Opéra Municipal de Marseille
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| Images: Camille Rovera |
Fricka – Marion Lebègue
Freia – Élodie Hache
Erda – Amandine Ammirati
Wellgunde – Marie Kalinine
Flosshilde – Lucie Roche
Wotan – Alexandre Duhamel
Alberich – Zoltán Nagy
Mime – Marius Brenciu
Donner – Yoann Dubruque
Froh – Éric Huchet
Loge – Samy Camps
Fasolt – Patrick Bolleire
Fafner – Louis Morvan
Director – Charles Roubaud
Assistant director – Jean-Christophe Mast
Costumes – Katia Duflot
Set designs – Emmanuelle Favre
Lighting – Jacques Rouveyrollis
Video – Julien Soulier
Orchestra de l’Opéra de Marseille
Thirty years since Das Rheingold – or L’Or du Rhin, as it was dually advertised – was last staged in Marseille, it returns as part of what I assume to be a new Ring, directed by Charles Roubaud and conducted by the Marseille Opera’s music director (also incoming Principal Guest Conductor of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper), the energetic and highly talented Michele Spotti. Marseille’s handsome art deco opera house is celebrating the occasion in some style, including an outing on the staircase for Erda’s stylish costume of thirty years ago (director also Charles Roubaud, designer Katia Duflot).
This too is stylishly conceived, evoking a time when the house was new: round about 1930, I should guess. The opening scene takes place, as in a sense it should, beneath the bank of the Rhine, albeit in the guise of a ‘Rheinbank’ vault. As the Prelude progresses and the curtain rises, a cleaner goes about his business, dreams of ‘higher’ things on his mind as his theatrical sweeping, in time with the music’s close, suggests. This is Alberich, soon to be teased by glamorous employees indeed, Rhinemaidens with keys to the safe and its gold bars. So, if Wagner dramatises primal conversion of value-free gold into capital, here we see a redramatisation such as happens every day, indeed every second, in our accursed age of capital. There never was a golden age: on that Wagner is clear. As we did with Patrice Chéreau at Bayreuth and have done many times since, we witness a specific case of Alberich’s ‘theft’ – in essence, he simply offers the asking price, though that is already to argue in the language of private property and capital – in a world created by the gods and yet already shaped by his forerunners.
The second scene introduces us, as one
might expect, to older ‘money’ and power. Here, is a gilded age, redolent in
particular of the United States, the age of Gatsby – they were careless people,
Wotan and Fricka – with art deco to boot. It does not portray the house or its
origins directly, but one might be led, as one is with the North American
trappings, to reflect in kind. A nice touch is an ornamental, visibly protected
tree in the corner, the light of Freia’s apples extinguished following her
abduction. Another is that an Empire-State-Building like Valhalla can be
partially seen, through the mists: yes, as Wagner intended, albeit for the age
of King Kong. Video projection enables us to witness Alberich’s transformations
in Nibelheim, whilst we hear him when invisible via totalitarian tannoy. Such points
of detail are welcome, not because everything necessarily has to be done in
this way, but because they anchor the drama with stage action that has been thought
through. The beginning of the final scene I found a little disappointing:
empty, without much to look at or have one think, but perhaps that was the
point, prior to entry into the new tower via gilded lift (ring any bells, Donner(ld)?)
Spotti’s musical direction was resourceful, given the relatively small orchestra at his disposal. Wind naturally came more to the fore than they might usually do, but that opportunity was seized to have us hear a good deal of that detail. Not that the Marseille strings were underwhelming, far from it; at their best, they played with an appropriately golden sheen. Some musicians were heard from beyond the pit, a pair of harpists in a box above included. The latter certainly worked hard for their gold. If there were a few awkward corners – this is far from an easy score for any orchestra – Spotti marshalled his forces with flair and assurance. It was a relatively broad reading - just over two-and-a-half hours, I think – but only occasionally, above all during the beginning of the final scene, did tension sag. I have heard many performances considerably more lacking in starrier houses.
Zoltán Nagy’s Alberich would have graced
any house, conceived and brought to life with a theatricality that did not
preclude but rather gave birth to musical excellence. His way with Wagner’s
words was similarly captivating. Much the same could – and should – be said of Samy
Camps’s Loge, a definite star turn. Alexandre Duhamel’s Wotan was more mixed:
initially sounding somewhat parted and unusually vibrato-laden, though it
improved. Marion Lebègue made the most of Fricka, bringing words and music
vividly off-page on-stage. Gangster giants – dead ringers, as it were, for Babylon
Berlin’s Ringverein – were presented by Patrick Bolleire and Louis Morvan,
the dark brutality of the latter’s Fafner properly chilling. A fine trio of Rhinemaidens
and, in general, a cast with excellent ensemble contributed to the important
lesson, familiar to many of us in London from Regents Opera’s ringside events, that Wagner should not, should not be left solely
to our metropolitan theatres. Emphasis, in both cases, on story-telling and
character definition, not eschewing conceptual apparatus yet also not being
overwhelmed by it, forms a crucial part both of our operatic ecology and of a continuing
tradition of Wagner as nineteenth-century theatrical drama that can yet speak
to us today.
