Festspielhaus
Siegfried – Stefan Vinke
Gunther – Markus Eiche
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Hagen – Stephen Milling
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster,
Andreas Rosar
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)
Patric Seibert (assistant
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 Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)
Bayreuth in particular is and
always has been a workshop, a place for experimentation, tendencies towards
sacralisation (Bühnenweihfestspiel,
anyone?) notwithstanding. That was what attracted Boulez to Bayreuth in the
first – and second – place; that was thus what brought Patrice Chéreau there,
for what must surely remain, bar the very first, the most celebrated Ring production in history. The
Boulez-Chéreau films remain a miracle: as watchable – and as listenable – as when
they first appeared. Moreover, and without slight, say, to Harry Kupfer’s
estimable successor – let us draw a veil over Peter Hall’s contribution –
Chéreau’s staging changed the work forever. Arguably, there was a good deal in
it, coincidentally or otherwise, presaged by Joachim Herz in Leipzig; but at
least in the West, and indeed worldwide, given its filming, it was the ‘Centenary
Ring’ that informed and reminded so
many what the work was, or might be, really about. Having come to the end of my
viewing of Frank Castorf’s Ring for
the third time, I am happy to put my neck on the line and to say that, for all
its problems and imperfections – not unlike the Ring itself – this is a production which, like Chéreau’s, Herz’s,
and Kupfer’s too, has changed the work forever. I recoiled from some of it the
first time I saw it, and freely admit that I was, in many cases, quite wrong to
have done so, although I think it also fair to say that many of the performers
have grown into it during its progress and also that it has itself grown in
stature following revision. For that reason, it would be hypocritical of me to
condemn too harshly those who found themselves lost or bewildered.
Let us hope, though, that there
will be another opportunity for them, and for others who have never seen this Ring, to experience it, on DVD. Some of Bayreuth’s
recent choices in that respect have frankly been bizarre: still no Herheim Parsifal,
but an instant release for Laufenberg’s miserable successor. Wagner may have
died owing the world a Tannhäuser;
Bayreuth would do much to stave off any such demise by giving the world a
Castorf Ring. Marek Janowski’s
conducting has had its ups and downs, the first two acts of Die Walküre the nadir. Yet here, if
still lacking much of the epic scale and dramatic thrust, let alone the
critical stance, of what we see on stage, it acts well enough as a foil. Bar a
few inevitable brass fluffs – I am not sure I have ever heard a Götterdämmerung in which that did not
happen – the orchestra was excellent on its own terms. Moreover, the vocal and
dramatic performances on stage have surely been better this year than in any of
the previous instalments.
For Götterdämmerung, the cast
was identical to last year’s – except for one partial, unforgettable exception.
Wagner is and remains theatre, which entails a great deal of contingency. In
this case, we were treated to our first – well, certainly my first – trans Brünnhilde.
Having injured her leg during the curtain calls at the end of the first act,
Catherine Foster, awe-inspiring in both her artistry and her professionalism,
sang the part magnificently: on crutches, from the sidelines. Meanwhile, production
assistant, Andreas Rosar donned a dress, wig, and so on, and acted the role on
stage. Both deserve the highest of praise, not just ‘in the circumstances’.
What deserves unmerited scorn and outrage is the small contingent in the
audience that booed Rosar. Seriously: what piece of subhuman scum would act in
such a way to someone who, at almost no notice, quite literally saved the show?
It is not as if such is an unheard of practice in the theatre, and if, for some
reason the AMOP delegation did not like it, why did they not just leave? If,
somehow you have managed to escape the sound and sight of resurgent fascism all
around us in ‘the real world’, here it was, frighteningly and sickeningly
present, railing at the mirror Wagner, Castorf, and their performers held up to
that world. I should love to have it revealed that the substitution was
actually all along part of Castorf’s Konzept,
but I think we can assume otherwise. At any rate, the same people booed his
indefatigable assistant – in many ways the greatest star of the entire
four-part show – Patric Seibert. His Everyman, surely unique in direction and
participation in such a piece, has clearly both been on quite a journey and
taken us on several others.
Back, anyway, to Castorf ‘proper’,
whatever that may mean. The cosmic tittle-tattle (Thomas Mann) of the Norns
takes place in an appropriately exhausted, end-of-the-world setting. Aleksander
Denić’s set designs, Adriana Braga Peretski costumes, and not lest the gloomy
lighting of Rainer Casper are very much in tandem with those world-weary E-flat
minor opening chords; this is not a production that always criticises or works against the musical drama, far from it.
Exhaustion in a well-nigh Beckettian sense rules: Fin de partie? A weird shrine, almost Marian, yet anything but, continues
to draw attention and repel. But to what is this little room into which not
only the Norns but many of their successors, canonical characters and others,
continue to enter and, perhaps just as important, from which they continue to attempt
to leave? It suggests exhausted consumerism, replete with plastic refuse, born,
of course, of the oil that has run through the entire cycle. It advertises a
deadly contemporary far-right politics, which, as the poster puts it, prefers ‘Oma’
to ‘Roma’. We also see glimpses of an eternally televised non-revolution such
as we endure in our own late capitalist lives: as witnessed Andreas Deinert’s and
Jens Crull’s video footage, both on the particular television screen within the
shrine, and elsewhere onstage. East and West both led here: state capitalism as
well as the still worse neoliberal variety. There is no escape. This is a world
that takes its leave from Chéreau’s Götterdämmerung,
or at least may be read as having done so: a world of rituals in a
post-religious society that knows no morality, indeed finds it impossible even to
‘know’. Yet still, in this nihilist hell, it must somehow continue to ‘do’
something – just as the second act will offer up desperate, pointless evocations
to gods who are already dead in any meaningful sense. The Norns are all dressed
up for a ball to which they know they are neither invited nor capable of
attending; but what else is there to do? They can sing, of course, and all
three of them do – magnificent both in solo and in blend.
Siegfried is no better. He may
even be worse. It is, after all, only at the last in Wagner’s drama that he
seems a character remotely worthy of the hopes invested in him – whether by
Brünnhilde to Sieglinde or by the newly-human ex-goddess to herself, or indeed
by us as bystanders (‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’)
to a revolution that fails. Humping Gutrune quickly, brutally, before asking
Gunther his sister’s name is horrible enough, but the reality of his rape of
Brünnhilde, video projections both clarifying and intensifying the horror of
what is going on, and of who, via the Tarnhelm, is who, chills as rarely
before. The brutality of Wagner’s score here does much of the work, of course –
so too did Foster’s frighteningly imperious impassivity before Marina
Prudenskaya’s heartrendingly imploring Waltraute beforehand – yet it can so
readily be partly undone by an uncomprehending staging. Siegfried is leader
now, his demeanour, his costume, the projections tell us: and what good has it
done us? None.
What I said about Stefan Vinke
in Siegfried counts doubly here: the
voice may not ingratiate, but should it? He is tireless, almost inhumanly so,
and that is surely a more important thing to register. That Gunther and
Siegfried make their oath of blood brotherhood in the kebab stall kitchen, none
too careful with hygiene, serves to underline not only echoes of Wagnerian
Palazzo Vendramin decadence but the sheer bestial depravity of the world within
and without the theatre. All the while, Wall Street, carelessly concealed in
cloth, awaits its deliberately underwhelming revelation. No one really bothers
to hide who is running the show any longer.
The second act is thus set for another
attempt at revolution that fails. Think, perhaps, of the ‘anti-capitalist’
protestors who neither know nor care what they want, but like a bit of
attention. There is real crisis here, real hunger. Or is there? Do the members
of the crowd putting up posters to that effect, and acting as if their lives
are at stake in their pillaging, really mean what they say? Or are they just engaging
in desperate rituals, whose meaning – again, like those evocations to the gods –
has almost passed from memory? There is certainly no doubting the brutality of
their behaviour, sons of Siegfried and Hagen, to Seibert’s character,
desperately trying to cater to their demands. Or is he ‘just’ an actor too? His
‘death’ at the beginning of the third act is certainly stage-managed. The video
shows him smear himself in ketchup (from his stall, perhaps?) and leave himself
for dead, awaiting the Rhinemaidens – like the Norns, equally fine individually
and in ensemble – to bundle him into their car, prior to their cavorting with Siegfried
and his subsequent brutal attack upon them. (Shades of Alberich in Rheingold, but in semi-reverse? To
return to the second-act crowd: does it have any revolutionary potential left
in it, when Siegfried clearly does not? Try as we might, it is difficult to
find. A good few of its members seem more preoccupied with culinary and sexual
excess; still, fake radicalism is a good way to win a girl, is it not? The
shots Seibert serves to many – Gutrune included – only make matters worse, but
he is hardly in a position to argue.
And so, when Brünnhilde threatens
to set Wall Street alight, nothing really happens. Everything is even worse
than we had feared. No more has the end of this miserable world come than a
revolution has saved us. Various participants go through the motions; someone
even pops a Picasso out of the window for safe keeping. Or is it just to put it
on more brazen display to the plebs below? The Rhinemaidens survive – or at
least they do on screen. (That someone was a Rhinemaiden.) They even give Hagen
a kitschy Rhine funeral, or at least see him off. Video, as it had in Das Rheingold, both comments on,
elucidates, and frustrates the action; it has done so in the Funeral March too,
Hagen marching back in a ‘Romantic’ landscape such as one might always have
wished for until, jarringly, one saw it – and thought ‘what a load of rubbish’.
It is all, perhaps, a bit Heimat 3: which, the more one thinks
about it, the more appropriate it seems. As Herbert Marcuse put it, in his self-reflexive
critique of Marxist aesthetics, The
Aesthetic Dimension: ‘If art were
to promise that at the end good would triumph over evil, such a promise would
be refuted by the historical truth. In reality it is evil which triumphs, and
there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time.
Authentic works of art are aware of this; they reject the promise made too
easily; they reject the unburdened happy end.’ Rejecting the catharsis unburdened
tragedy, or gnawing away at it out of post- or non-revolutionary ennui, twists the dialectical screw
further. What a world is ours.