There is no experience faintly comparable to sitting in an opera house at the opening of Wagner’s Ring cycle, knowing you will be watching and listening to the whole thing in the space of a week. The opening E flat, especially when it emerges as it does at the Royal Opera in total darkness, the pit as well as the auditorium, is thrilling beyond belief, and as the music slowly begins to move the sense of being in at the beginning and not knowing what will happen is overwhelming, however familiar you may be with the Ring. Wagner’s dynamic instructions are very specific — at no point in the prelude should the sound rise above piano, though that is a direction that no conductor, almost, obeys.
At Covent Garden we were treated to a torrent of sound before Woglinde sailed in with her ‘Weia! Waga!’ which consequently sounded a bit of a let-down. The sense of the primal is crucial here, and it wasn’t helped by having Flosshilde wearing a cheeky hat and Alberich arriving in a boat. It is, admittedly, a hard scene to bring off, because some of the music is quite sophisticatedly seductive, but however it is done it must, in characteristic Wagner mode, give the impression of being momentous — just as everything else should, too. In this production, or anyway with these performers, that didn’t happen, mainly because Wolfgang Koch as Alberich failed to combine the qualities of lechery, frustration, misery and impotence which dictate his crucial decision to renounce love and go for wealth and power. Koch has a rich voice, but as the biggest dwarf I have ever seen he doesn’t seem threatening, and the rape of the gold, with whooping winds, wasn’t as alarming as it has to be.
When we rise to the gods, who seem already to be living in Valhalla, though Wagner’s directions — but why bother about them? — state that it is an open space on a mountain, Wotan greets not a just-finished building but the kind that estate agents describe as ‘well lived-in’, with well-worn leather chaise-longue and plenty of silverware. Fortunately Wotan, its most important inhabitant, is impersonated by Bryn Terfel, and he offers, in the two Ring dramas that I have so far seen, an overwhelmingly great interpretation of the role. The distance he has travelled since he last sang it at the Royal Opera is immense, but he is far more impressive even than he was last year in the Met’s Ring, now issued on DVD.
His voice is magnificent throughout its range, he is able to sing daringly softly, as he did, to stunning effect, at the beginning of his monologue in Act II of Die Walküre, but also to summon Loge at the end of the same drama with colossal volume. And his interpretation of the god’s character has deepened commensurately, so that we live his drama as we don’t anyone else’s, at least at this stage. And he has, in Sarah Connolly, the ideal Fricka. She shows us how complex the character is, just as eager to lay hands on the ring as a delightful adornment as she is to ensure that her sister Freia shouldn’t be used to pay the giants for Valhalla, still finding her husband attractive and making physical contact with him whenever possible. Connolly’s voice is now quite large, and incredibly lovely, so that Fricka takes on a fullness that we aren’t usually shown.
In an interesting note in the vast programme book, amplified in The Power of the Ring, the book by Gary Kahn (which contains many interviews with everyone involved in the projects, and is brilliantly illustrated by Clive Barda), Keith Warner compares Wagner with Ibsen — he isn’t the first: Thomas Mann made the comparison in 1933. But where Mann saw the collaboration of myth and psychology, and practised it himself in Joseph and his Brothers, Warner sees them as being at odds, and as a contemporary director of course revels in the contradictions, etc. to which he sees them as giving rise. Warner has a really astonishing number of ideas, some of them brilliant, some of them silly, and many of them just puzzling.
It doesn’t seem to me to be a good thing that one spends quite a large part of this Ring cycle wondering why on earth something or other is happening – quite often what on earth it is that is happening. For instance, in Act I of Die Walküre, as Hunding, played with dreadful menace by John Tomlinson, goes off to bed, he crouches behind the chaise-longue and cuts himself with his polished axe, emitting a cry of pain: a spot of self-harming, a sacrificial ritual, or what? At the end of the same act, when Siegmund is meant to perform the heroic act of pulling the sword Nothung from the tree (no tree, naturally), he jumps on the table but is unable to reach it, so the sword, which has wandered around the set throughout the act, slides down helpfully into his hand. That idea, of course, is to dismantle any possibility of heroic deeds. Many directors feel embarrassed in the face of heroism, but few manage to undermine it as systematically as Warner.
However: much of Das Rheingold was musically on an exalted level, and despite many bewilderments as to what was going on, and outrage that the Nibelungs didn’t appear at Alberich’s behest and run off screaming, also that at the very end Wotan jumped into a hole, Wagner’s power managed to come through to a remarkable degree. Die Walküre wasn’t so lucky. After a tremendous opening orchestral storm, the perversities of production, and the unevenness of the singing, meant that it was only fairly exciting, though the audience response suggested I was in a minority.
Act II, for me the Ring’s greatest, where everything comes together and falls apart, was undermined by the most perverse and inept staging of the fight between Siegmund and Hunding that I have seen, and, alas, by the inadequacy of Susan Bullock’s Brünnhilde. She is an artist I have often written about with admiration and affection, and I would give anything for her to be up to this role now, but her voice is simply lacking in the requisite size, it lacks colour, and she has to concentrate too hard on technical matters to live the role as she once could. But that didn’t stop the Farewell, climaxing in a full incestuous kiss, from being shattering, so long as you didn’t mind getting singed by all that Magic Fire.
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