by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ran a recent download of a performance of
Wagner’s Das Rheingold, first of the
four parts of the Ring cycle,
from Opera North in Leeds, England in 2016. I had made two mistaken assumptions
about this performance: first, I had thought it would be staged and instead it
was a “concert performance,” with the orchestra on stage behind the singers and
everyone clad in normal business attire. Second, and much more disappointing, I
had assumed that since this was a TV broadcast from an English-speaking country
it would have English subtitles, which it didn’t, though there were occasional
summary titles giving the basics of the story in language that seemed
consciously designed to relate it to that “other” Ring cycle. The show was produced and directed by Peter
Mumford for an enterprise called Scene TV, and though it was a concert
performance and regrettably unsubtitled (albeit I know the story of Rheingold well enough that I was able to follow it and
register when the Big Moments were happening), it also turned out to be quite
good. None of the cast members are world-renowned stars — the principals are
Michael Druiett (Wotan), Jo Pohlheim — that’s a guy (Alberich), Richard Howard
(Mime), Yvonne Howard (Fricka) and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke (Loge) —but
they all had fresh and stirring voices, there were no wobbles or “Bayreuth
barks” (fortunately the idea that you can’t sing lyrically and beautifully just
because you’re singing Wagner seems to have died out long ago), and they
related to each other in ways star casts flown in from all over the world for a
single production or set of recording sessions often don’t. There were risible
aspects to Rheingold in concert —
in matching blue dresses, the rather zaftig Rhinemaidens (Jeni Bern as Woglinde, Madeleine Shaw
as Wellgunde and Sarah Castle as Flosshilde) looked even more like what Anna
Russell called them, “aquatic Andrews Sisters,” than usual, and the screens
behind the performers were used for projections of special effects, including
surfaces of water (which had Charles complaining that it still didn’t look like
the Rhinemaidens were in the
Rhine as the libretto specified — but then the bizarre merry-go-round
contraption Wagner spun them around in when the Ring premiered at Bayreuth in 1876 was probably even
sillier) and vague psychedelic effects supposedly representing the shifts in
scene from one locale to another.
Das Rheingold is in one continuous act (though after Wagner died
someone rewrote it to be in two acts for theatres, like the Met in the 1930’s,
which were contractually obligated under their deal with whoever ran their
refreshment counters to provide at least one intermission) but four separate
scenes: in act I Alberich, one of the Nibelung dwarfs who live underground in a
giant cavern called Nibelheim, comes to the surface because he’s horny and
wants one or more of the Rhinemaidens to have sex with him. They find him, as
Anna Russell put it in her famous parody of the Ring, “excessively unattractive” and reject him. Just
then the first ray of morning sun falls on the Rhinegold, a lump of gold hidden
in a rock under the Rhine’s surface, and the Rhinemaidens make the mistake of
telling Alberich that anyone who steals this gold and turns it into a ring can
rule the world — but only if he first renounces love. Alberich renounces love,
steals the gold, makes the ring and uses its power to enslave the other
Nibelungs, including his long-suffering brother Mime. The scene then shifts to
the mountains in which the gods dwell. Wotan, the principal god (Odin in the
original Norse myths on which the Ring was based), has just commissioned a giant castle for the gods called
Valhalla. He hired the giants Fasolt (James Creswell) and Fafner (Mats Almgren)
to build it for him (incidentally, in this odd concert performance the giants
are the best-dressed males in the dramatis personae), only in exchange he rashly promised to hand over
to the giants Fricka’s sister Freia (Giselle Allen), who tends the tree of
golden apples which the gods have to eat to remain immortal. Without Freia the
gods start aging and getting weak, and so Wotan has to go back to the giants to
see if there’s anything else they’ll accept in payment so he can get Freia back
and restore the gods’ immortality. Just then Loge — who in this version is
neither the trickster god of the original legends (by coincidence earlier in
the evening Charles and I had watched a Jeopardy! episode in which the Final Jeopardy clue was about
Norse mythology and specifically the legend that Loki, the original spelling of
his name, had turned himself into a female horse and given birth to an
eight-legged steed which was Odin’s favorite ride, though it’s hard to imagine
Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as either transspecific or transgender!) nor the out-and-out villain of the Mighty
Thor comic books and the films based on
them — appears as Wotan’s consigliere and tells him that the Rhinemaidens are complaining to the gods that
their Rhinegold was stolen and they want the gods to recover it for them.
Wotan
and Loge hit on the idea that if they can trick Alberich into giving up the
Rhinegold and the treasure he’s used the ring’s power to amass for himself,
that might be enough to bribe the giants into giving back Freia. So they
descend into Nibelheim — where Alberich is just now playing with his new toy,
the Tarnhelm, a helmet Mime gave
him that enables its wearer to become invisible and also to shape-shift.
(Charles once told me that one big difference between Wagner’s Ring and Tolkien’s is that in Tolkien’s the Ring and the Tarnhelm are the same object.) Wotan and Loge challenge him
to become first a serpent and then a frog, and in frog guise they capture him
and drag him back to the mountainside where the gods have been dwelling while
waiting for their giant contractors to finish Valhalla already. (Though this is
a concert performance, Alberich’s transformations are suggested by changing the
lighting on his face and having him push back his hair — and when he’s supposed
to be a frog the lights on him appropriately turn green.) In the finale the
giants return Freia to the gods but insist that they’ll only exchange her if
the treasure is piled high enough above her that they can’t see any part of
her. Wotan is O.K. with giving up the treasure but he understandably wants to
keep the Tarnhelm and especially
the ring, but he has to sacrifice the Tarnhelm to cover Freia’s face and then the giants say they
can still see a glint of her hair through the pile of gold. They demand that
Wotan give them the ring, Wotan is reluctant and then the earth goddess Erda (Claudia
Huckle), whom Anna Russell described as “a green-faced torso coming out of the
ground” but who in this production is, rather disconcertingly, the most
physically attractive woman in the cast, comes on the scene and tells Wotan,
“Weiche, Wotan, weiche,” which means “Be careful, Wotan, be careful.” She tells
him that he has to give up the ring to fulfill the destiny of the gods, and he
does so. The opera ends with Wotan and the rest of the gods ascending the
rainbow bridge to Valhalla (built by Donner, the German name for Thor, who gets
to sing one of the score’s towering lyrical moments, “Heda! Heda! Hedo!”) to
move in to their new home, while the Rhinemaidens complain that truth lies only
under the water and “false and fake are those who dwell above.”
The Leeds Opera
Rheingold was actually quite
good, blessed with a conductor, Richard Farnes, who does not subscribe to the currently accepted view of Wagner
that his scores will sound more “spiritual” and “profound” if played very, ve-e-e-e-ery slowly. His Rheingold times out at 2 hours 32 minutes (one recent CD Rheingold with Mark Elder as conductor is so slow it required three CD’s instead of the usual
two), and he’s got a fully competent cast — no one particularly stands out but
no one embarrasses the side, either. It’s true that Yvonne Howard doesn’t sing
Fricka with the riveting authority Kirsten Flagstad brought to the part in
Georg Solti’s legendary 1958 recording — but then, who has? It doesn’t help
that the anvils that are supposed to heard at the beginning and the end of the
Nibelheim scene are simulated with metal blocks — for the 1958 recording Solti
and producer John Culshaw borrowed 18 real anvils from something called an
anvil school in Vienna (Culshaw said in his memoir Ring Resounding, “To this day I have no idea what goes on at the
anvil school, or what career you adopt when you have graduated there, but we
were grateful for its existence”) and created the sort of spectacular din
Wagner no doubt had in mind — and the fluttering hand gesture Ablinger-Sperrhacke
makes through much of his part just looks stupid (the producers also had
Michael Druiett pantomime yanking the ring off Jo Pohlheim’s finger, not to
particularly good effect), but overall this Rheingold, even without subtitles, made an effect and was true
to Wagner’s genius. Wagner remains my favorite composer of all time (with J. S.
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy filling out my pantheon), and this Rheingold showed off not only his skill at tying together huge
spans of music but skillfully scoring every bit of action and making it clear
what’s going on. It’s no wonder that the film composers of Hollywood’s classic
era copied Wagner more than anyone else — particularly his Leitmotif technique of associating each person, place and event
in his story with a little bit of music so you would associate those notes with
that character or situation whenever they appeared, which proved an economical
means of tying together a film as well as an opera. Wagner lives, and
productions like this Rheingold
show that the world is still producing singers and conductors capable of doing
justice to his musical dramas.
