Bayreuth Festspielhaus
Wotan – Wolfgang Koch
Donner – Markus EicheFroh – Lothar Odinius
Loge – Norbert Einst
Fricka – Claudia Mahnke
Freia – Elisabeth Strid
Erda – Nathalie Weissmann
Alberich – Oleg Bryjak
Mime – Burkhard Ulrich
Fasolt – Wilhelm Schwinghammer
Fafner – Sorin Coliban
Woglinde – Mirella Hagen
Wellgunde – Julia Rutigliano
Flosshilde – Okka von der Damerau
Frank Castorf (director)
Aleksander Denić (set
designs)Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)
So this is it: Frank
Castorf’s notorious Ring. There are
various caveats: what I see may well not be the same as what audiences saw last
year; this is only Das Rheingold,
with the rest to come. However, whilst there is a good deal about which to be
frustrated, not least the lengthy passages in which Castorf appears to lose
interest, or at least I lost interest in him, and whilst it would e difficult
to acclaim his attentiveness to, or even his interest in, Wagner’s music, this
proved of considerably greater stage interest than some other recent staged Rings. Guy
Cassiers’s production for Berlin (and La Scala) may have been blessed with
a superior cast and a far superior conductor, but its lack of any ideas
whatsoever made it an inferior production when considered only as such. Stephen
Wadsworth’s Seattle Ring was
similarly inert in stage terms. Ironically, Daniel
Barenboim’s Proms performances have proved not only the most satisfactory of
recent years, but perhaps of my entire Ring-going
experience, with the possible exception – again, ironically – of previous
minimally-staged performances at the Royal Albert Hall from the Royal Opera
under Bernard Haitink.
Anyway, back to Castorf. This
Rheingold has ideas of considerable
promised and moments of real dramatic power. The Texan setting of the ‘Golden
Motel’ on Route 66 is undeniably not one for those who want their Vorabend to develop in an elevated
setting; just as undeniable is the loss, common to many stagings, of anything
that might make clan Wotan something akin to gods in the first place. Ernst
Bloch may have said that these were gods without being gods, but that is far
from the whole of Wagner’s story. Listen to the score – as Castorf seemingly
never does – and you will hear noble inspiration in Wotan’s dream of Valhalla.
Wagner’s Feuerbachian understanding of religious inversion, which underpins not
only Wotan’s sacerdotal fortress but also, by ‘true socialist’ extension,
Alberich’s conversion of gold into capital and his construction of Nibelheim, is
disregarded, again as so often, in favour of something cruder, more one-sided,
far less interesting.
If we can take the debased
setting, however, and perhaps even wearily concede its validity in our
appalling late-capitalist plight, we shall find, alongside the irritations and
provocations, more to engage us. The use
of film, far too often a trendy addition which adds little or nothing to an
opera staging, here stands at the very heart of the dramatic representation. A
screen at the top of the motel relays events elsewhere, some of which we can
see on stage very well already, some of which we can see with difficulty, some
of which we should otherwise not be able to see at all. They may be in the ground-floor
bar, run by an initially hapless but perhaps ultimately successful, extra, who
comes in for abuse from Alberich, Wotan, and others, but has us wondering
whether he will prove a survivor in the longer run. They may be in the sleazy
motel room above, in which we first see Wotan dream of power, in bed with
Fricka and then with Freia. (The latter seems to me perfectly justifiable;
after all, is not the very point of the gods’ relationship with the alleged
goddess of ‘love’ that they use and abuse her for the promised immortality of
her apples. For apples here, we should probably read stereotypical ‘female
assets’ from American trash culture.) The faded quality of the film, its
distorted colours in particular, have us wondering – or at least they did me –
whether what we are seeing is ‘real’ at all. Katie Mitchell-style filming might
be taking place, sometimes overtly with a cameraman, sometimes covertly as
befits our surveillance culture, but discrepancies seem to creep in, whether by
design or by our own unreliable narration. The world of webcams and ‘reality
television’ is never far away: discomfortingly, we participate whilst we
disdain. Perhaps this is after all a neo-Feuerbachian inversion for our time. The
dialectics are certainly unremittingly negative, as befits a post-Adornian
world. And indeed the moment of greatest dramatic power for me was the truly
shocking covering of Freia with gold bars, the motel bed stripped to its frame
as, clad in trashy, eye-catching PVC, she found herself submerged by the stolen
hoard. In many respects, it was the most literally-minded scene of all, and perhaps
drew some of its power from (more or less) trusting Wagner for once, but
filming and voyeurism made it sickening beyond any depiction I can recall
previously having seen.
What truly frustrates, then,
is that Castorf fails to live up elsewhere to that promise. I could not help
but have the sense that he would have been better off presenting a Ring, cut as he would do so with other
theatre, somewhere other than the Bayreuth Festival, which could hardly have
been expected to acceded to his requests for reworking the text. (Nor do I
think it should have done, which perhaps marks me down as being of the
reactionary camp, but so be it.) The third scene in particular drags – and certainly
not on account of Kirill Petrenko’s tempi, which were uniformly, excessively
fast. Here I sensed Castorf’s impatience with Wagner’s narrative. It is an odd
thing not to find Alberich and Nibelheim of dramatic interest; too often,
though, they seem awkwardly tacked on to the rest of the drama. There are
smaller irritations too, for instance, irrelevant, noisy interruptions,
such as Alberich kicking a beach ball
around during the Rhinemaidens’ hymn to the gold. (Their antics around the
motel paddling pool, filmed for ‘cultural consumption’ otherwise work well on
the whole.) The appearance of a rainbow flag for the entry to Valhalla
obfuscates. Presumably a ‘joke’ alluding to Froh’s rainbow, it adds nothing
since it is not developed. Is that what the gods’ going up in the world – or in
Heaven – really amounts to: the motel turning gay-friendly? In the absence of
any other allusions to homosexuality, it just seems silly. What appears to be
the drug-induced stupor of the bar guests, seemingly aroused by whatever
Donner’s summoning of thunder translates into here, is more suggestive, whether
intentionally or otherwise. Political and religious power does not only
stupefy, but stupefy it nevertheless does.
Rarely does there seem to be
any synergy between what we see on stage and what we hear in the pit. Petrenko
was – to my ears, bafflingly – acclaimed louder than anyone else by the
Bayreuth audience. His account was not bad; it was certainly preferable to the
aimless incoherence we in London have had to suffer time and time again from
Antonio Pappano. Line and, above all, drive were maintained almost ruthlessly.
But it was a musical account almost as one-dimensional, though not in the same
way, as Castorf’s stage direction. Indeed, I am not sure I have heard a less
variegated Wagner performance. Furtwängler – or Barenboim – this certainly was
not. At times, it sounded more akin to Toscanini conducting Mendelssohn. Fashionable
obsessive concern with Wagner’s early-Romantic roots hardened into something
very much of our time, a refusal or even inability to yield; Wagner was held
captive by something approaching turbo-charged automation. The orchestra itself
sounded more than usually ‘covered’ by the covered pit. Was Petrenko struggling
as much with the acoustic as with anything else?
There was a fine trio of
Rhinemaidens, which augured well, though such augury was not entirely to be
trusted. Wolfgang Koch’s Wotan grew in stature as the evening went on. Whether
by design, I was not entirely sure, and there were some early moments that were
straightforwardly rough, but there was enough here to hold promise for later on
– especially if Castorf allows the god to be more than a mere gangster. Oleg
Bryjak’s Alberich had his moments, but had a tendency to rely upon caricature
that shaded into crudity; when he permitted himself – or was permitted – to
concentrate upon singing, there was a voice to be reckoned with. Though Mime’s
role in Das Rheingold is not so
great, Burkhard Ulrich nevertheless managed to outshine his ‘superiors’ in an
attentive portrayal (at least in verbal and musical terms!) As Fasolt and
Fafner, Wilhelm Schwinghammer and Soran Coliban increasingly impressed too. It
was a nice touch to have a Fasolt who was actually for once a credible prospect
of attraction for Freia, whether or no she felt the same way. The brothers proved
increasingly differentiated in character through verbal and musical means at
least as much as through staging. Claudia Mahnke’s Fricka was initially shrill,
unalluring in the wrong way, but improved considerably. Elisabeth Strid’s
Freia, whatever one thought of Castorf’s stage portrayal, offered something
that went far beyond the merely tawdry. Nadine Weissmann’s Erda – her
fur-coated, Dallas-style appearance
presumably indicating a ‘classiness’ as elevated as Castorf is willing to
countenance – proved welcome in vocal contrast, though Petrenko’s hurrying did
her no favours. Markus Eiche’s Donner and Lothar Odinius’s Froh followed the
general pattern of really coming into their vocal own in the final scene. Norbert
Einst’s Loge likewise followed suit, though again, I think that was as much a
matter of the production as anything else. It is difficult, however, to believe
that, taken as a whole, this is the level of singing upon which Bayreuth should
be able to call; a standard at least approaching Barenboim’s Proms Ring should surely be the norm here. On,
then, to Die Walküre: with
trepidation but also with interest…
