Bayreuth Festival (4) - Siegfried, 26 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke

Mime – Andreas Conrad
Wanderer – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Woodbird – Ana Durlovski

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)

Siegfried is now for me the highpoint in Frank Castorf’s Ring. It is surely the most difficult of all four parts to bring off, but Castorf’s – and his performers’ – grasp of the work’s epic quality may well be unsurpassed. One would at least have to go back – from productions I know – to Harry Kupfer, perhaps even to Patrice Chéreau. In Wagner’s drama, as in Castorf’s staging, so many of the Ring’s strands come together here – and how!

A crucial idea to the drama, to its realisation, and indeed to the epic tradition in which it so triumphantly yet challengingly stands is liminality. At a basic, or perhaps better immediate, level, the revolving stage does its work here. Forest or station? Both are quintessential liminal zones. The German Romantic forest has a long history, of course, extending back long before German Romanticism. Think of the invention of ‘Hermann’, a Teutonisation of Arminius: ‘Assuredly he was the deliverer of Germany,’ wrote the admiring Tacitus in his Annals. Arminius ‘had defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals, but in the height of her empire’s glory.’ And for Romans, Germans such as Wagner, born in Leipzig in 1813, could substitute the French. Caspar David Friedrich contributed two paintings to an exhibition held in Dresden in March 1814 to celebrate the liberation of Germany from the French yoke, one depicting the imaginary grave of Arminius/Hermann. Wagner too rejoiced in the memory of those events in the Teutoburger Wald, even when he told Cosima in rather gloomy terms: ‘So far, we have been great in defence, dispelling alien elements which we could not assimilate; the Teutoburger Wald was a rejection of the Roman influence, the Reformation also a rejection, our great literature a rejection of the influence of the French; the only positive thing so far has been our music — Beethoven.’ The implication was, of course, that now things might change, although by then the strong, Schopenhauerian element in his world-view was already suggesting they might not. And so, enter the resigned Wanderer, more a hero than the rebel without a consciousness, Siegfried, born in that forest, and ignorant of anything beyond it, might ever prove in reality.

Castorf may be understood both to play on that characterisation and to question it. How, after all, could one not, concerned where – indeed knowing where – such Romanticism, even nationalism, might lead, or perhaps better, be understood by some to have led. And so, the fabled alternative Mount Rushmore presents a world in which socialism might appear to have won the day: Marx (great) – Lenin (good) – and then we on the Left do not quite know where to look when it comes to Stalin and Mao. Could we not have Adorno instead? The negative dialectic says no. Aleksandar Denić’s set design for the other side, Bayreuth (Al)exanderplatz station – S-Bahn, U-Bahn, post office, station restaurant, fountain, clock – is too real to be real. It is an astonishing sculpture and again an astonishingly apt liminal foil to the forest. What is more full of transience, more full of possibility, more full of the potential for foiling possibility, than a station? East Berlin seems to be going pretty well, or does it? Or is it East Berlin at all? It is what it is, just as those celebrated crocodiles are what they are. That does not stop us continually asking how, why, what, though. Like Mime, however, do we ask the questions whose answers we really need? Political leaders come and go above on the screens: is that Siegfried; is it Wotan; is it Mime? Or are they just faces of no one in particular, on to whom we (literally) project what we expect, what we want, what we have been led to believe? It is a question as much, perhaps for Honecker as for Merkel, for Lenin as for Stalin. And when actual projections of characters’ faces appear on Mount Rushmore again, what are we to make of them? Does it ‘mean’ anything that we see, or think we see, Siegfried’s face not on revolutionary Lenin or Mao but on ‘establishment’ Stalin, and Wotan (his eye damaged, yet playfully winking) on Stalin’s? Why do we insist on meaning at all? Have we not learned? Is Beckettian gloom perhaps all there is?

Maybe, yet there are other possibilities here we might grasp. Whether they are better or worse is for us to decide; perhaps Schopenhaurian renunciation would be better after all, but there is no short-circuiting of the question. Our supposed revolutionary hero, Siegfried, is a brutal figure by any standards. His Kalashnikov, heard to terrifyingly loud effect, should give us all pause for thought. Do we think of late Soviet, Brezhnev-era imperialism perhaps (Afghanistan?) or of our own, more fashionable heroes? We still all believe in Castro and Guevara, do we not? Meanwhile, oil continues to do its work; it always has, in West and in East. Patric Seibert, initially Siegfried’s chained bear, is literally covered in it. Alberich is still at large, watching and mocking – like the Wanderer and also like Mime. We draw connections between them; or perhaps we do not. It is up to us. And all the while, those awe-inspiring landscapes and cityscapes, with their wealth of associations, form our thinking, whether we like it or no.

Erda initially does not. But she must put on a show. The misogyny here of a newly revivified Wanderer – I am genuinely unsure as to whether the production participates in it, which is perhaps as it is uneasily should be – truly shocks. As soon as the tables turn – for Wagner, as soon as Wotan finally rejects Fate, but what does that mean here? – Wotan can treat the earth goddess as despicably as any other woman. There is no redemption for him here in the halting of a wheel’s turning; perhaps instead he transmutes it into post-Russian roulette. Desperate to have a piece of him, Erda debases herself in the now celebrated insistence on fellating the god. His response is to run after Siegfried and to leave her to pay the bill. She has even turned herself into one of his ‘favourite’ blondes, but to no avail. Nadine Weismann, giving a towering dramatic portrayal, quite unafraid to sound hurt, damaged, and cowed, cuts a movingly pathetic figure under the restaurant table at her last.

Will things go better for her daughter? Probably not. We fear the worst when she dons her wedding dress, sure that Siegfried will betray her. Our old friend, the Brazilian carnival Woodbird is still around, after all. But in an inversion of what we have seen in previous years, Siegfried returns to her and they embrace. Is Castorf reconciling himself somewhat with Wagner, with Romanticism? I admit that I felt a little disappointed – how much more powerful I found it for Brünnhilde to be left on her own, whilst Siegfried fucked the Woodbird. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps we now stand at the point at which we need to deconstruct the ‘Castorf Ring’, which, like Wagner’s, we know too well. At any rate, Catherine Foster proved herself in glorious voice, movingly eloquent as events around her coincided with, commentated on her – or did not. She has unquestionably gone from strength to strength.

Stefan Vinke, in the title role, proved tireless, if not necessarily ingratiating. But then, how ingratiating should a Siegfried be? When one hears so many singers who are simply incapable of getting through the evening, one cannot but be grateful for one who can, and who continues to be heard. He was certainly unafraid to repel us dramatically; no fairy-tale Romanticism here. Andreas Conrad’s Mime was very much a plausible opponent, heightening the dramatic stakes. This was a tenor, as well as a character, who demanded to be heard – and was. Thomas Johannes Mayer was perhaps on occasion a little verbally bluff as the Wanderer, but acted the role to a tee. His callous dismissal of Erda, mentioned above, chilled more, I think, than any of his predecessors’. Other singers all impressed in their different ways, very much part of the company.

And if Marek Janowski’s conducting of the score was not so alive to its epic quality as, say, that of Daniel Barenboim, or to the great conductors of the past, there was, at its best, a quicksilver dramatic quality to be heard and, yes, to be experienced that had been lacking in swathes of Die Walküre. Was the scene between Alberich and Mime simply too fast, almost glib? Perhaps, but it is not difficult to come up with a reading, in this context, to justify such a portrayal of what Hans Mayer brilliantly dubbed an ‘evil stockjobbers’ satire’. If Karl-Heinz Lehner’s darkly dangerous, still alluring Fafner represented, to quote Mayer once again, ‘the world of shameless wealth, the concentration of capital as a sign of the rise of the middle classes … under which Wagner had to suffer so much,’ then there is again something to be said for a lack of majesty to his prowling around the station. So long, that is, as it retained musico-dramatic coherence, which it did; Janowski certainly knew where the score was going, even when he seemed a little impatient with it. Perhaps, then, that will prove the most intriguing dialectical legacy of all from Castorf’s Siegfried: seemingly having held the work to sometimes extreme account, it vouchsafed the possibility, even the plausibility, of new musical readings too.

Bayreuth Festival (5) - Parsifal, 24 August 2016

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Amfortas – Ryan McKinny

Titurel – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Gurnemanz – Georg Zeppenfeld
Parsifal – Klaus Florian Vogt
Klingsor – Gerd Grochowski
Kundry – Elena Pankratova
First Knight of the Grail – Tansel Akzeybek
Second Knight of the Grail – Timo Riihonen
Squires – Alexandra Steiner, Mareike Morr, Charles Kim, Stefan Heibach
Flowermaidens – Anna Siminska, Katharina Persicke, Mareike Morr, Alexandra Steiner, Bele Kumberger, Ingeborg Gillebo
Contralto solo – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Uwe Eric Laufenberg (director)

Gisbert Jäkel (set designs)
Jessica Karge (costumes)
Reinhard Traub (lighting)
Gérard Naziri (video)
Richard Lorber (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

 

Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth Parsifal – perhaps the greatest staging of any opera I have ever seen (reviewed here, here, and here) – was always going to be a difficult act to follow. Katharina Wagner showed considerable boldness, to put it mildly, in planning to have Herheim’s production succeeded by one from the performance artist and painter, Jonathan Meese, entirely untested as an opera director, although he had designed the sets for Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysus in Salzburg, in 2010. The plug was pulled on that plan for financial reasons; or so it was said. Goodness knows what Meese’s Parsifal might have been; I tend to agree with Tom Service that it was ‘a shame … whatever else, it sure wouldn’t have been stultifying or conventional’. All is not entirely lost on that front, though, for a ‘new Parsifal opera’, seemingly deconstructionist yet nevertheless mythological, by Bernhard Lang will be directed by Meese next year in Vienna (at the Festwochen, I hasten to add, not at the State Opera!)

 

By contrast, I am afraid to say that all has been lost on the Bayreuth front with this new production by Uwe Erich Laufenberg. (And lest excuses be made about shortness of preparation time, it is actually a production originally intended for Cologne, which never materialised there.) Whilst I cannot say that earlier productions of Laufenberg’s I have seen, a Dresden Rosenkavalier and a Vienna Elektra, had proved earth-shattering, they were both intelligently put together, coherent, and with plenty of theatrical interest. None of that could be claimed of a production which is, to return to what Service said Meese would not have been, above all stultifying. Indeed, this may well be the most boring staging of the work I have seen in the theatre; take away its attempt at contemporary ‘relevance’, it might as well have been by Wolfgang Wagner or Otto Schenk. Its premise – seemingly contrived by a nightmare team of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry, ‘introducing’ George W. Bush as dramaturge – would have been more offensive still, had it been presented with some degree of coherence; one should, I suppose, be grateful for small mercies.

 

As it is, I can do no better than quote the opening Terry Eagleton’s magisterial LRB review of a book by the preposterous Dawkins (the review is more than well worth reading in its entirety):

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

 

It would be tempting to leave matters there, but alas, I should say something about the production myself, not least to attempt to justify the strong words above. Laufenberg takes us, with as much insensitivity as it would generally be possible, to Iraq. When the curtain opens, part way through the first Prelude, we see what appear to be refugees taking shelter in Monsalvat, which turns out to be a Christian community in war-torn territory. Running across the stage from time to time are some oldiers, presumably American, although I suppose they could be Blairite. Lest we feel unduly sympathetic, however, to people whose country has been invaded and their temple trashed, we learn that they are ‘fanatics’. If only they did not have such silly beliefs – no musician would ever consider the transcendent, would (s)he? – no one would ever have thought of destroying their lives; after all, Iraq was not about oil, was it? And so, in the sole powerful theatrical moment – however dubious – of the whole production, Amfortas is put on to the Cross himself, actually crucified for a while, and made to contribute blood himself to feed the community. Because that is what Iraqi Christians do, is it not? How good of a rational European to point that out to them and to us. The pornographic treatment of Ryan McKinny’s wounded, muscled body, naked, save, bizarrely, for what seems to be a nappy (!), suggests an object of devotion in itself. That might, in other circumstances, have led somewhere; Monsalvat is, after all, a dying community (cf. Dmitri Tcherniakov). Here, one can only presume, we are merely meant to appreciate that these simple folk are not only hopelessly deluded; they are sick perverts too. The rest is vapid nothingness – never more so than in what seems to be a bizarre misunderstanding of ‘Zum Raum wird hier Zeit’, the Transformation Music set to an expensive-looking video that takes us out into space, for an aerial view of the world, prior to homing in on our ‘conflict zone’. Religion, eh: what a terrible thing it is; how stupid it must seem to Martians and to enlightened earth-dwellers.

 

What to do for the second act? Let us be really brave, speak truth to power, spurn Western imperialism and racism, and have a go at Islam. Klingsor’s Magic Garden seems to be in ISIS-lite-land. Muslims, you see: they are both savages and hypocrites. Klingsor keeps a stash of crucifixes, perhaps stolen from the foolish Christian knights: perhaps he is ‘really’ a Christian himself, or perhaps it is just loot. Who cares? Later on, he flagellates himself (with his clothes on), excited by Kundry’s attempts at seducing Parsifal. There is worse, though, much worse. Soldiers again run across the stage from time to time; Parsifal, it turns out, is one of them. Being an American soldier of course means that he must be in the right. The Flowermaidens come onstage, hijab- or niqab-clad. (I do not think there was anyone with a full burka, but could not bring myself to look too closely.) Parsifal is not interested. They come back, having shed their modesty; interested he most certainly now is, and the Arab world is what it should be, an ‘exotic’ fantasy playground for white heterosexual men. So, having essentialised women’s bodies, reminded us  what they are really for, and having shown us what Islam is really about (probably even worse than Christianity, and equally lacking in subtlety, depth, or difference), we can sit back and endure a theatrically inert seduction. Amfortas – has the poor soul not suffered enough? – joins as a spectator, because otherwise we should not understand that he has some connection with what is unfolding. For anyone who might care, Parsifal makes no sign of the Cross at the end; I genuinely have no opinion whether that were a good or bad thing in context.

 

If there were at least some ‘offence interest’, however trivial, in the first two acts, the third commits, pretty much without exception, the ultimate sin of inducing boredom. Members of three faiths, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, get together, realise that they are all the same really, sing Kum ba yah (well not actually, but they may as well have done), and all is well; perhaps they will no longer even be refugees. En route to that revelation and revolution, we see some liberated (that is, naked) erstwhile Islamic Flowermaidens; relieved of their Islam, they are now able to show kindness to an elderly Kundry. Charity, of course, begins outside ‘religion’. Kundry and Gurnemanz take turns in a wheelchair, although the former seems quite sprightly the rest of the time: what a fraud! The final scene continues the eradication of theology: would it not be a grand thing indeed if we were to follow suit?

 

Musically, things were much better, although not good enough to offer ample compensation; that may, in any case, have been too much to ask. Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting was efficient; he clearly knew the score, but offered little beyond that. His briskness was, perhaps, in these particular circumstances, no bad thing; would we really have wished to linger? In the lead up to the Good Friday Music, however, the tempo was so absurdly fast that even that potential virtue was lost. Speeds in themselves are of little interest here; both Pierre Boulez and Daniele Gatti have had much to tell us about the work. But being fast is not a good in itself, any more than being slow might be. Far too often, the score seemed merely to be skated over. The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra played, as one might have expected, very well indeed, but was too often subdued and harried by its conductor. Although much better in the third act, and impressive in heft throughout, the chorus, to my surprise, proved somewhat erratic of intonation during the first act.

 

At least the singing was good, in two cases outstanding, those two cases being McKinny’s Amfortas and Georg Zeppenfeld’s Gurnemanz. Both showed something very close to the ideal musico-dramatic alchemy between words and music, heightening the meaning and impact of both. Zeppenfeld’s heroic stint at Bayreuth – I have seen him in the Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal! – must be regarded as one of this year’s great successes at the Festival. Reactions to Klaus Florian Vogt tend to focus on whether people like or dislike his highly controversial voice. It seems to me considerably better suited to Lohengrin than to Parsifal, but, on its own terms, Vogt’s performance was highly commendable. If the results were sometimes bland, at least to my ears, it is always a relief simple to hear a tenor capable of singing a Wagner role. Like McKinny and Zeppenfeld, Vogt can act too; so can Elena Pankratova, as one really noticed in the third act, when she has next to nothing to sing. If only the acting skills of all could have been put to better use. Whilst Pankratova’s vocal performance was sometimes a little wayward, it was nevertheless capable of thrilling beyond the more obviously histrionic passages, and often drew one with considerable subtlety to listen. Karl-Heinz Lehner and Gerd Grochowski offered laudable performances as Titurel and Klingsor respectively; so did a fine bunch, as it were, of Flowermaidens, likewise our Knights and Squires.

 

Who on earth (or beyond it?) the man seated above the stage, his back turned to us, may have been we never did find out. God? Wagner? Jonathan Meese? One had long since ceased to care. Perhaps we should let Meese have the next-to-last words: ‘Richard Wagner ist, wie Meese, ein Kunstfanatiker mit dem Tunnelblick K.U.N.S.T. Richard Wagner ist keine Ersatzreligion, Richard Wagner ersetzt alle Religionen. Richard Wagner ist die Machterzergreifung KUNST, Meese's Parsifal ist Kunstherrschaft. Meese dient dem Richard Wagner ohne Falsch.’ One does not have to agree, or even to understand, to sense that Meese might have offered something more engaging, perhaps even something more sympathetic towards Wagner’s complex relationships with theology and religion. Nach Wien, then…

Bayreuth Festival (4) - Siegfried, 23 August 2016

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke
Mime – Andreas Conrad
Wanderer – John Lundgren
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Woodbird – Ana Durlovski


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)

Mea culpa. I am by now convinced that this Ring has been far more strongly presented than it was when I saw it in 2014. (I have kept to my resolution not yet to re-read my earlier reviews, but shall do so once my visit to the festival is over.) Everything is tighter; revisions to the productions have been entirely to their benefit; the cast is much stronger, vocally and otherwise; the director seems less hostile to, although not necessarily less critical of, Wagner; and so on. And yet, the difference in my response cannot, I think, be explained away entirely in such terms; even if it can, I should rather err on the side of generosity. I am happy, then, to say that I owe Frank Castorf an apology.

Viewed overall, it was this Siegfried’s epic scope, quite in keeping not only with Wagner’s vision but with so many other dramatic works too, that struck me most of all. The word ‘journey’ has so been so debased by the lucrative language of ‘self-help’ – in some cases, in more than one literal sense – that it is perhaps too late to use it non-ironically; indeed, after Castorf, it is perhaps too late to view the Ring without some degree, at least, of irony. But the tale of the boy who learns what fear receives as probing and, in many respects, as sympathetic a treatment as I have seen for quite some time. There is no doubt of the distance both he and we have travelled by the close – and there is genuine (neo-Feuerbachian?) hope to be experienced, especially at the ends of the second and third acts. It is not hope that is unalloyed; nor should it be. (Listen to the words in the nihilistic ecstasy of Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s duet, if you doubt me; listen also to the disturbing contrapuntal virtuosity of Wagner’s music there, both attempting, so it seems, to conceal and yet to celebrate the terrifying, pyromaniacal marriage of Bakunin and Schopenhauer.) But it celebrates, as did Marek Janowski, in what proved unquestionably his strongest performance so far, the very particular character of what, for once, truly emerged as, according to the cliché, the ‘scherzo’ of the Ring: less of a cliché, if one considers, post-Beethoven, what that might actually mean, both for Wagner and for us. If the Wagnerian hero would be a Hegelian, world-historical figure, responding to contemporary necessity; so must our (anti)hero be. For, as Feuerbach pointed out, ‘God did not become man for his own sake’; nor do we produce the Ring solely for Wagner’s.

 

Aleksandar Denić’s sets remain a thing of wonder – and wonder is surely an epic quality in itself. The sublimity – gone right, or gone wrong? both and neither? – of the alternative Mount Rushmore backdrop reminds us that much is at stake. Irony need not be ornamental: ask Heine. As Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao look down on us, as we look up to (or down on?) them, as occasionally their faces metamorphose into those of others, unreliable narration kicks in once again: do we know the newcomers, both here and on video, or not? Is this actually, then, an alternative historical path? Can we, as Wotan still wishes, at least some of the time, avert Götterdämmerung – or, perhaps worse still, a return to the non-golden-age of the Golden Motel. What is intervention? Is it desirable, or even possible? As with the shocking golden concealment of Freia – and it was, for me, impossible not to hark back to that moment – the machine-gun brutality of Siegfried’s murder of Mime truly terrifies, truly casts its shadow. As the riddles, the narrations, play themselves out, Wagner plays along; or rather leads us – and the production. Does it mean anything, then, when Wotan rejects Fate (Erda)? Or has that idea been (rightly or wrongly) jettisoned? There are no easy answers, or indeed perhaps any answers at all, just as in the Ring.

 

But Wotan rejects Erda not in that location, of course; he rejects her on the other side of the revolving set, the extraordinary recreation – well, knowingly unfaithful creation – of Alexanderplatz, first seen, if I remember correctly, which is not necessarily the case, as a playground for Fafner and his floozies. It is at least as much a thing of beauty as the other side of the dialectical wall (or even Wall). And, crucially, like that other side, yet also unlike it, it is, as stations and their surroundings tend to be, a place of liminality. Whether or no we may salvage the idea and the experience of a ‘journey’, we seem fated, Wanderer-like, to remain in transit. We find meaning and meaninglessness in Everyman Patric Seibert’s activities, whether as house-animal-cum-servant chez Mime, the Nibelheim van pressed back into service, or as waitor-cum-post-office-manager in the mysteriously empty – in more than one sense – proceedings in East (is there even a West?) Berlin.

I did not regret the loss of the more excessive spaghetti-founded activities in the first scene of the third act. I most certainly did appreciate Erda’s varied reprise of her Rheingold actions. Having worried, with her assistant on film, about which wig to wear during the Prelude, she disappears and changes it for her final exorcism and/or intensification of Wotan’s Rheingold possession, consensual or otherwise, of her – which, amongst other things, may well, through the creation of Brünnhilde, have enabled the rest of the action to unfold. What had previously seemed to me – rightly or wrongly, in the context of the 2014 production – arbitrary, even plain silly, now seemed charged with meaning. Returning to the scene, unquestionably ‘up for it’, Erda asks us difficult questions about what we should do, faced with a god, or a God. Just as our politicians will fellate the nearest banker without a moment’s thought, so does she get to work – and so does Wotan contemptuously slip his banknotes where one might expect. Her final finger-gesture to our hapless waiter as he returns for his payment is a splendid gesture: again rich in both potential meaning and meaninglessness. Ditto the now ‘traditional’ addition to the now five-strong crocodile community. What, two years ago, to me seemed a mere scenic backdrop – or, at least some of the time, did so – is now crucial to the drama.

 

Janowski’s conducting, as I mentioned above, came much more into its own. Perhaps that personal impression of mine is owed, at least in part, to a long-term strategy on the conductor’s part. Many conductors, after all, present Das Rheingold in buttoned-up, almost frigid fashion. Nevertheless, there is, I think, more to it than that. The greater sense of ebb and flow, of harmonic ‘depth’ – yes, I know it is a nineteenth-century, Germanic, ideological construction, but is no less useful for that – was palpable and, more to the point, dramatically productive. Balances were much less problematical too. If wind instruments often, although not always, came to the fore, there is nothing wrong with that. There is arguable Beethovenian warrant for it; and we want to hear, of course, as much as is possible. The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra now, for the first time, seemed very much to be the same orchestra – if not necessarily quite so consistently – as that I had heard for Thielemann’s Tristan. Pacing, whether longer- or shorter-term could not really be faulted; it may not always have been how I imagine it in my head, but that is neither here nor there.

 

The cast was excellent too – and here, I think, we may come to the core of why I found this Siegfried so much more convincing than I had before. Lance Ryan’s Siegfried, however adept on stage, had been excruciating vocally; Stefan Vinke gave the most convincing vocal performance I have heard from him in quite some time, clearly benefiting from not having to force his voice to fill an absurdly large theatre. He entered into the stage proceedings with equal commitment too. As with the previous night’s Tristan, ‘untiring’ should not be understood here as a euphemism; pent-up energy spilled carelessly onto the ground, as it must in the case of this rebel without a consciousness. Catherine Foster gave a splendid performance – much more at home in the production, and in the role, than I found her last time – as Brünnhilde. Her problem is not to be untiring but, so late in the evening, to be immediately fresh, dramatically immediate; the problem proved not to be such, simply an opportunity very well taken. One truly felt her transition from immortal to human, its joy as well as its fears.

 

John Lundgren’s Wotan/Wanderer exceeded even its Walküre promise. His performance, born very much of the detail of Wagner’s poem, equally alert to the implications of its musico-dramatic flowering, was one for the sagas – mediæval and contemporary. Albert Dohmen’s highly intelligent portrayal of Alberich was spot on: as quicksilver in momentary response as it was determined by what had gone before. His verbal acuity was shared, responded to, by Andreas Conrad’s Mime: a brother-in-arms indeed. Karl-Heinz Lehner’s Fafner was just as sinister and, intriguingly, just as darkly, dangerously attractive as what we had seen and heard his Rheingold incarnation. What we lost in rentier sloth, we gained in other respects. Nadine Weissmann retained and developed that wonderful sense of musico-dramatic ‘presence’ from the earlier drama. And Ana Durlovski’s carnivalesque Woodbird came across – rightly, in the spirit of the production – as more woman than voice of Nature. I may be nearing the moment of a mea maxima culpa.