They were still there long
after the last showing of Kung Fu Panda 2, the vampire-tracking
Priest (in 3D!), and The Hangover 2 had released
their meager midweek audiences out beneath the canted neon crown of the
Regal Cinemas into the wasteland of a mall parking lot ringed distantly by
stubby pines and, somewhere beyond this residue of the natural world, the
street lights of a gloomy subdivision.
Of the fourteen theaters in the muliplex all were now
empty except this one, its audience assembled not for a sneak midnight
preview of the latest offering of the interminable Harry Potter
series or for some summer blockbuster that prematurely burst its marketing
shackles, but for something else entirely. The moviegoers were still taut
with attention after five hours, and thundering strong down the home stretch
of an overblown and addictive 19th-century music-drama by Richard Wagner
named after the virgin barmaids of Valhalla: The Valkyries. On
flying horses these armored beauties transport the bones and accessories of
fallen warriors to the festive hall of the gods where these daughters of
Wotan serve the heroes mead and reindeer tenders with lingonberry chutney
from the IKEA gift shop.
But in the multiplex seats facing this widescreen
Wagnerian music epic, the drink-holders were empty and few appeared to have
the nerve or inclination to gobble Good & Plentys in order to keep the
system stoked with stimulants past midnight. Instead, the necessary
infusion of energy was provided by the singing of a cast of international
opera stars and the potent charge of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra under
the direction of James Levine, soldiering on through the nearly six hours of
Die Walküre despite what appeared to be a great deal of physical
discomfort stemming from a pair of recent lower back operations.
And then there was the now famous—or, depending on who you
ask, infamous—multi-million dollar, computer-controlled contraption of two
dozen flapping and floating planks, a super elaborate construction devised
by the cycle’s director Robert Lepage. Although cleverly conceived and
imaginatively deployed in the first installment of the Met’s Ring
quartet, Das Rheingold, which premiered this past Fall, the
Machine, as it is was dubbed by the Met staff and musicians, did not seem to
pay compelling artistic dividends in its first outing. A highly speculative
investment even by New York standards, this most complicated and costly
technology in the history of opera, itself the most expensive musical
pursuit ever dreamt up, finally hit the jackpot in the sublime encirclement
of the sleeping Brünnhilde in a ring of flame at the close of Die
Walküre.
The box office of this past Wednesday’s evening
rebroadcast of the live transmission from the Metropolitan Opera House even
outperformed the neo-Nordic silliness of Disney’s Thor, as I
ascertained in an fact-finding mission during the second Walküre
intermission. It’s true that a Met simulcast on a few hundred screens
worldwide hardly measures up to the nearly 4,000 American theatres that
screened Thor; but the latter demonstrates that heroic exploits of
macho Vikings with big swords still holds monetizable fascination for boys
and young men, and that Wagner is unlikely to overtake Hollywood in
gross receipts any time soon.
Yet Wagner’s appeal appears far more diverse. The robust
simulcast audience had lots of old folks, whom one presumes generally didn’t
stay up this late on a Wednesday night; there were also middle-aged couples
out for a romantic evening; newly minted college grads; and a goodly number
of high schoolers. So resilient is the Wagner cult that it can thrive in an
environment more inhospitable to culture than even Brünnhilde’s distant
outcropping—the American suburbs.
I’ll have to admit that prior obligations prevented me
from making the 6:30 kickoff to this best of the four operas of the Ring.
A middle school research fare and ensuing gathering at an ice cream place
called Purity—a name brings with it an unintended Germanic overtones—had me
sliding into my high-backed multiplex seat just before ten o’clock. Although
at the simulcast itself two weeks earlier I’d opted not to go because I’d
missed just the first twenty minutes, I couldn’t stay away from the third
act given this rare second chance. Wagner is a big beast, and even a few
slices can fully fortify one with enough gloom, guilt, and ravishing song
for the bright summer months ahead.
Given the throng that showed up for the rebroadcast, I
could only find a place way down front and to the side, so that I had to
work my gaze across the screen like a search light scanning the sky for
aircraft—or perhaps panning over a stormy sea for opera juggernauts.
Moored to the right of the screen was Sieglinde in the perfectly cast and
clad person of Eva-Maria Westbroek. She’d just expired in a heap of remorse
and self-pity, having committed the double-barreled sins of incest and
adultery, and then run off with her brother/lover Siegmund leaving behind
her husband Hunding, who had offered the subsequent home-wrecker Siegmund
refuge and hospitality in the opera’s first act. Even prone on the
floorboards, this Sieglinde radiated naiveté and desire; there she was being
tossed by the storm surge of emotions, as her heaving breast made clear.
Nearby Jonas Kaufmann’s Siegmund prowled the
wilderness into which he had been flung. For all its heavyweight
operatic talent, abundantly embodied in the persons of Bryn Terfel as Wotan
and Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde, Kaufmann appeared the first among equals;
his German singing is pure—there’s that word again!—and evocative and in his
voice are huge stores of a sound that is never forced and perfectly projects
the Wagnerian mix of blinkered heroism and uncontainable, illicit love.
Brünnhilde soon arrives to provide some couples-counseling
for the runaways. Sieglinde is pregnant with the next generation of low-IQ
superhero, Siegfried. It’s a Teutonic Planned Parenthood session: chainmail,
and long and wavy red hair of a distinctly un-Aryan appearance all around,
from Wotan on down, and brother and sister with an Über-bun in the oven.
The part of Brünnhilde lies low in the voice, a range that
suggests this quintessential Wagnerian heroine’s tough resolve, which, of
course, is figured as masculine according to the wandering gender criteria
of the sometimes cross-dressing composer. Voigt cut through Wagner’s
unsettled motifs like a dark steel blade. But the natural beauty and
profundity of Kaufmann’s tenor, with its varied and luxurious vibrato and
soaring power, is like ore dug directly from German earth. He’s utterly
compelling and natural musically, and from this sonority flows the
nature-boy guilelessness together with that peculiar emotional neediness
that only heroes have.
Act Two culminates in a rare bit of swashbuckling action.
Brünnhilde decides to go against her father’s command and to protect the
young couple rather than whisk Siegmund alone off to Valhalla. When the
cuckolded Hunding shows up and Siegmund gets ready to do him in with his
trusty sword, Nothung, Wotan appears and shatters his son’s weapon, and
Siegmund is slain by the revening husbandof Sieglinde. But there is
also a contest going on for the attentions of the audience—Terfel, Voigt,
and Kaufmann fighting it out vocally. Unlike on the Nordic battlefield, one
doesn’t have to choose a victor, but if one did, the horned helmet would go
to Kaufmann.
Escaping to the wings of the Met stage for the second
intermission, Voigt was greeted by Placido Domingo, one of the hosts, and
primo uomo of the debonair. As Voigt came at him in her
figure-enhancing breast plate with tight-fitting chain-mesh sleeves, the
great tenor bobbled his reading glasses (who wouldn’t?), and as he went to
retrieve them said, “I‘ve lost my glasses between your …” It turned out the
spectacles had in fact fallen to floor, but the preposition “between” and
the dangling possessive pronoun “your” that followed seemed unambiguously to
refer to her breasts. Thus the high Wagernian drama of filicide was
immediately followed by one of the great off-stage comic moments in the
Met’s simulcast still-young history, though it would have been even better
if the genial Domingo had actually fished out his Prada glasses from the
above-mentioned décolletage.
After some suave words between Domingo and four of
Brünhilde’s Valkyrie sisters, the third act began with the famous Ride, the
maidens each astride one of the the Machine’s planks with reins affixed to
the distant ends—a kind of cross between a long board and the Grand National
Steeplechase. Even though the audience in New York along with a few in the
multiplex applauded this most famous set piece, I didn’t buy the look of it,
though the joisting of singers and orchestra was terrific stuff. Lepage’s
machine seemed yet again prone to the gimmicky.
The Valykries sisters are a more than a little surprised
when Brünnhilde shows up not with the body of Siegmund, but with the
grieving, heaving Sieglinde. An angry Wotan soon enough tracks down
his rebellious daughter and strips her of immortality, and threatens to put
her to sleep on a rocky promontory, presumably to be ravaged by the next
marauding Goth. In the end this loss of honor would be too much for
either father or daughter to contemplate, and Brünnhilde convinces Wotan to
encircle her in flames so that only a real hero will be able beat the heat
to rescue her. In a most opportunistic bit of plotting worthy of
Hollywood—where Wagner would have made a killing—this farfetched set-up
paves the way for Sieglinde’s unborn child to ride in for some
cross-generational incest (Brünnhilde is Siegfried’s aunt) to be followed by
the final conflagration of the world after eleven or twelve more hours of
opera. All this and more will be offered simulcast audiences in the next
final two Ring operas to be broadcast next year.
While the few minutes of Kaufmann I heard convinced me
that a lavish niche in the Wagnerian Hall of Fame should immediately be
prepared for him, Terfel and Voigt also gave epic performances—tormented,
resolute, magical, and devastating. At the curtain calls I could have sworn
Terfel was already sucking on a richly deserved lozenge to try to salve
vocal cords laid siege to by Wagner’s unrelenting lines. Terfel was
impressive musically as he was physically in simply enduring at such high
levels of intensity. Neither he nor Voigt shrunk from the demands of their
parts, but pushed them to their limits and occasionally beyond.
Final musical and moral negotiations between Wotan and
Brünnhilde condemn her to sleep within the flames, and he exits leading his
daughter. Both of them then appearing at the top of the Machine which slopes
downward towards the lip of the stage. Brünnhilde’s face is covered by
her opulent curls—a ready-made sleep mask—and Wotan fixes her feet to the
two central planks. As the frolicking fire and soothing sleep music
are shadowed intermittently the by ominous leitmotif of Destiny, the central
planks tipped forward, with the outer ones splaying to suggest both the
rugged terrain and the jagged teeth of the flames. Finally, Brunnhilde was
suspended upside down, her shield covering her bosom, her fiery locks pulled
downward by gravity to reveal her slumbering face as she was encircled by
the darting glow of lush lighting effects in orange, brown, and yellow.
It was Gustav Klimt meets the Summer of Love meets
Thor.
There is no more mighty a crown for the middle of the week
than Wagner’s Walküre. So exhilarating was this final act alone
that as the audience promenaded across the asphalt to their own magic
steeds, one suspected that only a bit of Wotan’s magic would get them to
sleep any time soon. If ever the suburbs needed a late night Mead bar, this
was the night for it.
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