|
OPERA REVIEW
A Satisfying Siegfried Renewed, With Surprises
|
By Thomas Grey
If Siegfried, the third installment of this year's Ring revival did not maintain the consistently inspired level of the preceding Die Walküre, it didn't fall far short of the high standard set by that, or by the opening Das Rheingold. And it boasted a welcome surprise in Wolfgang Schmidt's entirely creditable performance as Siegfried, a vast improvement over his ragged, strained Tristan during the last Fall season.
Bounding on stage on the trail of a particularly silly looking bear (the first of Siegfried's boisterous practical jokes at Mime's expense), Schmidt managed to maintain a reasonably solid and vigorous vocal presence throughout Act 1 and for most of the evening. Even more surprising, perhaps, he was able to come through with some genuinely heroic tenorial moments, especially at the very end of the first act (the climactic refrain, "Nothung! Nothung," to his series of forging songs) and across the strenuous final scene of Act 3. Granted, he was no match for the resplendent tones of Jane Eaglen's Brünnhilde in the final scene, as the sustained high G they trade off during the final pages of their great duet made readily apparent. But on the whole they did not come across as hopelessly mismatched, either.
From the first phrase of their duet, after Brünnhilde's solemn awakening, to the energetic ensemble coda (sustained G's notwithstanding), Schmidt measured up to Eaglen's vocal heroics about as well as one could expect Siegfried, that fundamentally problematic character, to stand up to the shining example of Brünnhilde. Elsewhere Schmidt's performance realized some hints of promise already faintly suggested by his Tristan performance last Fall, for all its problems: principally a knack for pensive declamatory delivery (related to, but less extreme or mannered than Morris's dramatic sotto voce). During the Act 2 "Forest Murmurs," for instance, when Siegfried reflects quietly on the identities of his unknown parents, Schmidt managed to convey a touching sincerity that went some way toward redeeming the hero's other, all-too-evident conceited and belligerent character traits.
Serban's revised staging of Act 1 did little to minimize those traits, if indeed such were possible at all, at least in the first act. In an attempt to get just a little bit even with the churlishly overbearing Siegfried, Mime spits several times in the "soup" he is brewing for Siegfried--a gratuitous touch, perhaps (especially considering that Mime has already poisoned the soup), but sort of amusing and, one feels, all-too-well deserved by the "high-spirited" (read: petulant and obnoxious) youth.
Serban's stage-direction added a few other new touches to the familiar high-jinks in Mime's forest cave, such as a large bunk-bed for the pair of unhappy (or at least mismatched) campers, to the upper level of which each one would flee from time to time in order to escape the other. But on the whole Serban and Schmidt faithfully observed all those traits in the young Siegfried, pretty much unavoidably inscribed in both text and music alike, that make him most difficult to stomach in his debut scene within the cycle.
Gary Rideout's Mime remained physically and vocally as engagingly theatrical, as in Das Rheingold. Particularly in the second scene of Act 1, when confronted by the mysterious Wanderer, Rideout's rendition of the hapless dwarf became a kind of amalgam of Lon Chaneyesque grotesquerie (part Quasimodo, part Dr. Frankenstein's assistant), twitching and slavering, or hopping about and rubbing his hands or head with glee according to the ups and downs of his perilous match of wits with his visitor.
Rideout's strongly profiled vocal and stage character was an asset in bringing out the counterpoint of Mime's comic scheming against Siegfried's forging songs at the end of the act. Equally important, Rideout invested Mime with a genuinely sympathetic streak when, for example, he recounts the episode of finding Sieglinde in the depths of the woods and in the fatal throes of her labor pains. Both Mime's narration and Siegfried's rapt response here underscored the fact that the young hero really does owe his life to the dwarf--a fact which Siegfried is otherwise scarcely able to acknowledge and which makes his behavior towards Mime all the less palatable.
James Morris and Tom Fox continued their strong representations of Wotan (here as "Wanderer") and Alberich, respectively, from Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. As the Wanderer, Wotan strode about the earth here in a dark-hued, layered set of robes that were appropriately ragged and regal at once. The world-weariness that seemed premature in Morris's Wotan in Das Rheingold was here perfectly in place. The Wanderer's three encounters in the course of the opera--with Mime in Act 1, with Alberich in Act 2, and with Erda (one last time) in Act 3--include moments of humor, gentle mocking, and even self-deprecation. But each one reaches a climax of grave seriousness as Wotan points to and/or accepts the course of the Gods' inexorable fate.
In his comfortable intimacy with this role, Morris does a good job of conveying Wotan's human face (and voice) and of shifting naturally back into
the register of divine gravitas, wrath, and clemency. In the Act 3 encounter with Erda, Wotan is already scripted as upstaging the dazed, confused Erda, but Elena Zaremba's rather unfocussed, lackluster portrayal of the earth goddess did little to challenge Wotan's pre-eminence in this scene. Likewise, the somewhat clownish aspect of Tom Fox's outfit as Alberich, and a portrayal that emphasizes the comic and even good-natured strains in the character over the sinister, left his appealing performance in Act 2, scene 1 very much in the shadow of Morris's commanding Wanderer.
The voice of the forest-bird at the end of the act (Suzanne Ramo)
warbled ludicrously. I couldn't tell whether this effect was natural or a result of some conscious manipulation connected with the amplification system. As Brünnhilde, Jane Eaglen has the good fortune to face the demanding final scene of Act 3 refreshed by a long, deep magic sleep, where she's been since the end of Die Walküre. Her clear, powerful singing throughout this climactic scene, and the contribution of the orchestra (which Wagner wields here to newly virtuosic effect) combined to make the wooing of Brünnhilde a fitting culmination to the first three parts of the cycle. (After some occasional, brief inconsistencies in the earlier acts,
the orchestra acquitted itself splendidly in the all-important third act--one
egregiously sour woodwind chord excepted.)
The stage settings offered relatively little by way of novelty over 1985 and 1990. One exception (if I recall the earlier production rightly) was a miscalculated re-visioning of Mime's forest smithy in Act 1 as a huge, solid-rock cavern giving out to a rocky, treeless wasteland outside by means a large cleft in the shape of an inverted-V. Not only is this new stark, stony image completely out of character with the remnants of Caspar David Friedrich landscape allusions elsewhere in the production, but the strip of bright desert sky that shines into the smithy throughout scenes 1 and 2 of Act 1 undermines the point of Mime's "hallucination" at the close of the
Wanderer scene, where he is suddenly blinded by a strange bright light from
outdoors, cutting through the dark foliage (and embodying the disorienting ray of enlightenment the Wanderer has just shed on his predicament over Siegfried, Fafner, and the sword).
Here the hallucination was realized as a sudden, phantasmagoric flaring-up of the smithy fires, hitherto unseen. Thus there was something, at least, for Mime to respond to, but it misses the real point of this episode. (It does, on the other hand, reflect one motif within Mime's hallucination--the fiery jaws of the dragon whom he hopes Siegfried will slay, while at the same time learn to fear.) The woodland glade in Act 2, which must be sinister and idyllic by turns, was more realistically conceived, based on the same misty fir-woods that backed the first act of Die Walküre.
Granted, Wagner's own vision of this scene (and that of many other Romantics) is dominated by ancient oaks, lindens, and other deciduous trees which contribute to the famous "murmurs" that accompany Siegfried's meditations on self and origins. But by comparison to the post-industrial blight that afflicts so many latter-day Rings, this setting was reasonably attractive and serviceable. The sizeable rocky outcroppings at either side of the stage were put to good use in concealing Mime and Alberich at appropriate points and as a platform for the Nibelungs to climb and descend, in keeping with their natural subterranean proclivities.
The vast, semi-decomposed dragon's head looks pretty much like it did before. Now it seems rather closer to scale with the newly enlarged Giants. The deft transformation of Fafner back into Giant form after his defeat by Siegfried (a fairly common directorial gambit) made perhaps the most effective use of the hulking, cowl-covered figure, which seemed in death to become one with the rocks themselves, in keeping with a familiar motif in giant lore.
The Act 3 settings were unexceptionable. Certainly more could be done in scenes 1 and 2 to suggest Wotan's ability to bar the way physically to Siegfried's access to the mountaintop. Apart from Erda's totemic egg-head that accompanies her ascension above ground, there was nothing much to look at in either scene, except a few stormy lighting effects. This production does make some gesture toward realizing something that is too often ignored, even though Wagner's music takes great pains to represent it: namely, the idea that Siegfried starts out at the foot of Brünnhilde's mountain, and has by the beginning of the last scene attained a sublime, rarified, empyrean height. (A still smaller projection of her rock at the end of scene 2 would have improved the effect.)
The final setting, atop the mountain (as in the close of Die Walküre) remains the same as before, minus the blasted remnants of a large pine tree, whose removal gives Siegfried and Brünnhilde a little more (welcome) breathing and moving space for their protracted courtship. Serban's direction remained here, as elsewhere, generally sensitive to the more important musical gestures and to the needs of the singers, without achieving
much by way of striking or memorable images. Still, it provided practical,
constructive support to the singing and playing of the scene, which are what make this one of the most all-time exhilarating finales in the repertoire.
(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
|
