Bayreuth Festspielhaus
Siegfried – Stefan Vinke
Gunther – Markus EicheAlberich – Albert Dohmen
Hagen – Stephen Milling
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Gutrune – Allison Oakes
Waltraute – Marina Prudenskaya
First Norn, Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl
Second Norn, Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel
Third Norn – Christiane Kohl
Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner
Frank Castorf (director)
Aleksander Denić (set designs)Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)
Bayreuth Festival Chorus
(chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Bayreuth Festival OrchestraMarek Janowski (conductor)
It would be a poor excuse for a
Ring that did not change those taking
part in it, whatever their roles – and that includes, or should include,
members of the audience. Frank Castorf’s Ring
of 2016 vintage will, I suspect, most likely prove to have changed me more than
most. There remains an abiding irony that the two greatest live Ring performances I have heard have been
concert stagings: both, believe it or not, at the highly unpromising venue of
the Royal Albert Hall, under Bernard Haitink and Daniel
Barenboim. I shall not even claim that I felt something was missing on
either of those occasions, since I did not. It was, though; one does not have
to be a crazed ‘authenticist’ to believe that, ideally, opera should be staged.
An excellent staging, moreover, is all the more likely, at least in many cases,
radically to transform one’s understanding of a work and its possibilities. For
all its flaws, which I should neither wish to exaggerate nor to ignore, Castorf’s
Ring has accomplished that in spades
for me. Many of the intriguing ideas hovering, sometimes more than that, in
2014 have more fully come of age. Some, perhaps especially in Götterdämmerung, have yet properly to do
so. This has clearly become, though, a striking achievement for Bayreuth.
There is, however, another
signal irony to mention: Castorf, it seems, has washed his hands of the
production, dissatisfied with certain of the conditions in which he had to
work. Quite when the changes took place, I cannot say, since I did not see the
production in 2015. I think it is only fair, however, to credit Patric Seibert,
not only the production’s Everyman, but Castorf’s assistant, who has remained
with the staging, as well as the rest of the production team. This thought must
remain speculative, but it seems quite possible that it took some distancing
from Castorf to achieve a more satisfactory dialectic between engagement with
and alienation from, even criticism of, Wagner’s work. Perhaps that may even be
owed to Seibert’s engagement onstage with Wagner’s characters, whom Castorf
himself may, at least initially, have underestimated. Whatever the precise
truths concerning responsibility may be, however, we should celebrate both the
achievement in itself and the reminder that opera is of its very essence a
collaborative effort. Wagner, his near-superhuman efforts as provider of words
and music notwithstanding, knew that very well. He did not, after all, conduct
the Ring at Bayreuth, knowing that he
had more than enough on his plate supervising the production. Perhaps more
importantly still, he was deeply dissatisfied with the results, offering those
concerned and us his celebrated exhortation, well heeded by Castorf et al.: ‘Kinder, macht neues!’
There is apocalyptic atmosphere
aplenty in this grand denouement. The Norns’ cosmic tittle-tattle gains both in
portentousness and in gossip-quality as they and their strange costumes –
somehow both redolent of extravagance and of bag-lady existence – make their
way across the stage and into a little shrine, whose function remains
mysterious in its apparent meaningless. The end of the world is truly nigh, it
seems. Writing on Patrice Chéreau’s legendary Bayreuth production, Günter
Metken spoke of Valhalla as ‘no longer the undamaged place it once was,’ with
‘something of the unhealthy air of Venice … It is one of those choice
apparitions of death conjured up by the previous [nineteenth] century, in order
to repress the rapacity of daily life.’ He went on to liken the entry of the
gods into Valhalla to a tableau vivant of Bruegel’s Parable of the
blind — astute commentary upon both Chéreau and Wagner. It also seems
rather well to fit both this Götterdämmerung,
and perhaps even its relationship to Chéreau as well as to Wagner.
‘The people’, or whatever we
want to call them, have not, hitherto, been entirely absent from this Ring. Indeed, their intriguing
inclusion, not only in the person of Seibert’s character, but also on video
(think, for instance, of the community in Die
Walküre’s Azerbaijan), and its collision with a world of cruel gods,
dwarves, heroes, and so on, has proved an important device not only of
alienation, not only of ‘relevance’, of Aktualität,
but also of dramatic interaction between those ‘kinds’ of being Wotan would
rather keep apart. They are nevertheless far more present here; such, after
all, is the nature of the work, in which the grand opéra chorus, as well as certain other Meyerbeerian
phenomena, is triumphantly reinstated, aufgehoben.
Part of the question posed seems, at least insofar as I understand, to be a
classic Marxist, and indeed more generally socialist, one. In a world of
abundance, the genuine achievement of the bourgeois mode of production, how can
we achieve redistribution? The world can feed itself, can provide for the needs
of its inhabitants, many times over, and yet does not. Hence, I think, the
importance here of food. As my friend and former pupil, Sam Goodyear has pointed
out to me, Wotan has previously proved conspicuous in his wastefulness. What
does he care if he orders several times over at the Alexanderplatz café in Siegfried? Money is no object.
Yet there are many, labouring
under the yoke of Wagner’s multiple post-Feuerbachian divinites – the state,
capital, religion, power, etc., even ‘love’ – for whom the denial of food, and
indeed the denial of other necessities and freedoms, most certainly does. So
long as the Gibichung regime provides for the people, it seems that Gunther and
Hagen will have their loyalty; and the frantic nature of provision as the crowd
is worked up by Hagen in the Vassals’ Scene seems suggestive both of the
relationship, increasingly stretched, between supply and demand, and of
dangerously fascistic frenzy, such as we see increasingly on our streets in a
Trumpist, Faragist, burkini-prohibiting world. The petty flags of different ‘nations’
underpin the violence as members of the crowd set upon each other and, perhaps
most crucially, the poor Everyman who must serve them, perhaps echoing, even if
unknowingly, the brutal treatment of the Migrant from Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960. Video both relays the
action and invite others, us included, to take pornographic pleasure in
watching the goings-on, just as we do with ‘the news’. When the Rhinemaidens
find the body of the murdered Everyman, and put him in the boot of their car,
the end seems closer still, which, of course, it is. Their mermaid seduction of
all three men, Siegfried, Gunther, and even Hagen, pleasuring them in that same
car, makes a chilling point of decadence.
There are still certain parts
of the drama, as I implied, which seem to me to work less well, with Aleksander
Denić’s magnificent set designs being relied on to do a little too much of the
work for themselves. The temperature drops, or at least seemed to me on this
occasion to do so, for the Waltraute scene, Castorf’s impatience with Wagner’s
Romantic heritage a little too prominent in the mix. And even the final scene
has something of a provisional air to it at times, although it was now strongly
assisted by a commanding performance from Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde. For
the most part, however, a greater willingness for characters to perform their
role in a greater dramatic whole, as well, perhaps, as a greater ability from a
number of them to perform that role, has led to a significantly more impressive
achievement.
Foster’s Brünnhilde now seemed
to own the stage, equally at ease with the demands of character and production.
Stefan Vinke, moreover, offered a huge improvement over Lance Ryan. The latter
could act but, to put it bluntly, could not sing the part. Vinke accomplished
both, even though there were understandable signs of strain at times
(especially, though, early on, so it was perhaps as much a hangover from Siegfried as anything else). Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester, an excellent Gunther
indeed, found a worthy successor in Markus Eiche: darkly dangerous, no mere
pushover, with violent tendencies of his own, intriguingly internalised more
than externalised, nowhere more so than at the end of the second act. Stephen
Milling’s Hagen initially sounded slightly on the gentle side, but quickly grew
into the role – or my assumptions died away. One sensed both sadism but
underlying fear too: this was anything but a one-dimensional reading. Allison
Oakes’s Gutrune was very well sung, also treading well the thin line between
manipulator and manipulated. As I said, I missed a degree of dramatic
engagement in the scene with Marina Prudenskaya’s Waltraute, but think that may
have been as much a matter of the production as anything else; it was certainly
not something I could put my finger on, in what was an accomplished
performance.
If Siegfried were the highlight of Marek Janowski’s reading of the
score, then there was nothing to complain about in Götterdämmerung. The strange balances heard in both Das Rheingold and, to a lesser extent,
in Die Walküre, were gone. There was,
moreover, in general a fine sense of ebb and flow, Janowski unafraid to relax
as well as to push forward. There were times when I longed for a stronger sense
of the orchestral ‘voice’ as Greek Chorus reimagined, but that was a matter of
degree. Towards the end of the first act and at the beginning of the second,
there was a sense of coasting, of the orchestral temperature dropping somewhat,
but again I should not wish to exaggerate. There was much to admire in Janowski’s
navigation – and it was, after all, only his first year at Bayreuth, a theatre
and acoustic with very specific difficulties. Both orchestra and chorus should
be highly praised for their achievements; they, as much as anyone else, were
crucial contributors to a truly challenging Ring.
The final, distinctly unsettling feeling, mixed with the exhilaration of the
conclusion of such an experience, was much as Boulez, at work on in this work in
this theatre, said it should be: ‘Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply
leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and
indeterminate in meaning.’
