All About The Warrior Girl

Although I was a little disappointed by the Rheingold, I had a much better time of it last night at Die Walküre. (Let’s face it—Rheingold is really hard to produce, and I’m bound to be an unusually severe critic of any production.) But last night we heard a really lovely group of singers, including the incredible Stig Anderson as Siegmund, with Stephen Milling (left) doing his terrifying Hunding and Susanne Resmark a nicely sung Fricka. James Johnson was the Wotan, one of the few non-Danes in this production (he’s from Portland). Anderson’s wife, Tina Kiberg is our Brünnhilde this week, and she’s a wonderfully giving performer. So was the Sieglinde, Gitta-Maria Sjoeberg.

While the feminist/matriarchal concept makes more sense in this opera, since it is all about the women, still there are things about the production which give me pause. My problems all stem from knowing the words too well; anything which contradicts the text throws my head for a whirl, and it takes me a while to get back in sync with the story after that. So for instance, in the first act, in the libretto, Siegmund is a rough-and-tough wild forest guy who has to take refuge for the night in the primitive house of Hunding, a fierce tribesman. In this production, they were both guys wearing ties from Hollywood in the 50s, and so the basic setup of the scene didn’t quite add up. Similarly, Wotan in Act Two is a god at the height of his powers and worship. He isn’t a human being. When a production tries to make it about human beings in some realistic context, he inevitably becomes a repulsive, pathetic, shabby loser. Which doesn’t fit the music.

Anyways, a few specifics about the show last night (feel free to skip to the next post at this point!):

Technical issues in the first act. The Hunding hut was a kind of house based on a Frank Lloyd Wright design (it helps to have an architect with you at the theater to recognize these things!), popular in Southern California in the early part of the century; and it only took up a small part of the center of the stage picture, the rest of the picture being obscured by a big black drop. At the moment when spring enters the hall, Siegmund takes a chair and smashes it through the big wall of windows facing backstage; the black drop flies out, the whole stage spins around, and we see outside the hut (which from the outside is a hideous black box) a hill with trees and red flowers falling from above. Except last night the trees, which come down from the flies, got messed up, starting swaying and swinging wildly, stopped halfway, and just as poor Stig sang “Winterstürme wichen—” the big red curtain came in and the conductor stopped the orchestra. Much grumbling from the audience. After a moment’s pause, they lifted the curtain, we began again a measure or so before the “Winterstürme”, and the scene continued to the end on the final tableau as it was supposed to look. So, not a horrible catastrophe, but I felt really bad for the poor singers, who had been singing a great first act and whose momentum—building up to the wildly orgasmic climax of that love scene—was so rudely interrupted.



Wotan’s chessboard. Act Two began with the same scaffolding bridge where the gods stood at the end of Rheingold, up in Valhalla; it reminded me the most of the BBC Gormenghast after Johnny Rhys-Meyers as the villainous Steerpike takes over for Barquentine, the Master of Rituals, and transforms his office into a nightmare-fascist headquarters. (Wotan, we are told, represents all the failed –isms of the 20th century.) Below this bridge, on the stage floor, there are several clay tablet torsos: a girl-torso with an S, and guy-torsos with S, H, and F. These are referenced several times in the act, and I understood because I know the text really well; but I spoke to several people at the breaks who never figured out that these chess pieces stood for Siegmund, Sieglinde, Hunding, and Fafner, with the gods manipulating them (à la Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis manipulating chess pieces standing for mortals in Clash of the Titans) from above. For instance, Wotan, when he sang“Siegmund falle!” smashes the Siegmund tablet in a thousand bits. An okay idea; but it’s hard to have an emotional reaction to that, and makes it really difficult to get the point that Wotan has come to love the mortals with whom he’s playing this mortal game of Harry Potter battlechess.

Why laugh? This is a tragedy. When Wotan tells his Valhalla flunky # 3 “Der alte Sturm, der alte Müh”, the supernumerary playing the flunky laughs loudly, then exits so Wotan can be alone for his confrontation with Fricka. Similarly, when Wotan usually kills Hunding with a contempuous wave of his hand, singing “Geh...geh!” last night Hunding just laughed evilly and stalked offstage. I found both of these directorial choices a little perplexing. Ordinarily, it’s tough to get an audience NOT to laugh at that Wotan-Fricka scene, which is about a wife nagging her husband into killing his illegitimate son. It’s one of the greatest scenes in world drama, and I suppose if you’re married maybe you do always find something funny about it. Maybe the director thought by having the guy onstage laugh at the idea, it would deter the audience from finding it funny. I don’t know. I also wonder about having Hunding survive Wotan’s finger-of-death moment; it diminishes Wotan, and particularly since his next line is “Wait till I catch up with Brünnhilde! She’s gonna get it!” And last night, since he had failed to punish Hunding, it looked like he only got mad at Brünnhilde because he needed to beat up on somebody and she was available.

Sieglinde awake. One of the things this director love to do is to put characters into scenes where Wagner didn’t ask for them. Froh and Donner, for instance, are onstage when R2 begins; they mime all sorts of stage business the director has invented until they are really supposed to enter, at which point they begin singing. Similarly, Sieglinde was awake last night during the long scene in which Brünnhilde comes to Siegmund to announe his death. (Ordinarily she’s passed out and is sound asleep downstage somewhere, so they can argue about her without her hearing.) I found it strange that she was conscious during this whole scene; at first it was a little interesting, since I was wondering whether she could see/hear Brünnhilde (who as an immortal perhaps could appear to Siegmund only); but then it became clear that having her awake wouldn’t add anything to the scene, and I kind of forgot she was there. I’m still not sure what the point was of keeping her awake. Makes her stronger, perhaps, since she’s now less schizo than she usually is, and this director may be interested in strengthening all his female characters as much as possible. But the result is the staging keeps fighting the text and the music.



Ugly Valkyrie Rock. While the orchestra played a fun (and very loud) "Ride of the Valkyries," I was unhappy when the curtain went up on the third act set (above). In Wagner’s Ring, you spend huge amounts of time on the set for W3, the Valkyrie rock, and I thought this one was particularly ugly. It was a rooftop observation platform, initially full of piles of dead 1950s GIs, with a bunch of Valkyries in 50s evening gowns, sipping champagne, each with a nice pair of big black wings. The sloping cement floor was dripping with blood from all the corpses (which unfortunately looked, as they usually do, like plastic corpses that weighed nothing). The big scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde was played inside the observation center, which we see after the set swivels around and another big black drop flies in, leaving only this strange hexagonal room. I’m hoping this set will evolve when we return to this location tomorrow night and for Götterdämmerung.

Real Fire. Ring productions in Seattle are well-known for always featuring real fire, and so does this Copenhagen production. The fire starts up on the rooftop when you get the fire music at the end of W3. And I noticed something really strange—fire, visually, is chaotic, like a fractal: a shape of nature. Nothing artificial, man-made, clean or angular about it. And that’s great—that’s SO IMPORTANT in a Ring production, because the text and the music are like that; craggy, weird, unpredictable. Not only is the Ring all about nature, it has a naturalness of form (by which I mean organic, superficially extremely complicated although it does follow interior logic) which a production will deny at its peril. What I noticed last night, when we saw the natural chaos of the fire, was how artificial and manufactured the rest of the design had been, particularly the design for the Valkyrie rock set of W3. (On the other hand, setting the Ring in the 20th century mandates a certain amount of artificial shapes, since nature has little to do with most of our 20th century lives.)