asleep but coming after all this anticipation, the scene fails to live up to expectations.
Thursday, May 12, 2016
A Blazing Valkyrie
It's not stretching things too much to suggest that Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) is Wagner's greatest opera. Some might hold out for Tristan und Isolde, with its deathless love music in the famed love-death (Liebestod) but I would hold with Die Walkure as overall the most satisfying and exciting of Wagner's several music-dramas that have continued to hold the stage in the more than a century since his death.
The opera proceeds through three full acts, getting better with each one. The opener features Sieglinde unhappily married to Hunding, and suddenly aware that there is a world out there--romantic as well as pleasant--with the arrival of the stranger "Wehwalt" who turns out to be her long-lost twin brother, Siegmund. The two siblings, known as the Volsungs, are also pawns in Wotan's great plan to recover the ring and the power to run the world with which it ostensibly endows its holder.
Hunding is revealed as a rustic brute which makes somewhat short-sighted the defense of marriage with which Wotan's wife, the goddess Fricka, assails the chief of the gods when she demands that Hunding be triumphant in the ensuing sword fight with Siegmund. Wotan and his warrior-daughter Brunnhilde, who leads the Valkyries who bring the heroes to Valhalla upin their battlefield demise, of course see Siegmund as the hero who deserves to win against Fricka's upholder of marriages, even unhappy ones, and much less the rights of a domestic violence offender. Fricka also has this old-fashioned distaste for the incest in which Siegmund and Sieglinde have engaged.
All these sordid plot elements have implications for the end of the world, no less--das ende, as Wotan intones when he is at his most despondent. Wagner never lets any little piece of his stories go to waste. Wotan in the second act--gazing at the skyscrapers from his high-tower corporate aerie, possibly in Manhattan--is beset with his desire to go with Brunnhilde and favor the hero they both love and then the argument from Fricka to uphold society and propriety (sounds for a moment like George M. Cohan's Marie in his song Mary).
As usual with Wotan's big decisions--in the pre-performance lecture, the dramaturg of the San Francisco Opera informed us that there is a special leitmotif in the Ring for major decisions--he probably gets this one wrong too, just as he failed to heed Erda's prophecy in Das Rhenigold and return the ring and gold to the Rhinemaidens. Here his conceding to Fricka alienates Brunnhilde who defies him and tries to help Siegmund win, after which he must disown her and punish her by placing her within a ring of fire for the first man, presumably heroic, to recover her, now no longer a god.
Through all of this we hear the perhaps too-well-known Ride of the Valkyries but also the always magnificent Wotan's Farewell and the fire music. Beginning with the last part of Act One, the opera becomes exciting and the tension and drive proceed at a high pitch, rarely stopping and never letting you lose your compelling attraction to and interest in the stage proceedings as well as the music. By Act Three, you are totally enraptured by the themes and the acting and the whole experience, much as the megalomaniacal genius Wagner surely intended.
Wagner was a showman and his ideas permit all kinds of staging--traditional, as in the old Met Otto Schenck production to this contemporary or 20th century version set in deteriorating industrial locations as well as corporate boardrooms, all clearly facades for a society that has been corrupted. Patrice Chereau, with Pierre Boulez on the podium, launched this kind of production years ago at the Wagner shrine, Bayreuth, and Francesca Zambello has refined it for the Washington National Opera, where she tested out the first two operas some years back and then the full cycle in San Francisco, the co-producer.
Alan Held was a strong Wotan, without some of the range that makes the leading character more enthralling, while Catherine Foster, for whom the great Christine Goerke filled in last week, was a fine, spirited Brunnhilde. Elizabeth Bishop, a friend of a good friend of ours, was a fine strong Fricka, Meagan Miller and Christopher Ventris gave adequate dimension to the Sieglinde and Siegmund roles.
The opera proceeds through three full acts, getting better with each one. The opener features Sieglinde unhappily married to Hunding, and suddenly aware that there is a world out there--romantic as well as pleasant--with the arrival of the stranger "Wehwalt" who turns out to be her long-lost twin brother, Siegmund. The two siblings, known as the Volsungs, are also pawns in Wotan's great plan to recover the ring and the power to run the world with which it ostensibly endows its holder.
Hunding is revealed as a rustic brute which makes somewhat short-sighted the defense of marriage with which Wotan's wife, the goddess Fricka, assails the chief of the gods when she demands that Hunding be triumphant in the ensuing sword fight with Siegmund. Wotan and his warrior-daughter Brunnhilde, who leads the Valkyries who bring the heroes to Valhalla upin their battlefield demise, of course see Siegmund as the hero who deserves to win against Fricka's upholder of marriages, even unhappy ones, and much less the rights of a domestic violence offender. Fricka also has this old-fashioned distaste for the incest in which Siegmund and Sieglinde have engaged.
All these sordid plot elements have implications for the end of the world, no less--das ende, as Wotan intones when he is at his most despondent. Wagner never lets any little piece of his stories go to waste. Wotan in the second act--gazing at the skyscrapers from his high-tower corporate aerie, possibly in Manhattan--is beset with his desire to go with Brunnhilde and favor the hero they both love and then the argument from Fricka to uphold society and propriety (sounds for a moment like George M. Cohan's Marie in his song Mary).
As usual with Wotan's big decisions--in the pre-performance lecture, the dramaturg of the San Francisco Opera informed us that there is a special leitmotif in the Ring for major decisions--he probably gets this one wrong too, just as he failed to heed Erda's prophecy in Das Rhenigold and return the ring and gold to the Rhinemaidens. Here his conceding to Fricka alienates Brunnhilde who defies him and tries to help Siegmund win, after which he must disown her and punish her by placing her within a ring of fire for the first man, presumably heroic, to recover her, now no longer a god.
Through all of this we hear the perhaps too-well-known Ride of the Valkyries but also the always magnificent Wotan's Farewell and the fire music. Beginning with the last part of Act One, the opera becomes exciting and the tension and drive proceed at a high pitch, rarely stopping and never letting you lose your compelling attraction to and interest in the stage proceedings as well as the music. By Act Three, you are totally enraptured by the themes and the acting and the whole experience, much as the megalomaniacal genius Wagner surely intended.
Wagner was a showman and his ideas permit all kinds of staging--traditional, as in the old Met Otto Schenck production to this contemporary or 20th century version set in deteriorating industrial locations as well as corporate boardrooms, all clearly facades for a society that has been corrupted. Patrice Chereau, with Pierre Boulez on the podium, launched this kind of production years ago at the Wagner shrine, Bayreuth, and Francesca Zambello has refined it for the Washington National Opera, where she tested out the first two operas some years back and then the full cycle in San Francisco, the co-producer.
Alan Held was a strong Wotan, without some of the range that makes the leading character more enthralling, while Catherine Foster, for whom the great Christine Goerke filled in last week, was a fine, spirited Brunnhilde. Elizabeth Bishop, a friend of a good friend of ours, was a fine strong Fricka, Meagan Miller and Christopher Ventris gave adequate dimension to the Sieglinde and Siegmund roles.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
The First Pot of Gold
Even Wagnerites don't always take Das Rheingold as seriously as the three massive operas which follow it in the Ring tetralogy: Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Goetterdaemerrung. First of all, unlike the others which tend to run towards four or even more than five hours (some productions come close to six), the first opera of the four runs barely over 2 1/12 hours. Of course, it's four scenes are now often performed without intermission, so it does become its own kind of challenge.
But this opera has lots of exposition, more story than sustained singing--no major songs, no Ride of the Valkyries. But tonight at Kennedy Center, we saw it as the first in the second Ring cycle that Washington National Opera is presenting over a three-week span. And the staging, the orchestra, and the singers were absolutely magnificent.
Wagner's music is the supreme ingredient--exciting, compelling, even at times subdued and enticingly seductive. Conductor Philippe Auguin deserved the rave reviews he and the orchestra received for the first cycle. This opera introduces all the leitmotifs--the musical themes that Wagner associates with ideas as well as characters. There's one for the Rhine, for Valhalla, for each of the main characters, and this time, I couldn't help noticing the strains of the fire music that will end Die Walkure but which is associated with Loge, who is a principal character only in Das Rheingold, and is the god of fire summoned by Wotan near the end of Act III tomorrow night,
Loge, here a demigod who does not share the heedlessness of the privileged gods, provides the element of trickery that Wotan requires to recover the Rhine gold from the dwarf Alberich. His status was higher in the Norse version of the same Germanic legends Wagner drew on: he always appears as a tricky character, rarely to be trusted. Here he saves the gods' bacon and you end up respecting him more than them.
Wotan also receives his first prophecy from Erda, the earth goddess, who warns him about wanting to hold on to the ring. We will see, of course, that his grand plan comes undone, at times by his own limitations of imagination. The gods in Wagner are far from being omnipotent nor omniscient in these operas.
This was a wonderful opening and I'm looking forward to the three longer but fuller evenings, beginning with tomorrow's Die Walkure, with its three acts that get progressively better and each contains so many marvelous musical moments.
But this opera has lots of exposition, more story than sustained singing--no major songs, no Ride of the Valkyries. But tonight at Kennedy Center, we saw it as the first in the second Ring cycle that Washington National Opera is presenting over a three-week span. And the staging, the orchestra, and the singers were absolutely magnificent.
Wagner's music is the supreme ingredient--exciting, compelling, even at times subdued and enticingly seductive. Conductor Philippe Auguin deserved the rave reviews he and the orchestra received for the first cycle. This opera introduces all the leitmotifs--the musical themes that Wagner associates with ideas as well as characters. There's one for the Rhine, for Valhalla, for each of the main characters, and this time, I couldn't help noticing the strains of the fire music that will end Die Walkure but which is associated with Loge, who is a principal character only in Das Rheingold, and is the god of fire summoned by Wotan near the end of Act III tomorrow night,
Loge, here a demigod who does not share the heedlessness of the privileged gods, provides the element of trickery that Wotan requires to recover the Rhine gold from the dwarf Alberich. His status was higher in the Norse version of the same Germanic legends Wagner drew on: he always appears as a tricky character, rarely to be trusted. Here he saves the gods' bacon and you end up respecting him more than them.
Wotan also receives his first prophecy from Erda, the earth goddess, who warns him about wanting to hold on to the ring. We will see, of course, that his grand plan comes undone, at times by his own limitations of imagination. The gods in Wagner are far from being omnipotent nor omniscient in these operas.
This was a wonderful opening and I'm looking forward to the three longer but fuller evenings, beginning with tomorrow's Die Walkure, with its three acts that get progressively better and each contains so many marvelous musical moments.
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