Any article about a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle has to begin by saying that it is the supreme challenge a company can face, and how much more so when the company is based in a remote foreign city, and flies in to mount the tetralogy a few hours after it has been performing something else in its home base. Wagner’s great epic is usually performed, even in Bayreuth, with two breaks of a day each between the second and third and the third and fourth parts. The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg, however, arrived last week in Cardiff to perform the Ring on four consecutive evenings, as Wagner originally hoped; but it’s almost never done that way, in the first place because of the immense strain that it puts on the singers of the three largest roles, Wotan, Siegfried and Brünnhilde.
Valery Gergiev has a way of handling such problems, as he does of handling all problems, it seems. Just avoid having the same singers each night. One could feel that what is gained on the swings here is more than what is lost on the roundabouts. And what happened is that there were three Wotans (two were intended, but the Rheingold Wotan, scheduled to sing the Wanderer/Wotan in Siegfried, was ill so we had a further one); two Brünnhildes, the first surprisingly turning up again as Erda in Siegfried; and two Siegfrieds; in fact two of every important character who appears in more than one of the dramas, so no sense of continuity there. Even so, we were given the chance of spending a major part of consecutive days being present at the biggest of all music dramas, even if a fair amount of that time was spent waiting for each act to begin. And the Wales Millennium Centre is an ideal location for concentration of the kind that is demanded from both sides of the footlights: spacious, delightful and comfortable to be in, with superb acoustics (at least from where I have heard things).
As must already be clear, Gergiev has a fairly large selection of singers to hand, and this Ring, or something pretty much like it, was first mounted in St Petersburg in June 2003, and has been taken extensively on tour already, and will continue further. Gergiev collaborated, too, in the ‘production concept’, with George Tsypin, a Russian who lives in New York; the two men have, according to the programme, ‘a special creative relationship’. Tsypin designed the sets, too, presumably working closely with the costume designer Tatiana Noginova, since it is often hard to say where the sets end and the costumes begin.
The stage is dominated throughout by huge anthropoid figures, I should think over 30 feet tall, about which or whom Tsypin writes, ‘I had this strange epiphany and I saw these enormous figures — I don’t know if they are gods or giants…. So it became this amazing device where you could, without really illustrating every scene, really create a different atmosphere.’ The figures are sometimes headless, sometimes they have equine heads, sometimes human, sometimes wires or veins stick out of their necks. When one of them lies full length, it serves as Brünnhilde’s rock or one of the other essential ingredients in staging the Ring. Sometimes they tilt forward, as if taking a vague interest in the action. Nor are they the only figures around. There is a collection of inanimate penguin-sized figures that periodically glow; and a team of eight or so runners or dancers who appear at unexpected moments, sometimes to do nothing in particular, at other times, with red plumage, for example, to stand round and nod vigorously as the flames round Brünnhilde’s rock. They more or less ensure that no one on stage feels lonely. Another unusual feature is that there are nine Rhinemaidens instead of the specified three.
Coping with these elements that might have surprised the creator of the Ring has evidently exhausted Tsypin’s energy. There is no attempt at directing the singers. If they’re tenors, they are left to stand at the footlights, centre stage, arms outspread, and sing to the audience. There is very little contact between the characters: after Siegfried has kissed Brünnhilde awake he sits with his back to her while she solemnly greets earth and sky. Both of them, as also Wotan in Die Walküre, have such trouble clambering over the recumbent ‘god or giant’ that there is no time for acting. Nor, on the whole, is there any indication that if there were it would be put to good purpose. For one thing, German is a language that these singers evidently don’t understand and certainly, for the most part, can’t pronounce. Instead of using the texture of the words to shape the vocal lines, what emerges most of the time is a consonantal blur, providing what legato line there is in the musical account of the work The Siegfried in Siegfried clearly has only a glancing acquaintance with the music and the words, and sometimes seemed to be making them up. As to the Siegfried in Götterdämmerung, I can’t say: I was so depressed, upset, by the end of the previous drama that I couldn’t face sitting through a travesty of the Ring’s longest and greatest drama. By not seeing it I know that I missed what must have been a most impressive if not wholly idiomatic performance of Waltraute’s narration, since Larissa Diadkova, playing that role, had also been Fricka in Die Walküre, and there she gave the one completely compelling demonstration of dramatic singing in the three parts I did see. She has a thrilling, huge voice, and a startlingly authoritative manner.
The Wotan in Das Rheingold was nothing special, but sang to a decent provincial level; the other two it is best not to speak about. The Loge of Vassily Gorshkov became the Mime of Siegfried, and both his performances were worthy. Why, in what on the whole seems to be a ‘mythic’ presentation, Mime should wear a tail coat I can’t imagine, but Alberich does, too, looking foolish and inappropriate beside the old-fashioned garments of the others. Brünnhilde wakes in a becoming off-the-shoulder breastplate with armpit-length black gloves; the males mainly wear biblical-style robes. But all that apart, the general musical level, both from singers and from the conductor, is so underpowered, reveals so little grasp of the dynamic of the score, that the whole thing can only be accounted the most large-scale artistic disaster I have ever encountered on the operatic stage, something for its spectators to forget and for its performers to be ashamed of.
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