Moses und Aron, Semperoper Dresden, 29 September 2018

Moses – John Tomlinson

Aron – Lance Ryan

Young Maiden – Tahnee Niboro

Sick Woman – Christa Mayer

Young Man/Naked Youth – Simeon Esper

Another Man, Ephraimite – Matthias Henneberg

Priest – Magnis Piontek

Youth – Beomjin Kim

Six Solo Voices – Katerina von Bennigsen, Stepanka Pucalkova, Michal Doron, Aaron Pegram, Jiři Rajniš, Tillmann Rönnebeck

Solo Soprano – Kira Tabatschnik

Naked Virgins – Tania Lorenzo, Tahnee Niboro, Grace Durham, Constance Heller

Elders – Woo Ran Lim, Andreas Heinze, Norbert Klesse

Calixto Bieito (director)

Rebecca Ringst (set designs)

Ingo Krügler (costumes)

Michael Bauer (lighting)

Sarah Derendinger (video)

Johann Casimir Eule (dramaturgy)

Vocalconsort Berlin, Dresden Symphony Chorus, Dresden State Opera Chorus, Extra Chorus and Children’s Chorus (chorus master: Jörn Hinnerk Andersen)

Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Alan Gilbert (conductor)

Images: Ludwig Olah

There is no more emphatic modernist masterpiece than Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. It stays so true to its mission that it cannot, irrespective of ‘the composer’s intention’, be completed, the very quintessence of the modernist fragment, of the ‘difficult’ work about ‘difficulty’. Its concern with the hubris of the representation leads it to a series of antinomies unflinchingly confronted, quite without evasion. Yes and no, perhaps more yes than no – and yet, perhaps even in work as well as in performance, with an undeniable element of the two. The balance may be skewed, just as it is between Moses and Aron, between truth and communication, but it is never one or the other; such would not be bad dialectics, but rather no dialectics whatsoever, and what could be less Schoenbergian than that? One can rejoice in the antinomies in the impossibilities; one can take them further. Alternatively, one can try to make something complete out of them. One will probably do both. Here, however, in an extraordinary new production from Calixto Bieito and the Semperoper Dresden, we perhaps come closer than ever to the next dialectical stage by both honouring the two-act fragment – performed, without an interval, almost as if a single, unbroken span – and, as Bieito insists both in speech and, more important, in the art and craft of stagework, by rendering it an apparently ‘complete’ artwork.

Bieito has at heart – he is assuredly a director with a great heart – always been one not only to present but also to necessitate a message of humanism. Just like Schoenberg, one might say, and these are unquestionably a composer and work for whom he has the greatest, most productive respect. He plays Moses pretty straight, but then he has never been much of one for deconstruction. (For that route, take Peter Konwitschny’s staging, which I saw in Hamburg in 2004.) The first act, then, plays itself out much as it tends generally to do, but with such attention to the detail and meaning thereof concerning the interaction between Moses, Aron, and the chorus, the Children of Israel, that even those of us who imagine we know the work reasonably well discover much that is new, not only visually, but verbally, musically too. Likewise, perhaps still more so, with the relationships between individual, group within the chorus, and the chorus as a whole (when indeed it exists as such). Here, as throughout, we see a deeply musical staging – just as, I think, we hear a deeply dramatic and indeed scenic performance. With Bieito, one never doubts that one is seeing what one should be seeing, the craft of his blocking as impressive as the enabling generosity of his vision. These people, all of them, are human beings, not symbols, whatever the complexity of their dramatic roles. Aron’s visible crises of confidence – the man behind the communicative mask – intrigue and perhaps help explain part of his later desperation to please. That and, of course, the fact that his life and the lives of others might be in danger otherwise. He is a politician, to be sure, but we are led to understand the psychology, not just the deeds, of this politician.

Which brings us properly to the second act proper. What is idolatry to us, today? That is a question any conceivable production of this work will have to ask. ‘BE GOD’ announce the video images – images, be it noted – running at the back and sides of the stage, the arena or agon for the unfolding wilderness drama. (We certainly behold, metaphysically as much as physically, a wilderness, Die Israeliten in der Wüste, as CPE Bach’s oratorio has it. JS Bach and, to a lesser extent, Handel are the most obvious eighteenth-century progenitors here, yet there is always room for more at this party, even when attended by so colossal a chorus as here.) It grows in size and then becomes ‘BE GOD YOURSELF’. Again, all the while, different, flawed human beings play their roles individually and en masse. Not unlike notes, although music is never lazily to be considered a ‘language’, the letters become objects of aesthetic contemplation – Kant? – and soon, tellingly, suggest chains rather than deliverance. What is freedom without determinism? What is an orgy without sado-masochism? The participants excitedly don 3-D-style glasses. Will they see, understand better? Who knows? They think they will; they feel that they do.

This is a Blutopfer, of course: a blood sacrifice. Words having become images, images become other images. As human bestiality – we do not need camels to traipse onstage, for the beast is within us all – manifests itself in blood and violence, video turns to hardcore pornography. We see no full bodies, although occasionally we see faces to lure us in: faces that may or may not be attached to the hairless, barely human sexual organs and emotionless, purely mechanical acts performed, ‘performance’ being both the operative word and not. (For where, ultimately, is the form allegedly derived, created?) These are bodies or parts of bodies, not people. This is matter, not spirit. This is certainly not ‘love’; ‘sex’ seems too neutral a word. You can – you do – fill in the verbal, conceptual gaps. And then you ask yourself questions about those antinomies you have just delineated. Are they as much to make you feel better, as much a reassertion of your moral and cultural superiority, as anything approximating to truth content? Schoenberg, whisper it, can be wrong or at least limited in his vision too. Aron, part mastermind, part victim, emerges more than ever as a Pilate-like figure. He has helped provide, perhaps even create – is that not God’s task? – the materials. But are not his images, conjured up from a plastic bag of tricks, a diversion both from the truth, whatever that might be, as well as from what is actually going on before his eyes and ears? He has modelled an idol, but the Children of Israel have made themselves, not that idol, let alone Moses’ unrepresentable, unimaginable, ever-apophatic Idea of ‘One’, their own god(s). The manipulated collective - manipulated by what, by whom? - has fashioned a cybernetic idol. Moses, interestingly, seems less central than is generally the case. His tragic diagnosis of what he thinks has happened, more in sorrow perhaps than in anger, is, as much recent scholarship has acknowledged, quite deliberately wide of the mark itself. So it seems, in a related if not quite identical sense, here.

Such would go for nothing were it not for the many outstanding musical and dramatic performances. Alan Gilbert, leading the Staatskapelle Dresden, gave far and away the finest performance I have heard from him; I suppose you either conduct Moses und Aron or you do not. It was a performance as colourful as the op.16 Five Orchestral Pieces, as ‘dramatic’ as Wagner, as comprehending and communicative of the work’s ebb and flow as an excellent account of Beethoven, and as imbued with the spirit of the dance as Der Rosenkavalier. After all, many of us have often thought of Richard Strauss as Aron to Schoenberg’s Moses. This great orchestra could hardly boast of a greater Strauss pedigree: what a list of premieres, from Feuersnot to Daphne! Nor, of course, should one forget that this was the orchestra of none other than Kapellmeister Wagner. It certainly sounded like it here, but with a kaleidoscopic array of timbre that looked forward far into the twentieth century. As for the assembled choruses, again one might say that one either sings Moses or one does not, but that would be to take for granted a well-nigh incredible achievement. These musicians conveyed and lived the drama through words, notes, modes of sung or speech delivery, and of course stage action. Their contributions proved, quite rightly, still more crucial than those of John Tomlinson and Lance Ryan. If the former proved, at times, a little on the generalised side and the latter, ironically, more able with word and stage deed than with tone – twelve-note bel canto this was not – one could readily adapt such shortcomings into the greater narrative and its frame. Anyone feeling disappointed would have missed the point absurdly in the face of something so very much greater than the sum of its parts. Bieito’s – and, I think, Gilbert’s – uncompromisingly operatic view of the ‘complete’ work would win converts from all of those with eyes to see and ears to listen. ‘What third act?’ one might have asked, had the question so much as occurred.

And yet, in the afterlife of its experience, in the way we continue to think about what we have seen and heard long after that final orchestral tragic unison, the work opened up once again. In that, and not only in that, its serialism won out. In 1975, Dresden played host to the first East German performance of Moses und Aron, directed by none other than Harry Kupfer; in Bieito and his assembled forces, Kupfer has found a more than worthy successor. For ultimately – at least for now – the work has emerged more strongly than ever not only as a contest of ideas at its grandest but as an uncontested musical masterpiece. It is fashionable in certain quarters to denigrate the very idea. Schoenberg, thank God or at least Moses, never had truck with fashion, nor will he.

Bayreuth Festival (5) - Götterdämmerung, 1 August 2014

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Lance Ryan

Gunther – Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester
Alberich – Oleg Bryjak
Hagen – Attila Jun
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Gutrune – Allison Oakes
Waltraute, Second Norn – Claudia Mahnke
First Norn, Flosshilde – Okka van der Damerau
Third Norn – Christiane Kohl
Woglinde – Mirella Hagen
Wellgunde – Julia Rutigliano

Frank Castorf (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
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

 

 

We used to hear the final motif heard in the Ring described in Hans von Wolzogen-ese as ‘redemption through love’. Its ‘meaning’ has proved endlessly controversial; for my money, ‘redemption of love’, though still partial, perhaps comes closer. Carl Dahlhaus, having pointed is first hearing in Die Walküre, when Sieglinde hails the miracle of Siegfried’s birth as foretold by Brünnhilde, it now represents ‘an expression of the “rapturous love” celebrated’ in Wagner’s envisaged ‘1852 ending’ to his poem, subsequently omitted. (Dahlhaus is ever at pains to deny the importance of Schopenhauer for the Ring, whether in terms of anticipation or influence.) Thomas Mann makes a similar point, writing that Wagner’s ‘real prophecy is not goods nor gold not lordly pomp,’ a reference to Brünnhilde’s rejection of such in the ‘Feuerbach ending’. Nor does the composer prophesy ‘sad compacts of living bonds’. Wagner’s ‘real prophecy’, Mann claims, is ‘the heavenly melody which at the end of Götterdämmerung rises from the burning citadel of earthly power and restates in music the same theme as that of the closing lines of the other German poem of life and world: Das Ewig-weibliche zieht uns hinan.’ It certainly is not all about love, though. As John Deathridge has pointed out, ‘part of the final motif’s meaning lies in ‘one of Wagner’s perennial concerns …: the relation of the individual to the community’. In the first instance, an isolated appearance of the motif is sung by an individual; its frequent repetition in the presence of ‘a silent on-stage chorus’ in Götterdämmerung is ‘a striking symbol’ of the relationship. Its content thus involves both the widening of the circles of sympathy — and joy — and what Wagner would, in a late piece (‘Ausführungen zu “Religion und Kunst”: Heldentum und Christentum’), call the ultimate ‘oneness of the human species’. The motif does not, at any rate, as Dahlhaus claims, straightforwardly ‘express’ rapturous love, but offers redemption of a force both glorious and destructive. In the terms of the German Romantic æsthetics of music – here words of August Wilhem Schlegel, from his Kunstlehre –  to which both Wagner and Schopenhauer owed a great deal, it might be said of the motif’s catharsis that: ‘It purifies, so to speak, the passions of the material, of the dirt that clings to them, by representing the passions in our inner mind without reference to objects, but only in their form; and, after stripping them of their mundane shell, permits them to breathe the pure ether.’

 

Why start rather than end there, if indeed I were to mention it at all? Because none of these possible interpretations – or indeed many more: what of Bakunin-like pyromania? of the revenge of the natural world through the Rhine? of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian shift from eros to caritas, etc., etc. – is prepared or considered in Frank Castorf’s staging. That might not matter: perhaps he might have something new to offer. Not really, alas, though this Götterdämmerung is certainly an improvement upon the absolute nadir of his Siegfried, if not quite a return to the (relative) form of Das Rheingold. But if, as Castorf, at least at times appears to be hinting, there is something of a political meaning to be gleaned, might it not be worth considering what others have thought about the Ring in that or indeed in any other respect? Above all, how can a staging which apparently takes no interest whatsoever in the music – I am told that Castorf never so much as looked at a score, referring only to a yellow Reclam version of the poem: true or false, it has the ring of truth – possibly begin to consider such necessary questions as the contextual meaning, be that context of the work, the production, or better, both, of that culminating motif, to which Wagner once enigmatically gave the label, ‘glorification of Brünnhilde’? Why, even if we are concentrating one-sidedly upon the poem, discard any sense of the ‘watchers’ whose social being contributes so much? They need not necessarily be ‘moved to the very depths of their being’, as Wagner’s Schopenhauerian suggestion has it; they could be something more akin to the cloth-capped, almost Brechtian questioners of Patrice Chéreau. There might be good reason, in context, to dispense with them, but one would have thought that they might have appealed to Castorf’s ‘post-dramatic’ conception of theatre. Like so much, alas, it is difficult not to suspect that they, like the small matter of Wagner’s score, were never considered in the first place.

 

Instead, then, we see what seems, at least at times, to be an allusion to some of the revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century. There is nothing wrong with that in principle: 1917, even 1989, alluded to European revolutionary tradition, not least that of the 1848-9 revolutions in which Wagner was an active participant, just as 1848-9 had alluded to 1830 and above all to the French Revolution. ‘Die Revolution’ was, as well as the title of a torrential revolutionary catechism by Kapellmeister Wagner, an abiding concept of Vormärz social and political discourse. Aleksander Denić’s once-again mightily-impressive sets – considered as sculptures – turn us between what seem to be West and East Germany, the sight of a GDR chemical works immediately evocative, I am told, for those who lived there, Chancellor Merkel (in the audience) included. It seems that at some point we come to die Wende itself, at which point, I presume, we fully glimpse the total victory of the now-unveiled New York Stock Exchange. The problem is that, for the most part, this remains little more than a backdrop, despite occasional promising treatment of the (revolutionary?) crowd. Quite why so many of them fly Union Flags I am not entirely sure. As for why we are treated to, or rather distracted by, film clips of our valiant director’s assistant – I was wrong in Das Rheingold; he does not survived quite until the end – chopping food at a kebab stall, and eventually splicing open his hand in especially gruesome fashion… (At least we were spared a return to Miss Fortune.)

 

 

 

Insofar as I can glean another theme, it is perhaps that of the power of visual, or rather filmed, media. It certainly comes, whether intentionally or not, quite to overpower Wagner’s drama, even if that were misleadingly understood simply to refer to his poem, let alone his music. Problematising that state of affairs seems to me again potentially a good idea, but if that happens, and I am genuinely not sure whether it does, it is occasional and sporadic. For the most part, Castorf – ironically, for a man of the theatre – seems to accept, or at least to present, quite uncritically the all-too-fashionable assumption prevalent at all levels of society of film’s superiority. And so, decontextualized references to film appear: a good example would be the second-act sudden appearance, pushed down the stairs by Castorf’s assistant, of a pram filled with potatoes. Yet, unless one knows that to be a reference to Eisenstein, it adds nothing at all; if the truth be told, it does not add a great deal even so. And why should one, particularly? It would doubtless be ‘elitist’ – or something – to presume knowledge of Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Aeschylus, let alone Schoenberg or Furtwängler; but film, for some reason, is considered necessary. If so, let us question that, as we should if it were any other medium. I am not at all sure that Castorf, whatever his intentions, does. Instead, he seems often to denigrate a form – opera, music drama, call it what we will – on which he is not necessarily in a strong position to comment. (Surely the undertow of much of Die Walküre and Siegfried is, chez Castorf: how on earth could you take this rubbish seriously? Well, to be able to say that, you probably ought to have tried to take it seriously in the first place.)   

 

 

What more might have been done, within the bounds of what I have read as a twentieth-century-revolutionary interpretation? Above all, this returns us to treating with the work in serious fashion, a sense of who the characters are within this setting? I realise that Castorf might disdain such ‘logical’ concerns, but in order to achieve something that is more than a mess, perhaps he should not. A group of thugs gathered around a kebab van, perhaps at best – or worst – some low-level members of an organised crime network: they are not real, revolutionary agents. Why are we not dealing with those in positions of real authority? The Gibichung court is bigger than that – and that is why its Nietzschean décadence matters. If Gunther, Gutrune, and Hagen are no one in particular, likewise Siegfried and Brünnhilde, then who cares (in this particular respect)? Wagner employed myth for reasons that largely remain sound; that certainly does not preclude specificity in terms of particular staging, but it seems perverse to be attempting something close to a political treatment, albeit an anarchic one in a decidedly non-Bakunin sense, and then not to look seriously at the political, economic, social, and religious nature of the society in which the myth is set. Just when one thinks that the director might, we have some irrelevant, puncturing silliness. Yes, doubtless that is partly ‘the point’, but again, I have to say that if that be so, the point is not a good one. It is a great pity, since here in Götterdämmerung, as in Das Rheingold, there are hints of interesting ideas; would that they were pursued. And above all, just to hammer the point home, would that the music were listened to – even just once or twice. A film of Hagen walking through a forest is not what, at any level, we need to see during Siegfried’s Funeral March. Better an entirely black stage than such irrelevant banality.

 

 

Musically, things were better – though, of course, if there is little sense of musical drama, then the music ‘itself’ will be sold short, reduced, as I commented in an earlier review, to the status of a troublesome soundtrack. Kirill Petrenko led the orchestra with considerable verve. I do not have a great deal to add to what I have said about his leadership before. There was not much in the way of metaphysical depth, although I doubt that there could be, given the production. But there was a strong sense of line, considerable ebb and flow, and perhaps above all, a sense of wonder, grandeur, and intimacy born of daring dynamic contrast, insofar as one were not distracted by increasingly ridiculous film footage. There were perhaps a few more orchestral fluffs, especially from the brass, than one might have hoped for, especially in Bayreuth, but these things happen. Choral singing was excellent, once again a great credit to all involved, and to Eberhard Friedrich.

 

Catherine Foster’s Achilles heel was her poor diction. Yes, those of us who know the text intimately could fill in the gaps, but that is hardly the point; with that logic, we might as well have a blank stage and empty pit. Otherwise, hers was in general a beautifully sung rendition of Brünnhilde. Foster certainly has the gift of making one sympathise, which counts for a great deal. Lance Ryan – well, though there were actually a few moments of decent, even alluring, tone production, most of this shouted performance might have been classified as ‘school of John Treleaven’ (remember him?) If Bayreuth has any sense, it will have enlisted the services of Andreas Schager as soon as possible. Ryan can certainly act, but much of what one heard was straightforwardly painful, perhaps particularly when in concert with others. Of the Gibichungs, Allison Oakes sang well as Gutrune, without making a huge impression; I liked, however, the idea of her initially rejecting Siegfried when she heard Brünnhilde’s accusations. Attila Jun certainly had the blackness of tone for a traditional Hagen, though his portrayal was somewhat generalised when compared with the (admittedly light-toned) likes of Mikhail Petrenko. Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester was for me the brightest star in the cast: a Gunther I should happily hear – and see – anywhere. For once, one had a sense, even given Castorf’s production, of the charisma that such a character must have to have survived at all. It is a very difficult balance to present someone who is at heart weak and yet also has the political gifts to survive, even to an extent to thrive, in this decayed world. Words, music, and Wagner’s ‘gesture’ were as one here; frankly, nine out of ten Brünnhildes would have been more likely to choose this Gunther than this Siegfried. Oleg Bryjak made an impressive re-appearance as Alberich, more careful with the words than his son. (Quite why Castorf then had him repeatedly giving an unidentified woman oral sex is another open question.) Claudia Mahnke made a better Waltraute than she had Fricka, but it would be difficult to say that hers was a Valkyrie for the ages. As Second Norn, however, she proved a characterful part of a splendid trio of Erda’s daughters. The Rhinemaidens, called on to do more than one would usually expect here – a car-based orgy with Siegfried and Gunther swiftly became tedious – also proved to be excellent singing-actresses.

 

And so, I left the Festspielhaus, following prolonged curtain-calls – and, in the case of the production team, prolonged booing, to which Castorf responded with considerable, highly creditable wit – feeling sadness that a staging which, at its best, was not without interesting ideas, had been let down so badly by a director’s apparent lack of interest both in much of the work and in all of the music. Perhaps Castorf needs an editor, though such ‘authority’ would doubtless be rejected. More likely, as I thought at the very beginning, a ‘version’ in which he was free, somewhere other than Bayreuth, to treat with the text, perhaps minus the music, as he wished might have brought something more worthwhile to the table. As it is, and not disregarding its good points, this remains a directorial failure – and, it seems, in many ways a wilful one. To return to Chéreau, he wished, as stated in a programme essay from 1977, ‘that the orchestra pit be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles — the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message.’ Should one, he asked, ‘not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?’ Indeed, but first one has to hear it at all.

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Siegfried, 30 July 2014

 

 

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Lance Ryan

Mime – Burkhard Ulrich
The Wanderer – Wolfgang Koch
Alberich – Oleg Bryjak
Fafner – Sorin Coliban
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Woodbird – Mirella Hagen

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)

Alas, it seems my tempered enthusiasm, amongst all the frustrations, as experienced in Das Rheingold was very much a case of having jumped the gun. Following a dramatically inert Walküre, this Siegfried hits a new low. Either Frank Castorf is failing catastrophically in what he is trying to do, or what he is trying to do is quite simply inadmissible – or, most likely, I fear, both.

 

However much incoherence might be trumpeted as an æsthetic principle, that does not make it appropriate to the Ring. Wagner’s intellectual method is rarely if ever Socratic, but it is exploratory, learning from previous ‘answers’ to questions he has asked – the questioning always being the most important thing – and attempting to ask further questions in response to the answers he has found wanting. Ideas overlap, even come into conflict. What his method is not is arbitrary. ‘So what?’ you might ask; ‘why should Castorf, or anyone else, be constrained by Wagner?’ Well, he need not necessarily be, although frankly there is enough in Wagner to keep most of us occupied for several lifetimes. But it does not follow from that that just anything goes. By all means question, criticise, even reject Wagner, but might it not be more fruitful to engage with him in the first instance? And yes, that certainly includes engaging with the music: not as ‘absolute music’, to employ that most ideological of terms as coined – pejoratively – by Wagner himself, but as drama. Castorf’s apparent total lack of interest in the score may be his greatest weakness of all. Whereas Stefan Herheim has said that when words and music come into conflict, he will listen to the music, Castorf seems to have no interest in either. I thought even in Das Rheingold that he would have been far better off offering his own version of the Ring, doubtless cut and interspersed with other material, somewhere other than Bayreuth, perhaps at his own Volksbühne in Berlin. Castorf’s presumable resentment at not being able to rearrange the text manifests itself most often in a disengagement which commits the cardinal sin of being less provocative than straightforwardly boring.

 

For this staging of Siegfried – or of whatever it is that Castorf has decided to stage – the revolving set alternates between a state-socialist version of Mount Rushmore, its heroes Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao a study in decreasing facial hair, and a place claiming to be Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, though certainly not a depiction of any reality I have witnessed there. Considered simply as set designs, Aleksander Denić’s work is stunning; to have what is pretty much a station entrance with surrounding shops created so convincingly is quite an achievement. (I hardly dare imagine the cost!) But Castorf’s direction rarely if ever engages with the locations, let alone with the work. Too often they seem merely to be backdrops, just as the score is reduced to the level of an inappropriate – and, one suspects, for Castorf, a tiresome – soundtrack.

 

Mime lives or at least works in a trailer van at the foot of the mountain, and that is where the first act unfolds. Our friend the actor – previously the barman in Das Rheingold, with a good few filmic appearances in Die Walküre – is the bear Siegfried has tethered, except he does not seem to be a bear, since he manages to work as handyman too. (It has now come to my attention that this man, who has a great deal to do, and may well prove the only discernible thread running through this Ring, is Castorf’s assistant, Patric Seibert, which may or may not prove ‘significant’.) Siegfried does not re-forge Notung, since he is holding it in his hand already, but occasionally he bangs on something he does not forge. He will not in any case use it to kill Fafner, who dies in a blaze of deafening machine-gun fire, once again a sign of disrespect for the score. In the second and third acts, it is difficult to discern any particular reasons why some of the scenes take place beneath the heroes of ‘actually existing socialism’ some in Alexanderplatz, some, still more confusingly, in both. A tendency already present in Die Walküre for the drama to descend into a parody of Doctor Who, the same characters – albeit in this case, rather more thinly drawn – reappearing in different locations yet carrying on just as before, becomes even more pronounced in Siegfried. ‘The lack of a coherent location is the point,’ someone will doubtless say; if so, it is not a very good point, to put it mildly, since nothing further is done with it. And that is the problem with so much of what we see, that nothing is developed or even related to anything else. Fifteen hours are too long a time simply to reiterate a nihilistic point that anything and everything is arbitrary.

 

 

 

Meanwhile in Alexanderplatz, we witness Siegfried with the Woodbird, her flamboyant get-up more redolent of a Rio de Janeiro carnival. First of all, he fumbles around in a dustbin as a substitute for sharpening his reeds. (The oboe contributions here, whilst superlative in a purely technical sense, are not what Wagner wrote; the idea seems to be that he has some sort of accordion/mouth-organ instead, albeit still played by the oboe.) Later on, at the end of the act, he engages in full sexual congress with the bird, thereby making his ‘discovery’ of Brünnhilde in the third act more or less meaningless. I assume he is being portrayed as a liar, but frankly had long given up caring. Indeed, at the ‘Das ist kein Mann’ moment, so poor is the lighting – a recurring and rather surprising problem here – that, from where I was seated in the Festspielhaus, I could not see Brünnhilde at all. ‘No, it is not a man,’ I thought, since ‘there is nothing there at all.’ There was, but anyway…

 

In the meantime, we have endured Erda as a sex worker, first of all spending a great deal of time on film with some other women choosing her lipstick, then sharing an Alexanderplatz café meal (waiter: Seibert) with Wotan, for whom we have a charming video close-up of his eating spaghetti. Having thrown a glass of wine over him, she returns and proceeds to maul him, resulting in a filmed blow-job whilst the waiter returns with the bill. (He later showers his staff with banknotes; the Wanderer tips well, it would seem.) That, apparently, is what the peripeteia of the Ring, Wotan’s rejection of Fate, one of the most extraordinarily profound scenes in all world-drama, amounts to chez Castorf. This is not alienating in the sort of post-Brechtian way it seems to think it is; it is, I repeat, just boring. A great deal of other irrelevant business appears on film. What had been an interesting, truly promising device in Rheingold has now descended to the self-indulgent level of a Bill Viola and his tedious ‘Tristan project’. The only relief, albeit somewhat banal, is some rather conventional footage of a horse in a forest: Grane, I presume, though perhaps that would make too much sense. The ending – in which crocodiles wander around Alexanderplatz, Brünnhilde sticking a table umbrella into one of their mouths, a woman (the Woodbird shorn of her wings, I think) climbing inside another, only to climb back out, briefly renew proceedings with Siegfried, only to be pushed aside by Brünnhilde – is something for which I have yet to develop appropriate vocabulary.

 

Kirill Petrenko repeated his good work from Die Walküre, a great improvement upon his peremptory, straitjacketed Rheingold. This is not the well-nigh all-encompassing Wagner of a Barenboim – though in a sense, how could it be, with Castorf plying his wares on stage? There was a good sense of line and, again, a still finer sense of dynamic contrast. With the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra on excellent form – such depth in the string tone, such piquancy in the woodwind, such power that yet proves infinitely yielding in the brass – this might well be a Ring worth hearing on the radio.

 

 

 

 

At least, that is, if one can put up with a cast which yet again falls considerably short of what Bayreuth ought to be able to engage. The only member of this evening’s cast who could reasonably be considered world-class was Burkhard Ulrich’s Mime. If he resorted on stage to frequent imitation of Heinz Zednik, then that was doubtless a consequence of the lack of Personenregie. Vocally and verbally, he put Lance Ryan’s shouted Siegfried to shame. One could put up with a bit of vocal roughness, were there discernible interest in the words, but, whatever Ryan’s skill in navigating the crevasses of Mount Rushmore, there was little to detain the ear here.  Catherine Foster’s likeable Brünnhilde remained a positive point, though again, this was hardly Nina Stemme – and, again, Foster seemed overly reliant upon the prompter. Wolfgang Koch’s Wanderer was, within Castorf’s constraints, well-acted and well-enough sung, but tended towards the merely petulant, with none of the wisdom (and darkness of tone) that the role really requires. Oleg Bryjak was booed – bafflingly – as Alberich; he was certainly in the top half of the cast, if nothing out of the ordinary. Sorin Caliban made for a decent enough Fafner, if again nothing memorable. Nadine Weissmann’s Erda was tremulous and – even in vocal terms – lacking in dignity. Mirella Hagen’s Woodbird was straightforwardly inadequate. If this were a cast in a middle-ranking regional house, one would probably think more highly of it. But this is Bayreuth, and deserves better.

 

Prom 18: Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Siegfried, 26 July 2013

Royal Albert Hall

Siegfried – Lance Ryan

Brünnhilde – Nina Stemme
Wanderer – Terje Stensvold
Mime – Peter Bronder
Alberich – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Fafner – Eric Halfvarson
Woodbird – Rinnat Moriah
Erda – Anna Larsson

Justin Way (director)

Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

The brightest star in this performance proved once again to be the Staatskapelle Berlin, under Daniel Barenboim’s guidance. It is to be hoped that those Londoners who do not travel much – though it remains unclear to me why they could not listen to the odd recording or broadcast – will finally be disabused by this Proms Ring of the strange claim that the sub-standard Wagner they have all too often been served up over the past decade represents anything but a pale shadow of the ‘real thing’. That is crucial not from the standpoint of drawing up some variety of ghastly league table, but because Wagner deserves so much better, as, barring a few noisy miscreants, do audiences. A friend remarked acutely earlier in the week that so much of the chatter concerning last year’s Covent Garden Ring concerned the work as some sort of ‘ultimate challenge’ and congratulated the forces for having (just about) withstood that challenge. Art is not, however, a school sports day; to come anywhere near realising Wagner’s potential requires musicians who understand his (admittedly strenuous) demands, who are as comprehending of his world-view and its implications, historical and contemporary, as possible, and who are expert at communicating his message at as many of its multiple levels as they can. ‘Muddling through’ – or, to put it another way, a self-congratulatory celebration of English amateurism – should never be an option.

 

Barenboim once again had the measure of the score, his understanding of which has deepened considerably over the years, from the outset. The Prelude to Act I opened very slowly, but its hallmark was flexibility, not least when a mini-Furtwänglerian accelerando led us, as the most natural development in the world, into Wagner’s menacing treatment of the no-longer-dormant Nibelung motif. Lesser conductors would simply present one thing after another, perhaps with the odd ‘shock’ effect imposed upon the meaningless progression; Wagner’s drama needs to be simultaneously communicated and reinforced through a tightly woven web of motivic interconnection. As Carl Dahlhaus put it, ‘the decline in importance of the symphony as a genre represented the obverse of an inexorable expansion of the symphonic style in other genres.’ It is inconceivable that a great Wagnerian would not also be a great Beethovenian.

 

The dark orchestral phantasmagoria, inevitably bringing to mind Adorno’s Versuch über Wagner, conjured up by Barenboim and his orchestra as Mime initially struggled to forge the sword told of dark forces, dramatic and musical, at work; one was drawn into the drama in the very best way, by the score ‘itself’. And yet, there was plenty of life: Siegfried’s music quite rightly evoked the world of a Beethoven scherzo, transformed into musico-dramatic material. Barenboim showed that lightness does not preclude depth; indeed, it often relies upon it. And depth one certainly heard from the Staatskapelle’s strings, heart-rendingly when Siegfried casually knocked the food Mime had prepared out of his hands; we empathised with Mime and his misery through Wagner’s extraordinarily sympathetic portrayal. Likewise, in the third scene, Barenboim – and Wagner, of course – conjured up the sheer horror of Mime’s predicament just as truthfully as the other, unconscious, heroic side of the coin. Competition between soundworlds, distinct and yet dialectically related, was very much the stuff of this first act. The dark Staatskapelle brass, never brash in the way sections from Anglophone orchestras might often be, told during the Mime-Wanderer scene of the darkness still cast by Alberich’s Nibelheim curse – even when the Wanderer was ostensibly talking of himself. Schwarz- and Licht-Alberich continued their dialectical dance of death (even though we never discover quite what becomes of the former).  

 

Act II opened in similarly magisterial fashion. Marking by kettledrums of that crucial tritone – the giants’ motif darkened, perverted, from its initially diatonic form – was effected to musico-dramatic perfection; that interval, that sound would hang over the act for at least as long as it took Siegfried to slay Fafner. A febrile undergrowth, scenic and harmonic, would soon find itself conjured up – that phantasmagorical phrase again – by composer, conductor, and orchestra together. The orchestra, moreover, gained a real spring to its step during those extraordinary exchanges between Mime and Siegfried, when the former, despite all his efforts, betrays his true intentions, Wagner’s sardonicism conveyed with the darkest of comedy. And that Feuerbachian moment of hope – love, revolution, love in revolution might yet emerge the victor – at the end of the act was captured to perfection, only to be contrasted, at the beginning of Act III, by a very different variety of dramatic urgency, the Wanderer’s dismissal of Erda (and thus of Fate itself) upon us.

 

Barenboim’s deceleration as Erda rose from the depths told of far more than mere handling of the score; this was an attempt to hold back history itself – likewise at the end of his confrontation with Siegfried in the following scene. The Wanderer’s urgency with Erda, rhythms buoyant and generative, would emerge victorious, but at what cost, and for how long? Questions rather than answers were proffered. His silence following ‘Weisst du, was Wotan will?’ was made to tell in a fashion not entirely unlike a silence in Bruckner, and yet, with its very particular musico-dramatic import, quite unlike it. By contrast, the transformation to the final scene was perhaps the most ecstatic I have heard, the orchestra revelling in Wagner’s wizardry, Barenboim ensuring that such revelry retained dramatic motivation. There were moments when one heard, for instance, the fresh air of Johannistag – ‘Ach! Wie schön!’ as Siegfried loosened Brünnhilde’s helmet – or delectable violin femininity, as Siegfried lifted the breastplate. But they never stood out, self-regarding, for their own sake; the drama was the thing.

 

Peter Bronder’s Mime was excellent. He wheedled without falling into caricature, projected a strong command of his line throughout, and even proved a dab hand pretty with his (small) hammer. There was real anger, moreover, as well as self-pity, when he dubbed Siegfried ‘dankbares, arges Kind!’ Lance Ryan is not possessed of a beautiful voice, but he showed the necessary tirelessness not simply to ‘get through’ the role, but also to shape its progress. If vocal lines were often less than mellifluous, one could hear pretty much every word. He had a nice – or rather nasty – line in cruelty of delivery, for instance when telling of how he longed to seize Mime’s neck, though there were undoubtedly occasions when he erred on the side of crudity, not least during the forging of Notung, and  clowning around over the horn was probably overdone. Johannes Martin Kränzle once again contributed an attentive reading of Alberich’s part, words, music, stage manner welded into something considerably more than the sum of its parts. Eric Halfvarson’s Fafner (from the organ) was properly evocative of the rentier as dragon: what he lay on, he owned. One even felt a degree of sympathy at the moment of death. Terje Stensvold’s Wanderer was not as large of life as some, but his solemnity told its own tale; this was, after all, a Wotan two generations on from Das Rheingold, scarred by events, working his way towards renunciation of the Schopenhauerisn Will. Whether that were actually how Stensvold thought of it or no, one could certainly understand his portrayal that way. His Norwegian way with Wagner’s words harked back to the the old sagas: perhaps not ideal in abstract pronunciation terms, but again opening up other associations for those willing to listen. As in Berlin, Rinnat Moriah proved a bright-toned Woodbird, perfectly contrasted with the deep contralto of Anna Larsson’s wonderful Erda, her tiredness and fading powers conveyed musically rather than by default. Nina Stemme’s Brünnhilde gave an excellent impression of awakening, and handled very well this difficult transition from Valkyrie to woman. She more than whetted the appetite for what is now to come.

Siegfried, Staatsoper Berlin, 18 April 2013

Schiller Theater, Berlin

Siegfried – Lance Ryan

Mime – Peter Bronder
The Wanderer – Terje Stensvold
Alberich – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Fafner – Mikhail Petrenko
Erda – Anna Larsson
Brünnhilde – Iréne Theorin
The Woodbird – Rinnat Moriah

Guy Cassiers (director, set design)

Enrico Bagnoli (set design, lighting)
Tim van Steenbergen (costumes)
Arjen Klerkx, Kurt D’Haeseleer (video)
Michael P Steinberg, Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (choreography)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Image: (c) Monika Rittershaus

 

And so, the Berlin State Opera’s Ring nears completion. Nothing has changed with respect to the bafflingly vacuous production served up by Guy Cassiers and his colleagues from the Antwerp Toneelhuis. It is not that ideas are banal or underdeveloped; rather, there seem to be no ideas at all, a truly extraordinary state of affairs when it comes to Wagner, of all dramatists. The production apparently aspires to the condition of something one might see or have seen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, whether Otto Schenk or the still worse Robert Lepage, albeit with refined visual taste. Quite why anyone would think tasteful Wagner desirable is quite beyond me. There are pretty stage effects, sometimes from video, sometimes not, but effects without cause they remain. Oddly, given the plentiful use of video, the dragon is conjured up by the Eastman Company – yes, I am afraid the dancers are back – and some sheets. It starts off rather well, viewed with disinterested æsthetic contemplation, only to degenerate into a vision more akin to a group laundry activity. There is doubtless some enjoyment to be derived from the lithe dancers, choreographed well enough in the abstract, but what any of it might have to say about the Ring is not even obscure. If Cassiers presents, as is claimed, a Ring for the twenty-first century, may God have mercy upon our culture-industry-enfeebled souls. Politics, religion, any variety of thought, even any variety of drama, have been banished to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is enough to have one wish to embark upon a spot of time travel.

 

Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin came to the rescue. I have not heard a better conducted, better played Siegfried, even from the Royal Opera and Bernard Haitink. The Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle may have offered breathtaking orchestral virtuosity in Aix-en-Provence, but there was something of virtuosity for its own sake in that case, partly, I think, because Rattle’s reading failed to dig anything like so deep. This was Barenboim at his more than estimable best. The great paragraphs of Wagner’s imagination unfolded with unforced, unexaggerated inevitability, not monumental in, say, the Knappertsbusch mode, but teeming with dramatic life born of the musico-dramatic material. Scenes, dialogues, phrases were sharply, colourfully characterised, playful yet steely Beethoven to the fore in the final scene of the first act, a grinding sense of peripeteia possessing us at the opening of the third. There was none of the reluctance one encounters from lesser conductors to let the orchestra speak as Greek chorus, no alleged ‘consideration’ for vocal fallibility. This was above all orchestral drama, as fully achieved in a Furtwänglerian sense as I have heard from Barenboim in Wagner. 

 

Lance Ryan had his moments as Siegfried, especially during the second act. Up until the scene with Brünnhilde, I should have said that at least he did not tire – quite an achievement in itself – but alas, a pattern of too much shouting and not enough singing took its toll. Iréne Theorin’s Brünnhilde, by contrast, was highly variegated in tone, at times almost too much, having one strain to hear the words. A rather wooden Wanderer from Terje Stensvold was shown up by Johannes Martin Kränzle’s vivid, detailed Alberich. Peter Bronder was very much the singing actor as Mime, stronger in tone than one often hears, but sometimes edging too much, against Wagner’s urgings, toward caricature. Mikhail Petrenko’s voice seemed to have lost some of its darkness, but there could be few real complaints about his Fafner. Anna Larsson’s otherworldly depth of tone reminded us why she is very much the Erda de nos jours. Rinnat Moriah navigated the Woodbird’s lines with admirable ease. It remained, however, Barenboim’s and the Staatskapelle’s show.