Bayreuth, Germany — Some 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac coup, Richard Wagner built a theater here on a hilltop in northern Bavaria.
His voluminous, complex and innovative operas were never presented the way he envisioned them. He concluded that if he wanted to do them right, he would have to do them himself.
However, when the Bayreuth Festspielhaus opened in 1876, the premiere of his complete “Der Ring des Nibelungen” took place. This is his four operas about nature and power, fifteen hours of mythological tales in which gods, warriors, dwarves and giants appeared and spoke. Birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still not satisfied.
Among the most awkward (and inadvertently laughable) problems was the magical effect he sought. Transformation into a serpent; Valkyrie riding through the skies on horseback; Even with the development of 21st century stage technology, Wagner still struggles to make what is musically compelling visually and dramatically compelling.
Schwartz’s acidic, passionately played version of the contemporary dress is a “ring” with no magic or nature, all characters are human, their relationships are even more complicated than usual, and all of events are held at a single property.
While in the script, the dwarf Alberich temporarily turns himself into a dastardly toad, but that’s just a metaphor here. It is written in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyrie doesn’t fly, but spikes he’s heels, flame nouveau he’s roaming the waiting room in rich outfits and cosmetic bandages. The flawed hero Siegfried I was given a sword, or at least a shard similar to it, but it does nothing supernatural. (Weapons here are mainly pistols.)
All this is a work that reflects the demythologizing trend in Wagner’s staging, especially in Europe, over the past fifty years. One of the most influential of the era was made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of “The Ring” as an allegory of anti-capitalistism. The action is more or less set in the present, with the gods portrayed as members of the modern upper class. , the character’s nobility and courage are almost fake.
This was also the case with the last Bayreuth ‘Ring’ by Frank Castorff, performed from 2013 to 2017. Anguish that runs through the family. The rawness of his visuals and acting has a bit of soapiness in the daytime, and a little bit of “inheritance.”
If “The Ring” is an allegory (affordable for some conservative opera lovers, but a given for many directors), then the conceptual anchor for the production is the nature of gold. , the theft from the Rhine is a sin that drives the grand plot in the opening minutes.
Gold, and the powerful, poisonous ring it is molded into, symbolizes the commodity the world on stage cares about most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated in a globalized economy. I am saying that I need
His “ring” is filled with adults obsessed with looking younger through exercise, plastic surgery, and ridiculous attempts at fashion-forward clothing.
This obsession flips over to the ominous manifestations of child trafficking and abuse. Nibelheim’s Slave is a room full of identically dressed blonde girls painting at a table. (The girls aren’t overtly injured, but they’re clearly hoarded.) The Dwarven Mime’s Workshop is a spooky tea party and puppet show for ragged homemade dolls. In Schwartz’s most original and inspirational idea, Kim is not a piece of metal, but an actual boy, whose abduction embodies a society that has been entrenched in an attempt to outrun death.
Lifecycle is important from the beginning. The script sets the beginning of “Ring” under the flow of the Rhine, but instead Schwartz shows an animated projection of the womb where the twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and struggle. increase.
That image of the family’s basic claustrophobia is key to everything that follows, as the action unfolds both inside and outside Valhalla, home of the gods. , the evocatively changing lighting is by Reinhard Traub, and the ferociously crappy costumes are by Andy Besuch.) Giants destined to build lairs in scripts, here by chic architects. is. Glass deployment. Alberich is now not of a different race than Wotan, the King of the Gods, but his less successful brother.
The all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are ubiquitous in the estate, part of the watchful lower classes, and silver shining as the protagonists suffer. , Mime and Dissipated Gibbitchan, Gutrune and Gunther became the more depraved inhabitants of some of the properties.
The role of Wotan is played by the brawny Aegirs Thielin (“Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Walkure” and “Siegfried”) as he reaches out to the most vulnerable of women. In the second act of Valkyrie last week, Konietzny had an apt bourgeois mishap — Eames broke the back of his lounge chair and tumbled to the floor — so he sat down in the third act, Michael his Kupfer gave his Radekky a chance. Brilliantly dove in a few days before his manic turn as Gunter.
In “Siegfried,” the tireless steady Andreas Schagger sang the title character, subtly showing the lovable side of the drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilly was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and would have been impressive without being so dramatic.
“Walkure” was by far the most vocally brilliant performance of the week, notable for Klaus Florian Voigt’s pure and frenzied Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s gentle, rolling Sieglinde. Daniela Koehler sang brightly in Brünnhilde’s short but esoteric part in “Siegfried”. On the longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung”, Irene Theorin worked hard on staging, but her loud voice wobbled under pressure.
Conductor Cornelius Meister, who stepped into the production just a few weeks earlier to replace an ill colleague, led a steady, wisely paced, somewhat deadpan reading of the sprawling score.
There’s a lot about Schwartz’s staging that’s obvious, even blatant, yet memorable and lyrically ambiguous. Appearing regularly throughout his “ring” are small glowing white pyramids within glass cubes. Sometimes the character carries it, sometimes it sits next to a piece of furniture or in a corner, but it’s never explained or elaborated on. A stylized sword or spear tip. Purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and after the complexity of reality. It is essentially an enigmatic, evocative series of poems.
Similarly, paintings of typical Wagnerian faces with winged helmets appear one after another. These are made by the girls in Niblheim. Then, “Götterdämmerung. Do they represent the weight of tradition in presenting the ‘ring’?
Thankfully, it’s not specified. Nor is there any sense of the ubiquitous horse figurines and toys.
A giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) is being shaped on his deathbed at home. Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and his Hagen (Albert Dohmen) face each other on a dimly lit stage. Hagen leaves in a slow, mournful dance, swinging Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.
And at the end of Valkyrie, instead of Brünnhilde sleeping in a ring of fire, we see Fricka’s (Christa Meyer) final attempt to reconcile with her husband Wotan. He walks away, leaving behind a single candle as the curtains close, nodding to the libretto fire that captures the emotions and moments of the music in a fresh light.
Their ecstatic duet in the first half of “Götterdämmerung” forces Siegfried to forget his love for Brünnhilde, for there is no medicine to betray him cruelly. must be staged in an unconvincing way as a battle that motivates his bitterness. Brünnhilde wanders aimlessly, cradling Grane’s decapitated head, lying next to the murdered Siegfried, lying at the bottom of the estate’s drained and dirty pool.
Instead, the real coup in “Götterdämmerung” is the realization that the kidnapped Rheingold boy has grown up to become a resentful and ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, Schwartz’s staging sees him treating Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the script) as callously as he does. The wheels of terror and abuse keep turning.
And the final image of the work is a reprise of the first image. Twin fetuses again, but this time seemingly peacefully embraced. Will that peace continue? Or does birth inevitably bring a rebirth of resentment, betrayal, and violence?
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Until August 30th at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. bayreuther-festspiele.de.
