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Opera Today |
John Yohalem |
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Wagner: Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera, (28.4.2011) |
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Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera
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There’s a lot to be said for lowered expectations. After last fall’s
cramped, over-busy staging of Das Rheingold, I was prepared for a rough
night at Die Walküre—and enjoyed the occasion very much, the staging, the
direction, most of the singing, even the costumes.
If I’d attended
the opening, I might have been less pleased. A friend whom I met at this,
the third, performance clued me in on all sorts of changes, not least in the
improving command of his music on the part of Bryn Terfel. On the third
night, there was only one major machinery mishap: Siegrune (Eva Gigliotti),
broke the straps that held her to her bucking “horse,” and landed with a
thump in the trough behind the forestage. She leaped (nothing broken!) into
the wings, and when (after, no doubt, cursing and moaning mercifully
inaudible to us) she bounded back onstage for a war-cry or two, there was
applause. At the Met, audiences take the singer’s side against malicious,
high-concept scenery. This may not be true at other performing venues.
Die Walküre has always been the most popular drama of Wagner’s Ring,
performed far more frequently than the others. The doomed romance of
Siegmund and Sieglinde is the most moving human relationship in the entire
cycle, their undeserved doom winning our deepest sympathy, and Wotan’s
tragedy is nowhere made more manifest than in his renunciation of
Brünnhilde, the daughter who has been his second self. Parents, children,
lovers, loners, schemers who fail—everyone who falls into any of those
categories, or sympathizes with one of them, will feel the terrific pang in
Wagner’s matchless musical setting of these situations.
The questions
I always ask before the curtain rises on Die Walküre are, first, can these
singers sing it properly? That is, beautifully, with enough breath and power
for the theater in which they find themselves, and can they act, so that the
lengthy debates of Acts II and III hold our attention? Then, what pitfalls
will the director fall into? Will Siegmund start fondling Sieglinde the
moment he sets eyes on her (which always makes me feel sympathetic to
Hunding) or will their physical communication be only by eyes and exchanged
drinks until their climactic embrace at the end of the act? They are two
people who have never been able to touch anyone all their lives, and this
first contact should mean something, should come only after we know their
stories, anticipate their destinies. Then, how will Brünnhilde’s
transformation from unfeeling goddess to sympathetic woman during the
“Todesverkündigung” duet be manifested? And will the director and the
singers be able to make sense of the end of Act II, where Wagner has given
them far too cluttered a set of events to perform? And, last act, lacking
real flying horses and real magic fire, how will they indicate flying horses
and magic fire?
A great deal of the answer in the Met’s new
production, by Robert Lepage, depends on special mechanical effects created
by lights, projections and twenty-four “planks” that perform as athletically
as anybody. You may remember them from Das Rheingold, as the roof of
Alberich’s cavern and the staircase down to it from Valhalla, the bridge
towards that castle and its monumental walls as well. This time around, the
planks portray the rustic insides and (later) the slate roof of Hunding’s
hut, a snowcapped mountain (getting all the icier with Wotan’s chilly mood),
eight cavorting steeds in the Valkyrie Theme Park™, a tulgy wood or two,
heaving in the wind, and a stage-wide winged bird-beast of prey. They are
also the plasma-screen projection TV of Siegmund’s bardic imagination, and
that’s going entirely too far—savages racing about like animated cave
paintings are mere kitsch and as unnecessary as subtitles. Just listen to
the leitmotifs and Wagner will tell you exactly what’s going on. Lepage also
provides a gigantic plastic eyeball (programmed for light show!) to
illustrate Wotan’s narration, and a spectacular ram’s head-armed High
Victorian settee for Fricka, but rarely did I feel in Act II (as I had with
the cave paintings) that he had gone too far, illustrating what simply did
not call for illustration. Many of the meditative sections of Wagner’s great
drama were indeed meditative: The music, the singing, needed no specific
illustration because the music, the singing, were the drama, and what it was
about. I wasn’t sure Lepage had got that important Wagnerian memo; perhaps
he has.
Was Lepage or some less exalted figure responsible for the
moving around of the humans in this staging? Someone has paid attention to
the psychological underpinnings of the drama, which is an excellent thing.
Though there are certain things I itch to tweak, in many ways it is an
improvement on earlier stagings, even the sacrosanct Schenk production.
Siegmund’s rush through the forest (those planks again!) was quite alarming,
and can’t be easy to render safe. It will also exhaust the average tenor,
but then, he has a time to catch his breath before singing again, and he
spends it lying across the Hundings’ hearth. Sieglinde, who has been out
gathering wood, finds him there and touches him, gingerly, to see if he’s
still alive. At this, Siegmund seizes her hand—plainly the reflex of a
hunted man and no flirtation. Later, Hans-Peter König—not merely a bass of
golden age vocal stature, who only has to open his mouth to remind us how
fallen, in other categories, is the modern Wagnerian estate, but also the
funniest Hunding ever—ambles brutally home, tosses his bearskins on the
sword-hilt conveniently sticking out of a tree, and, without looking at him,
sticks his spear across the stranger’s chest as if to say, “What the hell is
he doing here?” The focus on the scene that follows is, correctly, not on
Siegmund so much as on the portrait of an unhappy marriage that Siegmund has
interrupted.
I’ve always hated the salacious impulse of modern
directors to have Siegmund and Sieglinde flop down and do it on the kitchen
floor as the curtain falls on Act I. Surely she loathes her unhappy home,
Hunding might wake at any moment, and Siegmund’s whole message has been:
There’s a great big world full of springtime and love out there! Let’s go
and enjoy it! Wagner says they rush out into the night, and I’m with him.
So, happily, is Lepage, for as we watch, the planks that have been the inner
wall of Hunding’s hut turn into the slate roof, and we’re out in the woods.
Excellent.
In Act II, the planks became a sort of mountain platform
with a cavern beneath, and on this floated Stephanie Blythe, our Fricka.
Though sizable, Blythe has never had the slightest difficulty racing about
the stage and up and down reasonable obstacles, but Lepage has not been
willing to risk this. He gives her a motorized wheelchair with rams’ heads
on the arms (in Norse mythology and in Wagner’s text, Fricka drives a
chariot drawn by rams), and here she must sit and discourse with Wotan.
Being Blythe, she has no problem acting in this contraption: seething
goddess, neglected wife, yearning erstwhile lover, implacable lawyer (G.B.
Shaw said Fricka represented the Law to Wotan’s Church). I found rather
touching her extension of a hopeful hand to defeated Wotan, and his
sarcastic kissing of it. The next “effect” was the popping up from the
cavern under the rocks (the planks again) of a circular plastic “eye,” a
screen on which Brünnhilde watches suggestive videos while Wotan tells her
his tale. Cute but kitsch, and unnecessary.
For the
Todesverkündigung, we were back in plank forest, but nothing much should
happen during Siegmund and Brünnhilde’s stichomythia, at least until its
conclusion, when he takes up the sword to slay Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, in
stopping him, unknowingly becomes human herself. Here Deborah Voigt abruptly
deflected his blade with her shield, and disarmed him with her spear. It was
startling, as the moment should be.
I’ve rarely seen the scene that
ends Act II staged with all its elements clear and visible, gods “hovering”
protectively over mortals, a lot of weapons-play, witnesses to things
incomprehensible if not invisible. And how many Brünnhildes can pick up all
the pieces of broken Nothung and get Sieglinde offstage in the allotted
time? Lepage managed most of it to a thrilling degree. Hunding and his men
simply did not “see” Wotan or Brünnhilde; nor, so far as we could tell, did
Sieglinde, motionless until the moment Brünnhilde (whom she has never seen
before, remember) addressed her. Wotan strode forward with his spear to
break the useless sword in Siegmund’s hand, then stood back to allow Hunding
to strike the death blow. Siegmund died cradled in Wotan’s arms, reaching,
touchingly, to the face of the invisible father he has barely known. Then—a
little too hurriedly, methinks; he should have godlike dignity even in his
wrath—Wotan chugged off stage in pursuit of his errant daughters. It seemed
to me that there were far too many men around, Hunding’s confederates but,
in fact, Lepage’s crew. There is nothing for them to do, no reason for them
to move, and they neither moved nor sang. Two or three would fill the bill.
And so to the scene that is usually a snap: Wotan kisses Brünnhilde, her
godhead falls away, she sinks sleeping into his arms, and he lays her out on
the mountaintop before summoning the fire to surround her. Here, Lepage let
his ambitions for a startling tableau run away with him, adding many an
unnecessary complication in order to produce an image that, while
impressive, even chilling, hardly seemed worth the bother. We should focus
on Wotan and his feelings (lovingly described by the orchestra); instead we
are distracted by the sight of the snow-covered mountain sinking into the
earth, the spear-cradled Valkyrie (a body double) carried to the top of it
and hung upside down as we, presumably, witness from above, in dolly shot.
It’s quite a coup de théâtre, but aren’t we attending an opera? Shouldn’t
the emotional focus of the story be Wotan’s feelings, and not: How does she
stay up there?
The singing ranged from good to spectacular—alas, the
best of it came from the two least loved of the figures onstage, Fricka
(Stephanie Blythe), rock solid but warm and womanly, and Hunding (Hans-Peter
König), who opens his mouth only to caress the ear, reminding one of Kurt
Moll, Matti Salminen and the other Wagnerian basses of more golden ages. The
weakest link was Sieglinde, Eva-Maria Westbroek, a handsome woman and a fine
actress with a large, womanly instrument, who sang “Du bist der Lenz”
consistently flat and her final triumphant outburst in Act III all over the
place, never consistently anything or anywhere. She’d been suffering from a
cold a week before, at the opening; perhaps it lingered, unannounced. In any
case this was not an enjoyable Sieglinde.
At my first Die
Walküre (Nilsson, Jones, Vickers), forty years ago, a veteran of many Rings
beside me turned to her friend and said, “Such a pleasure to see a Siegmund
and Sieglinde who actually resemble each other.” I think Vickers wore a
blond wig, actually. At this latest one, Westbroek and Jonas Kaufmann seemed
to be wearing curly chestnut wigs—in any case, the resemblance of these
tall, slim persons in dark garb (especially when they first warily looked
each other over, profile echoing profile) was striking enough to seem
uncanny, as Wagner desired—score for the Met’s wig and makeup department!
Kaufmann, currently one of the world’s most admired tenors but one whose
voice had seemed a little small for the Met even against a Traviata
orchestra, gave us a darkly baritonal, cautious Siegmund, meeting nearly all
the role’s challenges with full weight. The “Wãl-” in his Act I-concluding
“Wälsungen Blut” was flat, as if his strength had given out by that time,
but the invocations of “Wälse” earlier in the act were stirringly done. He
seemed to have the measure of the Met’s acoustics and to know just how far
he did not need to push to be heard in a suave “Winterstürme” and the
ominous phrases of the Todesverkündigung. His ability to race through quite
a dangerous little maze of log palisade/thick forest, to fight almost
credibly with a broad sword and to die with an anguished gaze on the
father-god who has betrayed him won him a deserved ovation.
I’d been dreading Deborah Voigt’s assumption of the role of Brünnhilde, and
I still wish they’d find someone else for it, but she managed a decent,
B-level Valkyrie, devotedly acted, and she looked terrific in a costume
carefully modeled on the Victorian armor and silken flounces of Amalie
Materna’s creation of the role at Bayreuth in 1876. She brought the proper
emotions to her singing, the exultation to the war-cry (no trills of
course), a sense of inexorable doom to the all-important Todesverkündigung.
But Voigt’s voice these days suggests little in the way of color, of metal,
of shine; half the time she scrapes it over gravel. It is the ruins of a
voice and therefore, though she gives an enthusiastic performance, it does
not sound heroic. This is less painful in the long, narrative stretches of a
Wagnerian part than it was in lyric Puccini last December, when she was
simply a gray, blank space on a colorful canvas; in Wagner she is able but
uninspiring.
Bryn Terfel seemed inadequate to Wagnerian power in Das
Rheingold last fall, but either his health has improved or he has devoted
more attention and energy to the far longer and emotionally deeper Wotan of
Die Walküre. There were moments (such as the beginning of his Act II
narration) where his bad habit of acting, spitting, thrusting lines rather
than singing them proved briefly tiresome, but by and large this was an
honest, forceful, intriguing performance, one that holds proper weight in
the opera, with real lyricism when he dwelt on the springlike love of the
twins or his youthful ambitions, and in the long last exchange with the
desperate Brünnhilde. His diction was excellent, he never fell back to
crooning as he has been known to do when singing Mozart. His acting was full
of intriguing touches, like the unloving kiss he forces himself to place on
Fricka’s outstretched hand, nor did the wobbling planks beneath his feet
give him the slightest insecurity. He played an imposing if unlucky king of
the gods with conviction and authority.
James Levine was too weary to
climb up to the stage at the end of the festivities; the singers applauded
him from the stage apron. Other indications that he has changed were
apparent. For one thing, he kept the surge of Wagnerian power at a low
simmer: His singers never had to fight to be heard. This is new. Perhaps it
was a concession to the less than godlike power of Kaufmann and Voigt, but
Levine has never made such concessions before; he has usually been a
conductor you had to fight for stage attention. Many a glorious note has
risen clear and singing over the years to the front regions of the top
balconies of the Met’s horseshoe, inaudible in the orchestra seats. If this
was a new control, a new generosity, it was very pleasing in Row M. If there
was less of an emotional swell to the final parting of Wotan and Brünnhilde
than one likes to feel, let’s be generous and credit the awkward new
staging. But I’m strongly tempted to go to another performance, somewhere
high in the Family Circle, to check my perceptions of the Wagnerian
temperature, usually at white heat in those polar regions.
If the new
Rheingold made one wonder about the Met’s priorities and the advisability of
the entire endeavor, the new Walküre makes me look forward with interest to
the remainder of the cycle.
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