When the Seattle Opera last year unveiled its new, $3-million production of Wagner`s ”Der Ring des Nibelungen,” the audience was reported to be pretty evenly divided between those who found the production bold and invigorating, and those who considered it eccentric and gimmicky.
Each music drama of the four-opera tetralogy was greeted with a chorus of vociferous cheers and equally lusty boos. Most of the latter seemed to have been reserved for the production team of Swiss director Francois Rochaix and American designer Robert Israel, who also were having their first go at Wagner`s mighty, convoluted, 16-hour saga of gods, dwarfs, giants and mortals. At one performance of ”Siegfried” in 1986, a listener let forth with the following stentorian critique: ”It stinks!” To which a second voice shouted: ”Get out if you don`t like it!”
The assembled Wagnerites were considerably less divided earlier this month when the company presented the first of two German-language cycles of
”The Ring of the Nibelung” (the second cycle completed its run Saturday). The theatrical values were subjected to what the company called ”significant revisions,” mainly involving design elements in the final two music dramas.
There was also a newcomer in the pit, Hermann Michael, the young German music director of the Haydn Orchestra in Bolzano, Italy, conducting his first ”Ring.” He labored valiantly in what has to be the most grueling assignment in the entire operatic repertory. So grueling, in fact, that he collapsed between acts of ”Goetterdaemmerung” and had to be revived by a doctor before he could finish the performance. His conducting gathered force and passion near the end of the cycle, but earlier on it wanted tension and lyric sweep, particularly in ”Die Walkuere,” the weakest link of the Seattle ”Ring.”
Much of the cast was the same as in 1986, with the notable exception of Leonie Rysanek, enjoying a sentimental twilight fling at her signature role of Sieglinde. In honor of the beloved Viennese soprano`s Seattle debut, the Space Needle restaurant christened its newest dessert Raspberries Rysanek. Ah, marketing.
Although traditionalists still grumbled, their complaints were lost in the general enthusiasm that seemed to grow in volume as the cycle progressed. The ovation following ”Goetterdaemmerung” continued for nearly 15 minutes, during which time Linda Kelm, the Bruennhilde, found herself pelted with bouquets, one of which scored a direct hit to her heroic bosom. Looking more like a bouncing Broadway baby than a stately Valkyrie, a beaming Kelm waved bye-bye to the fans as the curtain descended on the ruins of a world purified by fire and redeemed through the power of love.
Opera fans for whom the ”Ring” has become a comfy, 13-year Seattle tradition were shocked earlier this year to learn that because of a lack of local support Seattle will present no ”Ring” in 1988. Speaking unofficially, general director Speight Jenkins expressed guarded confidence that sufficient funds can be raised to bring the ”Ring” back the following summer. At this writing, however, its future remains problematic.
Is this ”Ring” worth preserving? The answer would have to be a qualified yes. Rochaix and Israel (the designer`s work on behalf of contemporary opera will be on view in Chicago next month, when Lyric Opera stages the local premiere of Philip Glass` ”Satyagraha”) have turned their backs on the romantic, representational ”Ring” style that marked San Francisco Opera`s much-praised 1985 production and the ongoing cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, favoring instead an eclectic, postmodernist approach that sought to infuse Wagner`s symbols with new dramatic urgency.
The Seattle production team`s central conceit is that Wotan is Wagner, a theater man and egomaniacal visionary not above resorting to deceit to secure and retain power. The entire ”Ring” is thus seen as a play-within-a-play with Wotan (made up to resemble Wagner) as cosmic stage director, author and occasional observer.
Rochaix has argued that the god-king is ”the victim of his own theater” rather than the tragic prey of his own duplicity and hubris, as Wagner portrayed him. Much of this was not made clear by the staging, which seemed to shift point of view as it went along. For the third act of ”Siegfried”
Rochaix invented a curious pantomime recapitulating the principal events of the cycle, a dream sequence unknown to Wagner. The director confused unities of time and space as he saw fit. Without reading beforehand Rochaix`s dramatic apologia, one would have found it difficult to fathom the decision to have Bruennhilde fall asleep in Wotan`s ”theater” attic but awaken in a marble mausoleum.
In his pursuit of a kind of timeless, mythic ”reality,” Rochaix found himself entangled in many of the same inconsistencies that had tripped up Wagner.
Israel`s set and costume designs similarly linked past, present and future, letting the anachronisms fall where they may. Much of his imagery, set off by Joan Sullivan`s vivid lighting, seemed a conscious hommage to director Patrice Chereau`s Bayreuth ”Ring” of the mid-1970s, but there were also stage pictures borrowed from 19th Century American and French painters. Siegfried sported a breastplate beneath his Victorian wedding coat. The Rhinemaidens frolicked in Gay `90s bloomers. The Norns were Grandma-Moses biddies spinning invisible rope. In the wittiest scene of the cycle, the Valkyries pranced through the air on carousel horses suspended by wires.
Borrowing a few notions from Brecht`s theater of alienation, the production team did nothing to disguise the fact that everything we saw was mere theatrical artifice–props from Wotan`s property shop. Siegfried pursued the Wood Bird (here a toy parrot on a stick carried by a pretty soprano)
through what appeared to be Wotan`s living room. The eartyh goddess Erda later turned up in the same living room, hidden, Cherubino-style, in an armchair. The dwarf Alberich`s transformations were deliberately tacky where magical effects were clearly required.
Two major scenic changes were made over the 1986 production, but only one was an improvement. Last year the dragon Fafner was represented by three enormous crab legs suspended from the rafters. This year we had a two-faced giant in a Godzilla suit who knocked over painted flats with his tail.
Far more successful was the Immolation Scene. Gone were the red and blue banners depicting flames and water; in their place was a real conflagration extinguished by billowing blue draperies descending from the flies. Alberich, aka Wotan`s alter ego, cringed abjectly at the feet of the triumphant Rhinemaidens–a coup de theatre that brought the epic full circle.
Assuming that Seattle is able to revive the production in 1989, more fine-tuning doubtless will take place, and doubtless will enhance a ”Ring”
that, fortunately, fascinates more often than it frustrates.
Musically, the Seattle ”Ring” offered little to complain about, much to admire.
Kelm may be the best Bruennhilde in these vocally impoverished Wagnerian times. Her voluminous voice rode the grandest orchestral climaxes with tireless ease, a lack of tonal color notwithstanding. Although her generous figure prevents her from being a very convincing actress, she showed an increasing dramatic command as the cycle progressed.
If Roger Roloff`s lyric baritone weakened near the end of Wotan`s punishing three-opera marathon, his portrayal rose to moments of surpassing poetry, dignity and authority.
The fine portrait gallery of villains included such familiar figures as Hubert Delamboye`s spidery Mime, Julian Patrick`s menacing Alberich and James Patterson`s sonorous Fafner. The Rumanian bass Gabor Andrasy made his American operatic debut as a black-toned Hagen and Hunding.
Diane Curry brought a plush-sounding mezzo to the varied duties of the
”Walkuere” Fricka, Waltraute and the Second Norn. Alexandra Hughes
(”Rheingold” Fricka and Grimgerde) and Clarity James (Erda) sang adequately. Diane Kesling had greater luck with Freia than the weightier duties of Gutrune. Karol Hansen led a mellifluous trio of Rhinemaidens, but Geraldine Decker wobbled alarmingly as the chief Norn.
Of the tenors, special attention went to Toni Kraemer, who was making his U.S. opera debut as Siegfried. Given the worldwide dearth of Heldentenors, the German singer may have to weigh his operatic offers carefully lest he overtax his essentially lyric resources. The voice is smooth, even and attractive, even if it sometimes fell short of the heroic requirements. He was especially in conveying the primitive oafishness of the young Siegfried.
The veteran Emile Belcourt reprised his elegant Loge, John Del Carlo his sturdy Donner and Gunther, Gregory Stapp his sympathetic Fasolt. Peter Kazaras was a throaty Froh.
What can one say about Leonie Rysanek? The Viennese soprano, 60, has been singing Sieglinde all over the Wagnerian universe for nearly 40 years, and her performance has been widely celebrated. One could admire her intelligence, musicality and uninhibited dramatic involvement while sadly noting frayed vocal resources, painful vagaries of pitch and a reading so overwrought it seemed to be taking place in another opera altogether.
This left Barry Busse`s lyrical, young-looking, vocally undersized Siegmund at a distinct disadvantage in the Volsungs` passionate love duet.
Sonya Friedman`s supratitles added much to the audience`s comprehension, even though the singers displayed generally good German diction.
At the very least, one must credit the Seattle ”Ring” for having the courage of its sometimes prodigal convictions. One must commend it for throwing over the quaint storybook literalism that dulled the company`s previous ”Ring.” Flawed as it is (and what ”Ring” isn`t flawed?), the Rochaix-Israel version compels us to ponder anew the intellectual and esthetic relevance of Wagner`s masterpiece to our troubled century. A generation that has experienced Shaw, Schoenberg, Freud and Beckett, lived through the rise and fall of Hitler`s Reich, suffered the Holocaust and is grappling with the shifting realities of political power in the era of Irangate, would do well to heed the lessons of good and evil, love and hatred, salvation and corruption, that the ”Ring” can still impart.
