Picture by Herrwig Prammer
With just one extra installment to go, Calixto Bieito’s total plan for his Ring is turning into clearer, because it must be by this stage. I’m going to start with a considerable (although abbreviated) citation from the Paris Opera’s web site, as a result of it sums up the story up to now. We…
… started in Das Rheingold with huge knowledge (…) complete info and complete surveillance of personal life, and continued within the militarized cosmos of Die Walküre, the place the digital world collapses at each stage because of conflict – an apocalypse during which love nonetheless blossomed amid destruction (…) “On the finish of Die Walküre, the world is contaminated A poisonous orange smoke spreads in every single place, the pc of Valhalla is blown aside, Wotan, the artist of destruction, disappears into chemical poison, and Brünnhilde is frozen in time. The poison has contaminated the forest. It has not destroyed it, however mutated it (…) Nature has misplaced its code. The forest (…) has not been cleared, burned, or felled. It has been reprogrammed. The timber fall with their crowns downward, piercing area horizontally like lances; they (…) transfer as in the event that they had been the joints of a machine, an organism whose most basic construction has been altered (…) Gravity not works. Verticality not exists. Symmetry disappears. Ecological logic is damaged. Nature not responds to itself.
Siegfried appears to have gone down higher than the 2 earlier episodes within the press and on-line. I can consider three causes for that.
The primary is the forest setting. I don’t assume there’s been any change of tack within the total idea or from the design workforce; there’s nonetheless, as within the earlier two episodes, an enormous set, filling the stage and dwarfing the motion that takes place in entrance of it. However a forest, with huge, life like timber, even mutated and uprooted, is superficially extra conventional-looking than metal cages, cables and flickering servers, thus satisfying, to some extent, those that ceaselessly bang on about being confronted with “ugliness” in fashionable productions.
Second, there’s extra precise directing in Siegfried. After Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, I complained that Bieito appeared to have informed his design workforce to get on with it, and given up, leaving the singers to themselves, in stark distinction together with his virtuoso directing of The Exterminating Angel not so way back. Maybe he was fazed, and his work undermined, by the fixed adjustments of forged that hit Das Rheingold and Die Walküre however appear, now, to be over. Right here, we had some precision directing once more. Siegfried and Mime’s perpetual bickering, for instance, was very neatly managed and entertaining. I ought to, nonetheless, say that finally, the régie flagged: on the very finish, Siegfried and Brünnhilde simply confronted the viewers, one at every finish of the sword, and sang.
The third issue was, I feel, a perceived (I would say “imagined,” however that’s simply me) enchancment within the conducting, and naturally the energy and consistency of the forged.
Regarding the manufacturing: The deep, darkish forest is current all through. Within the first act, you may nearly make out, within the gloom, the skeletal construction of the exploded Valhalla within the background. In Act II, the forest is much less dense and the skeleton has moved just a little nearer. Within the final act it’s outstanding. The timber – huge and life like, as I mentioned, are suspended, tops pointing down, and there’s a horizontal fir thrusting in on both sides. Although mutants, or maybe due to it, the timber are lush with rustling greenery, and have a lifetime of their very own, shifting up and down, or out and in, and sometimes overlayed with flickering video, to lovely impact. However within the poisoned ambiance, even the cyborgs or androids staggering by means of the forest are sick.
In Act I, there’s no cave and we don’t see Siegfried’s bear. As an alternative, he drags in a automobile door and toys with it: it turns into his surfboard, teddy bear, and mirror. Bumbling Mime, in a brown swimsuit and specs, lives out of a fats suitcase, apparently medicated as much as the eyeballs: he shoots up, pops drugs, and tries to feed them to the lad, who spits them out. Whereas buying and selling riddles with Mime, the Wanderer slowly patches collectively the sections of his damaged spear with duct tape. As there’s no forge, there’s no forging as such: Siegfried rubs sections of the sword collectively, as if to kindle fireplace, and finally fishes the completed sword out of the grass—if I’m not mistaken, from precisely the identical spot the place Siegmund discovered it in Die Walküre. And as an alternative of splitting an anvil earlier than skipping off, he gaily chops the highest off one of many firs.
It could appear from this and what’s coming that Bieito treats the Ring’s legendary paraphernalia frivolously. However I believe he might take into account the Wanderer’s line within the second act, “Alles ist nach seiner Artwork: an ihr wirst du nichts ändern,”—issues transfer in their very own mysterious methods, and we’re powerless to change that. The legendary equipment are, on this imaginative and prescient, accent: “issues occur,” because the saying goes, with or with out them.
Act II is visually probably the most spectacular of the three, and consists of one in all Bieito’s most hanging, certainly shifting, concepts. Alberich arrives pulling a cart, bearing an ailing feminine cyborg. Whereas he confronts Wotan together with his fears for the long run, forceps in hand, he helps her give delivery, underneath a blanket, to a child. And simply as he asks, menacingly, who will inherit the baleful hoard, Alberich clutches the new-born little one tightly to his chest. The Wanderer, earlier than leaving, covers the now useless robotic; and as he wonders about his mother and father, Siegfried cradles her lifeless head in his arms.
The dragon-slaying scene is suitably spectacular. The beast is represented by a large masks wielded, shield-like, by a sort of spider-lift or crane behind. Beside it’s Fafner, himself masked and festooned with large beads like a Shaman. In clouds of stage mist, white backlighting beams out of the darkish depths of the woods by means of the dragon’s eyes and mouth and into the home, obliterating any “fourth wall” and drawing the viewers into the guts of the motion, immersively. I’m coming to hate the phrase “immersive’” (together with “curated,”) however this time it was le mot juste. When he lastly wrests the ring from the dragon’s lair (the mouth of the masks), Siegfried is drenched in blood, and can stay so to the tip of the opera. The chook places in a quick, cheeky, look, suspended on wires; its bright-yellow “feathers” wryly recall Publish-it stickers.
In Act III, the Wanderer meets Erda at a picnic desk within the woods. She carries in a saucepan of soup, they usually sit for his or her meal. Or they might have, solely on Wednesday, in a gesture of anger, Wotan by chance broke the leg of one of many chairs, forcing the singers to improvise new actions: Erda handed him her personal chair, and perched awkwardly on the sting of the desk along with her plate and spoon. As an alternative of sinking into the earth, she stays (on the one remaining chair) to chuckle at Siegfried’s disrespect, defiance and teasing of Wotan: the “floppy hat” mocked by Siegfried is the saucepan he’s plonked lopsidedly on the god’s head, after bedecking Erda with the blood-stained ring round her neck and the tablecloth over her head.
Picture by Herwig Prammer
By now, as I discussed earlier, Valhalla’s skeletal buildings are extra seen. We final noticed Brünnhilde, on the finish of Die Walküre, excessive up in a tower. The tower is now again, and advances slowly as Siegfried attracts close to. Brünnhilde, says Bieito within the citation above, is “frozen in time.” We understand, as Siegfried symbolically hacks aside a block of ice, that her sleep has certainly been cryogenic in variety. Having damaged the ice, he runs up the iron stairs to pierce (equally symbolically) together with his sword, and tear away the tower-room’s polythene cladding, which falls again and hangs down like icicles. Brünnhilde has frost in her hair; he rubs her arms to heat her again to life: “Heil dir, Sonne! Heil dir, Licht!” They descend to the stage for his or her ultimate duet, one at every finish of the sword, as I additionally talked about above, he nonetheless in his bloodstained tee-shirt, she nonetheless in her black high, cargo pants and boots, however with out her leather-based wristbands, unbuckled and eliminated in a gesture of submission, I suppose. They run off collectively: curtain.
Curtain and loud applause, I ought to say—loudest of all for Tamara Wilson’s Brünnhilde and Andreas Schager’s Siegfried.
It hardly appears worthwhile to explain Schager’s efficiency intimately, as anybody who’s heard him reside can simply conjure it up mentally. He’s a Duracell-bunny kind of tenor, fearlessly and unflaggingly energetic, each vocally and bodily, quick on melting lyricism (he does what he can, solely his voice isn’t minimize out for it) however filled with oomph. Again and again you assume he would possibly tire and crack, however in the long run you simply marvel at his stamina. He appears to want taking dangers to taking part in secure; typically he simply hurls the excessive notes into the air, and sometimes they miss the online. His voice let him down severely on one high be aware within the ultimate duet, however by that stage he had the viewers consuming out of his hand. He additionally makes his performing look simply pure: we very practically consider he actually is an insolently happy-go-lucky youth having the time of his life.
In fact, Wilson is neither Flagstad nor Jones nor Voigt—although one thing in her timbre on the high remembers the final. Her voice is smaller. However both one thing in regards to the Bastille’s acoustic fits her (some folks say the home is variety to sopranos), or she’s mastered no matter tips are wanted to sing Brünnhilde as subtly as she likes but nonetheless be heard in its gaping auditorium. My neighbor, in seventh heaven, claimed he was listening to particulars he’d by no means observed within the rating earlier than, all sung crisply and clearly. And her high notes, when she chooses to let rip, do ring out. She’s on high of the function and absolutely have to be among the best Brünnhildes round at current. And when correctly directed, she will act. One poster on France’s ODB opera discussion board claimed her awakening was “calamitous,” however in contrast to the easy-going and easily-pleased bunch on the extra well-known Parterre, ODB contributors are typically outrageously choosy and prickly, and I can’t think about anybody current and rising to their toes to applaud on Wednesday would agree.
Derek Welton was one of many many Wotans introduced in to switch Iain Paterson earlier within the cycle, however I didn’t catch him on the time. He’s undoubtedly a bass-baritone: his voice very satisfactorily combines a grainy baritone bronze with agency, bible-black bass undertones. At occasions, to me, it’s a stunning sound, however his voice can let him down by shedding quantity on the high simply while you’d anticipate to be blasted out of your seat. Nonetheless, many very fantastic moments – and, in his fur-collared nice coat, he has highly effective stage presence, radiating charisma.
Already, writing about Das Rheingold just below a yr in the past, I famous that Gerhard Siegel was “an idiomatic, multi-hued, refined character-tenor, whose expertise shone as Mime.” That’ s nonetheless true, and as he’s additionally a wonderful actor, his bickering scenes with Siegfried had been, as I discussed above, vividly entertaining.
Brian Mulligan’s voice is—so it occurred to me sitting there on Wednesday—as a lot a “tenorial” baritone as Kaufmann’s is alleged to be a “baritonal” tenor. He lacks the insinuating, evil darkness others might convey to the function, however that isn’t a specific legal responsibility with regard to Bieito’s extra feverish, jittery characterization of Alberich, bespectacled brother to the nervy bespectacled Mime.
Some folks have come down like a ton of bricks on Marie-Nicole Lemieux as Erda. It’s true she hasn’t a deep, dark-chocolate contralto sound, however in any other case she appears fantastic to me, singing with intelligence and subtlety reasonably than sounding, as some do, as if her mouth is filled with the earth she’s alleged to have emerged from and return to. Mika Kares is a suitably dark-sounding Fafner, even from the wings, and Ilanah Lobel-Torres is a suitably sweet-singing Waldvogel, ditto.
Although some critics have written that Pablo Heras-Casado is bettering, studying as he goes because it had been, I’m nonetheless discovering his Wagner stiff and dry, and this time the orchestra wasn’t at its most fluent and correct, both, the brass particularly.
However nonetheless… Bieito appears to have bucked up a bit within the Personenregie division now the forged has settled down, although his conceptual narrative stays fragmented, the fuzzy-edged dabs of concepts dwarfed by the units, lighting and results. I have to admit that I’m now, as not a lot earlier than, to see the place he lastly takes Götterdämmerung.
