Siegmund – Christopher Ventris
Hunding – Georg Zeppenfeld
Wotan – John Lundgren
Sieglinde – Heidi Melton
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Fricka – Sarah Connolly
Gerhilde – Caroline Wenborne
Ortlinde – Dara Hobbs
Waltraute – Stephanie Houtzeel
Schwetleite – Nadine Weissmann
Helmwige – Christiane Kohl
Siegrune – Mareike Morr
Grimgerde – Weibe Lehmkuhl
Rossweiße – Alexandra
Petersamer
Frank Castorf (director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski
(costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull
(video)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)
Again, one’s memory can readily
play tricks, but I think I can say with a good degree of certainty that this Walküre, like its Rheingold predecessor, marked a considerable improvement upon the
performance I saw two years ago. How much of that relates to revision of Frank
Castorf’s staging and how much to individual (and indeed ensemble) performances
onstage, I am not entirely sure. Perhaps that is as it should be, for a
performance without a little mystery – if not necessarily the mystification
that might be seen as the ‘bad nineteenth-century’ part of Wagner’s, still more
Wagnerian, aesthetics – will generally be found lacking.
It certainly, I think, made a
difference having Christopher Ventris as Siegmund. In
2014, although Johan Botha could certainly sing the role – not something to
be taken for granted, naming no names – his inability to act was a problem one
could not simply ignore. Now, with Ventris at least Botha’s vocal equal, albeit
very different in tone, but also a committed stage actor, the first act and the
end of the second looked up completely. There are many different ways to sing
Siegmund, and Ventris’s, perhaps inevitably, comes closer to the sound we
expect from a Parsifal; his is not a baritonal tenor. Nor need it be; this beautifully, though never
just beautifully sung, performance, equally attentive to words and music, was
quite beyond reproach. I was tempted to ask why we seemingly never hear Ventris
in Britain any more, but why should we? Germany surely has much more to offer
him.
Heidi Melton, on much better
form, or rather much more consistent form, than as Isolde recently at ENO,
offered a heartfelt reading of Sieglinde. Occasional intonational wobbles
counted for little or nothing when set against such palpable sincerity and
range. Much the same might be said of Catherine Foster’s Brünnhilde. Foster has
always struck me as a very likeable artist, not at all inappropriate for Wotan’s
wayward girl. Occasional waywardness was much in keeping with her character;
the tenderness of her farewell – suggesting perhaps that Brünnhilde understood
a little more than usual the finality of her sentence – was touching and
dramatically productive indeed. John Lundgren’s Wotan was dark of tone,
commanding of presence, highly attentive – crucial in this of all roles – to the
marriage of words and music. His shaping of Wotan’s second act monologue, his communication
of its verbal and musical contours, their interaction with each other and with
the orchestra, was excellent. A sense of chill, of reserve, seemed very much
part of the interpretation, and varied according to circumstances.
Georg Zeppenfeld’s Hunding proved
outstanding: dark, although not so dark as one often hears of tone, dark of
intent, yet not without charm. The return of video in the second half of the
first act gave him a great deal more to do than would generally the case; his
acting offstage, both before and after drugging, offered an important
additional standpoint upon the action below. Sarah Connolly’s return as Fricka
lived up to its Rheingold promise. There
was no doubting her fury and righteous indignation. An excellent band of
Valkyries worked together extremely well. Not unlike the Rhinemaidens the night
before, their ensemble and solo work was equally distinguished; they, again,
had much more to do, given close camera attention, than usual. Such was not a problem;
it was, instead, an opportunity.
Where I felt that opportunity
was slightly missed was in Castorf’s conception itself. By the time we reached
the third act, perhaps especially its first part, I could not help but wonder
whether he had somewhat lost interest. It was a feeling much less strong than
last time, but what earlier exerts considerable post-Brechtian force – the alienation
of the world of Aleksandar Denić’s wondrous set designs and their tale of
striking oil in Azerbaijan, 1942, from suspect, one presumes, ‘Romantic’ Lenz and Liebe – comes at some points to seem arbitrary again. Or at least
it did to me; I may well have been missing the point. The first act in
particular, as I said, benefited from Ventris’s Siegmund. Lengthy stretches of
almost nothing happening at all onstage are, mercifully, no longer with us.
What seemed to betoken contempt for the work, or stretches thereof, in 2014, no
longer does. However, even at the end of the third act, when things pick up
again dramatically, I wondered whether there was a little too much of Wotan and
Brünnhilde not listening to each other, not even being in the same place. The
case is at least arguable, though; maybe I need a more thoroughgoing purge of
my Romanticism.
Earlier on, the tension and
indeed interplay work better. The trip back seventy years or so in time from
the present-day (Wifi is available at the Golden Motel) does not bother me.
Wagner plays with time, in any case, as is witnessed by the confrontation of his
dual, Genesis-like creation myths (those of Alberich in Rheingold and Wotan in Götterdämmerung),
with the march of dramatic time, both as experienced by us and, we presume, by
the characters. He does not play with it as Castorf does, but Castorf’s play
has us think: always a good and necessary thing in Wagner, whatever his preposterous
‘protectors’ might claim. I wish, as I think I did before, that more still might
have been done with such disjuncture, but there we are. More to the point,
however, we come to think of Rheingold
all the more in retrospect as distant pre-history. That world of gods and
giants is not identical to that of the succeeding three dramas, although there
is, of course, much complex interconnection and interaction. We have seen, to a
certain extent, where things might lead.
However, we also come to see
that we are on different historical, even ideological trajectory. ‘Toto, I’ve a
feeling we’re not in Texas anymore.’ It is not just location, though; it is the
shift to the Eastern bloc, as once we called it. Russian and Azerbaijani
scripts, Pravda, even hints at socialist realism: are we perhaps giving Marx
and Wagner a try, taking them at, if not their own word, then a sceptical yet
not despising deconstruction thereof? If the world of the Golden Motel is so
bad, then show us what you can do? Is Wagner, then, being found wanting by Castorf?
Up to a point, I think, for it is difficult, on some level, to avoid the
conclusion that the ‘real’ action is that of the oil strikes rather than that
of Siegmund and Sieglinde? Unreliable narration nevertheless continues to make
its point, although less so – a pity, I think – than in Das Rheingold.
Where Castorf really
scores, though, at least for me, is in the return of the gods to this world. Adopting
local dress, customs, commercial practices, and indeed leading the latter, the
gods do what we have always thought they did when they assumed human form. One
might think as much here of Greek myth as Teutonic – as, of course, did Wagner.
Do they, or does capital, reinstate Fate? Or is the opposition false? We are
led to ask such questions, difficult to resolve, perhaps incapable of
resolution. Wotan’s loss of his 'local' beard (seen first on film towards the end of
the first act, as the god drinks his vodka) comes to seem akin to dropping of a
mask. We behold him, as, unforgettably, Hunding does, in all his godlike
terror. And we also recall, with Wagner, student of Feuerbach, that we have
made him, as we have our other gods of capital, law, ‘love’, and so on.
Marek Janowski and the Bayreuth
Festival Orchestra seemed to me on surer form than the previous evening (not
that they were bad then). There were still some odd orchestral balances: the
clarinet line again, albeit to a considerably lesser extent. Perhaps the issue
was more acoustical than intentional. More generally, though, Janowski’s
emphasis on the woodwind in particular was balanced by a greater willingness to
let the strings play out. He was more flexible of tempo too, usually to
excellent effect. If the results remain more conventionally of the ‘opera’
world than its ‘musico-dramatic’ sibling or rival, increased command of the melos, the ebb and flow, worked very
much to the drama’s benefit. We cannot always hear Daniel Barenboim, and there
is much to be said for the marriage of general competence to a desire to bring
out overlooked aspects of a work.
