by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Over the last two nights
Charles and I watched the May 14, 2011 Metropolitan Opera performance of
Wagner’s Die Walküre,
originally presented live in movie theatres as part of the Met’s “Live in HD”
program and now available on PBS as part of a complete Ring cycle in the four-part mini-series format that
Wagner intended (well, in San Diego, sort of; PBS’s national schedule provided
for telecasting the opening documentary Wagner’s Dream, about the Met’s new Ring production by Quebec-born director/designer Robert
Lepage, on Monday and the actual operas Tuesday through Friday — but KPBS
insisted on presenting the documentary a week ago Friday night and the operas
themselves once weekly in their usual ghetto for cultural programming, Sundays
at noon, with the result that I missed the first episode, Das Rheingold, though the clips of it in Wagner’s Dream hinted that it was probably the most interesting
opera in Lepage’s production, at least visually). It turned out to be an
absolutely thrilling theatrical experience, not so much from Lepage’s
production — though for the most part Lepage’s staging worked, serving the
music and the libretto without
calling attention to itself the way (judging from the stills I saw in the Los
Angeles Times) Achille Freyer’s
ridiculous-looking Los Angeles Ring did — as from the excellence of the singing, the playing and Lepage’s
direction of the singers.
It certainly helped that costume designer François
St. Aubin kept the performers clothed in medieval garb — George Bernard Shaw
may have made the comment that the Ring’s contemporary message could only be brought home if the singers wore
“top hats instead of Tarnhelms” and otherwise dressed in 19th
century clothes, but the productions that have actually tried that (starting
with Patrice Chéreau’s controversial centennial Ring in Bayreuth in 1976) have only managed to look
ridiculous, and in any event the sensational success of the Lord of the
Rings movies (based on the cycle
of novels by J. R. R. Tolkien that clearly was influenced by Wagner and even
used a similar structure — a shorter introductory piece and three large-scale
epic sequelae) showed that a modern audience could easily relate to a fantasy
in which the actors were costumed with the clothes of a legendary time. Though
there were a few points in this production where I thought James Levine, the
Met’s long-time musical director (celebrating his 40th anniversary
with the company with this production before ill health forced his retirement
and Fabio Luisi took over with the remaining installments of this Ring, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, when they were staged later), was a bit too slow and poky (a common
failing with him), for the most part he conducted with energy, drive and a
peculiar almost chamber-music transparency that challenges the stereotype of
Wagner as a composer who wrote big, undifferentiated orchestral parts and
essentially pioneered the “wall of sound.” (Phil Spector actually said in his
“wall of sound” days that he was trying to reproduce Wagner’s sound in rock ’n’
roll.)
The cast was absolutely stellar and virtually everyone in it I’d heard
before outsang themselves. I’d previously heard and seen tenor Jonas Kaufmann as Radamès in a Met
telecast of Aïda and had found the voice
perfectly professional but not especially impressive; this time, far more
attractively costumed (he’s a real hunk and if he ever does Siegfried he’ll be one tenor in the role that won’t look like Ed Asner in a loincloth and blond wig)
and singing a part with real emotional depth instead of a typically idiotic
Italian tenor role, his appearance and his voice commanded the stage. His Sieglinde was Eva-Maria Westbroek,
who had just returned from Covent Garden where she’d created the title role in
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Anna Nicole (an incredible tour de force for her and a marvelous opera based on the life of trailer-trash girl
turned heiress and tabloid queen Anna Nicole Smith) and showed up with her
voice so worn down that when this production first opened on April 22, 2011 she
had to withdraw after the first act (Margaret Jane Wray, ordinarily a mezzo,
filled in for her in the rest of the opera — recalling the bad old days under
Rudolf Bing where in one particularly notorious 1961 matinee of Tristan und
Isolde Birgit Nilsson was the
Isolde throughout but three separate tenors sang Tristan, one in each act). By
May 14 she was still a bit shaky, singing with a wide vibrato that came
dangerously close to wobble-dom, but she was clearly into her role (and it’s
ironic that she went from singing Anna Nicole Smith to Sieglinde — as depraved
as her life might have been in other respect, at least there’s no evidence Anna
Nicole ever committed incest, despite some rather wild tabloid speculations
that her grown son was the father of the baby girl she gave birth to a year or
two before she died) even though it was odd to hear a version of the
Brünnhilde-Sieglinde confrontations in which the Brünnhilde was outsinging the
Sieglinde.
The Brünnhilde was Deborah Voigt, making her debut in the role — as
the Wagner’s Dream documentary noted, the
first time she performed in the production she bobbled her entrance, sliding
down Lepage’s steeply raked set and losing her balance, but this time she
managed it fine. After all the shaky Brünnhildes we’ve had to suffer since
Birgit Nilsson retired, Voigt was a treat: absolutely secure in the role,
rock-solid technically and vivid and impassioned emotionally. So was her Wotan,
Bryn Terfel, a singer I’ve previously found overrated — probably because I’ve
heard him in too many PBS “crossover” specials, including his ghastly
performance on Andrea Bocelli’s Central Park concert on September 15, 2011 in
which he appeared as one of the guest stars and sang a dreadful version of
“Home on the Range” (as I noted when I watched this concert on a PBS
pledge-break special, compared to Bing Crosby’s magnificent 1933 recording of
the song “not only does Bing outpoint Terfel on emotion and soul, he outsings
him technically as well”) — but who really tore into the part of Wotan, king of
the Norse gods and father of 11 other on-stage characters in this opera
(Siegmund, Sieglinde, Brünnhilde and the other eight Valkyries — when Charles complained that in the first
three parts of Wagner’s Ring “there seem to be only 12 people in the entire universe” maybe he had a
point!). Unlike most of the Wotans of the past — even the ones generally
considered the greatest on record, Friedrich Schorr and Hans Hotter — Terfel
played the second act more in anger than in sorrow, using his great Act II
monologue to lash out at the others against him rather than lamenting the
impossible situation his own prior actions have put him in: using trickery and
deceit to steal the ring from Alberich, giving it to the giants who built
Valhalla instead of returning it to the Rhinemaidens, then breeding Siegmund as
the “independent” hero who would win it back for him — not only siring him but
staying on earth long enough to train him in the ways of a warrior — then
having to turn against Siegmund not only because he met, fell in love with, had
sex with and sired an as-yet unborn son with but, as Wotan’s wife Fricka points
out, Siegmund is Wotan’s agent and not “independent” at all. It’s some of the
deepest and most impassioned singing I’ve heard from someone who usually seems
more in love with the beauty of his own voice than interested in using it to
communicate drama.
The Fricka, Stephanie Blythe, also had the right look and
sound: implacable, determined, and powerful enough to overcome the silliness of
Carl Fillion’s set design for her (Wagner stipulated that she make her entrance
in a chariot drawn by rams, and rather than try that literally Fillion gave her
a throne whose arm-rests were life-size representations of rams), and she and
the Hunding, Hans-Peter König — who was given a costume strikingly similar to
the one Ferruccio Furlanetto wore as Silva in the Met’s recent Ernani that highlighted the similarities of the
characters (particularly the extent to which they were both ruled by twisted
codes of “honor”) — were clearly worthy of their cast-mates and not just people
thrown into a cast at the last minute after the opera company had already blown
their budget for singers’ salaries hiring big names for the leads. Lepage’s
direction, fascinatingly, is better in the more intimate, confrontational
moments than in the Big Scenes for which his basic visual concept — staging
much of the action and projecting the backgrounds on 24 giant steel slats that
move up and down (he said in the Wagner’s Dream documentary he got the idea from visiting Iceland,
which because it’s on the intersection of two of the earth’s tectonic plates is
unusually active volcanically and seismically — when Charles saw the image of a
new volcano bursting forth from the Icelandic soil all of a sudden the concept
of a “ring of fire” with which Walküre ends didn’t seem so alien to him) — verged on silliness and sometimes
(as with the Valkyries “riding” the slats as if they were the flying horses
specified in Wagner’s libretto and sliding down them when the text called for them to dismount) went
over. As backgrounds with filmed projections on them, the slats were
surprisingly effective, and the final scene is a coup de thêatre in which the magic fire that’s supposed to
surround Brünnhilde on her rock and that only a hero without fear (who of
course, in episode three, turns out to be her nephew Siegfried, still an embryo
at the end of Walküre) can
pass through and claim her as his bride is represented by a deep orange glow
projected on the slats surrounding an effigy of Brünnhilde hung in a way that
makes it look like she’s being crucified upside-down.
While it rather explodes
the conceit Lepage expressed during the Wagner’s Dream documentary that he was producing the Ring as Wagner would have done it if modern-day
technological resources were available to him (actually the late 19th-century
stage was far less primitive than it’s often portrayed and swimming
Rhinemaidens and flying horses were not beyond the capabilities of a
state-of-the-art theatre of the day — the obstacle wasn’t technological but
financial, which is why a stage version of Ben-Hur was one of the biggest draws of the 1890’s but it
could only be performed in major cities with theatres sufficiently well
equipped to have the treadmill equipment on which the chariot race was staged),
Wagner’s ideas of stagecraft were conservative enough that he would probably
have wanted either real fire (I’m sure he would have loved the effect at the end of the 1943 movie Reveille
with Beverly in which Ann Miller sets
miniature flames off on stage in a “V” for victory shape as she tap-dances in
the final number) or at the very least a simulacrum of flickering flames for
the final scene. I’m also sure he wouldn’t have wanted Wotan and Brünnhilde to
have as much physical contact as they do in Lepage’s production — at one point
he gives her a hug that momentarily suggests the Siegmund and Sieglinde
relationship isn’t going to be the only incestuous one in this opera, and in the final scene he’s hugging her
when I had always envisioned he would have already lain her down in her magic
sleep and would merely chastely touch her forehead and kiss her cheeks to take
away her godhood and the immortality it conferred. There’s also one other
aspect of this production that bothers me, though it’s been shared by all too
many recent Wagner productions: lighting designer Étienne Boucher keeps the
stage too damned dark and resolutely ignores the instructions in Wagner’s text
as to when it’s supposed to get lighter and when it’s supposed to get darker.
(Unfortunately, this is a trend that really started with Wagner’s grandson
Wieland in his Bayreuth productions in the 1950’s and stage directors and
lighting designers, apparently following the authority of Wagner’s grandson
rather than Wagner himself, have continued to stage the Ring and Wagner’s other operas in this preposterously
murky gloom.)
As for the work itself, Walküre remains eternally fascinating, and actively watching it (with English subtitles to give you a minute-by-minute
account of what is going on and what is
being sung — though I would fault the Met’s subtitlers for not translating names like Siegmund’s alias “Wehwalt”
— “woeful” — and the name of his sword, “Nothung” — “needful”) instead of just
listening to it can really change your perspective on the work. (For one thing,
Jonas Kaufmann’s performance came off a lot more strongly when I could see him
than he did when I only heard the radio broadcast.) John Culshaw wrote in his
book Ring Resounding that “the
first act of Walküre is one
great lyrical outpouring, as if Wagner, having rightly held back the flood of
passion during Rheingold, could
not restrain it any longer” — indeed, it’s the most passionate love music
Wagner had written to that time (the duets in Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin sound awfully stiff by comparison) and quite possibly the most
passionate love music anyone had written to that time. (For all his skill at writing father-daughter
and male-to-male duets, Verdi’s romantic duets are the weakest portions of many
of his operas, even as late as Otello.) Culshaw also wrote in another book, Putting the Record Straight (he was writing about Tristan but it applies as much to Walküre), that Wagner may have blurred the distinction
between recitative and aria more than any other opera composer before him but
he didn’t wipe it out completely: “When narrative has to be expounded Wagner
immediately thins his orchestration and writes a vocal line that will have no
difficulty in getting through; but where the literal meaning of the words is of
less importance than the overall musical effect, he is quite willing to let the
voices sink into the texture, and to magnify them would be false.”
In some ways
it’s surprising that Walküre became the most popular of the Ring operas, the one most frequently performed as a
stand-alone piece — one would have thought either Siegfried (despite the absence of women’s voices through
much of it) or Götterdämmerung (originally planned as a self-contained work until Wagner decided he
needed to set the backstory, and he eventually ended up spinning out the
backstory into three other operas, writing their texts in reverse-chronological
order) would make more sense on its own — but the passion of the first act, the
cut-and-thrust of the duels between the gods and demigods in act two, the
big-hit status of the “Ride of the Valkyries” (ironically better known in the
cut-and-paste instrumental version Wagner concocted to play at the fundraising
concerts he conducted in the early 1870’s to get the money to open Bayreuth and
give the Ring its premiere) and the
utter heartbreak of the final scene (in which Wagner, Verdi’s master at duets
between lovers, proved his equal in a father-daughter duet as well), made Walküre the best-known episode of the Ring and the only Wagner opera available (more or less)
complete on 78’s, though in order to compile a complete Walküre on 78’s one would have had to buy three expensive
albums (back when an “album” meant just that — a batch of records sold together
in a packaged that looked like a photo album) from two labels recorded over a
ten-year period (1935, 1938 and 1945) with three separate orchestras,
conductors and casts. Certainly the Met’s new Walküre does justice to the work — and it makes me look forward
to the upcoming PBS telecasts of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.
