Festspielhaus
Siegfried – Stefan Vinke
Mime – Andreas ConradWanderer – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Woodbird – Ana Durlovski
Frank Castorf (director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)
Siegfried is now for me the highpoint in Frank
Castorf’s Ring. It is surely the most
difficult of all four parts to bring off, but Castorf’s – and his performers’ –
grasp of the work’s epic quality may well be unsurpassed. One would at least
have to go back – from productions I know – to Harry Kupfer, perhaps even to
Patrice Chéreau. In Wagner’s drama, as in Castorf’s staging, so many of the Ring’s strands come together here – and how!
A crucial idea
to the drama, to its realisation, and indeed to the epic tradition in which it
so triumphantly yet challengingly stands is liminality. At a basic, or perhaps
better immediate, level, the revolving stage does its work here. Forest or
station? Both are quintessential liminal zones. The German Romantic forest has
a long history, of course, extending back long before German Romanticism. Think
of the invention of ‘Hermann’, a Teutonisation of Arminius: ‘Assuredly he was the deliverer
of Germany,’ wrote the admiring Tacitus in his Annals. Arminius ‘had
defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals,
but in the height of her empire’s glory.’ And for Romans, Germans such as
Wagner, born in Leipzig in 1813, could substitute the French. Caspar David
Friedrich contributed two paintings to an exhibition held in Dresden in March
1814 to celebrate the liberation of Germany from the French yoke, one depicting
the imaginary grave of Arminius/Hermann. Wagner too rejoiced in the memory of
those events in the Teutoburger Wald, even when he told Cosima in rather gloomy
terms: ‘So far, we have been great in defence, dispelling alien elements which we could not assimilate; the
Teutoburger Wald was a rejection of the Roman influence, the Reformation also a
rejection, our great literature a rejection of the influence of the French; the
only positive thing so far has been our music — Beethoven.’ The implication
was, of course, that now things might change, although by then the strong,
Schopenhauerian element in his world-view was already suggesting they might
not. And so, enter the resigned Wanderer, more a hero than the rebel without a consciousness,
Siegfried, born in that forest, and ignorant of anything beyond it, might ever
prove in reality.
Castorf may be understood both to play on that
characterisation and to question it. How, after all, could one not, concerned
where – indeed knowing where – such Romanticism, even nationalism, might lead,
or perhaps better, be understood by some to have led. And so, the fabled alternative
Mount Rushmore presents a world in which socialism might appear to have won the
day: Marx (great) – Lenin (good) – and then we on the Left do not quite know
where to look when it comes to Stalin and Mao. Could we not have Adorno instead?
The negative dialectic says no. Aleksandar
Denić’s set design for the other side, Bayreuth (Al)exanderplatz station –
S-Bahn, U-Bahn, post office, station restaurant, fountain, clock – is too real
to be real. It is an astonishing sculpture and again an astonishingly apt
liminal foil to the forest. What is more full of transience, more full of
possibility, more full of the potential for foiling possibility, than a station?
East Berlin seems to be going pretty well, or does it? Or is it East Berlin at
all? It is what it is, just as those celebrated crocodiles are what they are.
That does not stop us continually asking how, why, what, though. Like Mime,
however, do we ask the questions whose answers we really need? Political
leaders come and go above on the screens: is that Siegfried; is it Wotan; is it
Mime? Or are they just faces of no one in particular, on to whom we (literally)
project what we expect, what we want, what we have been led to believe? It is a
question as much, perhaps for Honecker as for Merkel, for Lenin as for Stalin.
And when actual projections of characters’ faces appear on Mount Rushmore
again, what are we to make of them? Does it ‘mean’ anything that we see, or
think we see, Siegfried’s face not on revolutionary Lenin or Mao but on ‘establishment’
Stalin, and Wotan (his eye damaged, yet playfully winking) on Stalin’s? Why do
we insist on meaning at all? Have we not learned? Is Beckettian gloom perhaps
all there is?
Maybe, yet
there are other possibilities here we might grasp. Whether they are better
or worse is for us to decide; perhaps Schopenhaurian renunciation would be
better after all, but there is no short-circuiting of the question. Our
supposed revolutionary hero, Siegfried, is a brutal figure by any standards.
His Kalashnikov, heard to terrifyingly loud effect, should give us all pause
for thought. Do we think of late Soviet, Brezhnev-era imperialism perhaps
(Afghanistan?) or of our own, more fashionable heroes? We still all believe in
Castro and Guevara, do we not? Meanwhile, oil continues to do its work; it
always has, in West and in East. Patric Seibert, initially Siegfried’s chained
bear, is literally covered in it. Alberich is still at large, watching and
mocking – like the Wanderer and also like Mime. We draw connections between
them; or perhaps we do not. It is up to us. And all the while, those
awe-inspiring landscapes and cityscapes, with their wealth of associations,
form our thinking, whether we like it or no.
Erda initially
does not. But she must put on a show. The misogyny here of a newly revivified Wanderer
– I am genuinely unsure as to whether the production participates in it, which
is perhaps as it is uneasily should be – truly shocks. As soon as the tables
turn – for Wagner, as soon as Wotan finally rejects Fate, but what does that
mean here? – Wotan can treat the earth goddess as despicably as any other
woman. There is no redemption for him here in the halting of a wheel’s turning;
perhaps instead he transmutes it into post-Russian roulette. Desperate to have
a piece of him, Erda debases herself in the now celebrated insistence on
fellating the god. His response is to run after Siegfried and to leave her to
pay the bill. She has even turned herself into one of his ‘favourite’ blondes,
but to no avail. Nadine Weismann, giving a towering dramatic portrayal, quite
unafraid to sound hurt, damaged, and cowed, cuts a movingly pathetic figure
under the restaurant table at her last.
Will things go
better for her daughter? Probably not. We fear the worst when she dons her
wedding dress, sure that Siegfried will betray her. Our old friend, the
Brazilian carnival Woodbird is still around, after all. But in an inversion of
what we have seen in previous years, Siegfried returns to her and they embrace.
Is Castorf reconciling himself somewhat with Wagner, with Romanticism? I admit
that I felt a little disappointed – how much more powerful I found it for
Brünnhilde to be left on her own, whilst Siegfried fucked the Woodbird. But
perhaps that is the point. Perhaps we now stand at the point at which we need
to deconstruct the ‘Castorf Ring’,
which, like Wagner’s, we know too well. At any rate, Catherine Foster proved
herself in glorious voice, movingly eloquent as events around her coincided
with, commentated on her – or did not. She has unquestionably gone from strength to strength.
Stefan Vinke,
in the title role, proved tireless, if not necessarily ingratiating. But then,
how ingratiating should a Siegfried be? When one hears so many singers who are
simply incapable of getting through the evening, one cannot but be grateful for
one who can, and who continues to be heard. He was certainly unafraid to repel
us dramatically; no fairy-tale Romanticism here. Andreas Conrad’s Mime was very
much a plausible opponent, heightening the dramatic stakes. This was a tenor,
as well as a character, who demanded to be heard – and was. Thomas Johannes
Mayer was perhaps on occasion a little verbally bluff as the Wanderer, but
acted the role to a tee. His callous dismissal of Erda, mentioned above, chilled
more, I think, than any of his predecessors’. Other singers all impressed in
their different ways, very much part of the company.
And if Marek
Janowski’s conducting of the score was not so alive to its epic quality as,
say, that of Daniel Barenboim, or to the great conductors of the past, there
was, at its best, a quicksilver dramatic quality to be heard and, yes, to be
experienced that had been lacking in swathes of Die Walküre. Was the scene between Alberich and Mime simply too
fast, almost glib? Perhaps, but it is not difficult to come up with a reading,
in this context, to justify such a portrayal of what Hans Mayer brilliantly
dubbed an ‘evil stockjobbers’ satire’. If Karl-Heinz Lehner’s darkly dangerous,
still alluring Fafner represented, to quote Mayer once again, ‘the world of
shameless wealth, the concentration of capital as a sign of the rise of the middle
classes … under which Wagner had to suffer so much,’ then there is again
something to be said for a lack of majesty to his prowling around the station.
So long, that is, as it retained musico-dramatic coherence, which it did;
Janowski certainly knew where the score was going, even when he seemed a little
impatient with it. Perhaps, then, that will prove the most intriguing
dialectical legacy of all from Castorf’s Siegfried:
seemingly having held the work to sometimes extreme account, it vouchsafed the
possibility, even the plausibility, of new musical readings too.
