A TRIUMPHANT RING AT COVENT GARDEN
Despite some negative criticism of the individual operas of Keith Warner’s Ring cycle when they first appeared one by one, the three complete cycles of Wagner’s Ring at the Royal Opera house in October / November 2007 were generally thought to be a great success. In the main, this was due to director, Keith Warner’s ability to juggle both the specific and the symbolic aspects of Wagner’s drama successfully. As the director notes:
…a 19th century naturalistic, specific universe of Ibsenite and Strinbergian psychology
meets the archetypal poetic universe of Greek drama. There is a tension …between
these two elements which, it seems to me, is never resolved and must not be resolved –
least of all in the Ring.
The specific, psychological interaction between the characters of the drama was superbly realized by Warner, building upon the regietheater of German directors such as Harry Kupfer. This was best seen in the Wotan of John Tomlinson, veteran Wotan of Kupfer’s productions in Bayreuth and later in Berlin. In creating this performance, he and Warner had mined text and score to realize all the implications of word and music in gesture, movement, and vocal inflection. This was also true of the rest of the cast, notably Lisa Gasteen’s athletic, yet very moving Brünnhilde, Domingo’s somewhat more restrained Siegmund, and Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Sieglinde. This Ibsenite specificity extended to Stefanos Lazaridis’s sets and props: most of Wagner’s directions received respectful attention, even if sometimes this was reduced to the metonymic, such as the horse’s skull which did duty for Grane.
Amid this specificity, director and designer also gave us an archetypal world: throughout the four operas, two massive, yet elegant steel curves dominated the set, a fragmented ring whose components occupied various positions according to the drama. Nevertheless, Warner’s vision of the cycle is also firmly located in the social context of Wagner’s time. As Warner notes:
Wagner had been heavily involved in the politically radical movement….. influenced
by the thinking of Feuerbach, who in his writings put forward the idea of an end of a
world influenced by God….and this connected directly to Bakunin and the young
Hegelians who were really saying that the beginning and end is man and that there is
nothing else: God and the gods are invented by man. So I wondered if what Wagner
is trying to do in the Ring is to dramatize that enormous conflict at the end of an
entire arc of history and in doing so herald the birth of a new age.
The components of Warner’s vision were best realized, it seems to me, in Die Walküre so that may offer a suitable entry into the cycle.
DIE WALKÜRE
In the first act, Sieglinde is seen cowering in a triangular-shaped room above the main part of the set clutching a bundle. Later when she gives the bundle to Siegmund, we discover that it is the wolf-skin coat, a relic from her previous life with her brother and father (we have seen Wotan wear it in Das Rheingold). The coat feeds her trauma at the separation from both, while the confines of the room and its blood-red colour suggest her brutal marriage and confinement by Hunding.
The wolf coat later becomes the acknowledgment of her bond with her brother as she rapturously gives it to Siegmund ;
and the room is triumphantly transformed by lighting and a shower of petals at the climactic musical moment when Spring enters the hut and the glow of the segments of the curved ring seconds the beauty of the music. Throughout the act, the singing is first rate: Domingo, belying his age, makes Siegmund sound both beautiful and virile; Westbroek is a most moving and vocally resplendent Sieglinde; and Stephen Milling is in turn menacing in his quiet passages and frightening in his outbursts .
The second act surprises us by bringing all nine Valkyries on stage into the set familiar
from scenes 2 and 4 of Das Rheingold . They do not remain, however and it is left to Brünnhilde to swap hearty banter with Wotan and hurl furniture about, a foretaste of her impending rebellion against her father’s commands. The deep-space set includes the sweep, mid-stage, of one of the huge curved metal segments, and stretching across the background, the paneled window, part of which is now shattered. It is through this hole that Fricka enters, the side lighting and Rosalind Plowright’s regal demeanor ensuring the full impact of this moment. Her scene with Wotan is both intense and subtle and gives us the feeling that it replays many such encounters between them. At first it seems that Wotan will persuade her, via caresses and winning words, that Siegmund and Sieglinde’s love represents something new, vital and even necessary to the survival of the gods;
but the power-relations soon change, and the ascendancy of Fricka culminates in her slapping her husband, an action which devastates both Wotan and the audience. Her exit is as theatrical as her entrance: she sweeps up stage, apparently ignoring Brünnhilde, then turns at the shattered window ,
to deliver her triumphant message to the Valkyrie. Throughout, Plowright’s voice has been the equal of her acting.
The crucial scene between father and daughter also contains some surprises. It begins with the two standing back to back, Tomlinson reducing his voice to a whisper; but soon what is usually played as a quite static scene sees both moving restlessly about the stage, their movement effectively portraying the turmoil of the one and the confusion and then rebellion of the other.
The whole of the Siegmund and Sieglinde scene which follows is observed by Brünnhilde, making her eventual capitulation to Siegmund much more believable. The subsequent Announcement of Death scene is here extremely effective thanks to conductor Pappano’s slow, solemn pace and Gasteen’s lovely singing. Surprisingly, Sieglinde does not sleep during the scene but distractedly wanders about the stage, returning to her resting position only in time for her lover’s threat to kill her. Meanwhile, the Valkyrie has come so close to Siegmund that their faces touch as she stares into his eyes, amazed at the strength of his love.
The death of Siegmund and the actions of all concerned are clearly seen in Warner’s staging, including Wotan’s shattering of Nothung, and Hunding’s spear thrust .
Tomlinson’s performance throughout the act has been one of extraordinary intensity, and so it is at the bitter outcome of the struggle: his first “Geh!” addressed to Hunding is soft, contemptuous; the second, accompanying the spear thrust which kills Hunding, carries all Wotan’s pent up anger and is loud, terrifying.
In the third act, a massive upright white block occupies the downstage area, facing the audience. The eight Valkyries stand against it and produce jerky, stylized movements during the Ride of the Valkyries. The block acts as a sound board so that the singing of the eight has enormous impact, the details clearer than I’ve ever heard. The orchestra, too, is thrilling here, the Royal Opera’s open pit providing a very full, “raw” sound very different from the refined sound of the Bayreuth pit. The block has a sliding door within it, and this is put to effective use on Wotan’s entrance as pairs of the girls come through it plead for Brünnhilde, while the revolve of the block allows us to see both sides .
Finally, Brünnhilde emerges from the door for her “Hier bin ich, Vater” and Gasteen’s scene with Tomlinson is superbly managed, Wotan’s final kiss suggesting a lover rather than a father. The now sleeping Brunhilde is guided to the door by Wotan and walks unsteadily out of sight behind the white block. Finally the block is flown upwards to reveal the beauty of the whole set – the elegant curve of the two metal ring segments framing Brünnhilde asleep on a couch. Loge is summoned and a little piece of flame slides down one of the curved segments. Magically, Wotan creates a flame in his hand, then bangs his spear impatiently. Suddenly the whole of the two curved segments burst into flame to quite wonderful effect .
The orchestral playing is superb in the Magic Fire music, as indeed it has been throughout the opera.
But the great moment in this production has belonged to Eva-Maria Westbroek as Sieglinde and her long-spanned phrase “ O hehrstes Wunder!”(sung to the so-called “Redemption by Love” motif) as she rejoices in the knowledge that she will give birth to “the noblest hero in the world”. Pappano draws out the moment, secure in the knowledge that his soprano can easily cope with his dramatic lengthening of the phrase.
At the end of the evening there was an eruption of applause and showers of flowers rained down on the stage. It was indeed one of those great nights in the theatre which a few minor disappointments did not spoil. Lisa Gasteen was still recovering from the virus which caused her to cancel two performances in the second cycle. As a result, her hojotohos and many of her top notes were less than resplendent. But the beauty of her middle register, and a performance to match any on stage made this a minor flaw in a marvelous evening.
SIEGFRIED
Keith Warner both surprises and entertains us at the beginning of the second evening of the cycle. The front curtain is raised during the orchestral introduction and we see a curved black drop-curtain with a swirling design painted with white figures, letters, and formulas which Mime contemplates. These presumably represent the theoretical calculations which dog his vain attempts in practice to forge a sword ,
while the orchestra reinforce this by playing the gestural motifs associated with hammering and the sword. But the orchestra goes further and reminds us, via the motifs which suggest Mime’s scheming, the hoard of gold, the ring, the power of the ring, and Alberich’s dream of annihilation of the gods, that Mime’s purpose during the many years he has raised Siegfried has been to acquire a hero who will acquire gold and ring before his brother Alberich can. The staging, on the other hand, allows us to see an amusing cross-section of Siegfried’s early years. First, Mime mimes some “entertain-the-baby” antics to a hand protruding from the baby pram positioned down-stage right. Mime’s subsequent instruction in swordplay results in the hand breaking the sword his guardian has made. A series of jumps in time allows us to see this breaking of a sword first by Siegfried as a young boy, then by a rebellious adolescent, and finally when John Treleaven as the fully grown Siegfried bursts in, accompanied by a bear, from under the curtain: he too breaks Mime’s latest effort at forging. Siegfried’s entrance coincides with the lifting of the black curtain to reveal a set which includes a derelict aeroplane, reminding us of the model plane visible in Das Rheingold, and above it, the ceiling with a jagged hole suggesting the path of the crashed plane. In the foreground is a clutter of test-tubes, pots, and a stove on a bench .
The scene between the Wanderer and Mime is expertly played and sung by John Tomlinson and Gerhard Siegel. The Wanderer exerts his right as the winner of the question game by tying Mime to a chair, dousing him with petrol (from the crashed aeroplane?), and setting a lighter with a naked flame close by, before his exit. We recall that Loge had done something similar in Das Rheingold. Mime’s terror as he attempts to blow out the flame before it causes his immolation accompanies the musical sequence, based mainly on Loge’s fire themes, which begins at Loge’s words
Damned light! Is the air there on fire?
What’s that flicker and flare, that glimmer and buzzing?
It is an ingenious way of motivating Mime’s terrifying vision suggested by the music.
The following scene in which Siegfried decides to bypass Mime’s futile forging and re-cast his father’s sword himself is quite naturalistically staged. He grinds down the sword pieces (using Mime’s kitchen mincing machine!), empties the result into a pot on the hotplate (which glows convincingly), then attaches a fuel hose from the plane to fuel his furnace, one of the plane’s propellers rotating to form the bellows. Another propeller blade serves as his mould. All of the action pays careful attention to Wagner’s stage directions and the hints in the music. At the climax of the scene, Siegfried cleaves the bench in two with the newly forged Nothung.
Throughout the act, Treleaven has proved a competent Siegfried, the effect spoiled by an unpleasant beat in the voice and a tendency to overplay the hearty boy with excessive laughter and bluster. Siegel’s performance is excellent, if a little small scale, marred only by an occasional habit of dropping syllables and notes, with the result that these are barely audible.
The second act set moves the previous act’s ceiling, with its jagged hole, downwards to form the stage floor. Behind and around it are the remains of a cement structure (a building? a freeway?). The first scene between Wotan and Alberich brings masterly playing, especially from Tomlinson as he successfully persuades the other that he will not interfere with the subsequent action and even becomes physically friendly with him. As Wotan calls up Fafner, we register some disappointment in seeing Fafner, not as a dragon but in his previously recognizable form, near the jagged hole which is now the cave. With the arrival of Siegfried and Mime, an amusing moment occurs when the latter barely prevents the boy from prematurely drinking the drugged drink, almost spoiling Mime’s plan for after the slaying of the dragon.
Siegfried’s solitary scene amid the beauty of the forest draws some nice staging touches from director and designer: Siegfried goes down into the hole and the floor lifts to become a starry ceiling above a green area around which male and female deer glide about .
The woodbird perched on the roof is extremely athletic, first dangling a toy bird through the hole, then from a precarious seated position on the stage edge of the starry roof. Siegfried’s attack on Fafner completely erases our disappointment at not seeing the dragon form of Fafner previously; he now appears as a huge, hideous face .
As Siegfried emerges from slaying the dragon, the woodbird is flown on wires from above as she advises him what to take from the hoard. The athletic feat is very effective, especially as the singing of Ailish Tynan is so good. As Siegfried returns with tarnhelm and ring, he places the cube-shaped tarnhelm down stage right, lifting it to reveal the head of Fafner now in the form of the giant. Later he lifts it again and the head comes alive; a trapdoor has enabled the prop head to be replaced by that of costumed Phillip Ens who sings Fafner’s last words – an eerie effect. The woodbird now flits about the stage and, as Siegfried rushes away upon learning of the sleeping Brünnhilde, the back part of the stage becomes illuminated, showing the path upwards to the Valkyrie’s rock.
In act three, the stage is dominated by an obliquely placed square platform which rotates as Wotan calls up Erda. She appears to float about the stage (in fact, on a barely visible, elevated trolley), then walking about normally, and finally on the trolley again as Wotan ends her all-knowing position with a thrust of his spear. For the Wotan-Siegfried scene, the platform rises from the horizontal (or near horizontal) to the vertical, and then rotates as a wall with a door as in Die Walküre. The confrontation between the two is side-lit from both sides so that Siegfried and Wotan, separated on stage, are in confrontation on the platform / screen in shadow form .
Wotan’s spear is placed across the door (he had positioned it when the platform was in the horizontal) and it is this position, barring the way to Brünnhilde, that it is shattered by Siegfried. Brünnhilde’s awakening and greeting to the sun is a great moment: at first just a silhouette from the other side of the platform, she bursts through the door at the climax of this most beautiful musical sequence, while the platform glows a sunny yellow. Her scene with Siegfried is once more shot with double side-lighting, their magnified shadows forming a union on the platform wall. Gasteen’s performance here is superb, making the most of the words with her richly expressive middle register so that the rather frayed upper notes are quickly forgiven.
As with the previous opera, the reception is rapturous with showers of flowers raining down upon the stage during the curtain calls.
GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
The Norns scene is played in front of a flat, inscribed like the curved black curtain at the beginning of Siegfied, with a swirling design containing figures and calculations. Through a door come the Norns bearing the rope of life, here an electric-red rope which links with similar red ropes in the earlier operas .
As they exit, the flat is lifted to discover Siegfried and Brünnhilde seated on chairs in front of the white vertical platform seen previously. Siegfied is asleep but as he awakes, they fly into each other’s arms for their ecstatic duet. Here and indeed throughout the drama, Gasteen is wonderful voice, now fully recovered from her indisposition. For the first time in my experience, Siegfried’s Rhine journey is displayed for us – a series of projections on the platform seen from the hero’s point of view as he travels down the Rhine; we see the river and even the water spray, vast forests, and eventually huge buildings. Meanwhile, the vertical ropes which Siegfried had rather puzzlingly attached to the front of the stage, now make dramatic sense: they pull up some canvas to create a sail or perhaps the side of a boat during the journey. The whole is an ingenious accompaniment to Wagner’s descriptive music.
A latticed back window-wall is lowered across the width of the stage, a huge white couch moves into place in front of it, and the Gibichung Hall is created. A feeling of decadence is apparent as the inhabitants appear- Gutrune, beautiful and elegant, whose relationship with Gunter, resplendent in a sumptuous red suit, and Hagen, dour in drab black, is clearly more than sisterly. As with her performance as Freia, Emily Magee sings beautifully as Gutrune, and Peter Coleman-Wright gives a well-sung and very positive performance as Gunther, making his crumbling confidence the more telling later in act two. When Siegfried arrives, the side sections of the back wall move through 90 degrees to form a three-sided box, reminding us of the shape of the tarnhelm; like it, the wall has a hole in one shattered panel. Gutrune returns to the stage in such a spectacular dress that the potion is barely necessary to make Siegfried fall in love with her.
Back at the Valkyrie’s “rock”, Brünnhilde and her sister Waltraute clash chairs in sisterly greeting and begin their scene sitting back to back, recalling the Brunnhilde-Wotan scene in Die Walküre. As in that scene, Warner moves the two about restlessly and anxiously, avoiding a static staging of Waltraute’s long narration. Both staging and superb singing / acting from Gasteen and Mihoko Fujimura make this an engrossing scene. The white wall flares red as Gunther and Siegfried approach. The problem of having Siegfried, his memory of Brunnhilde erased by Hagen’s potion, adopt Gunther’s shape via the tarnhelm is a difficult one for a stage director. Here, Warner has Coleman-Wright in Gunther’s clothes act Siegfried-as-Gunther, while elsewhere on stage, Treleaven, wearing the tarnhelm, sings the words. However, the device works no better in this production than the same solution did in the Toronto Ring. As Siegfried-as-Gunther pushes Brünnhilde through the door, Treleaven removes the tarnhelm to proclaim that Nothung will mark out a chaste distance between the pair. During the whole of the scene, Hagen, the initiator of these events, is an unseen presence: he is seated on a chair down stage left, where he has remained from “Hagen’s Watch”, that somber end to scene 2.
Act Two
Hagen remains in the same position for the beginning of the second act, that dream-like scene where Alberich appears to Hagen in his sleep, urging him to gain the golden ring. Warner however, makes the scene somewhat more prosaically realistic, though no less effective. Alberich appears in the same boat which delivered him to the bottom of the Rhine. Now, however, as the boat is lowered from the flies, and Hagen approaches it, we see that the boat is now like a hospital bed, with pillow, oxygen source, and medicinal drip .
This and the Sidhom’s performance suggest that he is near death. At the end of the scene, both boat and the black curtain behind it are flown to reveal Siegfried on the raised horizontal platform, greeting Hagen. In the scene which follows, when Hagen has summoned up the vassals, the first chorus in the Ring is thrilling thanks to the excellent work of the Royal Opera chorus. The Gibichung vassals pay homage to the gold statues of the gods on plinths against the window-wall ,
after which the statues (recalling the tiny gold statue which was part of the treasure hoard) are wheeled off to the sides. Gunther’s arrogant entrance, as he accepts the applause of the vassals, contrasts with Brünnhilde’s humiliation as she appears in a barbed-wire encirclement shaped like a boat .
The following scene shows Gasteen at her superb best, vocally and dramatically, as she moves from bewilderment at finding Siegfried there, through gradual comprehension, to barely-contained fury. My seat in the second row of the stalls, though engagingly close to the action, is at a slight disadvantage here as the raised platform obscures some of the action when seen from below.
Act Three
The audience is jerked into attention by the sudden horn call, announcing the fatal hunting scene designed to cover the murder of Siegfried. The precipitous call causes some amusement in the audience or perhaps it is the rather accident-prone delivery of the horn player. Yet another boat shape is revealed, moored to the bank of a pond set close to the front of the stage. The Rhinemaidens, who splash around in the pond, are nevertheless in mournful mood since Alberich’s theft of the gold. All three singers give excellent performances despite their hideous, encumbering costumes (for some reason, one of them wears a man’s hat) .
Siegfried suddenly emerges from beneath the boat cover and becomes the butt of the maidens’ flirting and teasing. The scene where the other hunters arrive, and Hagen fatally stabs Siegfried, does not have the impact it should. For the most part this is Treleaven’s fault since his third verse, sung as he dies from the spear thrust, is strangely unmoving – an unusual occurrence since even the poorest of Siegfrieds generally rally for this crucial dramatic moment; but also the fact that all others have left the stage before his last words hardly helps, dramatically. Nor perhaps does Warner’s staging of what follows: during the funeral music, a dramatic and moving performance from the orchestra, the dead Siegfried rises as a ghost and walks off stage.
For the final scene, the back part of the set moves forward closing over the pond, while Siegfried’s body is seen being wrapped in funeral garments. The body is brought down stage for Brünnhilde’s lament which is sung with great understanding and tenderness by Gasteen. As Brunnhilde hurls the flaming torch, an impressive conflagration ensues: fires approach the golden images of the gods now suspended on ropes; first a tree, then the whole of the angular buildings representing Valhalla in the background burst into flame ;
and the Rhinemaidens rejoice as the ring is returned and Alberich’s attempt to snatch it is foiled. Many productions of the Ring attempt a positive outcome of Brünnhilde’s self immolation and the destruction of the gods. And so it is in Warner’s Ring. The large metal circle-segment seen throughout the cycle is now seen centre stage with a young female figure standing confidently upon it, her outstretched arms embracing the future .
This performance, the last of the three cycles, fully deserved the lengthy, appreciative reception at the end. And it was good to see that Pappano had assembled the excellent Royal Opera House orchestra to share in the applause.
DAS RHEINGOLD
But what of the prologue to this highly successful staging of Wagner’s tetralogy? I confess to enjoying it less than the three major parts of the drama, though staging and direction are no less ingenious and detailed, and all the visual motifs of Stefanos Lazaridis’s design are here set forth and reappear, like the composer’s musical motifs, in the subsequent operas.
Rippling, mesh-like projections and blue lighting suggest the waters of the Rhine, and the first of the circular visual motifs appears, the two, huge, metal circular segments
curving across the stage. Down one of these, slides the boat carrying the love-sick Alberich, soon to be taunted maliciously by the three Rhinemaidens for his attentions. Since all three singers are quite naked, we perhaps sympathise with him. Warner has taken note of Fricka’s comment in the following scene, about the “lecherous bathing” with which the Rhinemaidens have lured men, and leaves them naked until Alberich has feasted his eyes upon them, whereupon they don flowing garments.
Both boat and circular segments reappear throughout the tetralogy. Another circular motif emerges in the form of the lovely glass ball which encloses the gold ,
and through which Alberich rams his fist as he renounces love and steals the precious metal. Furthermore, the watery mesh projections contract into a ball-shape at the end of the scene. Here Wotan appears, clearly fresh from the spring by the World Ash tree, for the spear he carries is a rough branch torn from a tree and one damaged eye-socket reveals that he has forfeited an eye in exchange for drinking at the spring of Wisdom. Wotan feigns sleep as the set for scene two becomes visible: a vast room with rear, latticed-glass wall, reflecting as the designer suggests “the grandiose architecture of the industrial revolution”. It contains luxurious, high-backed, studded-leather chairs, a glass case containing Donner’s hammer, a telescope, a silver dish containing the last of Freia’s apples, and a floor with a hole into which disappears a red rope. The red rope is repeated in this opera in Fricka’s red knitting-wool, and the rope binding Alberich. It returns in the tetralogy in Hunding’s house, again in act two of that opera, then as the rope spun by the Norns, and as a ribbon in Gutrune’s hands.
The appearance of the giants is at first very impressive: they approach as giant shadows on the rear glass wall ;
but the subsequent change to the smaller figures, and the rather small-scale voices of Phillip Ens and Franz-Josef Selig are then something of an anti-climax. Any disappointment, however, is quickly banished by the subtlety of Warner and Selig’s creation of Fasolt as a highly sympathetic individual rather than the “dumb giant” he dubs himself. The costumes throughout the scene are attractive and impressive, suggesting a bourgeois family of the industrial period. Vocally, the honours go to the women, Rosalind Plowright, statuesque and beautiful in her splendid costume as Fricka, and Emily Magee as a very positive and alluring Freia who flirts with Fasolt (She is after all the goddess of love and eternal youth). Rather disappointing is Philip Langridge as Loge. Anyone who has seen the BBC broadcast of the 2004 premiere of this production will know just how theatrical yet subtle his performance of Loge can be, maliciously allowing Wotan only occasional energy-giving bites of the one remaining golden apple from Freia’s bowl, and later callously enjoying Fasolt’s death. On this evening, however, an indisposition means that his performance of this part, usually a histrionic high point in any Rheingold, is underpowered both vocally and dramatically. John Tomlinson, too, is not in his best voice, yet his wonderfully detailed performance ensures our attention.
Nibelheim in Warner’s production comes as a surprise. As the previous set moves upwards, we see what seems like the laboratory or hospital of a sanatorium with partly-dissected corpses on operating tables. What this has to do with the realm of the Nibelungs is made clearer by a comment from designer, Stefanos Lazaridis:
Talking about Das Rheingold and the hall of the gods, at some point Keith [Warner]
said ‘Of course this is The Magic Mountain, this is Thomas Mann’. And the idea of
a sanatorium on a mountain top was there….
So the Nibelheim set here represents a kind of grizzly basement laboratory for the vast hall above. And grizzly it is, for the Nibelungs who come at Alberich’s bidding are clearly on their way to join the corpses on the tables since many have their brains exposed; then again, Alberich’s first attempt to display the tarnhelm’s power to Wotan and Loge emerges from stage left as a huge, bloody, skinned corpse ,
with separate body pieces (an arm, a leg) also protruding from the wings; and much of Gerhard Siegel’s manic performance as Mime involves his hurling about bloodied body parts. The tarnhelm, that magic helmet fashioned by Mime at Alberich’s insistence, remains on Alberich’s head in his guise as the giant bloody corpse. It is cube-shaped, constructed of white-latticed glass, a visual motif which permeates the cycle in the form of walls and rooms. A tiny version of the cube is seen during Alberich’s second transformation: to the delight of the audience, a toad pops up near the front of the stage also wearing a minuscule cube. It is easy, then for Wotan and Loge to capture the toad and stuff it in one of the suitcases now on stage. These suitcases have been the containers of the gold booty which the Nibelungs brought to their master, Alberich, in response to the power of the ring he fashioned from the Rhinemaidens’ gold.
The sinking of the basement once more allows us access to the vast Victorian hall as Wotan and Loge exit from the hole with the captured Alberich who emerges from the suitcase in his normal form. The gold is brought up in the suitcases though the hole and the subsequent covering of Freia with the gold at the giants’ insistence takes place in the hole. Here it is no more convincing dramatically than in most productions. A small gold statuette, part of the treasure, returns in various forms in the later operas, as does the tiny aeroplane seen below in Alberich’s grizzly laboratory. Will Hartmann as Froh makes the most of his big moment vocally and later creates a very effective rainbow which is visible through the back wall. Valhalla, it seems, is somewhere up above since the gods begin climbing the ladders which now descend from the flies. They do so to Wagner’s music for the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla, music which can variously be interpreted as grand and impressive on the one hand, or suggesting the inflated pomp of the self-deluding gods on the other. Wotan clearly has his doubts, in Warner’s staging, about joining the other gods since he ignores Fricka’s pleas and moves to make contact with Erda.
The cycle has been a great experience and one looks forward to the more detailed scrutiny that the telecasts (and subsequent DVD release) of the three major operas of the tetralogy will enable. What is clear, however, from the experience of viewing a single cycle is the success of the scrupulously detailed stage direction by Keith Warner and his essential faithfulness to Wagner’s stage directions; it is, however, a faithfulness that needs to be read in the light of his and his collaborators’ attempts to encompass both the specificity of a late- nineteenth century drama and the archetypal aspects of Wagner’s tale in settings which range from the Victorian era to the present, yet also embrace timeless abstraction.
Graham Bruce,
November, 2007