San Francisco Classical Voice

Wotan and Erda are isolated in front of a stage-filling wall of rock, striations and fractures tracing its surface. Eva Podles as Erda slips out through a crevice and in the ensuing scene, instead of the traditional practice of keeping Erda apart from him as some unreal spiritual figure, Wadsworth makes clear their intimate sexual bond. Her motherhood is no figment of fiction. This intensifies the recriminations they both unloose, and eventually elevates Wotan's concluding resolve. As she had in Die Walküre, Podles sang in a world-beating contralto, an all-enveloping voice.

The bass-baritone of Greer Grimsley, the Wotan, was enlarged in this third opera, as he found deeper resonance and projected more directly. This greater vocal presence paralleled and enhanced what had been in process with Wotan. Paradoxically, as Wotan approaches the end of his powers, arriving at a clearer, more honest view of himself, he becomes stronger, and for the first time in this interpretation, almost noble.

In his encounter with the brash, unknowing Siegfried, the hero manhandles the god as roughly in deed as in word, throwing him to the ground, putting on Wotan's hat and wearing it mockingly. This striking take of the stand-off, usually not done so physically, is capped with Wotan's lingering at the exit to watch Siegfried begin his climb up the mountain's sheer face.

There are other unexpected turns. When Alberich shows up to witness the Siegfried-dragon show-down, he is no longer a creepy-crawly creature but grown up, fully erect, well costumed, a real force to be contended with. The encounter between "Light Alberich" and "Dark Alberich," with Wotan assuring his counterself of his neutrality in the competition for the Ring, was suave. The entire second act came off as a chain reaction.

The dragon was the most spectacular monster yet. Siegfried poked at the thrashng coils of the great tail visible at the cave mouth, not noticing the gape-mouthed beast, poison dripping from its slavering jaws, huge pteractodyl wing/arm looming behind, who has come aaround out of the unseen back door opening of the cave. Super sci-fi, as if out of the Lucas studios. The Forest Bird sequence was charming as ever, though the bird voice, Wendy Hill, was heavy for that and vibrated below pitch.

In Act I, the protagonists, the Siegfried of Alan Woodrow and the Mime of Thomas Harper, and the forging of the sword Nothung, were satisfactory, not particularly more. Woodrow made it in the high tenor range but on crossing the evident break in his register to a different baritone sound, was not always true to pitch. Similarly, Harper's low register is weak and, even up higher, is not one of the better projecting Mime voices. Dramatically, physically, they do their characterizations well enough, although the filing, forging and finishing sequence was routine, too much of it out of sight and gestural.

That Act I used the same "Olympic forest" setting that had served Das Rheingold. An enormous fallen log has been added upstage, also a roof over the cave (the former entrance down to Nibelheim) that now serves as Mime's digs. Act II was placed in a modified version of Die Walküre's Act II (lovers' flight and the battle). Birch trees were added to mask the cliff on the right. The opposing rocky mountainside on the left was pierced by the dragon's cave. Brünnhilde's rocky ledge (Act III, scene 3), was, of course, where she has been left sleeping at the end of Die Walküre, the real flames still flaring all around, turning off after Siegfried's appearance.

Brünnhilde's Awakening and Union with Siegfried was as climactic and exuberant as it could be. Woodrow portrayed the "awakened" Siegfried with the growing ardor appropriate to the story, if amusing as ever, given nature boy's previous lack of any contact with the opposite sex. Having guarded his voice wisely during this marathon role, Woodrow had sufficient vitality in the high to produce the rapturous lines. Jane Eaglen was her uppermost self vocally, dominant, sweeping and conquering in that extended duel of "Heil Dir!" phrases. She managed the tricky back and forth love-me-but-don't-touch me posture with a reasonable grace. At the beginning of the great love duet, Eaglen began at a pianissimo level not normally associated with her; and building from that, the pair brought the opera to a rightful radiant, exultant close.