San Francisco Classical Voice

The 2001 Seattle Ring got its own "second chance," of sorts, when British tenor Richard Berkeley-Steele stepped in to do the whole of Siegfried's part in the third and fourth operas of the cycle. (During the first cycle he mimed the role for the originally cast Alan Woodrow. Woodrow had sustained a serious leg injury at the last minute but sang the role from the side of the stage.) Berkeley-Steele's youthful, nimble physical account of the role was a welcome change from the customary stolid renditions.

Berkeley-Steele's voice itself was agile, clean, and dramatically well modulated in the first scene of Siegfried, if also distinctly tentative. Still, in the forging songs at the end of Act I, Berkeley-Steele compensated with kinetic stage activity for a vocal performance that had some trouble holding its own against the roiling orchestration of the scene (not to mention the noise of his own hammering). Act II, where the role is more about action and dialogue, provided some respite for him. By Act III he managed a valiant performance in all respects, under the circumstances (which included, of course, Jane Eaglen's Brünnhilde).

If not quite a match for Eaglen in the punishing final scene of Siegfried, Berkeley-Steele easily bested Philip Joll's Wotan in their confrontation at the foot of Brünnhilde rock. (With a few exceptions, as in the climax of his monologue in Walküre, Joll lacked focus and the declamatory power required by the part.) The audience enthusiasm that greeted Berkeley-Steele's curtain calls at the end Siegfried was more than just moral support.

Energized by this success, perhaps, Berkeley-Steele negotiated the daunting continuation of the role in Götterdämmerung with aplomb. This was more evident in the final act than in the Prologue, where Eaglen inevitably upstaged him vocally while his energetic prancing was underscoring the limitations of her stage movements. (Under Wadsworth's direction, though, Eaglen managed to infuse Brünnhilde with flashes of charm and vitality.) Elsewhere, the fast tempos favored by Franz Vote in the cycle's many dialogue and narrative passages served his voice and stage manner well, as in the brief balladesque "memoir" he delivers prior to his murder by Hagen ("Mime hiess ein mürrischer Zwerg").

Richard Paul Fink's powerful, deftly characterized Alberich continued to dominate his scenes in the final two operas, which encompassed the Nibelung's several encounters outside Fafner's cave in Götterdämmerung.

As Hagen, bass Gabor Andrasy, on the other hand, was too innocuous a villain to command the scenes in the Gibichung's hall in the way Hagen ought to do. In the assembly of the vassals in Act I, the following vengeance trio, and the scene of Siegfried's murder in Act III, Andrasy's Hagen fared better, thanks in part to Wadsworth's dynamic staging. (A kind of moving-frieze effect of chorus and extras in the background gave the crowd scenes of Act II a splendid energy matching that of Wagner's music.)

The murder scene and the final confrontation of the Gibichung family, when Siegfried's corpse is brought home, were imbued with a level of violence that suggested operatic verismo. The connection was reinforced when Gutrune (Marie Plette) solved the question of what ultimately becomes of this character by taking up the dagger Hagen has just wielded against Gunther and doing away with herself on the spot. Plette's bright, full voice captured Gutrune's self-deluding girlishness in the first two acts, but she also managed the transition to tragic despair in the final scene.

Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley (a name Wagner might have devised if he'd written a Ring with English characters) was a capable Gunther, though sometimes a bit hollow and reedy. Nancy Maultsby's warm and penetrating mezzo sustained dramatic interest in a slowly paced rendition of Waltraute's narrative in Götterdämmerung as well as in the confrontation between Erda and the Wanderer opening Act III of Siegfried.

In these, as in most of the fraught dialogues of the Ring, Wadsworth managed to engage dramatic attention through careful, thoughtfully observed behavioral details. A favorite device of his was to reveal unsuspected bonds of sympathy between apparent antagonists. Wotan, in particular, seemed able to find a good side in everybody in this production. Siegfried and Gunther expressed more than the usual contrition at the murders they are involved in. Siegfried prattled affectionately with Fafner's tail, before he discovered the head (drooling quantities of toxic slime) looming behind him. Altogether, Siegfried's antic high spirits actually came across as such, rather than as a boorish petulance that so often alienates.

The visual novelty of Thomas Lynch's sets wore off somewhat, even though his recycling of them in a number of later scenes was done in thoughtful, resourceful ways. The mountain stream setting, bordered by a high rock wall and a forested path, in which Siegmund and Sieglinde fatally tarry in Act II of Walküre, returns as the "Neidhöhle" set for Siegfried's encounter with Fafner in the next opera and finally becomes the scene of Siegfried's own demise in Act III of Götterdämmerung. (As the site in which Siegmund, Hunding, Fafner, Mime, and Siegfried each meet with a violent death, the setting becomes "leitmotivic" in its own right.)

The forest glade occupied by the gods in Rheingold is resettled by Mime and his smithy in Siegfried. The spot of Fasolt's murder there is now subtly marked by a bed of red flowers. An imposing rock wall cut in the side of Brünnhilde's mountain exposes geological strata suggestive of the accumulated mythical strata of Wotan's story. This wall backs the Wanderer-Erda scene in Siegfried, and again the scene with the three Norns, symbolizing — better than does their rope — the sense of inexorable, foreboding destiny.

Given all the questions raised by Wagner's attempt to bring closure to his sprawling epic, surely no single staging will satisfy critical-minded Wagnerians as getting it absolutely "right." Wadsworth's rapid, multiple transformations at the end of the immolation were by turns both surprising and predictable, witty and moving. It was delightful, if somewhat perplexing, suddenly to discover the gods reassembled underwater (Valhalla as Atlantis?) after the Rhine-maidens had caught the Ring tossed away by Brünnhilde.

It was also rewarding just to see them using their swimming gear once again, this time with Hagen's drowned body bobbing gently alongside. Odd, though, that Valhalla could still catch fire under these humid conditions, with the signs of its conflagration somewhat halfheartedly projected on a scrim. The final image of nature reborn was an apt one to conclude this Ring, reminiscent, at any rate, of the end of Tannhäuser, with the Pope's staff sprouting its redemptive greenery.

Here and there Vote still opted for unusually broad tempos, notably in the almost painfully protracted transition following "Hagen's Watch" in the first act of Götterdämmerung. But balancing such moments was the opposing tendency to speed along the many declamatory bits, whether monologue or dialogue. Despite increasing signs of fatigue in the brass, the Seattle Opera Orchestra continued to provide an impressive background, and brought out a rich abundance of detail suitably matched to the production's visual style.

(Thomas Grey is chairman of the Music Department 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.)

©2001 Thomas Grey, all rights reserved