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OPERA REVIEW
Reworked Rheingold Launches Ring Auspiciously
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By Thomas Grey
The mytho-operatic cosmology of Richard Wagner's Ring of the
Nibelung was given a solid foundation in Wednesday's performance of Das
Rheingold , inaugurating the four complete Ring cycles being given
during June by the San Francisco Opera. The production is a now
familiar one to veterans of the War Memorial Opera House, a
collaboration of German director/producer Nikolaus Lehnhoff and American
set designer John Conklin.
First seen in toto in 1985 (Rheingold and Walküre
were previewed in the summer season of 1983), and revived in 1990, the Lehnhoff-Conklin Ring has worn well, in general, and its 1999 incarnation includes a number of revised elements: Bob Ringwood's costumes, André Serban's stage direction, and some genuinely giant Giants, along with a strong, largely new cast since 1990. Donald Runnicles, who also conducted in 1990 (two years prior to becoming the company's full-time music director), has become a truly outstanding exponent of the Wagner canon. He has a considerable number of Wagner performances to his credit both here in San Francisco and internationally (including the Bayreuth Festival).
The principal veterans in the cast are James Morris as Wotan and
Tom Fox as Alberich. (Mark Baker, who sang Froh in 1990, also returns to
the role for this year's 3rd cycle and debuts as Siegmund in Walküre, and the 1990 Fasolt, Eric Halfvarson, returns now as Fafner, getting the better part of the bargain, at least as far as the Rheingold action is concerned.)
Morris's Wotan is by now a fixture of the international Wagner
repertory, on stage and in recordings. (His first Rheingold Wotan was in fact sung for the 1985 San Francisco cycle.) He now wears the role
like a comfortable old garment, in both good ways and bad. The
vocal-expressive intimacy he conveys with the part can be moving and
impressive, and he is still very much up to the grand perorational climax,
in his address to Valhalla at the end of the opera ("Abendlich
strahlt"-"So gruss' ich die Burg"). But at times, the garment can look a little faded (in contrast to the amazing technicolor dream-coat in which
this Wotan is decked out).
In this Rheingold Morris' Wotan is already the resigned, world-weary leader, both vocally and theatrically. (Wotan may have
his troubles from the beginning, but the Weltschmerz shouldn't really set in before Act 2 of Walküre at the earliest.) While Morris can use his trademark dramatic sotto voce to great effect, it can be abused. His opening lines in scene 2 (where Fricka wakes Wotan from his
dream-vision of the new Valhalla) were a touch too realistic; he sounded
as if he really were singing in his sleep, and not quite aware of the
conductor or the orchestra.
Tom Fox also traces part of his Wagnerian genealogy to this
production, having made his San Francisco Opera debut as Alberich in 1990.
He's done consistently excellent work, and seems to have a real knack for
investing baritonal villains with dramatic and musical life: Telramund and
Dr. Schön here; Pizarro, Klingsor, Iago, Scarpia, Nick Shadow, and all
four baddies in Les Contes d'Hoffmann elsewhere. (I look forward to his Klingsor in San Francisco next season.) His look here has been reconceived to match the original drab Nibelung costumes. Bald pate, powdered face, and stuffed with pillows of various sizes, the look was a little too close to Mike Meyers' Dr. Evil in "Austin Powers."
Altogether the villains were the heroes of this production,
musically speaking. (This is not so unusual for Rheingold, considering that the characters of Freia, Froh, and Donner are pretty much ciphers, while Fricka and even Wotan have to work hard to make a really strong impression.) Especially commanding was Gary Rideout's Mime. Even the more grotesque convolutions of Wagnerian Stabreim in Mime's text were delivered with impeccable diction, and Rideout met with considerable finesse the main challenge of Mime's part, supporitng his vivid vocal "character acting" (all those sighs, groans, shrieks, and quiverings) with consistently powerful, even "beautiful' singing.
Thomas Sunnegårdh as Loge was another high point. It's a dramatically grateful part, and Sunnegårdh made the most of that, sashaying about the stage in his flame-trimmed robe with supercilious abandon and shaking his fire-red palms at his various antagonists in jazzy Bob Fosse gestures that lent the character a kind of dapper, crazed charm. Serban and new costume designer Bob Ringwood have restored Loge as a flashy, fickle fire-god, abandoning the ineffective conceits of Loge as Victorian-era solicitor and as alienated Romantic poet, tried out in earlier versions of this production. (The earlier conceptions rang especially false in a production that otherwise eschews radical re-conceptualization of characters and setting.)
Another nice new touch was Loge's fluid choreographic interaction with Freia during the first part of his narration in scene 2, in which he sings the praises of "woman's inestimable value" that no right-thinking being would sacrifice for the sake of mere power. Throughout this and later scenes Sunnegårdh's supple, nuanced, and firm tenor realized this new ("old") conception of the role in a fully satisfying way.
The women were all more than satisfactory, too, though none of them
gets anything like a real star turn in this opera. Kristin Clayton filled
in ably as Wellgunde so that Elizabeth Bishop could take over the role of
Fricka from the indisposed Marjana Lipovsek. Bishop carried off the
assignment with aplomb. Her powerful, incisive singing gave Fricka the
degree of authority necessary to establish a plausible foundation for the
sway she will later exert over Wotan in Die Walküre, without sacrificing the glimpses of innocent cajolery and other more sympathetic notes allowed to her character, if briefly, in Rheingold. Nicolle
Foland (like Bishop, a former Adler fellow) brought a warm luster to Freia's music, and did her best to kept the character alive during the considerable time she is seen and not heard. Elena Zaremba's Erda was suitably husky and impressive (she is presented now as an older relation of the Rhine-maidens, themselves re-conceived this time as funky acquatic pop-divas with glossy high foreheads and seaweedy big hair).
Among the other men, the Giants (Halfvarson and Reinhard Hagen) were hampered by the new, genuinely gigantic giant-apparatus. Positioned somewhere inside 16-foot oversized puppet structures, their voices emerged with widely varying degrees of audibility according to the positioning of the figures (vis-a-vis the listener). Altogether the voices seemed sonically and spatially
ill-adapted to the physical image on stage--not so much the fault of the
singers, but of a scenic idea at odds with the basic demands of
music-making.
Jeffery Wells (who takes over Wotan in cycle 3) provided a powerful Donner. James Cornelison looked suitably regal and Apollonian as Froh (conceived as a "light god" in contrast to stormy Donner); but vocally he was the weak link in the cast, all the more apparent since his few significant moments depend on a bright, ringing, trumpet-like delivery.
The Lehnhoff/Conklin Ring offers an attractive, semi-traditionalist image
of Wagner's mythic world that is subtly inflected with traces of the
composer's own century. In this respect it is a compromise of sorts
between two of the most widely seen productions of modern times, the
1976-80 Bayreuth Ring of Chereau and the Schneider-Siemsen Ring still going
at the Met after some 10 years. But the 19th-century traces -- Caspar
David Friedrich's landscapes and Karl Friedrich Schinkel's architecture --
are very different ones than those in Chereau's production: idealized,
poetic, and allegorical images of early German Romanticism, rather than the
social realism (freely spilling over into the 20th century) of Chereau, for
whom any grandiose latter-day architectural motifs become suspect,
fragmentary, decadent.
The visual allusions in Lehnhoff/Conklin are alternately nostalgic, idealistic, theatrical, or merely aesthetic in
purpose. I, for one, enjoy looking at this production, but it's true that
I am not immediately provoked to think much about the moral ambiguities of
Wotan's dealings with the Giants, the Nibelungs, or his fellow Gods.
Still, it doesn't stand in the way of interpretation (unless we assume the
audience is fundamentally incapable of thinking without the aid of
heavy-handed cues from the director); and more importantly, it doesn't
distract from the stage action, the text, or the music.
The reminiscence of Caspar David Friedrich's "Sea of Ice" in the rocks of the first scene (the contours considerably softened here) makes no particular point that I can see, unless we are supposed to extrapolate from the half-visible detail of a shipwreck in the painting a reference to the
future "shipwreck" of all those hopes founded on the stolen Rhine Gold and
the Ring forged from it. The Gothic/neo-Classical architectural mix of
Valhalla, on the other hand, hints not only at Schinkel's Romantic utopias,
but more sinisterly at Albert Speer's architectural visions of Fascist
omnipotence. Wotan's moral position falls somewhere in between these two
places, and so we may have some reason, after all, to reflect the
ambiguities of that moral position.
More questionable are the stationary framing set of massive neo-Renaissance pilasters or portals, said to represent "a mixture of theater and nature" (they are in a state of partial decay, partially encrusted by some petrified root- or vine-like substance). I can scarcely think of any fixed scene element that would accommodate itself to every scene in the Ring. But this one was striking for its incongruity with nearly any scene, at least in Rheingold. (Why is it under the Rhine, or even on the banks? Why in front of Valhalla, though clearly not part of Valhalla? Why down in the bowels of Nibelheim, not generally known for architecture of any sort? Apart from the Hall of the Gibichung's perhaps, I am hard-pressed to imagine where it could be of any immediate service.)
The production boasts some striking moments, either new or
re-worked from before. At the beginning of the Nibelheim scene, for
example, the curtain comes up on a swarming mass of Nibelung bodies,
clothed in off-white baggy worksuits, who cover a vast lump of ore-laden
rock. The image is redolent of maggots swarming some rotted mound of
cheese or loaf of bread. So, this makes a pointed commentary while simply
"representing" Nibelungs at work, without resorting to the kind of blatant,
overdetermined allegorical images of so many contemporary opera productions
that immediately begin to pall once they've made there all-too-plain point.
(I notice some version of this image in the 1983 and 1990 program books,
but the effect seems to be much bolder in the present production.)
I had forgotten how effective it is when Valhalla suddenly looms full sized in the closing moments following the thunderstorm, having been viewed as a kind
of scale model before that. Its massive solidity of structure makes an
very apt visual counterpart to the massive, sonorous blocks hewn out by the
orchestra before and after the crossing of the rainbow bridge. (At first
there is a rainbow, but no bridge; later a rainbow "carpet" of sorts is
briefly projected onto the front steps of Valhalla.)
Among several apparently new details was a kind of "March of the Nibelungs"
created by having a procession of treasure-laden dwarves gradually cross
the stage to the incessant repetitions of the hammering Nibelungen motive
(following Mime's lament, "Sorglose Schmiede, schufen wir sonst"). The
blocking of the opening Rhine-maidens' scene was probably the most
successful I've seen. The scene initially appears to play on the surface of the water--in the background we see the sky, with clouds, and one can view the jutting rocks as rising above the river bed.
The Rhine-maidens' movements are impressively fleet, and all the more plausible as movements of amphibious creatures who are alternately under, afloat on, or above the water at different times. (Underwater Rhine scenes generally don't work, unless perhaps one were to revive Wagner's original 1876 swimming machines.) Only with the illumination of the Rhine Gold is there a stronger suggestion of being under water. Even so, the precise topography is left open.
The new Giants were visually striking enough, and effective up to a point. Some Kabuki-style stage-hands (kuroko) assisted in manipulating the
Giant-models, and the singers themselves are said to have been responsible
for "the head and torso movements." But the impossibility of showing facial movement or gesture on these large wooden-style facial "masks", and
the extremely limited hand gestures allowed by the hugely oversized arms
and hands made any co-ordination between their gestures and details of the
vocal parts essentially impossible. When Fasolt rebuked Wotan for moral
obtuseness in his business dealings ("Lichtsohn du"), his voice emerged as
much too faint and timid for the righteous authority of the words and the
situation.
The orchestra played for the most part splendidly under the
direction of Donald Runnicles (apart from a couple of brief but very
exposed gaffes in the horns and trumpets at unfortunately crucial moments).
The low brass gave wonderful heft and bite to various moments of
altercation between Wotan and the Giants. Runnicles swift tempi during
some of the orchestral transitions (and elsewhere) were well-matched to the
clean, sparkling, gem-like scherzando playing in upper strings and
woodwinds. The potential of the Rheingold score to lapse into discursive formlessness was generally kept at bay. These performances promise to be a fitting culmination to a century of Ring performances in San Francisco that began with Walter Damrosch conducting the Metropolitan Opera on tour in 1900 at the San Francisco "Grand Opera House," and an auspicious entry into the next century of opera here.
(Thomas Grey is Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is author of Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, and editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Opera Handbook on The Flying Dutchman as well as the Cambridge Companion to Wagner.)
©1999 Thomas Grey, all rights reserved
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