Miscellaneous Copenhagen Adventures

I only have one day left in Copenhagen, so I thought I’d briefly report on some of the other fun things we’ve seen. The statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid in Copenhagen’s main canal is amazingly lame. An endless stream of busses full of Japanese tourists washes by this little spot, a little north of the lovely Amalienborg (where the Danish royal family live today). I went there because Juraj insisted, having always had a thing for this particular story. (If you only know the story from the Disney version, you should know that Hans Christian Anderson, who languished in unrequited love most of his life, wrote a very different ending to his version. And in the Czech opera Rusalka by Dvořak, which we were producing when I first met my friend Juraj, who’s from Slovakia, she refuses to kill the prince and thus forfeits her voice to the wicked witch and becomes a will-o’-the-wisp, a wraith luring men to their death in swamps for the rest of time; the foreign princess rejects the prince, whereupon he goes crazy and comes reeling into the forest looking for the little mermaid; and when he finds her, she’s a wraith and kisses him with lips of ice. He dies, and she lives forever after as this horrible undead wraith-vampire creature. Stupid Disney always tries to make everything so happy!)

In any event, unless you’re a tool you should skip the Little Mermaid statue adventure on your visit to Copenhagen. The statue goes back about a hundred years, during which time it’s been decapitated twice and defaced several times, probably by tourists disappointed after all the hype. Here’s a photo of the statue, looking across the canal at a sailboat and the windmills on the far shore (Denmark, being a typically Green Scandinavian country, is covered in windmills):



A far more interesting statue, south of the Little Mermaid near Churchill Plads, memorializes the myth of Gefion, retold in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (one of the principal sources of the old Norse myths which inspired Wagner’s stories for the Ring). The island of Zealand, where I’ve spent the last week, was created when a giantess named Gefion, assisted by a team of very large bulls, dragged some land that had been part of Sweden across the sea. This statue is one of those cool ‘fountain’ statues, which has water coming out of it in various spots—including the nostrils of the steaming bulls, which makes for a really neat effect.



In addition to scouring the city looking at statues, we’ve done more than a little inspection of the state of design in contemporary Denmark. Back home in the US, of course, we mostly think of Danishes as tasty pastries and the country of Denmark in connection with furniture (although the cafe at IKEA down in Renton, Washington serves Swedish meatballs and lutefisk, not Danish food). Sure enough, Denmark is the land of design. Stores upon stores showcase the latest and greatest in Danish design for any product you can think of. It reminds me of Professor Tolkien’s elves: making art out of the most ordinary elements of everyday life, like toilets, instead of our American project of making the most sacred elements of life (food, sex, communication) into the mundane. Here’s a photo from the lovely Copenhagen Kunst Industri Museum, the Museum of Danish Design. This piece is silver, folded into ocean waves and then beaten with a hammer to give it texture, and with a little golden ship sailing on the sea:



The bulk of the Kunstindustrimuseum (which I highly recommend) is a historical survey of design trends in Denmark and the world, including a thorough history of 20th century Danish design, as well as rooms devoted to many of the earlier trends which still influence our design today. Mary, of course, gravitated to the 1960s room, and got several ideas to make her condo in Seattle even more of a flashback than it already is:



Being fed up with statues, museums, churches, and operas, I took the morning off today and took the bus out to the Copenhagen suburb of Dragør, south of the airport, just at the bottom corner of Zealand where the Ørsund strait opens up into the Baltic Sea. What a cute little town! There’s a glorious marina, with boats from every corner of the world, and it was fun to eat an ice cream (a Danish obsession, there’s ice cream for sale on every corner in this weird country—and yet the people are very skinny) while walking along the piers looking at the boats. As you know, everyone is immediately ten times cuter if they are on a boat.



Dragør is south of the Copenhagen airport, and south of the bridge to Malmø, Sweden. (It’s easy nowadays to get to Sweden from Denmark: you drive across this bridge or take a train through the tunnel that follows the bridge route. At 7.8 km, it’s the longest bridge in Europe. Reminds me of waterways I know in northern Michigan and in the Puget Sound region, however.) Here I am lounging in the grass behind Dragør Fort, which used to patrol this area and defend Denmark from ships coming up the Baltic Sea, which is spread out to the right; to the left, you can see the Malmø bridge. As the picture indicates, today was a gorgeous day.



The day climaxed in a meal for the ages: we all ate at Kommandanten, one of Copenhagen’s nicest restaurants, with a quartet of terrific Brits who had been to Seattle and who are also attending this Copenhagen Ring. I’m sorry I don’t have a picture, but it was an epic meal: five or six courses (I lost count, since there were as many wines); incredibly interesting company; discussion ranging from this Copenhagen Ring to the English garden industry, to differing Anglo and American attitudes towards smoking, the press, and opera supratitles; and an adorable girl who explained what we were eating in English but with a thick Danish accent. I write to you now a very satisfied person, hopeful and eager to round off my Copenhagen adventure with a memorable Götterdämmerung tomorrow.

Going to Operaen

The new opera house in Copenhagen is quite the thing to see...I’m very proud of our new opera house in Seattle, but this theater has the additional advantage/disadvantage of being on the other side of the canal from the main part of the city. It is possible to drive up from the back side of the island, but for most patrons a trip to Operaen starts here on the far shore, waiting for a boat to come and whisk you across:



Once there, there’s plenty of time to be social in the lobby. One of the fun things about going to a Ring cycle is you always make new friends, because you’re with the same people night after night. The many Danes in the audience are taking special pride in THEIR production of the Ring; for many of them, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard the opera, because it hasn’t been done here in full since 1912. Below, Linda Jenkins and Laurel Nesholm pause for a photo in the very attractive main lobby space.



The lobby, with it’s four levels of tiers and balconies, is all windows and is especially fun because of these three weird iridescent shapes, the name of which I never heard:



You go into the main floor from the lobby through the space pictured below. I wasn’t able to get any good photos of the auditorium, which is a nice, intimate European-size opera house. (European opera houses, in general, seat less than half as many people as their American equivalents. The people in general are more slender, too.)



During the second intermission, opera fans go out to the watch the sunset across the canal:



The opera house has an incredible sloping roof above it, and below it goes down 30 feet below the water level for rehearsal spaces.



The money from the opera house comes from Mærsk shipping, the company with all the boxcars that you see in Seattle and around the world. Copenhagen is also building a new double theater for plays, across the canal from Operaen.

The point is, a really great theater building is a pleasure to visit even when you’re not finding the performance particularly pleasurable.

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.”

Food in Copenhagen

Someone (a member of my family, with standard Dean priorities) asked me how the food has been so far on this adventure. I’m happy to say we’ve been eating very well, from the yummy morning Danishes with cappucino we had at the fabulous local joint Lagkagehuset in Christianshavn (see left) to the hot dogs and ice cream available on every street corner to the fine meals we've had before and after opera performances, such as this one in the café of the terrific Craft Industry Museum—yes, that’s a Danish quesadilla with jalapenos on it, that thing that looks like a big pancake, or some naan bread.



I’m proud to say we tried smørrebrød, the national obsession, and I thought it was great—that’s a plate full of small open-faced sandwiches on thin rye bread, and they come with all sorts of toppings. The edgiest one I tried was aged Icelandic herring, and I really loved it. Speight, who’s a vegetarian, has been having a harder time than usual finding good vegetarian options; but the rest of us (including Linda Jenkins, pictured below) have had a good gastronomical trip so far—and it looks like it’s only going to get better.



All Danish culture, and all Viking culture before it, is based on the sea, and the food is no exception—we’re really big on fish and shellfish here. Much of the Danish countryside is farmland, but you’re never far from the ocean here, and so you’re always eating its bounty. Below, Mary imitates the pose of her favorite statue, the fishwife on the canal leading to Slotsholmen.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Actually it isn’t, so far as I can tell, Denmark is an astonishingly cool place. But I hope you didn’t honestly expect an old Shakespeare buff like me to put together a blog without saying that at some point!

So far as the state of my WagnerQuest is concerned, we’ve got a nice little pattern going. Most of the days this week have begun with a little breakfast, see left (at first, squinting from across the street, I thought this place had a slightly different name and so took this photo for Juraj’s benefit):



After a light breakfast, we’ve typically been trying to get in some sight-seeing, as for example this church from 1170 (Danish architecture from this period is more preoccupied with light and space than some of their southern contemporaries):



Somewhere along the way there ends up being a little food excursion (Seneca, you might want to open a franchise of this fine establishment up in your hometown):



And then before you know it, it’s time to take the water bus, which leaves from the canal at Nyhavn (named for my college town of New Haven, formerly a lot of seedy fishermen’s dives, now more upscale restaurants and housing):



The water bus takes us and thousands of other Wagnerites over to the beautiful new opera house for the evening’s show:



We had a day off without any opera, yesterday, and so took a little adventure out of town and went up the north Øresund coast to Helsingør, known to Shakespeare fans as Elsinore. It’s not far from Copenhagen—about 45 minutes on the train—although it would have taken Hamlet a long time to get here from college down in Wittenberg. Across a narrow strait from Helsingør is the little Swedish town of Helsingborg. Ferries constantly shuttle back and forth between the two cities, and if the water weren’t so darn cold I bet you could swim it:



The castle itself dates from the Renaissance (although it was burned and rebuilt several times), when the Danes noticed that all traffic passing out of the Baltic Sea into the Black Sea had to pass through this tiny little channel, and thus they could get really wealthy by taxing every ship that passed by or blowing them out of the water if they failed to pay the tax. Reminds me a little of all the Ottoman and Italian castles protecting the narrow passage of the Bosphorus, north of Istanbul, which we visited five summers ago. Elsinore (its real name in Danish is Kronberg Slot) is, in fact, a really beautiful castle, much more so than you typically see when you watch a film or go to a production of Hamlet:



It doesn’t have much to do with Shakespeare’s play, however, despite the fact that they seem to be constantly producing the play on the castle grounds and in the nearby town. Shakespeare, everyone thinks, had never been to Denmark (although his patron, King James, had stayed at this very castle, which is where his wife Queen Anne of Denmark had grown up). Will merely revised an older play, which was itself a new version of an old story. But our knowledge that it never really happened didn’t stop us from shouting out our favorite lines from the play at every chance we got, photographing ourselves in the attitudes of the various characters in places where they might have been, and trying to find Ophelia floating in the moat:



After our Elsinore adventure we returned toward Copenhagen, stopping briefly in the town of Humlebæk to check out the fabulous Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (it began as the private collection of a wealthy art-collector, all three of whose wives were named “Louise”). Unfortunately we ran out of time at the Lousiana Museum, and so I can’t say I really got to enjoy all the museum was offering. But I did get to explore their fabulous sculpture garden, a particular interest since a) I’ve always been kind of interested in this art form and b) the Seattle Art Museum back home is about to open a huge new sculpture garden. The following photo shows my favorite sculpture I saw yesterday (I’m sorry, I didn’t get the name of the piece or the artist):



It’s tough, in a two-dimensional picture, or in blathery prose, to represent the extreme coolness of this piece. At the center of the marble sphere there are four windows, two looking out at the camera, both angled from top left to bottom right, but one on top of the plane and one below; the two windows that look to the woods are oriented in the opposite direction, since the plane back there is at perpendicular to the one on this side. Anyway, it’s really fun and makes you want to go and stick your head inside it, or pretend you’re an article of clothing and put yourself in the dryer.

On today’s trip, as you might guess, there was much discussion of the two Ring operas we’ve seen this week, and the singing, design, and concept so far. No one is absolutely convinced, but I’d say most of us are curious to see where director Kaspar Bech Holten and his team are going to take us. Between their feminist/matriarchal approach to the Ring, the popularity of Denmark’s Queen Margarethe, the new novel everyone’s talking about that’s supposed to hit Danish bookstores this morning (Peter Høeg’s The Silent Girl, apparently it too has something to do with rebalancing gender inequities), I’m not at all surprised to find a piece like this one in the Louisiana Sculpture Garden:



We had a very late lunch in the outdoor café at the Lousiana Museum, the best part of which was the view. The museum is situated on a bluff overlooking the Øresund; the sculpture garden extends out into well-landscaped grounds that sweep down to the water. In the distance is Sweden, now a little farther away than at Helsingør. Here are John and Laurel Nesholm, posing with John’s ancestral home of Sweden in the background:



John had been to the Lousiana Museum in 1965, and was enthusiastic about making another visit, even a brief one. Laurel enjoyed the museum, but was skeptical of the video art installations, especially the one featuring the drunken, portly Danish video artist whose ‘piece’ consisted of an endlessly protracted strip-tease which I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch. I think the creator probably hoped to call attention to the narcissistic process of the solipsist artist’s self-revelation. It reminded me more of the Star Wars Kid. For narcissistic self-revelation, I always say, nothing beats a blog!

So long, Arch

After singing in the performance of Macbeth in Seattle last Saturday night (as Lady Macbeth’s Doctor), Archie Drake had a major heart attack; he was taken to the hospital, held on for a while, but in the end gave up the ghost. Our Seattle Opera contingent in Copenhagen was extremely sorry to hear this news (we’d been getting updates on email all week), although in a way it’s what he would have wanted, because he was singing up until the very end.

Archie, pictured above in the role of Luther in Tales of Hoffmann (another great photo by Rozarii Lynch), was still singing at the age of 81 last week; he was a special favorite of the Seattle audience, and people were still commenting how great he sounded in these recent performances of the cursed Scottish opera. (Of course it was THIS opera that was his last.) I’ve always been extremely fond of Archie, who sang Lillas Pastia in my own first Seattle Opera production as title guy (Carmen in 1995). He’s been with the company since 1968, sung hundreds of roles, thousands of performances, and was always great fun to have around, as entertaining offstage as he always was onstage. One of his fondest memories was playing Wotan in a Seattle Opera Ring back in the 1970s. The director of the production was a great Wotan himself, bass George London, and apparently he understood that Archie wouldn’t make a career out of singing the king of the gods: London told Arch, “If you’ll change your name and grow three inches, I can make you a world-class Wotan!”

A few years ago I did an interview with Archie, obstensibly about the early days of Seattle Opera, but we ended up talking even more about his pre-Seattle Opera life. Born in 1925 on the North Sea coast of England, he had fought in the British Navy in World War II and after the war worked in the British merchant marine before becoming an opera singer and working up and down the west coast of the US in the 1960s. He lived a really fascinating life, and was a Seattle treasure. He’s reputed to have been working on some memoirs, and I have truckloads of material from this interview which was never published. It is my great hope that the story of his life will be told in more detail very soon.

In other news, I was happy to hear (again, via email) that my mother’s surgery was successful the other day and that she is once again walking without pain. I look forward to seeing her in northern Michigan, in a few weeks’ time.

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.)

Sightseeing in Denmark

Here’s a quick report on some of what I’ve seen these last two blustery, wet, cool days in this fabulous and weird country:

Canal Tour. We hopped on one of Copenhagen’s famous Canal Tours the other morning, which is always a great way to get a feel for any city. Denmark is mostly islands, and Copenhagen is on the large island of Zealand; the Øresund strait separates Denmark from Sweden, and the Copenhagen canals are basically extensions of the Øresund. The new opera house is built on an island across the biggest canal from the main part of the city, seen here from our canal ride:

After the tour we returned to the new Royal Danish Library, a building known locally as the “Black Diamond.” It’s cool the way it leans out over the water; as you sail by you can see the rippling of the water reflected in the glass and the black stone. I went to the library hoping to find a little free wireless, but alas! it’s not that easy in this city.

Roskilde Adventure. We took a train over to Roskilde, the ancient home of the Danish kings, a little city on lovely Roskilde Fjord. Here’s a photo of Speight Jenkins in the Roskilde Domkirke, paying his respects at the column which contains the mortal remains of one of Speight’s heroes, Harald Blue-tooth, the ancient Viking king who championed the conversion of the Danes to Christianity in 980 A.D.

Viking Museum. The reason I dragged everybody over to Roskilde is that I really wanted to check out the Viking Ship Museum, which was one of the great adventures of the year so far for me (the other being my first time ever scuba diving, back in February, in Hawaii, on a day that looked much like this one). Somewhere around 1070 A.D. the inhabitants of Roskilde sunk five old Viking ships across their harbor to slow down the attacks of Norwegian Vikings, and over the last fifty years archeologists, historians, and sailors have been having a great time digging up the remains and reconstructing replicas of the original Viking boats.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that while my obsession with Vikings complements my obsession with Wagner, I’m the only person I know who seems to care about both subjects. Wagner’s Ring operas are obviously inspired by the myths of the ancient Norse people, and the Vikings worshipped gods who are characters in Rhinegold. But most of the Ring fanatics I know find the literary background to the Ring unimportant. I won’t say it’s the key to the cycle, but I think it’s an important road into the work and a great thing to study in and of itself.

Below, Roskilde’s reconstructed Viking warship, which held 80 men and could travel from the North Sea to the Mediterranean in two weeks. (They’d all be kind of rank by the time they got there...but I doubt these guys were too concerned about making a great impression.)

An All-Danish Ring

One of the most remarkable things about this Copenhagen Ring cycle is that the cast is entirely Danish (at least as far as I can tell). The Ring features lots of roles (like around 30) and none of them are easy to sing. It’s tough enough just to put together a cast to sing the darn thing. And to do so only using singers from this one, admittedly productive, but quite small country is really remarkable. My sense after listening to the Rhinguldet tonight is that, had the casting director been working with people from all over the world, it’s unlikely that all these particular singers would have been engaged; but to restrict yourself to all Danish singers and even find a complete cast (two, actually, because most of the parts are double cast) who could simply sing the Ring speaks well of the state of singing and singer training in Denmark. We could probably do the same in America; I know we couldn’t if we restricted our search to the state of Washington, which is itself bigger than Denmark. Special favorites at tonight’s Rhinguldet included Stephen Milling (whom we’ve often heard in Seattle) as an adorably sympathetic Fasolt, and the charismatic Sten Byriel as a wild, white-haired, Willem-Dafoe-as-Green-Goblin Alberich.

The dramaturg at Det Koneglige Teater, Henrik Engelbrecht, gave a brief overview to the “concept” of this particular production for audience members standing in the lobby shortly before the Rhinguldet began; he intimated that the production would be about the 20th century, with Rhinegold in the 20s, Walküre in the 50s, Siegfried in 1968, and Götterdämmerung in the late 90s. He also suggested that if there was a message to their production, it could be described as ‘feminist’; ie the many horrors of the twentieth-century can perhaps be attributed to the male energy making all the decisions, and wouldn’t the world be a different (and perhaps better) place if only women were in charge? The expensive program for tonight’s opera also included a synopsis in English featuring such surprising plot points as “When Alberich sees the maidens adoring a handsome young man whom they call the Rhinegold, he feels even more hurt and angry. He kills the man in anguish and steals his heart” or “Wotan meets a woman, Erda, with whom he falls head over heels in love. She reminds him that life should be lived, and he soon realizes that love should not be traded for power” or “Wotan feels he must silence Loge: he knows too much. He transforms him from a god to pure fire.”

It’s probably way too early for me to sit in judgement on any element of this concept. The ideas are certainly interesting, even if they’re very far from the ideas that might have been percolating around inside Richard Wagner’s oversize head while he was thinking about this show.

What I notice about myself, attending a prodution like this one, is what a reactionary-traditionalist I am. I’ve never staged a Ring cycle myself; instead, I’ve attended four, written a set of titles for the whole thing, and made an hour-long children’s opera in English of tonight’s first chapter. But in my fantasy production, we always SEE whatever the imagery might be in the music. I believe Wagner achieved a miraculous synthesis of text and music, and would love to expand that synthesis to include the visual image as well. Thus, I get slightly bent out of shape by productions that not only don’t visualize what’s in the music, or the text, but that go out of their way to visualize something else instead. Example: in the first scene of this opera, there are several long passages of music illustrating stage action: Alberich the clumsy, repulsive dwarf chases three sleek, pretty mermaids around a riverbed. Let’s admit it: Wagner was asking for a lot, this is tough to pull off! It’s hard to make a baritone look like an ugly, scary dwarf; it’s really tough to make a trio of opera singers look and swim like mermaids; and to choreograph a movement sequence to this music which a) looks real, b) doesn’t get repetitive and boring, and c) is tense/dangerous/dramatically interesting is a tall order. BUT THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO PUT ON THE SHOW! I find it a cop-out, if, like tonight’s director, you tell everyone to sit in place during that music and wait until the end to re-enter the drama.

A few notes on the unusual things about the staging, for those of you who like this kind of thing. (You others, skip ahead to the bottom!)

- The swimming pool. The first scene was played in an empty swimming pool, with a bar at the bottom; Alberich was a guy at the bar foolish enough to think he could pick up one of three flappers. But of course, women cluster in numbers like that for protection, and he had no chance against the three of them. Cute staging bit: Flosshilde, in the third seduction, gets down on her knees and takes down his pants, as if she’s going to give him a blow job; then she empties the bucket of ice sitting on the nearby bar into his shorts. He then winces as he sings his terrible cry of “Wehe! Wehe! O Schmerz! O Schmerz!” and it was nice to see him in physical pain while he sang that anguished music.

- - The Rhinegold. The gold here in Denmark is an attractive naked man swimming back and forth in a little fish tank behind the pool; word on the street was he went up for a breath every time he disappeared from our sight. He was beautiful, and his first appearance—as the girls sing their wildly joyous cry of “Rhinegold!”—brought tears to my eyes. A really powerful and unusual image. And as the program implied, at the end of the scene Alberich climbed into the pool, stabbed downwards with a piece of broken glass, and the water turned red. I was happy to read, after the fact, that it was the man’s heart he was removing, ‘cause in the theater I couldn’t see it and didn’t know what body part it was.


- Fafner the Monopoly Man. Fasolt and Fafner enter by descending, in an elevator we didn’t know was there, from the construction site where they’re finishing work on the Empire State Building of the gods. Fasolt is a big, sweet, dumb, bearded worker-guy in overalls; Fafner is in a wheelchair, with a bow-tie and top hat, and has a ridiculous fat-suit pillow which didn’t look real. He reminds one a little of the tycoon caricature from the boardgame Monopoly; and a little of Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. I deeply appreciated the detailed psychology of the weird relationship between the brothers in this production.

- Alberich’s evil magic. Nibelheim was a mad scientist’s grand guignol dungeon, with various body parts hanging in sacks attached to generators, and, in the center, a large cylinder in which Alberich stood for his transformations. The dragon was nasty-looking, although I couldn’t say exactly what it was; it looked sort of like a larva, sort of like a white asparagus, sort of like a penis. The toad looked like a little plastic toy toad.


- Brutalizing Alberich. The ring in this opera tonight was no ring but rather a bracelet; to get it off the dwarf, Wotan ended up sawing off his arm with a knife. I thought this was probably overkill. It didn’t really scare me, since I had seen it coming, and was more grossed out than surprised. For the top of Scene 4 Alberich was chained, spread-eagled, in a 1920s basement/dungeon that reminded me of a hospital set from one of the Godfather movies. Wotan was increasingly unsympathetic in this scene, while Loge was increasingly pathetic and wimpy.

- Rhinegold stands or falls by its Loge. I can’t say I was a fan of this interpretation of Loge: he was a schlepp, a nabob, a bald guy with a comb-over who smoked way too much and seemed incredibly disorganized and useless as a lawyer. At the end, Loge replays the reel-to-reel tape of his interview with the Rhinedaughters (who sing, in a scratchy 1920s-style recording “Rhinegold! Rhinegold!”) and sings his ironic last line; and then Wotan stabs him with his spear. I wondered why we were jumping to the end of Götterdämmerung already; the program (and Wotan’s subsequent action, taking Loge’s notepad out of his coat and pocketing it) indicate that Wotan felt Loge knew too much. Perhaps, if they are both human beings. But that certainly isn’t what Wagner said; he had both of them gods, with Wotan more powerful than Loge. If the gods were human beings, then ordinary laws of human morality might apply to their behavior; and then you open a door to all sorts of trouble.

So in the end, I can’t say it was an entirely satisfying evening in the theater. But it certainly was interesting (it only sagged a little in the second half of the second scene, where—I find—Rhinegold usually sags), and we had a lively time eating salmon and drinking local Pilsner afterwards, arguing about the production and the singers.

oN THE oTHER sIDE

First impressions of Copenhagen: a wild, rainy, windy day; endless lines of bicyclists at every stoplight; a vast pedestrian shopping mall standing in for downtown; and, perhaps due to the excellence and fabulous-ity of design in this country, everything and everyone is fun to look at. It was wet when I got off the airplane, but it cleared off into a really lovely afternoon; Mary and I found our way to Nørrebro, a fun residential neighborhood a little north and west of downtown, and found (in the Assistens Kirkegaard cemetary) graves and memorials to those Great Danes Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard, and, of course, Hans Christian Anderson. (SIFF-type shot of Mary in the beautiful park-like cemetary at top.)

24 Hours in Copenhagen

Wow! Internet access up here in fair Scandinavia isn´t simplicty itself, as I had assumed it would be. A lesson for those planning on doing this kind of thing--not a bad idea to look into access each place you´re going before your trip begins.

In any event, SAS flies a great flight from Seattle to Copenhagen, the train system here is simplicty and beauty itself, and everyone in the city bicycles everywhere. Mary and I spent yesterday afternoon tearing around the city (found the beautiful Assistens Kierkegaard cemetary, where lie buried Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard, and Hans Christian Andersen), then rendez-voued with Speight and Linda for Tapas in the evening. This morning we took a canal boat tour of the city, then checked out the Dansk Design Museum and the wild new library, and, in an hour or two: off to RHEINGULDET!

Me and Richard

Before this goes much further, I want to say a thing or two about being a Wagner fanatic. 'Cause I obviously am one, otherwise I'd never be going on this trip; and if anyone is reading this you either a) are a Wagner fanatic or b) know Wagner fanatics and are probably a little curious and a little more suspicious about why we're so weird.

I fell under the spell of Wagner twice, once when I was a little kid, and again when I was an adolescent. If it hits you that early, it's hopeless; you're a lost cause. When I was 8 or 9, it was the stories, the characters and their cool names, and the sound of the music--especially the orchestra--that did it to me. I got hooked on the RING when the Chereau Bayreuth production was telecast in the US, back in the early 80s; and I had a recording with orchestral excerpts which I loved, and a big picture book of watercolors by Ul de Rico, which I still think are amazing and powerful.

When I was a teenager, it happened again...this time it was the Met telecast, in 1990, and a more adult experience of what's so remarkable about these operas--Wagner's unique fusion of words and music, where the sound is the story and vice versa, and the two are meaningless without each other.

Since then, the RING has never been far from the center of my life. I came to work at Seattle Opera because the RING is the company's signature piece; I've now worked through four RING summers at Seattle Opera (and two Februarys producing my children's adaptation of the RING's first opera), translated the entire thing for English captions, taught classes on it up one side and down the other, and I still always find it beautiful and fascinating. I'm greatly looking forward to hearing and seeing a production of the RING this week in the new Copenhagen opera house, Det Kongelige Teater. (Check out the link to learn more about the production.)

By the way, Wagner wrote some non-RING operas which are nothing to sneeze at, either. I came to those later, and to the bizarre story of his life, which (if you don't know it) is a wildly entertaining opera in itself. As a Wagner fan, all of this is important to me; but it's my relationship with the RING which makes me a fanatic.