Crapcore: ENO’s The Rhinegold reviewed

Tubas and timpani thunder in The Rhinegold as the giants Fasolt and Fafner, having built Valhalla, arrive to claim their fee: Freia, goddess of beauty and youth. It doesn’t go well. Suddenly Fasolt drops his defences and declares his yearning (the translation is John Deathridge’s) for ‘a woman who’d lovingly and softly live with us lowly mortals’. At those words the music melts, and a solo oboe sings a melody so poignant that Ernest Newman thought it worthy of Mozart. This is the first instance in the whole cosmic drama where Wagner gives us a glimpse, however unformed, of something that an adult human might recognise as love. It’s the first gesture towards the shattering moment in The Valkyrie when Brünnhilde gazes at the doomed and broken Siegmund and realises that his fearful, exhausted sister Sieglinde means more to him than all the glory of heaven.

It’s a moment, in other words, that contains worlds, and there’s no denying that in his new production for English National Opera, Richard Jones runs with it. Fasolt is played, with careworn dignity and an aching, oaken tone, by Simon Bailey, and you’ll rarely see him differentiated more fully from his grimly utilitarian brother. He makes an effort for Freia (Katie Lowe); putting on a tie, and offering a crumpled handkerchief to dab her tears. She, in turn, is presented as a backwards naïf, responding to Fasolt’s tenderness with desperate affection – an idea that receives no overt sanction from Wagner. Her horror at his fate is wrenching.

How this all works in the context of Wagner’s overall dramatic trajectory is another question – though whether that even matters any more is anyone’s guess. Reprieved from an Arts Council death sentence, ENO is now on starvation rations, and no one seriously believes that this Ring cycle will be completed.