Wotan – Egils Silins; Donner – Raimund Nolte; Froh – Attilio Glaser; Loge – Daniel Kirch; Fricka – Christa Mayer; Freia – Elisabeth Teige; Erda – Okka von der Damerau; Alberich – Olafur Sigurdarson; Mime – Arnold Bezuyen; Fasolt – Jens-Erik Aasbø; Fafner – Wilhelm Schwinghammer; Woglinde – Lea-ann Dunbar; Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel; Flosshilde – Katie Stevenson. Valentin Schwarz (director), Andrea Cozzi (designs), Andy Besuch (costumes), Konrad Kuhn (dramaturgy). Reinhard Traub (lighting), Luis August Krawen (video), Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Cornelius Meister (conductor)
This is the fourth time I’ve been to Bayreuth (1972, 1974, 2017 and now), and the second time I’m seeing The Ring here. As is to be expected on what has long been described in quasi-religious terms as a pilgrimage, my journey on 24/8 from London was fairly arduous, made more so by DB engineering works and a track-side fire. I finally got to my guest-house at 1030pm, after 15 hours by 5 trains and 1 bus, and going round in circles via Google-Maps in Bayreuth. I spent the morning of the next day remembering my bearings in the town – I am very usefully based near Wahnfried and Richard Wagner Strasse on this trip – and then walked up the hill to the Festspielhaus for a 6pm Rhinegold
Because I have to give a talk about this production to the Wagner Society in Manchester, I have been a bit more assiduous than I would otherwise have been about reading reviews of this new production, and preparing myself also by listening to the explanatory podcasts now on the Bayreuth Festival website. As readers may well have noticed, this new production has not exactly brought out fanfares of praise from reviewers – the blogs and newspaper articles I have seen have run from the ‘quite an interesting idea but rather muddled’ kind of approach to hysterical invective about ‘regie-theater’ gone mad.
A few points it’s maybe worth making before we start. The Ring of the Nibelung is one of the great pinnacles of western high art. As such, you’d really only expect for there to be many different ways of interpreting its story. Just because an interpretation is unusual, you shouldn’t just reject it out of hand. Instead, you might use criteria like:
- consistency in the implementation of the concept
- how that concept relates to what the words and music are telling you
- the insights which the approach brings to the work
- also, you’d want to think about the quality of singing conducting acting and orchestral player.
- So these are 4 criteria I’ll be basing my views of this Ring production on
Obviously I have now seen only one of the four operas so these are some tentative notes which I might expand or disown as the cycle proceeds.
You forget – or you do if like me you have only been to Bayreuth a few times – how magnificently large the Bayreuth stage is and the depth of resources it has for huge visual impact – whatever the merits of the production, with the right designer you can be assured of spectacle! We certainly got that here. I also needed to be reminded both of the wonderful acoustic, and the kind things it does to singers performing this music, and also of the quality of singers Bayreuth can draw on, who, moreover have been working together for a number of months on this production, and this really shows in the quality of the interactions they have with one another. This was an outstanding cast, I thought.
The basic concept of the production is the history of an extended family, gripped by the need for power and money, and a fondness for lavish display. The spectacular Valhalla set for Scenes 2 and 4 works on three different levels, with a very fancy drawing room for the gods, and a garage space for Fasolt and Fafner to drive in with their big SUV. The latter is one of the various moments where a bit of undercutting humour on Wagner’s sometimes rather loud and pompous music works rather well. The best example of the latter is Donner, a golf enthusiast, who tries to hit the giants with his club earlier on and uses his club again in the calling forth of thunder and lightning, with a little putt as the thunder rolls. Erda makes various appearances in Scene 2 and earlier in Scene 4 as, clearly, a girl friend of Wotan, which she undoubtedly is in the text, as the future mother of Brunnhilde. This is all good and creative stuff. Part of the extended family history is the fact that Alberich and Wotan are twins (again, perfectly justifiable from the text) and the Prelude is accompanied by beautiful images of foetal twins with an underlying message about the human capacity for good and evil which lies within both of them.
The main issue that is harder to get one’s head round is the concept of the Rhinegold being a child, and how this then plays out. Scene 1 is visualised as a swimming pool, presumably on Wotan’s estate, with the Rhinemaidens as nannies and a group of children playing in the pool and around the edges. Alberich’s increasingly desperate conversations with the Rhinemaidens is well-handled and the fact that they can splash him and push him face first into the water is a clever way of showing how humiliated he is. The concept of a child having the potential for good and evil also makes sense – and of course in many ways this is similar to how gold is seen. The Rhinemaidens’ lament at the end of the work is for the fact that there is no return to the innocence of childhood. But the concept of child-gold does bring with it a clear question – so what is Alberich renouncing and what is he taking on at the end of Scene 1? I assume he is renouncing love based on mutuality and respect and taking on the control of children to shape his future (which of course is what Wotan is also doing). Where I lost the plot a bit Is in Scene 3 and the early part of Scene 4. Here, instead of the usual miserable dwarves, we had a group of little girls, identically uniformed and obediently scribbling away, and looked after by a somewhat dubious and possibly pederastic Mime, within an airtight box. The stolen ‘Rhinegold’ little boy is engaged in being violent and disruptive towards them, and we begin to see that he is the young Hagen.
Four points relating to questions I had in my mind as I watched this:
- I suppose the little girls are another example of people – in this case Mime acting as Alberich’s agent – controlling others’ potentiality. OK,….
- But, why does one little girl come up to Valhalla in Scene 4 to ‘cover’ Freia (she is taken away by Erda after her warning to Wotan, and wouldn’t it have been better if all the little girls came up from Nibelheim?
- … why also would Wotan go down into Nibelungs’ kingdom to take possession of a nasty little boy – and why would Fasolt and Fafner want him? Is the idea that he is still a human being of infinite potential, and therefore ‘treasurable’. Or that he is just the sort of criminal mind in the making they need. I sort of get those two options, but remain baffled by the point above
- As several commentators have mentioned there’s also the odd glowing pyramid towards the end of Scene 4, which the Gods are very keen on. I didn’t think this was much of a deal – just the Gods indulging in a bit of New Age-ism as another way of trying to control the future
One of the writers in the programme book says that, because there are inconsistencies in Wagner;’s Ring, it’s OK for the director to create some more (I paraphrase)! I am not sure about this philosophically, but, all in all, though occasionally baffled, there was a lot more right than wrong about this production so far. I think my main concern is that, as a non-German speaker, although I have a reasonably good knowledge of the German text and what it means, it’s not detailed – I can’t feel viscerally what it means when a giant says ‘there’s a ring on your finger’ when a little school-girl is standing before Wotan. That is a limitation which will inevitably colour all my comments.
Musically, this was very, very good. There were really no weak links among the singers – the stand-outs were three excellent Rhinemaidens, a truly outstanding Alberich in Olafur Sigurdarson, and an excellent (dodgy lawyer) Loge in Daniel Kirch, But Egils Silins was also very fine as Wotan, utterly commanding the stage when he sang. A really great cast. I was slightly less impressed by Cornelius Meister, the late replacement conductor. Some of the music sounded a bit gabbled at a fastish pace (2 hours 20 mins), with some over-obvious gear changes. The orchestra sounded glorious for the most part, with a few bumpy bits when coordination went a bit askew (unusually for this orchestra, in my experience).
One gentleman shouted out something angrily during the performance, and there were a few boo’s as the curtain came down but also then an enormous cheer and stamping of feet from the audience as the cast took their curtain calls. There were a few boos for the conductor (unfair given that he stepped in at the last minute)
John's musical journey 