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The New York Observer, April 26, 2011 |
By Zachary Woolfe |
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Wagner: Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera, 22. April 2011 |
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Bored of the 'Ring': Wagner’s Cycle Loses Its Shine in Robert Lepage’s Timid, Visionless Production
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Near
the end of Robert Lepage's production of Wagner's Die Walküre, which opened
at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual
beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections,
turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It's a breathtaking
transformation, one that encapsulates everything that's wrong with Mr.
Lepage's work.
This scenic shift takes place right after the god
Wotan has been forced, harrowingly, to disown his favorite daughter,
Brünnhilde. She lies on the ground in shock; he has turned away in grief.
Our attention should be fixated on the tortured pair as the orchestra swells
in solemn sympathy, but instead we watch in awe as the massive set—a series
of enormous, seesaw-style beams that together weigh about 45 tons—noisily
creaks its way upward. It's only after 30 seconds or so, when the passage is
over, that we remember that there are two people onstage in desperate pain.
That Mr. Lepage has chosen to draw us away from them at this crucial
interval turns out to be disastrously typical of his costly production.
Many people assume that the Ring is about size and splendor, but as Alex
Ross observed in last week's New Yorker, the cycle is ultimately not about
spectacle but is rather "a deconstruction of power, the dismantling of
grandeur." Tracing an eerily familiar story of the gods who want to hang on
to power at any cost, as well as those who can glimpse a new world order,
most of the Ring is, in fact, disconcertingly intimate—far closer to Ingmar
Bergman than to Cecil B. DeMille. And yet too often in the new production,
Mr. Lepage keeps giving us the DeMille—big, often gorgeous stage
pictures—because, you suspect, he's worried that the Bergman material isn't
enough to keep our attention.
In Walküre, the second of the Ring's
four parts, Mr. Lepage does some stunning things. As with his production of
the cycle's prelude, Das Rheingold, the beginning is a high point. He brings
the opening storm to vivid life: We are in a sky full of dark, rushing
clouds; then we are in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm; then we
are inside a hut glowing with firelight. It is sweeping and evocative,
showing off the set's much-touted ability to swiftly morph into the cycle's
dozens of settings.
So Mr. Lepage understands the mixture of
stylization and realism that can make us seem to see what we are hearing.
But far too often, his interventions undermine his cast's connection with
the audience. There's that scene change on the mountaintop, which diverts us
from one of the opera's most intense moments. Even worse, once the snowy
mountain is in place and Wotan and Brünnhilde confront each other with
heartbreaking candor, Mr. Lepage further undercuts the performers by
distracting us with projections of avalanches. These have no inspiration in
the libretto or score; they're just punctuation, something to keep us from
getting bored. But it's hard to imagine anyone being bored by one of the
most moving, riveting scenes in the opera, as Wotan finally forgives his
rebellious daughter before abandoning her forever.
A sure sign that
Mr. Lepage doesn't quite trust the text he's been given to interpret is that
the most effective of Wagner's radically extended monologues are the ones
with which he feels most compelled to interfere. To Siegmund's Act I
description of his troubled childhood, Mr. Lepage adds an unfortunately
Disney-ish animated shadow illustration of the story. Later, when Wotan
tells Brünnhilde the dark story of the Nieblung's ring, Mr. Lepage has an
eyeball emerge from the floor; onto it he projects, dutiful as CliffsNotes,
the narrative's key images. But when you have, as Siegmund and
Wotan, two of the world's greatest singing actors—the tenor Jonas Kaufmann
and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, respectively—you need to guide them and
focus their emotions, not distract from them or compete with them for the
audience's attention.
As in Mr. Lepage's Rheingold, the
performers seem largely to have, if anything, been left to their own
devices, a lack of cohesiveness not helped by James Levine's erratic
conducting, including a lethargic first act. Sometimes the absence
of directorial attention worked out all right: Mr. Kaufmann, an intensely
eloquent, intelligent singer, used his focused, dark tone to project
Siegmund's wounded cautiousness, his sense of isolation. The
mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, a resplendent Fricka, seemed more vocally
comfortable than she had in Rheingold.
But this is Wotan's opera,
dominated by his agonized monologues about his tragic lust for power, his
fears about losing everything. While Mr. Terfel sings richly, he could, with
the help of a more acute director, broaden his emotional range and turn a
powerful performance into an unforgettable one. The soprano Eva-Maria
Westbroek, making her Met debut as Sieglinde, seemed blandly generalized
before withdrawing due to illness after Act I.
Perhaps most
egregiously, Mr. Lepage hasn't helped to guide the soprano Deborah Voigt,
singing her first-ever Brünnhilde, past stock expressions of grief—fake
crying and awkward contortions—in the final act. We should always respect
the risk-taking that separates true artists from merely good singers, but
Ms. Voigt was disappointing. As always, she was a warm, tender presence,
pointing the text with clarity. But her tone has turned edgy and thin in the
past few years. She now lacks the vocal flexibility to capture all the
facets of this complex character, a task made more difficult in a production
allergic to complexities.
The only complexities are, alas, logistical
ones. Act I seems to take place behind a low wall, such that we only see the
performers from the knees up. The set was noisy throughout the opera, and
the huge planks bounced disturbingly as the singers climbed on them. On Ms.
Voigt's first entrance, she tripped trying to step onto a particularly steep
section, and Ms. Blythe at one point seemed terrifyingly close to stumbling
off the structure entirely.
These flaws, though, are minor and
fixable. The production's deeper problem is its utter lack of vision and
lack of trust in the intelligence and power of the work and the talented
cast. Mr. Lepage might justify his emphasis on visual splendor at the
expense of a deep reading of this rich text as a post-ideological reaction
to the grandly charged Ring stagings of directors like Patrice Chéreau. But
it looks more and more like he just doesn't have any ideas.
Next
season brings Mr. Lepage's Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Perhaps we should
be optimistic: As Wotan says in Act II of Die Walküre, "Things can suddenly
happen that have never happened before." But Mr. Lepage's Ring has thus far
been so opposed to the spirit of the cycle that the prospect of the final
two installments is more depressing than exciting.
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