Bayreuth Festspielhaus
Siegfried – Lance Ryan
Mime – Burkhard UlrichThe Wanderer – Wolfgang Koch
Alberich – Oleg Bryjak
Fafner – Sorin Coliban
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Woodbird – Mirella Hagen
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)
Alas, it seems my tempered
enthusiasm, amongst all the frustrations, as experienced in Das Rheingold was very much a case of
having jumped the gun. Following a dramatically inert Walküre, this Siegfried
hits a new low. Either Frank Castorf is failing catastrophically in what he is
trying to do, or what he is trying to do is quite simply inadmissible – or,
most likely, I fear, both.
However much incoherence
might be trumpeted as an æsthetic principle, that does not make it appropriate
to the Ring. Wagner’s intellectual
method is rarely if ever Socratic, but it is exploratory, learning from
previous ‘answers’ to questions he has asked – the questioning always being the
most important thing – and attempting to ask further questions in response to
the answers he has found wanting. Ideas overlap, even come into conflict. What
his method is not is arbitrary. ‘So what?’ you might ask; ‘why should Castorf,
or anyone else, be constrained by Wagner?’ Well, he need not necessarily be, although
frankly there is enough in Wagner to keep most of us occupied for several
lifetimes. But it does not follow from that that just anything goes. By all
means question, criticise, even reject Wagner, but might it not be more
fruitful to engage with him in the first instance? And yes, that certainly
includes engaging with the music: not as ‘absolute music’, to employ that most
ideological of terms as coined – pejoratively – by Wagner himself, but as
drama. Castorf’s apparent total lack of interest in the score may be his
greatest weakness of all. Whereas Stefan Herheim has said that when words and
music come into conflict, he will listen to the music, Castorf seems to have no
interest in either. I thought even in Das
Rheingold that he would have been far better off offering his own version
of the Ring, doubtless cut and
interspersed with other material, somewhere other than Bayreuth, perhaps at his
own Volksbühne in Berlin. Castorf’s presumable resentment at not being able to
rearrange the text manifests itself most often in a disengagement which commits
the cardinal sin of being less provocative than straightforwardly boring.
For this staging of Siegfried – or of whatever it is that
Castorf has decided to stage – the revolving set alternates between a
state-socialist version of Mount Rushmore, its heroes Marx, Lenin, Stalin and
Mao a study in decreasing facial hair, and a place claiming to be Berlin’s
Alexanderplatz, though certainly not a depiction of any reality I have
witnessed there. Considered simply as set designs, Aleksander Denić’s work is
stunning; to have what is pretty much a station entrance with surrounding shops
created so convincingly is quite an achievement. (I hardly dare imagine the
cost!) But Castorf’s direction rarely if ever engages with the locations, let
alone with the work. Too often they seem merely to be backdrops, just as the
score is reduced to the level of an inappropriate – and, one suspects, for
Castorf, a tiresome – soundtrack.
Mime lives or at least works
in a trailer van at the foot of the mountain, and that is where the first act
unfolds. Our friend the actor – previously the barman in Das Rheingold, with a good few filmic appearances in Die Walküre – is the bear Siegfried has
tethered, except he does not seem to be a bear, since he manages to work as
handyman too. (It has now come to my attention that this man, who has a great
deal to do, and may well prove the only discernible thread running through this
Ring, is Castorf’s assistant, Patric
Seibert, which may or may not prove ‘significant’.) Siegfried does not re-forge
Notung, since he is holding it in his hand already, but occasionally he bangs
on something he does not forge. He will not in any case use it to kill Fafner,
who dies in a blaze of deafening machine-gun fire, once again a sign of
disrespect for the score. In the second and third acts, it is difficult to
discern any particular reasons why some of the scenes take place beneath the
heroes of ‘actually existing socialism’ some in Alexanderplatz, some, still
more confusingly, in both. A tendency already present in Die Walküre for the drama to descend into a parody of Doctor Who, the same characters – albeit
in this case, rather more thinly drawn – reappearing in different locations yet
carrying on just as before, becomes even more pronounced in Siegfried. ‘The lack of a coherent
location is the point,’ someone will doubtless say; if so, it is not a very
good point, to put it mildly, since nothing further is done with it. And that
is the problem with so much of what we see, that nothing is developed or even
related to anything else. Fifteen hours are too long a time simply to reiterate
a nihilistic point that anything and everything is arbitrary.
Meanwhile in Alexanderplatz,
we witness Siegfried with the Woodbird, her flamboyant get-up more redolent of
a Rio de Janeiro carnival. First of all, he fumbles around in a dustbin as a
substitute for sharpening his reeds. (The oboe contributions here, whilst
superlative in a purely technical sense, are not what Wagner wrote; the idea
seems to be that he has some sort of accordion/mouth-organ instead, albeit
still played by the oboe.) Later on, at the end of the act, he engages in full
sexual congress with the bird, thereby making his ‘discovery’ of Brünnhilde in the
third act more or less meaningless. I assume he is being portrayed as a liar,
but frankly had long given up caring. Indeed, at the ‘Das ist kein Mann’
moment, so poor is the lighting – a recurring and rather surprising problem
here – that, from where I was seated in the Festspielhaus, I could not see
Brünnhilde at all. ‘No, it is not a man,’ I thought, since ‘there is nothing
there at all.’ There was, but anyway…
In the meantime, we have
endured Erda as a sex worker, first of all spending a great deal of time on
film with some other women choosing her lipstick, then sharing an
Alexanderplatz café meal (waiter: Seibert) with Wotan, for whom we have a
charming video close-up of his eating spaghetti. Having thrown a glass of wine
over him, she returns and proceeds to maul him, resulting in a filmed blow-job
whilst the waiter returns with the bill. (He later showers his staff with
banknotes; the Wanderer tips well, it would seem.) That, apparently, is what
the peripeteia of the Ring, Wotan’s rejection of Fate, one of
the most extraordinarily profound scenes in all world-drama, amounts to chez Castorf. This is not alienating in
the sort of post-Brechtian way it seems to think it is; it is, I repeat, just
boring. A great deal of other irrelevant business appears on film. What had
been an interesting, truly promising device in Rheingold has now descended to the self-indulgent level of a Bill
Viola and his tedious
‘Tristan project’. The only relief,
albeit somewhat banal, is some rather conventional footage of a horse in a
forest: Grane, I presume, though perhaps that would make too much sense. The
ending – in which crocodiles wander around Alexanderplatz, Brünnhilde sticking
a table umbrella into one of their mouths, a woman (the Woodbird shorn of her
wings, I think) climbing inside another, only to climb back out, briefly renew
proceedings with Siegfried, only to be pushed aside by Brünnhilde – is something
for which I have yet to develop appropriate vocabulary.
Kirill Petrenko repeated his
good work from Die Walküre, a great
improvement upon his peremptory, straitjacketed Rheingold. This is not the well-nigh all-encompassing Wagner of a
Barenboim – though in a sense, how could it be, with Castorf plying his wares
on stage? There was a good sense of line and, again, a still finer sense of
dynamic contrast. With the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra on excellent form – such
depth in the string tone, such piquancy in the woodwind, such power that yet
proves infinitely yielding in the brass – this might well be a Ring worth hearing on the radio.
At least, that is, if one can
put up with a cast which yet again falls considerably short of what Bayreuth
ought to be able to engage. The only member of this evening’s cast who could
reasonably be considered world-class was Burkhard Ulrich’s Mime. If he resorted
on stage to frequent imitation of Heinz Zednik, then that was doubtless a
consequence of the lack of Personenregie.
Vocally and verbally, he put Lance Ryan’s shouted Siegfried to shame. One could
put up with a bit of vocal roughness, were there discernible interest in the
words, but, whatever Ryan’s skill in navigating the crevasses of Mount Rushmore,
there was little to detain the ear here. Catherine Foster’s likeable Brünnhilde
remained a positive point, though again, this was hardly Nina Stemme – and,
again, Foster seemed overly reliant upon the prompter. Wolfgang Koch’s Wanderer
was, within Castorf’s constraints, well-acted and well-enough sung, but tended
towards the merely petulant, with none of the wisdom (and darkness of tone)
that the role really requires. Oleg Bryjak was booed – bafflingly – as Alberich;
he was certainly in the top half of the cast, if nothing out of the ordinary.
Sorin Caliban made for a decent enough Fafner, if again nothing memorable.
Nadine Weissmann’s Erda was tremulous and – even in vocal terms – lacking in
dignity. Mirella Hagen’s Woodbird was straightforwardly inadequate. If this
were a cast in a middle-ranking regional house, one would probably think more
highly of it. But this is Bayreuth, and deserves better.
