The Core of the Ring

I love Siegfried, the third opera of the Ring. It’s got it all—tenderness, humor, passion, politics, psychology, philosophy—and there’s some pretty darn good music in there while you’re at it. The show last night made a strong start and a weak finish, and for me the essence of the problem was musical.

Michael Schønwandt, the conductor of this production, is a big name in the Danish musical scene. I think he still has a lot to learn about conducting Wagner. Last night there were balance problems (where the orchestra is too loud, and drowns out the singers) and tempo problems (usually the conductor trying to go too slow, and the singers fighting them, trying to get them to speed up so they don’t run out of breath), in addition to the various mistakes which the orchestra has been making all along. These major conducting issues were exacerbated by some issues with the casting. Gisela Stille as the Forest Bird got hopelessly confused in her second line (she only has four lines in the whole opera, so it’s a big deal if you screw one of them up). Once again Brünnhilde was sung by Tina Kiberg, Stig Anderson’s wife and a breathtakingly gorgeous woman who doesn’t quite have the voice it takes to sing this part beautifully. We had a new Wotan (that’s three Wotans in one week, making my head spin): Robert Hale, an old pro at this part, covering for someone who got sick. Unlike his predecessors in the role this week, Hale carries around with him enormous musical and personal charisma—he walks onstage and it’s like, BOOM! Wotan King of the Gods has arrived. That’s very important in this opera; Wotan makes his point mostly by his presence, so you have to be able to get that presence tangible, attractive, and even sympathetic, all of which Hale did. What he didn’t do was coordinate with the conductor. I wondered, after the fact, if they had ever rehearsed together, because tempo-wise everything was such a mess! In this opera Wotan mostly sings in a very slow, legato 4/4, which is such an obvious rhythm everyone will notice if it isn’t perfect. I’m also sorry I don’t have much nice to say about the Siegfried, Johnny van Hal. While he looks good, and acted the part marvelously, I don’t think his voice is right for it at all. He’s got a small, pretty, lyric tenor, and seems to have a very hard time singing through his consonants. Although he's a fine actor, I barely understood any of the text he was singing. Last night either the poor guy was being covered by the orchestra, or just running out of gas because Siegfried is such a ridiculously long and strenuous part. Van Hal, a staff tenor who was probably asked to do this role by a management desperate to save money and get another Siegfried, seemed almost suprised when he came out for a bow and heard enthusiastic cheers from the audience. ‘Cause he knew it had been touch-and-go all night.

I should say that we got some fine singing and acting from the people I haven’t mentioned: reprising their roles from the other night’s Rheingold,
Sten Byriel as Alberich, Bengt-Ola Morgny as Mime, Christian Christiansen as Fafner, and Mette Ejsing as Erda. It’s much easier on a Ring audience if the same singer plays the same character each time that character appears.

The concept, about feminism/matriarchalism and setting the Ring in the 20th century, had very little to do with this opera, since there are barely any women in it and the show is very far from realism. That said, I had mixed reactions to the work of the director tonight:


Act One: Loved it. This is exactly how I’ve often thought Siegfried Act One should be staged—as a TV show, a sitcom, in a small suburban house. (Looked Scandinavian to me.) Left, Siegfried questions Mime's lessons about the birds and the bees; later on, when Mime tries to teach Siegfried a lesson about fear, it turns out he's really teaching a sex ed class--Siegfried gets all hard and horny, which is brilliant because of course we hear Brünnhilde music in the orchestra at that point. The opera was set in 1968, according to the dramaturg; the set for this act was a three-floor house, with Mime’s workshop in the basement, a kitchen/eating area on the main floor, and Siegfried’s bedroom upstairs, complete with posters and paraphernalia indicating ‘disaffected 1960s radical youth’. After many fine moments I won’t describe in detail, the act climaxes when Siegfried brings his reforged sword Notung crashing down—-not upon the anvil, which is right there, but upon Mime’s television. This provoked endless, and inconclusive, discussion at a late dinner after the show. I think it was just kind of fun, which makes it really not much of a contribution at all.


Act Two: Hated it. On the other hand, it’s gotta be partly Wagner’s fault, because this act almost never works. In particular, here, the dragon and the bird were disappointing. The dragon was in fact shamefully terrible, beneath mentioning; the bird was kind of interesting, it was a real live bird, probably a carrier pigeon. But it sat perfectly still through its entire long discussion with Siegfried (the soprano messing up her lines backstage somewhere), so still that at first, thinking it wasn’t alive, I was getting annoyed with it. But then it flew up and offstage, just as it did at the end of Walküre when Brünnhilde releases it from a cage after Wotan rips off her wings. When the curtain went up on Act Two, Hagen was hanging around in the forest with Alberich, his one-armed survivalist dad. I didn’t mind including Hagen, although it didn’t really add anything, just as bringing Froh and Donner on at the top of R2 is just a waste of staging rehearsal energy. The Hagen thing here confused some in the audience terribly, who spent lots of energy wondering who that could possibly be.


Act Three: Meh. This act has never been my favorite, partly because it’s all so inconsistent musically. (I feel similarly about Verdi’s Macbeth!) The one thing about the act is, it takes some paint-peeling singing, and we didn’t get too much of that. Instead we were perplexed to find Wotan visiting his old mistress, Erda, who lived in a sort of Traviata apartment and who, it turned out, had cancer (see picture, above); then he argued with Siegfried outside a barbed-wire fence; and the Siegfried/Brünnhilde scene took place on the same aethetically challenged Valkyrie rock we’d seen the other day. Most of this act (after the Erda scene) followed a very standard staging, with the exception of Wotan breaking his own spear at the moment when Siegfried usually breaks it. (Hale just picked it up and broke it over his knee.) No one could figure out why he was breaking his own spear; maybe it had something to do with the television in the first act. Or maybe it was being different just for the sake of being different. Or something to do with the ‘feminist/matriarchal’ concept. Or, it occurred to me, it was the singer, tired of fighting the conductor, eagerly breaking it himself as a way of saying, “Okay, that’s it, I’m outta here.”