chi su quel seno
2005-02-17 10:26:27 UTC
http://www.nytheatre-wire.com/lt00092t.htm#2
A CONTEMPORARY BAYREUTH RING-
Wonder & Flimm's 20th Century Saga of Greed
"That is why the new Bayreuth Ring production of director Jürgen Flimm
was only the Second Big Topic on the hill this past summer. Some
humorists, however, wondered if it would become known as the Wonder
Ring, or the Flimm [-flam] Ring.
Curiously, though every Wagner fan refers to the 1976 Centennial Ring
as the "Chereau Ring," the most recent Ring is clearly "Rosalie's
Ring." No one thinks of calling it the "Kirschner Ring," after its
director, Alfred Kirschner.
There is even a beautiful new book about "Rosalie's Ring," with
stunning production photographs and Rosalie's set & costume sketches.
Published by Hatje/Cantz, it's titled quite simply rosalie/Bilder zum
Ring. In case you are wondering [that word again!], the lower case r
is a stylistic choice. And this charming, innovative artist also chose
not to continue calling herself her birth-name, Gudrun Müller.
Even though this avant-garde artist's unusual and colorful designs
earned that Ring Cycle her name, that did not happen to Richard
Peduzzi, who certainly gave the 1976 Ring its very special "Look."
Possibly, many who say they admire the Chereau Ring either cannot
remember who designed it, or never knew.
The "Wonder Ring" has a very fine sound to it-rather like the Magic
Ring. The "Flimm Ring" has no real ring to its sound at all. For
English-speakers, the director's name also sounds too much like
phlegm, or flim-flam. Neither of these has pleasant connotations.
That puts him far out in front of Flimm, in terms of
brand-recognition. The projected book on Flimm's concepts about the
staging of the new Ring will appear only at the end of the year.
Promised from Propyläen, it is already titled: Götterdämmerung/Der
Neue Bayreuther Ring.
Conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli, Flimm, Wonder, and costume-designer
Florence Von Gerkan will explain their guiding production concept[s].
The total absence of an essay by a lighting-designer-Manfred Voss is
credited with all the lighting at Bayreuth-says something about the
perceived importance of stage-lighting on the impact of a production
on the Grüner Hügel.
This new volume also promises to be something of a justification for
the philosophizing and psychologising of Flimm's two ingenious
dramaturgs-who clearly are more responsible than Flimm for some of
the
visualized sub-texts they believe they have discovered.
These clever fellows are Udo Bermbach and Hermann Schreiber. Flimm
admits they saved him a lot of reading about theories concerning the
Cycle's possible meanings, academic and media critiques, and
descriptions and reviews of past Ring productions.
The book will probably have to take the place of a color video of this
impressive production. That is most unfortunate, for it is not only
powerful musically, but also in purely theatrical and psychological
aspects. But no one buys videos of operas anymore-at least that's the
word from record-companies. Not 960 minutes worth of Wagner...
Flimm, Wonder, and Company had their work cut out for them. In German
opera-theatres, the greatest challenge to designers and directors is
mounting a new production of Wagner's Ring Cycle. This is so not only
because it involves a sequence of four operas, totaling some 16 hours
of performance.
The really major problem is how to eclipse what has been done before.
This is especially true at the Bayreuth Festival, founded by Wagner in
1876, with a purpose-built theatre to provide a unique showcase for
his works.
With the resumption of the annual festival after World War II, the
brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner-dedicated to Modernist
innovations in design, staging, and technology-chose to call Bayreuth
a "workshop." And the distinctive style of Wieland Wagner's
idiosyncratic designs and stagings of his grandfather's operas became
known as "New Bayreuth."
This had a profound influence on opera design and staging-and not
only
for Wagnerian Music-Drama-for several decades. After Wieland's
untimely death, however, it became clear that startling and seminal
new ideas would have to come from outside.
The "Chereau Ring" of 1976, largely designed by Richard Peduzzi,
became a new standard of innovation and experiment. More recent Rings
have been distinguished by the design insights of William Dudley, Hans
Schavernoch, and Rosalie-the first woman ever to design the entire
Ring. All of these important artists your roving reporter has
interviewed on Bayreuth's Grüner Hügel.
When Wolfgang Wagner announced that the new Millennium Ring would be
staged by Jürgen Flimm, with sets designed by Erich Wonder,
speculation was rampant. How could Wonder top the Ring he had already
designed for the Bavarian State Opera in Munich?
Wotan's daughters-the Women-Warriors called Valkyries-zip into the
space-ship on rocket-powered scooters. Quite an update from the winged
horses Wagner had envisioned!
Obviously Wonder could not be more Futuristic than this. Nor did he
want to try, for the new Ring. He explains that he was at that time
inspired by SciFi and Steven Spielberg.
Working with Flimm-former director of Hamburg's Thalia Theatre, noted
for the human quality of his productions-Wonder has concentrated on
creating a series of inter-related scenes, in which basic set & prop
elements reappear throughout the four operas. This not only emphasizes
continuity, but it is the major indicator of a design style.
Flimm says the Ring should be seen, not as four operas, but as a play
in four acts. He views the Ring as a very contemporary and cautionary
saga: "...of a world ruined by corruption and unscrupulousness, a world
of political careers, full of lust for power and murderous conflicts
between generations." So he and Wonder have devised an almost
Post-Modernist landscape in which to play out this tragedy of Gods and
Mankind.
For Flimm, Wotan is a modern monster, an adept of Realpolitik, who
breaks his own laws and kills his own children to increase his power.
"In comparison," Flimm insists, "Kohl is a Garden-Dwarf."
As Flimm and his dramaturgs have noted: "A dramaturgy of locations
determines the scenic landscape." In the first-and shortest-opera,
Das
Rheingold, Wonder and costume-designer Florence Von Gerkan seem to
have begun visually where Patrice Chereau and Richard Peduzzi left off
in 1976.
Their vision was a fantastic mixture of Myth and Industrial
Revolution. In the new Bayreuth Ring, Wotan is still lusting for
power, to keep what he has and seize even more. But his wardrobes-and
those of his fellow gods-have been updated to the Edwardian era. At
least in the prologue-opera of Rheingold. In the following three
operas, when considerable time has passed, fashions of the Thirties
and today mingle comfortably.
Flimm's emphasis in staging is not on Wagner's larger-than-life
characterizations in his music and libretto, but rather on the
all-too-human frailties of gods and men, as revealed in the actions
and passions of the singer/actors. The result, both visually and
emotionally for the audience, is of an abstracted modernist reality,
populated by people they can recognize from TV and the daily
headlines.
If Wagner's music were not played at all-thanks to Flimm's subtle
direction, the ingenuity of the designers, and the almost unsuspected
acting talents of the singers-this new Ring would still be an
immensely powerful and moving theatre-experience.
Alan Titus, as Wotan, was a revelation: not only vocally, but also in
the scheming authority and devious character he projected in his
physical and emotional interpretation of the role.
And he was very well-partnered by Birgit Remmert as an intractable
Fricka-with a fierce moral authority of her own. Oddly enough, she
reminded me of the late Winifred Wagner, though this Fricka would
certainly have told Hitler that his Thousand Year Reich was an even
more disastrous idea than building Valhalla.
Last spring at the Met, Placido Domingo seemed ageing and fading as
Prince Danilo. This summer at Bayreuth, years melted away as he became
the desperate Siegmund, always on the run-but desperately in love.
This impressive change may well have been inspired by Flimm's personal
direction-bringing out nuances in the character and encouraging
Domingo to make them physically and emotionally real-instead of just
singing about them.
Some German Wagnerites still disparage Domingo's sung German and
attempts to sing Wagner roles at all. I could understand his German
quite well, while some other German-speakers in the cast were not at
all distinct.
But it was his Sieglinde who stole the spotlight. Waltraud Meier was
contracted to sing the role in the Second Cycle, as she had the
premiere. But she was already embroiled in a bitter dispute about
rehearsal schedules with Wolfgang Wagner.
Wagner issued a special letter to the press, explaining the Festival's
position. It appeared that Meier's fans could forget about seeing and
hearing her at Bayreuth in 2001.
In the event, we didn't even get that privilege in the second Die
Walküre. Only the day before the performance, she got a note from her
doctor to prove she was sick. The next afternoon, Cheryl Studer was
heart-breaking as Sieglinde.
Because all the performances thus far had obviously been very
carefully rehearsed in acting terms for the human depths of the roles,
some of us assumed she must have been previously rehearsed as well, as
a potential cover for Meier. The performance was so assured, so
moving, it could not have been a last-minute walk-on!
But it virtually was. She told colleagues she'd been on the beach at
Marbella the afternoon before, when the call came from Bayreuth. She
took to the air and arrived on the hill sometime after 2 am. The rest
is opera-history. She was superb.
With far more taxing vocal, dramatic, and physical demands made of
her, Gabriele Schnaut was also impressive as Brünnhilde. Also
admirable in their special roles were Ricarda Merbeth as Freia and
Mette Eising as Erda.
Older Wagnerites were offended by Wolfgang Schmidt's lack of the
Heroic as Siegfried. But his rough working-class appearance and rowdy
behavior was just what one might expect of a contemporary lout, raised
in filth, poverty, and ignorance, with no schooling or manners.
Don't any of these old-timers ever read the libretto? Siegfried has
had a dwarf for a foster-father. And only a vague longing where a
mother should have been.
Like Parsifal, he is a Tor, almost a simpleton. Though not a Holy
Fool, alas. And he learns nothing from his tragic life-experience. He
is the Instinctive Primitive Man: willful, selfish, quarrelsome, and
boastful. He is, in fact, ultimately boring when dwelling on his
heroic exploits in song.
But enough about the wonderful singing actors. What about the Erich
Wonder wonders on stage?
For the initial scene-with the three Rhine-maidens frolicking at the
bottom of the River Rhine-Wonder has devised three ancient
ship-wrecks
for their antics. They wear smart raincoats over their snug
bathing-suits.
At the end of the Cycle, when the golden Ring is finally returned to
them, a projection shows the Rhine-bed laden with sunken World War II
battle-ships!
Throughout the Cycle, Flimm and his designers make a strong visual
point of the pairings of contrasting characters like Wotan and
Alberich, Siegmund and Hunding, and Siegfried and Hagen.
Tables with architects' plans stand before a scrim showing the
incomplete high-rise. Entrances made behind it, down
scaffolding-steps, are visible, suggesting the insubstantiality of
Wotan's plans and schemes.
The invention of the elevator made skyscrapers feasible, a fact not
lost on Erich Wonder. Even in the depths of the Rhine, there is an
elevator-cabin on a cog-rack reaching up into the flies. This is one
of those design elements which recurs.
As in Wagner's libretto, there is a serious financial crisis for Wotan
& Co. Cost-overruns mean Wotan cannot pay the builders, the giants
Fasolt and Fafner.
Wotan has to let them take his wife Fricka's sister, Freia, as a
hostage against final payment. Without her mythical golden apples, the
gods promptly age, verging rapidly on decrepitude.
Loge, the trickster God of Fire, urges Wotan to go deep into the earth
to take the Rheingold from his opposite, Alberich. Loge's costume is
the epitome of an Edwardian sporting gent. Flames run down his arms,
and smoke streams out of his briefcase, like a plume of exhaust. He
cavorts like a Music Hall comedian.
Taking the elevator down to Nibelheim, Wotan and Loge find
Alberich-in
a three-piece suit-at his roll-top desk in an office set up in a
cargo-container. On either side, dwarfs-in what look like
radiation-safe uniforms-feverishly sort pieces of raw gold at
individual work-tables.
When Alberich has been tricked and tied up by his devious visitors,
he's forced to give up his horde of gold, plus the newly forged Ring
and the helmet-here only a cloth-of invisibility, the Tarnhelm.
To deliver the treasure to the surface, Wonder has provided an opening
of a mine-shaft, complete with a tracks and small flat-bed
freight-wagons to transport the sacks of gold. This trackage even has
a turntable, so Fafner can scoot his loot offstage, after murdering
his brother giant.
The ruins of this rail-system turn up again in Siegfried, as Wotan
returns to earth as the Wanderer to see how his grandson is
developing.
To emphasize the parallels between Wotan and Alberich-whose son Hagen
will later murder Siegfried and blast all of Wotan's hopes of power,
even of survival-Flimm has added a young prep-school Hagen to the
cast, something Wagner neglected to do. Of course, he is mute, but
costumer Von Gerkan has outfitted him with regulation blue blazer and
chinos.
Apparently, while Siegfried has been learning to forge swords in the
cave of the evil dwarf, Mime, young Hagen has been coming back home to
Alberich's Underworld Lair on weekends for help with his math.
A big disappointment for Wagnerite traditionalists in most modern Ring
productions is the lack of a visible or recognizable Rainbow Bridge
from earth to Valhalla. Rosalie suggested one with strings of brightly
colored plastic pails suspended overhead.
Erich Wonder has actually indicated the bridge, but it is too far
upstage and too dim to be easily seen. This could be corrected next
summer, as changes are always made from year to year. But this visual
vagueness-evident in Wonder's fuzzily painted backdrops for some
other
scenes-seems a conscious choice.
In the second opera, Die Walküre, Wotan's earthly twin children,
Siegmund and Sieglinde, discover each other in Hunding's Hut. She is
married to the warrior Hunding, and her previously unknown brother is
on the run.
Wonder's interior is anything but a hut, but it does have an immense
tree growing in it-as specified in the Nibelung Saga. The tree, now
bent and crooked, turns up again in Mime's cave. In the final opera,
it is only some shards of burnt roots.
For a simple hunter-gatherer, Hunding seems to live in a very elegant
white conservatory, with tall, jalousied-windows. Martha Stewart could
have been his design-consultant. The white furniture could have come
from IKEA.
As could Wotan's Post-Modernist office-furniture in Valhalla.
Curiously, in addition to the large tree-with the magic sword Nothung
stuck in it-clumps of river-reeds are also growing inside along the
wall. This must emphasize the close connection with Nature of these
primitive mythical characters.
When the incestuous twins declare their love, the back wall of the
room flies up out of sight. Wagner specified "Spring" in the
background, a visual metaphor for their new-found love. Wonder's
painted background drape is dark and murky, more like Night on Bald
Mountain.
Meanwhile, back in Wotan's Oval Office in Valhalla-complete with
document-shredder, computer-monitor, mobile-phones, and
water-cooler-an angry but business-like Fricka confronts Wotan with a
dossier about the twins and his extra-marital infidelities.
These violations of his own divine laws-and of the sanctity of The
Family-have got to stop. Or the gods are finished! She could be a
female Trent Lott, harassing Bill Clinton! Or a Republican
Fundamentalist, giving George W. Bush a piece of her mind.
Fricka is smartly but sensibly attired, and Wotan is the model of a
top CEO. Wotan subsequently shreds her dossier.
Later, this space-defined by a curving wall upstage and a matching
elliptical curve-track downstage-is converted to the Valkyries' rocky
lair. The wall is pierced by six vertical apertures. although there
are eight flying female warriors. So two have to double-up to sing
from the heights.
Obviously, Wonder wouldn't give them old-fashioned Wagnerian winged
horses to fly through the heavens. Or repeat his Munich
rocket-scooters.
Instead, they rappel down from the flies, like Furies on bungee-cords.
Although Wagner specified only eight of them-plus sister
Brünnhilde-Flimm and his designers have outfitted a small platoon of
apprentice Valkyries.
There are no ballets in the Ring, but Flimm has the women do
close-order military drills to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."
The dead heroes they bring to Valhalla look like a long, dazed line of
the dead from Saving Private Ryan, dressed in World War II GI
uniforms. Wonder may not completely have gotten over Spielberg yet.
The women take helmets and weapons from them, piling them in a heap
upstage. Wotan later takes a helmet and breastplate from this pile to
protect the sleeping Brünnhilde.
The Valkyries all seem to have perpetual Bad Hair Days, with immense
tangles of wild hair. Their outfits appear a mixture of
mountain-climber, space-cadet, and army surplus garb.
Unfortunately, Brünnhilde's outfit makes her look fat, inflated,
almost like the Michelin Tire Man. When she sheds it, she seems in
great shape!
Designer Von Gerkan is, in fact, a resourceful user of "found" costume
elements. Siegfried's rough trousers are actually a Swedish
motor-biker's pants she found in a New York flea-market.
Sporting a buzz-cut, Siegfried looks rather like a stocky Peter
Sellars, the opera-director. This may be an inside joke, but his
costume, appearance, and boorish behavior angered some spectators, who
mistakenly believe Siegfried is an Ideal Hero. He is anything but.
The American Southwest may have had some influence on a
drape-covering
the curved wall upstage-that Wonder designed for the desperate flight
of Siegmund and Sieglinde, pursued by Hunding. With low mountains in
the distance, it has long rows of fence-posts with a central
vanishing-point. A later, similar drape is a sunset montage of rows of
posts stretching into infinity..
When Wotan puts Brünnhilde to sleep on a mountain-top, surrounded by
the Magic Fire, Wonder suggests this by having two hinged sides of a
giant curved golden screen close, resembling somewhat the ship-funnel
form of Valhalla's exterior.
In fact, in the final moments of the Cycle, some critics were struck
with the similarity of the ovoid tower and the forward smokestack of
the Titanic-another construction headed for disaster.
At the beginning of Götterdämmerung, elements of Hunding's interior
decoration are still in place, including the white chairs and the
swamp reeds.
The Three Norns, in long gowns and white turbans, measure out the red
thread of Human Life. But they also have very long-handled ladles-not
for eating soup with the Devil, but for dipping water out of a
rectangular spring-which later becomes a hearth.
When Siegfried ends his Rhine Journey at the Hall of the Gibichungs,
he has clearly arrived in Silicon Valley. The hall is a great
Post-Modernist glass-house of three floors, thronged with smartly
dressed office-workers and Middle Management.
Hagen organizes a hunting party in Siegfried's honor. The company
executives-in their tan, brown, and gray three-piece suits-are
equipped with automatic pistols and folding stools, useful when
Siegfried stops to sing of his heroic deeds.
After Hagen has killed Siegfried, secretaries come forward with
funeral bouquets. When the sorrowing and suicidal Brünnhilde returns
the Ring to the Rhine-Maidens, it's all over. The world that was is in
ruins. Valhalla and the gods are no more.
Wagner suggested the return of the Ring-with the Rhine overflowing
its
banks-as a rebirth of the earth, a return to natural order. Flimm and
his designers have quite a different vision-but also one of hope and
promise.
Harry Kupfer ended his Bayreuth Ring with a little boy and girl with
flashlights coming through the curtain onto the dark forestage,
searching into the future.
The new Bayreuth Ring offers hope of a more mythical-historical kind.
A blond boy in full medieval armor stands silently on stage. He is the
youthful knight and redeemer Parsifal.
This visual footnote could spark a dangerous trend: Performing
Wagner's Parsifal as a fifth sequence of the Ring Cycle, which would
then make the saga over 21 hours long!
But there are other design & directorial elements which need more
urgent rethinking before next summer's festival. Fafner as a Dragon,
for example. This is a total visual and dramatic failure. But Bayreuth
is a workshop, and every recent Ring has undergone design and staging
changes from summer to summer.
At the Bayreuth Rathaus during the festival, Wonder showed some wildly
colorful and abstracted paintings he calls "Siegfried's Memory." His
canvas suggesting the dragon showed the chaotically tumbled coaches of
an ICE super-train after a crash. That is an image he might want to
develop.
Two paintings evoking the relationships between Wotan and Brünnhilde
and Siegfried and Brünnhilde both show two flaming jet-planes
colliding in midair. Obviously, this kind of imagery is too far out
for the human-scale of Jürgen Flimm-who is the new Director of
Theatre
at the Salzburg Festival and President of the German Theatre
Association.
On the basis of its interior decoration alone, this Ring could have
come from IKEA, Now it's time to send it out to Cartier's for some
polishing. Replace the rhinestones with real diamonds?
Gero Zimmermann, Bayreuth's long-time tech director, who is now
departing, notes that the shops do not necessarily build everything
that is designed. Some set-props and scenes for the Chereau Ring were
passed over. For the Peter Hall/Bill Dudley Ring, some models and
plans were not ready in time.
And, despite Erich Wonder's obvious ingenuity, over 15% of his designs
were not executed, says Zimmermann. The reasons include costs, but
also the problem of limited storage for all the sets and props of the
operas in the summer repertory."
A CONTEMPORARY BAYREUTH RING-
Wonder & Flimm's 20th Century Saga of Greed
"That is why the new Bayreuth Ring production of director Jürgen Flimm
was only the Second Big Topic on the hill this past summer. Some
humorists, however, wondered if it would become known as the Wonder
Ring, or the Flimm [-flam] Ring.
Curiously, though every Wagner fan refers to the 1976 Centennial Ring
as the "Chereau Ring," the most recent Ring is clearly "Rosalie's
Ring." No one thinks of calling it the "Kirschner Ring," after its
director, Alfred Kirschner.
There is even a beautiful new book about "Rosalie's Ring," with
stunning production photographs and Rosalie's set & costume sketches.
Published by Hatje/Cantz, it's titled quite simply rosalie/Bilder zum
Ring. In case you are wondering [that word again!], the lower case r
is a stylistic choice. And this charming, innovative artist also chose
not to continue calling herself her birth-name, Gudrun Müller.
Even though this avant-garde artist's unusual and colorful designs
earned that Ring Cycle her name, that did not happen to Richard
Peduzzi, who certainly gave the 1976 Ring its very special "Look."
Possibly, many who say they admire the Chereau Ring either cannot
remember who designed it, or never knew.
The "Wonder Ring" has a very fine sound to it-rather like the Magic
Ring. The "Flimm Ring" has no real ring to its sound at all. For
English-speakers, the director's name also sounds too much like
phlegm, or flim-flam. Neither of these has pleasant connotations.
That puts him far out in front of Flimm, in terms of
brand-recognition. The projected book on Flimm's concepts about the
staging of the new Ring will appear only at the end of the year.
Promised from Propyläen, it is already titled: Götterdämmerung/Der
Neue Bayreuther Ring.
Conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli, Flimm, Wonder, and costume-designer
Florence Von Gerkan will explain their guiding production concept[s].
The total absence of an essay by a lighting-designer-Manfred Voss is
credited with all the lighting at Bayreuth-says something about the
perceived importance of stage-lighting on the impact of a production
on the Grüner Hügel.
This new volume also promises to be something of a justification for
the philosophizing and psychologising of Flimm's two ingenious
dramaturgs-who clearly are more responsible than Flimm for some of
the
visualized sub-texts they believe they have discovered.
These clever fellows are Udo Bermbach and Hermann Schreiber. Flimm
admits they saved him a lot of reading about theories concerning the
Cycle's possible meanings, academic and media critiques, and
descriptions and reviews of past Ring productions.
The book will probably have to take the place of a color video of this
impressive production. That is most unfortunate, for it is not only
powerful musically, but also in purely theatrical and psychological
aspects. But no one buys videos of operas anymore-at least that's the
word from record-companies. Not 960 minutes worth of Wagner...
Flimm, Wonder, and Company had their work cut out for them. In German
opera-theatres, the greatest challenge to designers and directors is
mounting a new production of Wagner's Ring Cycle. This is so not only
because it involves a sequence of four operas, totaling some 16 hours
of performance.
The really major problem is how to eclipse what has been done before.
This is especially true at the Bayreuth Festival, founded by Wagner in
1876, with a purpose-built theatre to provide a unique showcase for
his works.
With the resumption of the annual festival after World War II, the
brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner-dedicated to Modernist
innovations in design, staging, and technology-chose to call Bayreuth
a "workshop." And the distinctive style of Wieland Wagner's
idiosyncratic designs and stagings of his grandfather's operas became
known as "New Bayreuth."
This had a profound influence on opera design and staging-and not
only
for Wagnerian Music-Drama-for several decades. After Wieland's
untimely death, however, it became clear that startling and seminal
new ideas would have to come from outside.
The "Chereau Ring" of 1976, largely designed by Richard Peduzzi,
became a new standard of innovation and experiment. More recent Rings
have been distinguished by the design insights of William Dudley, Hans
Schavernoch, and Rosalie-the first woman ever to design the entire
Ring. All of these important artists your roving reporter has
interviewed on Bayreuth's Grüner Hügel.
When Wolfgang Wagner announced that the new Millennium Ring would be
staged by Jürgen Flimm, with sets designed by Erich Wonder,
speculation was rampant. How could Wonder top the Ring he had already
designed for the Bavarian State Opera in Munich?
Wotan's daughters-the Women-Warriors called Valkyries-zip into the
space-ship on rocket-powered scooters. Quite an update from the winged
horses Wagner had envisioned!
Obviously Wonder could not be more Futuristic than this. Nor did he
want to try, for the new Ring. He explains that he was at that time
inspired by SciFi and Steven Spielberg.
Working with Flimm-former director of Hamburg's Thalia Theatre, noted
for the human quality of his productions-Wonder has concentrated on
creating a series of inter-related scenes, in which basic set & prop
elements reappear throughout the four operas. This not only emphasizes
continuity, but it is the major indicator of a design style.
Flimm says the Ring should be seen, not as four operas, but as a play
in four acts. He views the Ring as a very contemporary and cautionary
saga: "...of a world ruined by corruption and unscrupulousness, a world
of political careers, full of lust for power and murderous conflicts
between generations." So he and Wonder have devised an almost
Post-Modernist landscape in which to play out this tragedy of Gods and
Mankind.
For Flimm, Wotan is a modern monster, an adept of Realpolitik, who
breaks his own laws and kills his own children to increase his power.
"In comparison," Flimm insists, "Kohl is a Garden-Dwarf."
As Flimm and his dramaturgs have noted: "A dramaturgy of locations
determines the scenic landscape." In the first-and shortest-opera,
Das
Rheingold, Wonder and costume-designer Florence Von Gerkan seem to
have begun visually where Patrice Chereau and Richard Peduzzi left off
in 1976.
Their vision was a fantastic mixture of Myth and Industrial
Revolution. In the new Bayreuth Ring, Wotan is still lusting for
power, to keep what he has and seize even more. But his wardrobes-and
those of his fellow gods-have been updated to the Edwardian era. At
least in the prologue-opera of Rheingold. In the following three
operas, when considerable time has passed, fashions of the Thirties
and today mingle comfortably.
Flimm's emphasis in staging is not on Wagner's larger-than-life
characterizations in his music and libretto, but rather on the
all-too-human frailties of gods and men, as revealed in the actions
and passions of the singer/actors. The result, both visually and
emotionally for the audience, is of an abstracted modernist reality,
populated by people they can recognize from TV and the daily
headlines.
If Wagner's music were not played at all-thanks to Flimm's subtle
direction, the ingenuity of the designers, and the almost unsuspected
acting talents of the singers-this new Ring would still be an
immensely powerful and moving theatre-experience.
Alan Titus, as Wotan, was a revelation: not only vocally, but also in
the scheming authority and devious character he projected in his
physical and emotional interpretation of the role.
And he was very well-partnered by Birgit Remmert as an intractable
Fricka-with a fierce moral authority of her own. Oddly enough, she
reminded me of the late Winifred Wagner, though this Fricka would
certainly have told Hitler that his Thousand Year Reich was an even
more disastrous idea than building Valhalla.
Last spring at the Met, Placido Domingo seemed ageing and fading as
Prince Danilo. This summer at Bayreuth, years melted away as he became
the desperate Siegmund, always on the run-but desperately in love.
This impressive change may well have been inspired by Flimm's personal
direction-bringing out nuances in the character and encouraging
Domingo to make them physically and emotionally real-instead of just
singing about them.
Some German Wagnerites still disparage Domingo's sung German and
attempts to sing Wagner roles at all. I could understand his German
quite well, while some other German-speakers in the cast were not at
all distinct.
But it was his Sieglinde who stole the spotlight. Waltraud Meier was
contracted to sing the role in the Second Cycle, as she had the
premiere. But she was already embroiled in a bitter dispute about
rehearsal schedules with Wolfgang Wagner.
Wagner issued a special letter to the press, explaining the Festival's
position. It appeared that Meier's fans could forget about seeing and
hearing her at Bayreuth in 2001.
In the event, we didn't even get that privilege in the second Die
Walküre. Only the day before the performance, she got a note from her
doctor to prove she was sick. The next afternoon, Cheryl Studer was
heart-breaking as Sieglinde.
Because all the performances thus far had obviously been very
carefully rehearsed in acting terms for the human depths of the roles,
some of us assumed she must have been previously rehearsed as well, as
a potential cover for Meier. The performance was so assured, so
moving, it could not have been a last-minute walk-on!
But it virtually was. She told colleagues she'd been on the beach at
Marbella the afternoon before, when the call came from Bayreuth. She
took to the air and arrived on the hill sometime after 2 am. The rest
is opera-history. She was superb.
With far more taxing vocal, dramatic, and physical demands made of
her, Gabriele Schnaut was also impressive as Brünnhilde. Also
admirable in their special roles were Ricarda Merbeth as Freia and
Mette Eising as Erda.
Older Wagnerites were offended by Wolfgang Schmidt's lack of the
Heroic as Siegfried. But his rough working-class appearance and rowdy
behavior was just what one might expect of a contemporary lout, raised
in filth, poverty, and ignorance, with no schooling or manners.
Don't any of these old-timers ever read the libretto? Siegfried has
had a dwarf for a foster-father. And only a vague longing where a
mother should have been.
Like Parsifal, he is a Tor, almost a simpleton. Though not a Holy
Fool, alas. And he learns nothing from his tragic life-experience. He
is the Instinctive Primitive Man: willful, selfish, quarrelsome, and
boastful. He is, in fact, ultimately boring when dwelling on his
heroic exploits in song.
But enough about the wonderful singing actors. What about the Erich
Wonder wonders on stage?
For the initial scene-with the three Rhine-maidens frolicking at the
bottom of the River Rhine-Wonder has devised three ancient
ship-wrecks
for their antics. They wear smart raincoats over their snug
bathing-suits.
At the end of the Cycle, when the golden Ring is finally returned to
them, a projection shows the Rhine-bed laden with sunken World War II
battle-ships!
Throughout the Cycle, Flimm and his designers make a strong visual
point of the pairings of contrasting characters like Wotan and
Alberich, Siegmund and Hunding, and Siegfried and Hagen.
Tables with architects' plans stand before a scrim showing the
incomplete high-rise. Entrances made behind it, down
scaffolding-steps, are visible, suggesting the insubstantiality of
Wotan's plans and schemes.
The invention of the elevator made skyscrapers feasible, a fact not
lost on Erich Wonder. Even in the depths of the Rhine, there is an
elevator-cabin on a cog-rack reaching up into the flies. This is one
of those design elements which recurs.
As in Wagner's libretto, there is a serious financial crisis for Wotan
& Co. Cost-overruns mean Wotan cannot pay the builders, the giants
Fasolt and Fafner.
Wotan has to let them take his wife Fricka's sister, Freia, as a
hostage against final payment. Without her mythical golden apples, the
gods promptly age, verging rapidly on decrepitude.
Loge, the trickster God of Fire, urges Wotan to go deep into the earth
to take the Rheingold from his opposite, Alberich. Loge's costume is
the epitome of an Edwardian sporting gent. Flames run down his arms,
and smoke streams out of his briefcase, like a plume of exhaust. He
cavorts like a Music Hall comedian.
Taking the elevator down to Nibelheim, Wotan and Loge find
Alberich-in
a three-piece suit-at his roll-top desk in an office set up in a
cargo-container. On either side, dwarfs-in what look like
radiation-safe uniforms-feverishly sort pieces of raw gold at
individual work-tables.
When Alberich has been tricked and tied up by his devious visitors,
he's forced to give up his horde of gold, plus the newly forged Ring
and the helmet-here only a cloth-of invisibility, the Tarnhelm.
To deliver the treasure to the surface, Wonder has provided an opening
of a mine-shaft, complete with a tracks and small flat-bed
freight-wagons to transport the sacks of gold. This trackage even has
a turntable, so Fafner can scoot his loot offstage, after murdering
his brother giant.
The ruins of this rail-system turn up again in Siegfried, as Wotan
returns to earth as the Wanderer to see how his grandson is
developing.
To emphasize the parallels between Wotan and Alberich-whose son Hagen
will later murder Siegfried and blast all of Wotan's hopes of power,
even of survival-Flimm has added a young prep-school Hagen to the
cast, something Wagner neglected to do. Of course, he is mute, but
costumer Von Gerkan has outfitted him with regulation blue blazer and
chinos.
Apparently, while Siegfried has been learning to forge swords in the
cave of the evil dwarf, Mime, young Hagen has been coming back home to
Alberich's Underworld Lair on weekends for help with his math.
A big disappointment for Wagnerite traditionalists in most modern Ring
productions is the lack of a visible or recognizable Rainbow Bridge
from earth to Valhalla. Rosalie suggested one with strings of brightly
colored plastic pails suspended overhead.
Erich Wonder has actually indicated the bridge, but it is too far
upstage and too dim to be easily seen. This could be corrected next
summer, as changes are always made from year to year. But this visual
vagueness-evident in Wonder's fuzzily painted backdrops for some
other
scenes-seems a conscious choice.
In the second opera, Die Walküre, Wotan's earthly twin children,
Siegmund and Sieglinde, discover each other in Hunding's Hut. She is
married to the warrior Hunding, and her previously unknown brother is
on the run.
Wonder's interior is anything but a hut, but it does have an immense
tree growing in it-as specified in the Nibelung Saga. The tree, now
bent and crooked, turns up again in Mime's cave. In the final opera,
it is only some shards of burnt roots.
For a simple hunter-gatherer, Hunding seems to live in a very elegant
white conservatory, with tall, jalousied-windows. Martha Stewart could
have been his design-consultant. The white furniture could have come
from IKEA.
As could Wotan's Post-Modernist office-furniture in Valhalla.
Curiously, in addition to the large tree-with the magic sword Nothung
stuck in it-clumps of river-reeds are also growing inside along the
wall. This must emphasize the close connection with Nature of these
primitive mythical characters.
When the incestuous twins declare their love, the back wall of the
room flies up out of sight. Wagner specified "Spring" in the
background, a visual metaphor for their new-found love. Wonder's
painted background drape is dark and murky, more like Night on Bald
Mountain.
Meanwhile, back in Wotan's Oval Office in Valhalla-complete with
document-shredder, computer-monitor, mobile-phones, and
water-cooler-an angry but business-like Fricka confronts Wotan with a
dossier about the twins and his extra-marital infidelities.
These violations of his own divine laws-and of the sanctity of The
Family-have got to stop. Or the gods are finished! She could be a
female Trent Lott, harassing Bill Clinton! Or a Republican
Fundamentalist, giving George W. Bush a piece of her mind.
Fricka is smartly but sensibly attired, and Wotan is the model of a
top CEO. Wotan subsequently shreds her dossier.
Later, this space-defined by a curving wall upstage and a matching
elliptical curve-track downstage-is converted to the Valkyries' rocky
lair. The wall is pierced by six vertical apertures. although there
are eight flying female warriors. So two have to double-up to sing
from the heights.
Obviously, Wonder wouldn't give them old-fashioned Wagnerian winged
horses to fly through the heavens. Or repeat his Munich
rocket-scooters.
Instead, they rappel down from the flies, like Furies on bungee-cords.
Although Wagner specified only eight of them-plus sister
Brünnhilde-Flimm and his designers have outfitted a small platoon of
apprentice Valkyries.
There are no ballets in the Ring, but Flimm has the women do
close-order military drills to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."
The dead heroes they bring to Valhalla look like a long, dazed line of
the dead from Saving Private Ryan, dressed in World War II GI
uniforms. Wonder may not completely have gotten over Spielberg yet.
The women take helmets and weapons from them, piling them in a heap
upstage. Wotan later takes a helmet and breastplate from this pile to
protect the sleeping Brünnhilde.
The Valkyries all seem to have perpetual Bad Hair Days, with immense
tangles of wild hair. Their outfits appear a mixture of
mountain-climber, space-cadet, and army surplus garb.
Unfortunately, Brünnhilde's outfit makes her look fat, inflated,
almost like the Michelin Tire Man. When she sheds it, she seems in
great shape!
Designer Von Gerkan is, in fact, a resourceful user of "found" costume
elements. Siegfried's rough trousers are actually a Swedish
motor-biker's pants she found in a New York flea-market.
Sporting a buzz-cut, Siegfried looks rather like a stocky Peter
Sellars, the opera-director. This may be an inside joke, but his
costume, appearance, and boorish behavior angered some spectators, who
mistakenly believe Siegfried is an Ideal Hero. He is anything but.
The American Southwest may have had some influence on a
drape-covering
the curved wall upstage-that Wonder designed for the desperate flight
of Siegmund and Sieglinde, pursued by Hunding. With low mountains in
the distance, it has long rows of fence-posts with a central
vanishing-point. A later, similar drape is a sunset montage of rows of
posts stretching into infinity..
When Wotan puts Brünnhilde to sleep on a mountain-top, surrounded by
the Magic Fire, Wonder suggests this by having two hinged sides of a
giant curved golden screen close, resembling somewhat the ship-funnel
form of Valhalla's exterior.
In fact, in the final moments of the Cycle, some critics were struck
with the similarity of the ovoid tower and the forward smokestack of
the Titanic-another construction headed for disaster.
At the beginning of Götterdämmerung, elements of Hunding's interior
decoration are still in place, including the white chairs and the
swamp reeds.
The Three Norns, in long gowns and white turbans, measure out the red
thread of Human Life. But they also have very long-handled ladles-not
for eating soup with the Devil, but for dipping water out of a
rectangular spring-which later becomes a hearth.
When Siegfried ends his Rhine Journey at the Hall of the Gibichungs,
he has clearly arrived in Silicon Valley. The hall is a great
Post-Modernist glass-house of three floors, thronged with smartly
dressed office-workers and Middle Management.
Hagen organizes a hunting party in Siegfried's honor. The company
executives-in their tan, brown, and gray three-piece suits-are
equipped with automatic pistols and folding stools, useful when
Siegfried stops to sing of his heroic deeds.
After Hagen has killed Siegfried, secretaries come forward with
funeral bouquets. When the sorrowing and suicidal Brünnhilde returns
the Ring to the Rhine-Maidens, it's all over. The world that was is in
ruins. Valhalla and the gods are no more.
Wagner suggested the return of the Ring-with the Rhine overflowing
its
banks-as a rebirth of the earth, a return to natural order. Flimm and
his designers have quite a different vision-but also one of hope and
promise.
Harry Kupfer ended his Bayreuth Ring with a little boy and girl with
flashlights coming through the curtain onto the dark forestage,
searching into the future.
The new Bayreuth Ring offers hope of a more mythical-historical kind.
A blond boy in full medieval armor stands silently on stage. He is the
youthful knight and redeemer Parsifal.
This visual footnote could spark a dangerous trend: Performing
Wagner's Parsifal as a fifth sequence of the Ring Cycle, which would
then make the saga over 21 hours long!
But there are other design & directorial elements which need more
urgent rethinking before next summer's festival. Fafner as a Dragon,
for example. This is a total visual and dramatic failure. But Bayreuth
is a workshop, and every recent Ring has undergone design and staging
changes from summer to summer.
At the Bayreuth Rathaus during the festival, Wonder showed some wildly
colorful and abstracted paintings he calls "Siegfried's Memory." His
canvas suggesting the dragon showed the chaotically tumbled coaches of
an ICE super-train after a crash. That is an image he might want to
develop.
Two paintings evoking the relationships between Wotan and Brünnhilde
and Siegfried and Brünnhilde both show two flaming jet-planes
colliding in midair. Obviously, this kind of imagery is too far out
for the human-scale of Jürgen Flimm-who is the new Director of
Theatre
at the Salzburg Festival and President of the German Theatre
Association.
On the basis of its interior decoration alone, this Ring could have
come from IKEA, Now it's time to send it out to Cartier's for some
polishing. Replace the rhinestones with real diamonds?
Gero Zimmermann, Bayreuth's long-time tech director, who is now
departing, notes that the shops do not necessarily build everything
that is designed. Some set-props and scenes for the Chereau Ring were
passed over. For the Peter Hall/Bill Dudley Ring, some models and
plans were not ready in time.
And, despite Erich Wonder's obvious ingenuity, over 15% of his designs
were not executed, says Zimmermann. The reasons include costs, but
also the problem of limited storage for all the sets and props of the
operas in the summer repertory."