Die Walküre, Royal Opera, 17 May 2025

Royal Opera House

Siegmund – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Sieglinde – Natalya Romaniw
Hunding – Soloman Howard
Wotan – Christopher Maltman
Brünnhilde – Elisabeth Strid
Fricka – Marina Prudenskaya
Gerhilde – Lee Bisset
Helmwige – Mauda Hundeling
Waltraute – Claire Barnett-Jones
Schwetleite – Rhonda Browne
Ortlinde – Katie Lowe
Siegrune – Catherine Carby
Grimgerde – Monika-Evelin Liiv
Rossweisse – Alison Kettlewell
Erda – Clare Almond
Actors – Illona Linthwaite, Lucy Brenchley, Clea Godsill, Maria Leon, Virginia Poli, Nadia Sadiq, Jay Yule

Director – Barrie Kosky
Set designs – Rufus Didwiszus
Costumes – Victoria Behr
Lighting – Alessandro Carletti

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)

The Royal Opera’s new Walküre proved very good in every respect, often excellent, offering some degree of solace for having come close to taking out a bank loan to buy a ticket. Our ultra-neoliberal, genocidal government will no more fund the arts than its kindred, ever-so-slightly-less genocidal, ever-so-slightly-more-separatist predecessor. As the last remnants of humanity crash down livestreamed before us, an historic half a million-plus citizens protesting but a stone’s throw away to stop the genocide in Gaza, Wagner’s message could hardly be more urgent. Will anyone listen? Doubtless. Will any of the people who need to listen do so? Almost certainly not, as signalled by the unpleasant experience of passing a key architect of Brexit Britain’s malaise, Michael Gove, on the stairs. What do these people think the Ring is about? It is a question as old as the work itself, but then the same question could be asked – doubtless was – in the theatres of Athens. A politically committed artist such as Wagner could not have been less concerned with l’art pour l’art: that was at best the world of actually existing opera houses and their ‘absolute music’. Such is never all we have, though sometimes it may feel like it. As once again, Wagner and his performers sought to ‘make clear to the men of the revolution the meaning of that [non-]revolution,’ it was possible, whatever the catastrophes outside and perhaps even on account of them, once again to be moved and challenged by Wagner’s drama in the theatre. 

I missed Das Rheingold, though if the final Götterdämmerung has not by then subsumed us all, I hope to catch up when the whole Ring is staged. Barrie Kosky’s outward-looking Kammperspiel of a Walküre seemed nevertheless to stand perfectly well on its own merits. Hallmarks not only of Kosky’s direction, indeed not only of the cast onstage, but also of Antonio Pappano’s direction of a splendidly responsive Orchestra of the Royal Opera House were listening and collaboration: qualities in shorter supply than ever as fascism deepens its grip with every day—over Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’. Trump’s politics-as-gameshow, and almost anywhere else one can think of in the benighted ‘West’ (and not only there). 

I have not been a fan of Pappano’s Wagner in the past; here, both his conducting and that orchestral response sounded transformed. (In retrospect, there may have been something of an augury in the unusually Wagnerian Turandot I heard him conduct in 2023, but the Ring is a challenge of quite another order.) Now it seemed to spring directly from the words – perhaps a little too much, rather than asserting itself as an equal partner – but, if one wanted an Opera and Drama Wagner, at least according to many readings, here it was. There was none of the orchestral scrappiness, none of the merely following (‘supporting’) singers that had bedevilled earlier Ring performances I had heard. (I skipped the last outing of Keith Warner’s Ring, or rather could not afford to go.) No Wagner performance, not even Barenboim’s or Furtwängler’s, will cover every base; this is music, as it is drama, that encompasses and suggests more than any one performance can. On its own terms, it convinced, and there was no doubting the strong relationship built with the production.   

Kosky’s production is in many ways straightforward, its overriding concept of the despoliation of Nature (chapter four of my book on the Ring) clear and fatally apparent. A tree and all that has been felled from it, presumably beginning with Wotan’s spear (in the work’s prehistory as recounted to us by the Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung), offer the roots and present of the tragic calamity that has befallen this world. Designs, especially set and lighting, contribute powerfully, a black-grey-white colour scheme occasionally bloodied in red, for instance that on Siegmund as Wotan chillingly watches him expire. Perhaps at some level he cares; perhaps not. Ambiguity renders it all the more chilling. There is perhaps a touch of the actor-politician Zelensky to him: a fascinating figure, with whom the Nietzsche of The Case of Wagner would have had a field day. Continuation and re-emergence of that red, flowing from the tree and seeping into the scene with the Valkyries and their carts of heroes (also tree-like, Nature’s wholeness still just about intact), made its point unmistakeably. So did Wotan’s brutal violence: no Rheingold ‘Nicht durch Gewalt’ here, should we take it seriously. Even Fricka’s glamourous arrival in a vintage car, which could readily have seemed an expensive distraction, took its place against this backdrop, connected to it in clear musicodramatic terms, as did Beckettian emergence of characters, Endgame-like, from holes in the savaged tree in the final scenes of the second act. For all the fuss about Erda, her appearance seemed in many ways of lesser importance, though the painterly provision of her spring fruits at the end of the first act was a nice touch. The tree doubled as Brünnhilde’s rock; in lesser hands, that might have confused, yet here seemed perfectly in order, aided by interventionist surtitling. 

Binding together musical performance and stage direction was of course the cast, which worked together very well indeed—almost as if this were a repertory spoken theatre with singing, in which company members worked together day in, day out. This made for moments of extraordinarily powerful emotional impact: Sieglinde’s ‘Lenz’ jubilation; Brünnhilde’s quandary following Wotan’s monologue, spotlit simply in front of the curtain; her embrace of Sieglinde following her decision to defy Wotan; and above all, Brünnhilde’s sobbing on her separation for the rock. Natalya Romaniw and Elisabeth Strid offered powerful portrayals of our two heroines, if we may call them that, founded, like the performance as a whole, in a word-driven approach that proposed rather than detracted from musical possibilities. Stanislas de Barbeyrac’s subtle Siegmund grasped at vocal steel when required, a fine match for Soloman Howard’s Hunding-as-policeman, as rounded a portrayal as any I can recall, perhaps more so, with unforgettable physical presence. Christopher Maltman’s Wotan occasionally lacked heft, but more than often than not impressed, in another highly text-driven performance. Marina Prudenskaya seems always to offer a class act, and certainly did here as a proud Fricka, marshalling instrumental reason just as her consort has always done. Individual direction (and performance) of the other Valkyries was put to excellent dramatic ends, one daring to tarry, so as to confront Wotan with the heinousness of his deeds, only to be brutally dismissed. 

I look forward to Siegfried. 

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Das Rheingold, 27 July 2014

 

 

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Wotan – Wolfgang Koch

Donner – Markus Eiche
Froh – 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…

Die Feen, Oper Leipzig, 20 April 2014

Leipzig Opera House

Fairy King, Voice of Groma – Sejong Chang

Ada – Elisabet Strid

Zemina – Magdalena Hinterdobler

Farzana – Jean Broiekhuizen

Arindal – Arnold Bezuyen

Lora – Eun Yee You

Morald – Mathias Hausmann

Drolla – Paula Rummel

Gernot – Milcho Borovinov

Gunther – Ferdinand van Bothmer

Harald – Roland Schubert

Messenger – Tae Hee Kwon

Children of Ada and Arindal – Lukas Gosch, Jacob Scipio

 

Renaud Doucet (director)

André Barbe (designs)

Guy Simard (lighting)

Marita Müller (dramaturgy)

Chorus of Oper Leipzig (chorus master: Alessandro Zuppardo)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Matthias Foremny (conductor)

Perhaps one of the more surprising yet ultimately most significant revelations of Wagner Year for me was this Leipzig production of Die Feen and the conviction it furthered that Wagner’s first opera was not merely ‘interesting’, not merely ‘promising’, and so on, but a work which had been poorly, extremely unfairly treated by history – or rather by the lazy judgements of those claiming, and usually failing, to know the opera. Doubtless there will be exceptions – there are, after all, people who do not take to Parsifal – but I have yet to speak to anyone who has actually attended a performance of Die Feen who has not thought highly of it, if not necessarily quite so highly as I do.  Uncannily, it was a year to the day – 20 April 2013 – when I heard that Leipzig performance as part of the first outing for Renaud Doucet’s delightful yet not unprobing staging. 20 April 2014 actually brought me to tears as the third act drew to a close, both delighted at the opportunity and saddened at the condescension or just downright ignorance with which this wonderful work still meets.

 

So three cheers once again to Oper Leipzig. I shall not dwell on the staging, essentially because I have written about it before, along with some background both to the work and to other productions (click here), and the revival serves to confirm rather than to transform its qualities. On this basis, I should happily see more, metatheatricality worn lightly, humorously, yet tellingly. The metatheatricality, as I observed previously, is worn lightly yet wittily frames the performance – and reminds us, again lightly, that occasions such as this are few and far between. Following a Saturday evening family meal, a father tunes in to a live broadcast of Die Feen from Oper Leipzig. In something of a modern fairy-tale, his living room becomes the performance space, blurring of typical performing boundaries in a sense a counterpart to the blurring – yet ultimate upholding – of the world of immortality, the world of the fairies, to which, as Arindal, he, through the workings of his imagination, had exceptionally been admitted. In both cases, and above all through the medium of music – tellingly, in a clear echo of Orpheus and his lyre, that is how Wagner brings the story to reconciliation – this man, perhaps unremarkable and yet receptive and dedicated, brings different worlds together. It is not a bad model for artistic endeavour in more general terms: we all have our part to play, but the question is whether we shall be willing.

 

Where Ulf Schirmer had tended more towards the early Romantic tendencies undoubtedly present in Wagner’s score – Mendelssohn, Marschner, Weber, and so on – Matthias Foremny seemed more concerned to place Wagner in the line he himself would later stress, if not necessarily for this work. Beethoven’s example stood  more clearly than before: both the symphonic and the operatic composer. More than once I was put in mind of Wagner's early, underrated C major Symphony, but also of the advances he had made upon his work since then. Sometimes this worked better than others; there were occasions, for instance, when forward thrust was occasioned perhaps at the expense of ebb and flow. But for the most part, this was a valid, thought-provoking performance, which brought out something close to the best of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Its ‘old German’ glow seemed almost as much a welcome resurrection as that of the work itself, though in reality, of course, the former has never really gone away; it is more the case that one has to look, or listen, harder to find it in an age in which orchestral homogenisation is all too often the rule.

 

Morald (Matthias Hausmann) and Lora (Eun Yee You)

Arnold Bezuyen once again impressed in the title role, not least in his portrayal of the difficult compromise between domesticity and the heroism that our paterfamilias imagines. There was some tiring towards the end of the third act, but Bezuyen recovered well. I had not encountered Elisabet Strid before, but she certainly impressed as Ada, a worthy successor to last year’s Christiane Libor. If only a woman in the centre stalls had not loudly coughed throughout the whole of Ada’s great second-act aria, so clearly inspired by Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (the aria, that is, rather than the coughing). Strid nevertheless rose above such selfish provocation to give a fine account of that extremely difficult number. Eun Yee You still seemed stretched as Lora, but had somewhat grown into the role. Mathias Hausmann offered a strong performance as Morald, whilst Paula Rummel and Milcho Borovinov delighted in their surprising buffo duet – and not just there. Though perhaps a little too much of a contrast for consistency to be maintained, it is a lovely piece and so it sounded here; the pair’s acting skills contributed as much as their musicality. The Leipzig Opera Chorus also made great contributions in both respects: their role here is often considerable, and gave no little pleasure on this occasion.

 

I shall conclude by repeating my pleas both for this excellent production to be filmed, so that others may see – and hear – it, and for other houses to follow Leipzig’s suit. This is a work that has been wronged indeed; it is our responsibility finally to right that wrong.