Bayreuth Festival (4) - Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, 28 and 30 July, 1 August 2026

Festspielhaus

Siegmund, Siegfried – Klaus Florian Vogt
Sieglinde – Elza van den Heever
Hunding, Hagen – Mika Kares
Wotan – Michael Volle
Fricka, First Norn – Anna Kissjudit
Brünnhilde – Camilla Nylund
Siegrune, Second Norn, Gutrune – Alexandra Ionis
Rossweiße, Wellgunde – Natalia Skrycka
Grimgerde, Floßhilde – Marie Henriette Reinhold
Helmwige, Third Norn – Magdalena Hinterdobler
Gerhilde – Martina Weischenbach
Ortlinde – Brit-Tone Müllertz
Waltraute – Karis Tucker (Walküre), Anna Kissjudit (Götterdämmerung)
Schwertleite – Freya Apffelstaedt
Mime – Gerhard Siegel
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Fafner – Peter Rose
Woodbird – Victoria Randem
Erda – Christa Mayer
Gunther – Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Woglinde – Katherina Konradi

Curator – Marcus Lobbes
Artistic and technical conception – Marcus Lobbes, Nils Corte
Dramaturgy – Andri Hardmeier
Digital- and AI-storytelling – Roman Senkl
Creative code, visual art – Nils Corte, Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger
Set design – Wolf Gutjahr
Costumes – Pia Maria Mackert

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra 

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images: Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

‘Auf geb’ich mein Werk: nur Eines will ich noch: das Ende – das Ende!‘ When, in bitter disillusionment, in his great monologue from the second act of Die Walküre, Wotan offers Alberich – absent from the stage, yet present in words, orchestra, and our thoughts – the world he had once striven so hard to retain, now desiring one thing alone, the end, he spoke for all of us. Michael Volle delivered the line with characteristic intelligence and artistry. The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra ‘spoke’ with equivalent excellence as Wagner’s Attic chorus. Goodness knows what happened or did not onstage. I cannot recall and I doubt anyone else can; the likelihood of anyone having cared is still lower. Maybe it happened at one of the times I experimented by closing my eyes or wearing a newly acquired sleeping mask from a Bayreuth branch of Rossmann. (Tentative conclusion: may help relieve symptoms for a short period, but consult a musicodramatic physician should symptoms persist, as alas they did.) The truth, alas, is that most of us had willed that end far sooner, from about a minute or two into the first Rheingold screen-saver foisted on us by ‘curator’ Marcus Lobbes. His recorded utterances suggest barely the slightest acquaintance with the Ring, let alone what it might mean, but such knowledge is doubtless to be disdained in a braver new world than Aldous Huxley might ever have imagined. 

In a sense, there is little else to write, yet somehow, like the pilgrims who returned night after night, more in expectation than in hope, I should make the attempt. What did we learn? That the ‘machine’, the ‘intelligence’, the ‘prompter’ – whatever we wish to call it/him/whatever – was never happier than when covering singers with red, which contrasted with brown, to merge in a sickly terracotta, only to be eclipsed by yellow? That the bizarre ‘historical’ pictures could indeed get worse? The Prologue and first Act of Götterdämmerung took us not very far, from Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan to Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, the latter understandably covering his face. That whoever/whatever was signally incapable of aligning past production images, all still in terrible resolution, with what was going on, so that Frank Castorf’s legendary alternative Mount Rushmore appeared only when it should not in Siegfried, and that, staggeringly, Patrice Chéreau’s still more legendary Immolation Scene, Dame Gwyneth and all, appeared first in the wrong scene with Brünnhilde? What on earth the advent of the euro was doing there, I refuse even to speculate. We cannot or, better, should not be expected to do the work for these machines. We are not Alberich’s enslaved Nibelungs; or rather, we are, but must free ourselves. Not that we saw them anyway—and the chorus, when it appeared, was denied costumes and indeed visibility. An unfortunate moment of mislighting, were that a word, nonetheless revealed the arrival of its female contingent. The ‘cage’ of screens, front and back, could not function on its own terms, let alone ours.

Occasionally what we saw just about aspired to the level of a mid-price greeting card image; near-aspiration consistently failed to elevate itself into achievement. The obscenity of randomly posting a picture of what appeared to be starving Africans, presumably as a result of a colonial atrocity, as something to gaze at for a few seconds, then having it ‘transform’ into some meaningless shapes, whilst Siegmund and Sieglinde voice their increasing love – and lust – for one another should in itself have been enough to take this idiocy off the stage. That Walküre ‘moment’ fell, if I remember correctly, somewhere between sightings of Thomas Mann (at the right time for Wälsungenblut, though apparently not intended as such) and a pair of keyholes; Lenin and Hitler remained some way off. Who knows? Who cares? Actually, many might care about suddenly being presented with an unmotivated, uncalled-for giant image of Hitler impressed upon them in the Festspielhaus. Where is the obligation to them? A concert performance would have been infinitely preferable; so too would even the worst of stagings.

Someone should have pulled the plug, literally, before this debacle had begun, leaving us with what would doubtless have been a fine concert performance. It might well have been a disappointment, but it would not have been a catastrophe. It would have spared some of the ‘AI’ environmental footprint too, as our own World-Ashes not only wither but blaze across the world. Home to Wagner’s endearing encounter with Jessie Laussot, Bordeaux has endured more temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius this unfinished year alone than it has over the preceding century-and-a-bit during which records were kept. Soon not only revolutionary composers will be expelled; not only the vines whose fruits Jessie’s husband traded on will wither; the city itself may fall.  The end approaches and it does not look pretty; nor does it seem likely to cleanse us and the world Musk, Trump, Lobbes, and others have despoiled. Mention of sustainable theatre, sustainable anything else, or indeed any sort of theatre, let alone drama, now raises little more than a shrug. We are all apparently just to destroy our eyes, ears, minds, and souls sitting in front of screens waiting like the gods in Waltraute’s heartrending plea to Brünnhilde—or what would have been, had it not similarly been obliterated by further image-bombardment. Say what you like about the US occupation forces when they turned the Festspielhaus into a venue for musicals and other entertainments; they never conceived of such an indignity on Wagner’s house, work, performers, and audience, let alone put it into practice.

Again, I shall need to be brief about the performances, since I found it well-nigh impossible to concentrate upon them. Bar a very few inevitable slips, the orchestra continued to play brilliantly for Thielemann, despite its relegation to soundtrack for whatever it was we were compelled to view. Silken strings that darkened on demand; sensuous yet spirited woodwind; brass that rang with the hallowed tones, yet none of the complacency, of altdeutsch tradition: from this palette our necromancer-in-chief painted a series of epics to my ears closer to Strauss (and even at times Debussy) than the Bayreuth Wagner of old, yet certainly with tales to tell. These were aesthetic decisions rather than omissions; this was made clear at points of the highest dramatic tension in Act I of Die Walküre, when suddenly Thielemann shifted to an almost Klemperer- or Barenboim-like focus on growling, foundational harmony, the parallel gear-shift in tempo audible yet convincing. There was often a chamber-music line less in the line of Karajan than beyond him; at least, I discerned it from time to time when the images would permit me to listen.

 

The singers were, of course, still more poorly served—some might say unforgivably so. This may seem an absurdly first-level question for a production, but did our ‘curators’ for one minute consider the implications for the outstanding, hard-working vocal artists placed at their disposal? Either they did and utterly failed in another basic task, or they did not and were thereby negligent. Volle’s class shone through nevertheless, if only sporadically, as did that of everyone else. Perhaps I might have been more critical in other circumstances, but Klaus Florian Vogt’s follow-ups to his excellent Mime, taking in both Siegmund and Siegfried – surely a record? – offered insight throughout and only occasional tiring. He acted too, bringing far more to the stage than a thousand screen-savers might ever: not only in his own dramatic presence, but in engagement with others. If Mika Kares did not quite manage such a feat, our Daland and Fasolt excelled also as Hunding and Hagen. Here is a first-rate artist, readily adaptable, without threat to lyricism, verbal meaning, or their musicodramatic union. Anna Kissjudit stood out to me similarly as Fricka and the First Norn. Her sister Norns, their sister Rhinemaindens, and indeed their sister Valkyries were all excellent as individual voice and ensemble. Camilla Nylund emerged as first among equals, in fiercely committed performances as Brünnhilde in all three of these operas. Far too often, though, these were fleeting rather than sustained impressions, and all on account of the ‘curation’. 

This ‘production’, ‘curation’, or whatever one wants to call it is not about ‘AI’; it is not ‘about’ the Culture Industry or capitalism. It denotes and indeed forms part of their logical, lowest-common-denominator, catastrophic conclusion. Of course the Ring, like anything else, cannot preserve itself from the structures of our current existence; nor should it, even if that were possible. By the same token, it should not – must not – merely surrender to them. The Bayreuth Festival was, for sound reasons, founded as a joint stock company. That was not an endorsement of later-nineteenth-century capitalism; it was a decision necessitated by economic furchtbare Not. To complain about that is to plummet to the inanity level of ‘you have an iPhone, so how can you criticise capitalism?’ There was neither call nor need for this aesthetic disaster, surely the worst in the history of the Festival. If any of us hears again of Lobbes in the opera house, it will be too soon, but this is not the fault of a single person, however culpable he and his ‘team’ may be. We are not all guilty, as the cliché has it; guilty indeed, though, are obsession with technology – as ‘bros’ call it, ‘tech’ – and an economic system so ruinous Alberich might have led the revolution against it. 

The optimistic view would be that, once this is all done, there will be a chance to start again, echoing Harry Kupfer’s vision of a Ring post-nuclear-apocalypse. That now seems merely utopian, however welcome it was to find occasional relief in Siegfried from poor-quality reproductions of Kupfer’s lasers. Wagner situates hope, at the close of Götterdämmerung, in the survivors, the men and women ‘moved to the very depths of their being’ by what they have witnessed. If we have witnessed nothing and merely been numbed to the ever-narrowing shallows of what remains of our being, will not the fires continue to rage until we are all incinerated? Make a Ring about that and just maybe we can still talk, create, and crucially listen. Otherwise, as a composer-conductor in Wagner’s line, soon to work on the twentieth century’s defining production of the Ring here at Bayreuth, once put it: ‘The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution?’

Or, as Wagner, already at work on the Ring project, noted in his diary from revolutionary Dresden almost 120 years earlier: ‘8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.)’ If we do not stop ‘AI’ and the forces behind it, such will soon be all our lot, minus Wagner’s strange feeling and certainly minus redemption, ‘through love’ or anything else. Booing with a fury and unanimity I have never previously encountered ensued: which already returns us, once again, to Wagner and the Dresden uprising. Let us consider this, then, a warning on multiple levels, in the unlikely event it is not too late already.

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Der fliegende Holländer, 29 July 2026

Festspielhaus

Daland – Mika Kares
Senta – Elisabeth Teige
Erik – Benjamin Bruns
Mary – Nadine Weissmann
Steersman – Kieran Carrel
The Dutchman – Nicholas Brownlee

Director, set designs – Dmitri Tcherniakov

Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filshtinsky
Dramaturgy – Tatiana Werestchagina

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint),
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

Images: (c) Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrather

Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Dutchman and Dutchman return, still ship-less, to their small town of still smaller horizons for what may or may not be the last time. They have had a good run by recent Bayreuth standards, rightly so, and are not scheduled for next season. (Minus Tristan, all dramas from Rienzi onwards are scheduled either for this season or next.) Whilst there was naturally immense relief all round at an actual theatrical experience amidst the torture-debris of the ‘AI’-Ring debacle, things were looking a little tired, at least until a third act that continues to pack quite a punch. I doubt this was really the fault of anyone concerned, although Tcherniakov presumably did not return to direct this revival, since there was no production team present for curtain calls. Indeed, what we saw had very much the air of a repertory house revival, somewhat at odds with what is held to be the ethos of ‘Werkstatt Bayreuth’, if infinitesimally so when compared to the horrors that had unfolded the previous two nights. (I shall deal with Die Walküre in a single ‘rest of the Ring’ review following its much-awaited Götterdämmerung.)

Providing, as ever, his own set designs, Tcherniakov presents in the Prelude a pantomime in which the young ‘H.’ (Holländer, we presume) sees his mother hanging lifeless from a house window, shamed by a hypocritical, Peter Grimes-like community that had her yield – perhaps as sex worker – to Daland’s advances, only to be cast aside when no longer of use. His adult return is no seven-year ritual in search of an impossible love, but rather pursuit of revenge against the man and more broadly the community that did this. His whole life, one senses, has explicitly led up to this, as he is welcomed by the venal Daland – maybe he continues to run up such expenses? – and later his wife Mary, acted with palpable compassion by Nadine Weismann, as well as by Senta. Invited to dinner, his plan falls into place when, following interesting initial reluctance that has her decline even to come inside, Senta falls for him. The third act shows the community at large, in mirthless corporate celebration for which the Dutchman’s crew (or whatever they be) notably fail to participate. Shots are fired, Daland falling before his daughter, who nonetheless continues to hold faith in H., to be cruelly tossed aside—as surplus to his requirements as his mother had to Senta’s father’s. Daland’s house and wealth ablaze, the entire claustrophobic Nordic townscape at risk, Mary returns to kill the Dutchman. Senta’s highly disconcerting, hysterical turn between grief and celebration is ultimately transformed into compassion for the woman who has long cared for her. Perhaps, then, as we hear the 1860 post-Tristan ‘redemptive’ ending, there is a form of feminist redemption after all. Men have created and perpetuated this world and its revenge saga; if women survive, they can hardly do worse and might, just might, do better.

Oksana Liniv’s conducting remained the weakest link in the evening’s proceedings (from when I last heard it in 2024). It is a pity she could not have been replaced with someone more able and willing to respond to such a dramatic conception, or indeed any other, of the work. If the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra played well enough, it rarely sounded inspired, and one could hardly blame it. Lyniv’s alternation between pressing too hard and listlessly meandering, the latter especially apparent in a second act that seemed much longer than it was, offered a reversion to number opera seemingly not from aesthetic conviction, but because a more music-drama-focused performance could not be sustained. A sudden change of gear to breakneck speed at the close of the spinning chorus had pit and stage fall apart for several bars, the chorus compelled to find its own way back into sync, quite unaided by the conductor. 

A further sadness lay in the sound offered by a now reduced chorus,  especially at the beginning of the third act. The Festival’s decision to take an axe to what should be one of its crown jewels has regrettably had consequences, notwithstanding the musicianship of those remaining and their new director. In the title role, Nicholas Brownlee had an awkward beginning, intonation surprisingly, repeatedly awry in the first act. He grew into his own, though, to offer a compelling performance later on. Having sung two other challenging roles (Fasolt and Hunding) on two immediately preceding evenings, Mika Kares was undaunted by prospect or reality of Daland, outsinging the Dutchman in the first act and continuing to impress thereafter. Benjamin Bruns and Elisabeth Teige offered an aural, if not necessarily dramatic, glimpse of what a future Siegfried and Brünnhilde might sound like, Bruns impassioned and vocally fearless as Erik, Teige taking all in her musicodramatic stride in a role notorious for its demands. It was heartening too to welcome a fresh-voiced Kieran Carrel from Berlin’s Deutsche Oper to the Green Hill as the Steersman; let us hope this intelligent portrayal will prove neither his last visit nor role here. If I had certain reservations, then, this revival nonetheless proved quite a tonic after the anti-human production horrors of the two preceding evenings.

Bayreuth Festival (2) – Das Rheingold, 27 July 2026

Festspielhaus

Wotan – Michael Volle
Donner – Alexander Grassauer
Froh – Siyabonga Maqungo
Loge – Klaus Florian Vogt
Fricka – Anna Kissjudit
Freia – Evelyn Novak
Erda – Christa Mayer
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Mime – Gerhard Siegel
Fasolt – Mika Kares
Fafner – Peter Rose
Woglinde – Katharina Konradi
Wellgunde – Natalia Skrycka
Flosshilde – Marie Henriette Reinhold

Curator – Marcus Lobbes
Artistic and technical conception – Marcus Lobbes, Nils Corte
Dramaturgy – Andri Hardmeier
Digital- and AI-storytelling – Roman Senkl
Creative code, visual art – Nils Corte, Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger
Set design – Wolf Gutjahr

Costumes – Pia Maria Mackert  

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images (c): Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

The Bayreuth Festival has had a chequered history over its (almost) 150 years to date. It nonetheless remains, or has until now remained, in many ways an object lesson to the rest of the operatic world in how to take art seriously, how to create conditions in which it might be produced and experienced, and much else—not least with respect to the Festspielhaus amphitheatre and covered pit. That the rest of the world has failed almost entirely to heed its example may sadden us, but reflects on that world and us, not on Bayreuth, nor indeed on Wagner. As Pierre Boulez observed, whilst at work here half a century ago on the now legendary ‘Centenary Ring’ with Patrice Chéreau, perhaps with a little exaggeration, if understandably so, Wagner’s ‘diatribes’, written in turn:

… more than a century ago, are still completely relevant, for nothing has changed—the laziness of the repertory theatre, its failings, its precarious functioning, the blind choice of works, the fortuitous casting of singers and players, the lack of rehearsal, the sauve-qui-peut routine. Architecturally speaking, the Bayreuth model has remained a dead letter and we still have Italian-style theatres. … Both visually and acoustically, we continue to witness this permanent defeat of what is truly theatrical, Bayreuth having effected not the slightest improvement.

To strike a slightly less pessimistic note than Boulez, I think Bayreuth has played a notable role in effecting certain theatrical improvements, if more related to staging than stages. That 1976-80 production and numerous others – Ring stagings from Harry Kupfer and Frank Castorf, Tristan from Heiner Müller, Parsifal from Stefan Herheim, Hans Neuenfels’s Lohengrin, Tobias Kratzer’s Tannhäuser, and so on – set standards for and posed challenges to the rest of the world, just as Wagner did, and occasionally, sometimes more than that, they have been taken up, run with, even surpassed. Bayreuth as ‘workshop’ (Werkstatt), the greatest legacy of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, created the conditions for such innovation, building on the vision and achievements of Richard himself, as well as (whisper it) the best of the Winifred era, brought such artists of vision, Boulez included, to the Green Hill, showing not only the necessary courage to fail but the equally necessary courage to rethink, to revise, to rejuvenate: Wagner’s own celebrated ‘Kinder, macht Neues!’ following that very first festival in 1876.

If,  gentle reader, you sensed a less-than-gentle ‘but’ approaching, I fear you would be anything other than mistaken. Perhaps nothing, especially in the theatre of Tannhäuser and Parsifal, is truly irredeemable; perhaps something can be salvaged from this. Imagining how lies quite beyond my little mind, though perhaps some machine will tell us. For what the Festival, incomprehensibly, has come up with to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the first Ring must be the greatest travesty ever to have been visited on it anywhere at any time, an experience so unbearable five (out of five) people I spoke to afterwards described it independently as the worst thing they had ever seen, one (Stefan Mauß, whom I have permission to quote) adding the unforgettable and entirely accurate phrase ‘visual waterboarding’, and a rebuke not only to Wagner, not only to Bayreuth, but to any conception of art that tiny, human mind of mine will ever be able to entertain. Enter the ‘AI’-Ring, mysteriously and with insufferable pretention subtitled ‘‘Ring 10010110 – vom Mythos zum Code’, seemingly undirected, and yet ‘curated’ by one Marcus Lobbes.

What we saw can be dealt with briefly. (If only one might say the same of experiencing it.) Following a mercifully image-free Prelude, beautifully and imaginatively led by Christian Thielemann, near-peerlessly performed by the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, any sense of drama, opera, or basic humanity deserts us for a parade of banal screensaver images shown upon a curtain in front of the singers, thus largely obscured and left to fend for themselves, wearing identical, indistinguishable, weirdly yet unrevealingly hideous costumes. (Final applause, for those who could bring themselves to engage, proved something of a game in trying to identify who was presenting him-/herself at any point At least it offered the first and only prospect of entertainment in the entire sorry evening.) Sometimes there was a clear reference to the Ring at Bayreuth, the first image being the celebrated representation of the Rhinemaidens in 1876, amidst genuine theatrical wizardry that enabled them to appear as if  swimming in the Rhine. (Yes, as Anna Russell told us, in the Rhine: now on the curtain.) I almost wept upon a brief appearance, in bizarrely low resolution such as would be refused by the least assiduous reviews editor, of Castorf’s Golden Motel, not out of the nostalgia I feel for that production, but because it was vaguely discernible. We did, to be fair, see a few large rings, on apparently female fingers, when the ring should first have been seen on stage with Alberich. Otherwise, endlessly, pointlessly transforming shapes came and went, sometimes returning, few with any relation to what we heard, culminating in an anonymous man and woman who turned into street (or perhaps theatre?) lights, quickly to turn back again. Some more recognisable, if irrelevant images were suggestive of  Ludwig II put in a very brief guest appearance during the descent to Nibelheim, as did very occasional glimpses of other Rheingold productions, but that was it.

The ultimately unforgivable thing was the way this abject, wasteful nonsense distracted from whatever might have remained of the drama. With that going on before our eyes, our ears (at least my ears) struggled for more than a minute or so to keep track of what was probably a very good musical performance. Not only was this entirely at odds with any idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk – in many ways, a problematical idea that will benefit from deconstruction – but with art and even humanity themselves. I managed to hear flashes of an intriguingly mobile, flowing orchestral conception shaped by Thielemann—rather along the analytical lines suggested by Wagner in an 1871 report to German Wagner societies, tracing an entire corpus of interrelated themes from the individualisation of ‘a few malleable Nature motifs’. If I sensed that most vividly in the Prelude, its low E-flat foundational in every sense and exquisitely decorated by some of the fruitiest, bubbliest woodwind I can recall hearing here, that is a comment related in no sense to the performance itself.

Vocal contributions seemed to be of a very high standard too. Not having had chance to remind myself of the cast beforehand, I had a very pleasant surprise in hearing Klaus Florian Vogt, no less, as Loge, the ringing clarity and sincerity of his tone both in consonance with the demi-god’s revelation of uncomfortable truths and in productive contrast with his wheedling strategizing. Michael Volle’s performance, lighter than one often hears from him and in keeping with the specific demands of the Rheingold Wotan, would doubtless have graced any stage, had I been able to follow it adequately; likewise Jochen Schmeckenbecher’s darker hued Alberich, Mika Kares’s evidently lovelorn Fasolt, Christa Mayer’s chalumeau-like Erda, and much else besides, Evelyn Novak's golden Freia and a fine trio of Rhinemaidens included. To claim that I properly heard any of these performance, though, would be entirely misleading, so I shall leave it there. 

According to Tina Lorenz, writing in the programme, ‘Ring 10010110 tells a radically contemporary story about how we are currently witnessing the beginnings of a transformation in the global order’. It may be a ‘contemporary’ story, but its only ‘radicalism’ lies in turning Das Rheingold and presumably the rest into an immersive Fidelio in which we as prisoners finally experience light and fresh air upon its close. The stampede for the doors was unlike any I have seen—or participated in. Some brave souls managed to agitate for opening of the theatre doors during its course and escaped, to the intense envy and admiration of the rest of us. A period of lengthy reflection, absention, and apology would be in order from all involved. Wagner deserves better, as do the musicians and audience. So too does a world, like that of the Ring, on fire thanks to wasteful, ‘technological’ domination.

Salzburg Festival (4) - VPO/Thielemann: Capriccio (concert performance), 26 July 2024

Grosses Festspielhaus

Flamand – Sebastian Kohlhepp
Olivier – Konstantin Krimmel
La Roche – Mika Kares
Countess Madeleine – Elsa Dreisig
Count – Bo Skovhus
Clairon – Ève-Maud Hubeaux
Major-Domo – Torben Jürgens
Italian Soprano – Tuuli Takala
Italian Tenor – Josh Lovell
Servants – Kieran Carrel, Jonas Jud, Fabio Dorizzi, Ian Rucker, Christian Tschelebiew, Jan Petryka, Lucas van Lierop, Philipp Schöllhorn
Monsieur Taupe – Jörg Schneider

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

There is a certain irony to the popularity of Capriccio in concert performance. The last time the Royal Opera presented Strauss’s valedictory opera – assuming we do not count Des Edels Schattens – it was also without staging. Now, for reasons unclear, it has appeared in the Salzburg Festival’s festival-within-a-festival of sacred music, ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’, treated as the first ‘full-scale’ opera of the festival, works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Luigi Dallapiccola notwithstanding, attracting the traditional complement of dignitaries for its premiere. Irony and Strauss are not so much excellent bedfellows as two sides of the same musical coin, so there is no problem there. If the world of La Roche found itself somewhat obscured on that occasion, the impresario inspired by Max Reinhardt remained present not only onstage, nodding off during the opening sextet, but also in honoured bust-form at the entrance to the Haus für Mozart next door. Strauss himself, naturally, remains on the first floor of the Grosse(s) Festspielhaus itself. And if a concert performance, perhaps especially without interval, may not have been entirely what some of those invited were expecting, they, like the rest of us, will surely have enjoyed finding themselves lightly satirised, elevated, and perhaps even inspired by what unfolded. 

Interestingly, although no ‘concert director’ or similar was credited, a degree of accomplished acting was involved, as were telling transformations in lighting (not least for the closing moonlight). Truth be told, or at least one truth among many, little seemed to be lost. When the cast engaged so animatedly with one another, onstage when necessary and offstage when not, the impression was not so very different from a ‘traditional’ production in which they would do the very same, only seated in an eighteenth-century salon. And Strauss’s question, Countess Madeleine’s too, is ultimately ‘Wort oder Ton?’ not ‘words, music, or gesture,’ however strangely that sits both with the conversations and the composer’s veneration for Wagner’s Opera and Drama (‘the book of books about music’). If we all ultimately know which will win in our hearts and minds, if not necessarily in the Countess’s, then the contest was established with commendable even-handedness by those performing, balances of all kind upheld and dramatically generative, even without a mise-en-scène or directorial Konzept. 

Moreover, if one might expect the conductor, possibly the orchestra too, to be favoured in such a scenario, such was not the case. Christian Thielemann has often proved to be at his best in Strauss. He led an extraordinary performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten in this same hall thirteen years ago, blighted yet far from obliterated by Christof Loy’s arrogant dismissal of the work as director; the composer has long proved central to his operatic work in Dresden, Vienna, and elsewhere. If his Dresden FroSch earlier this year was impressive yet, to my mind, a little on the precious side, this Capriccio unfolded with a warmth, affection, and ease that spoke of a fine balance – that word again – between preparation and familiarity. Restraint is not quite the word, but there was no grandstanding, nothing forced. One was led to listen, perhaps via music, yet to words as much as their confrere-competitors. Quotations were assumed into the orchestral fabric, never underlined. That might be the vulgar way of some, but hardly Strauss’s. There were passages of rapt orchestral magic; if the close of the string sextet has sounded more hushed, I have not heard it so. The Vienna Philharmonic clearly loves playing for Thielemann; it is just as clear that the affection is mutual. And although that sextet was certainly conducted, it never sounded like it. 

Sebastian Kohlhepp and Konstantin Krimmel made for a pair of finely cast, nicely contrasted suitors as Flamand and Olivier respectively. If Flamand ultimately stole the heart, that is really Strauss’s doing. Mika Kares lived up to La Roche’s outsize promises in a performance that relished not only his boastfulness but also his status as dramatic lynchpin, leaving implicit sadness – or am I being sentimental? – to another day. Ève-Maud Hubeaux was a splendid Clairon; before I knew who she was, I truly sensed the ‘act’ of a French tragedienne. Such is not reserved to a French singer, of course, but there was a tang of almost Voltairean authenticity here, without sacrifice to crystal-clear German. Bo Skovhus marshalled his resources wisely as the Count. Torben Jürgens’s Major-Domo made a fine impression, as did an array of individual servants, perhaps the best I have heard. They might have had a spin-off show of their own; perhaps one day they will. 

One person is missing in that, of course, and it was there that I found myself, seemingly unlike the audience, somewhat in two minds. Elsa Dreisig’s Countess was well sung, well acted, in general had much to commend it, yet somehow did not feel quite ‘right’ to me. Was that a matter of having too much a certain interpretation or mode of interpretation in my head, to which others must conform? Quite possibly, but what I heard came across in tone and character as more girlish, even Sophie-like, than a successor to the Marschallin, the true director of metatheatrical proceedings. I shall dwell on this no more; we all have our preconceptions and prejudices, and this may well have been mine. As we all know, no operatic performance is or can be perfect, let alone correct. Music, words, and theatre (visible or invisible) are too human for that.

Khovanshchina, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 2 June 2024

Prince Ivan Khovansky – Mika Kares
Prince Andrey Khovansky – Najmiddin Mavlyanov
Prince Vasily Golitsin – Stephan Rügamer
Boyar Fyodor Shaklovity – Georre Gagnidze
Dosifey – Taras Shtonda
Marfa – Marina Prudenskaya
Emma – Evelin Novak
Scrivener – Andrei Popov
Susanna – Anna Samuil
Varsonofyev – Roman Trekel
Kuzka – Andrés Moreno García
Streshnev – Johan Krogius
Two Streltsy – Taehan Kim, Friedrich Hamel
Henchman – Dmitri Plotnikov

Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Christian Schmidt
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson
Video – Roland Horvath
Live camera – Jan Speckenbach, Marlene Blumert
Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Rebecca Graitl

Staatsoper Children’s Chorus (director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Simone Young (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Who writes? In history, as in its dramatisation, the question is crucial, its answer often complex. It is present, overtly, in Pimen’s chronicle in Boris Godunov, and it takes centre stage, later moving rightward, leftward, and above in Claus Guth’s new production of Mussorgsky’s successor work, Khovanshchina for Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden. There is also the fateful – perhaps more so than Marfa, in fortune-telling guise to Prince Golitsky – figure of the scrivener. How much, if at all, does his writing-for-hire set in course a series of unintended, world-historical consequences? Writing can be considered more broadly and narrowly, in close relation to what we now consider to constitute a ‘text’—and, of course, reading. At any rate, opening in the modern Kremlin, a statue of Peter the Great towering (as, eventually, would the two-metre-tall historical Peter) over an empty desk, with some goings on but the main character – probably wisely – never shown, just as the Romanovs could not be in Mussorgsky’s time. A functionary, seemingly somewhere between secretary and researcher, provides historical information on the characters and drama that will unfold, transcribed for us (in German and in English) on screens above the action. Given the knowledge of Russian history Mussorgsky’s drama more or less assumes (though also elides), the conceit serves both as framing device and more straightforwardly as source of useful background—or should it be commentary? Who writes, how and why? The framing is not overdone, though; part of me actually wished more had been made of it. Guth seems keener to highlight the work’s fragmentary tendencies, if anything drawing attention to the years passed between acts – themselves Rimsky-Korsakov’s grouping, whose reorganisation has not yet been generally accepted – where Mussorgsky, up to a point, brings them together. Someone other than the composer has to write here, in any case, and it will in practice prove to be more than a single person. 

If other Romanovs remain offstage, Peter, both as a young boy and as a co-tsar on the brink of adulthood sometimes watches, striding across the stage and (so I was told) also from a box above it (though sightlines prevented me and, I presume, a large part of the audience from seeing that). Otherwise, the action proceeds on stage pretty much as one might ‘expect’. It is difficult to imagine even the most hardened traditionalist objecting to the costumes – which, along with set designs, is usually all such a person cares about – but they are not fetishised. This forms, after all, some sort of investigation from the present as to how Peter attained and consolidated power, removing those who might have opposed him. Sometimes we see on film images from later Russian history. I can see the point, but I am not sure they add much, especially in the toppling of a statue of Lenin. (It could well be said that the dissolution of the USSR was a catastrophe for Russia, and not necessarily for the reasons Vladimir Putin would say it was, but it was unclear how that fitted in here.) Generic historical crowd scenes were less of a problem, presumably intending to show the Petrine settlement to be less conclusive than some would have claimed, though whether such doubling of the stage action is desirable was less than entirely clear. Likewise, whilst I think I can see the point of having Khovansky kill the Persian slaves, in a stylised representation of the bloodbath of order, restoration, progress (call it what you will), it arguably seems an arbitrary way of doing so.

A firing squad turning brutally on the ‘pardoned’ Streltsy at the end of the fourth act is a fine, properly harrowing touch, serving both to prepare the way for the self-immolation of the Old Believers in the final act but also, I think, to suggest these are different. Presenting their martyrdom as ‘resistance’, though, seems an unfortunate secularism, sadly typical of so many directors’ inability to take religious belief seriously. The idea that the contemporary ‘project’ breaks down is good: an almost Nietzschean view on the alleged ‘uses’ of history, one might say. The act, though, is real, moving, awe-inspiring, yet no more ‘resistance’ as is generally understood than the martyrdom in the final scene of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. It is more political than that, surely a crucial (and often overlooked, perhaps deliberately so, not least by Rimsky and his successor Shostakovich) note of questioning the entire Petrine and post-Petrine project of Westernisation. Peter’s troops initiate the apocalypse for some, a far stranger and more powerful drama than is allowed here. At the end, though, once the Old Believers have burned – use of video effective in conveying the nature of the act, if less so its horror – we return to the modern Kremlin. If the ‘lesson’ has been abandoned as useless or at least unhelpful, what, one might ask, has been the point? It still happened, one might reply; we have still been shown someone’s record, at least. And at least we do not become too entangled in the slightly embarrassing  ‘love story’, which, in the person of Marfa does its bit to bind things together, yet is surely a little too ‘operatic’ for comfort.

There is, also, the question of who compiles, orchestrates, and so on. Listening to the first-act Prelude in Rimsky’s orchestration, immediately before writing this, I remain far from convinced of the superiority of Shostakovich’s version of the opera (save for reversing Rimsky’s cuts and orchestrating those additional sections). It certainly has its merits, but so does Rimsky’s, and I cannot say I find it comes closer on the whole – sometimes it does; sometimes it does not – to my fantasy of how Mussorgsky ‘should’ sound. Perhaps, though, I am guilty of taking Boris Godunov – and increasingly its earliest version, given its recent favour – as a model, when Khovanshchina is a different work, rather as if one were to approach Lulu expecting it to be Wozzeck. There are also, of course, issues of performance, whichever version is used. I should dearly love one day to hear the work of Ravel and Stravinsky in full, but for now at least we had Stravinsky’s extraordinary ending, somehow more Mussorgskian even than Mussorgsky, and infinitely truer to any plausible view of the work’s dramatic message. (Shostakovich, as Richard Taruskin observed, not only ‘ratified Rimsky’s [melioristic] view’ of the Petrine reforms but ‘even managed to strengthen it’. The composer of The Rite of Spring showed himself better able to imagine and communicate the world of the Old Believers. 

Ivan Khovansky (Mika Kares), Persian slaves

Such choices were, I assume, the province of conductor Simone Young, probably in discussion with Guth. Young’s own conducting and the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin were excellent throughout, the latter sounding as golden as it did transparent, and without loss to precision. All was well placed and well balanced. Changes of metre, the lifeblood of Mussorgsky’s conversational recitative, were throughout so well handled that one barely noticed them as such; they are not, after all, the jolts of Stravinskian neoclassicism, but rather founded in a speech rhythm very different from the German ‘norm’ (and which, of course, proved highly influential upon the younger Stravinsky in particular). This happens vocally, of course, but at least as much in the orchestral ‘accompaniment’ (the Italian accompagnato seems wildly out of place here). 

Mention of things Italian brings me to my principal reservation: one of taste more than anything fundamental. Khovanshchina is considerably more inclined than Boris to more conventional, even Italianate, vocal-melodic writing. This seemed to be the cue to a more generally Verdian approach, especially during the first three acts. Elements of Wagner – more coincidental than anything else, I suspect – surfaced from time to time too, as did slightly disconcerting kinship with Tchaikovsky. Something rawer is certainly possible and, to my ears, more ‘authentically’ Mussorgskian, textual issues notwithstanding. I should not exaggerate, though, and there could be no doubting either the sincerity or, on its own terms, the success of Young’s approach with the orchestra, nor indeed the warmth with which the audience received it.

Dosifey (Taras Shtonda)

The cast was excellent too, headed by a charismatic, characteristically detailed Mika Kares as Ivan Khovansky. Taras Shtonda exuded star quality in what can hardly be other than a charismatic role, that of Dosifey, leader of the Old Believers. Stephan Rügamer imparted his usual intelligence to the part of the thwarted reformer Golitsin. (His could, perhaps even should, have been the better path, but it was not to be.) George Gagnidze’s Shakolvity shone on each of his appearances, not only his moving account of Russia’s troubled history. Marina Prudenskaya gave everything, returned with interest, to an all-encompassing performance as Marfa, finely complemented by Evelin Novak’s characterful, tender Lutheran Emma and a spirited Susanna from Anna Samuil. Andrei Popov offered a well-judged Scrivener: one could sympathise with the predicament his lowborn status presented and appreciate why he might sing in more noble, even florid style, without losing sight of his fundamental opportunism. If I felt Najmiddin Mavlyanov’s Andrey at times a little less sharply drawn, he came more into his own later on and likewise relished the opportunities a more Italianate performance offered. 

Dancers, well choreographed by Sommer Ulrickson, contributed intelligently to the greater drama too. It was, though, the outstanding chorus, expertly trained by Dani Juris, that truly crowned the performance: dramatically, harmonically based, roots in a Russian past that may or may not be invented, but certainly came to life in the here and now. It was, quite simply, outstanding in every way. Surely in this work, as in Boris, there is a fundamental lesson on the people’s suffering to be learned therein.

Rusalka, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 4 February 2024

Rusalka – Christiane Karg
Prince – Pavel Černoch
Foreign Princess – Anna Samuil
Vodník – Mika Kares
Ježibaba – Anna Kissjudit
Gamekeeper – Adam Kutny
Kitchen Boy – Clara Nadeshdin
Nymphs – Regina Koncz, Rebecka Wallroth, Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein
Huntsman – Taehan Kim

Director – Kornél Mundruczó
Designs – Monika Pormale
Lighting – Felice Ross
Video – Rūdolfs Baltiņš
Choreography - Candaş Baş
Dramaturgy – Kata Wéber, Christoph Lang

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Robin Ticciati (conductor)

Images:  Gianmarco Bresadola
Rusalka (Christiane Karg)

Director Kornél Mundruczó comes like a breath of fresh air to unsettle our conceptions of Dvořák’s penultimate and, by some way, greatest opera and thus to do precisely what the material demands; or rather, it comes as something bitterly stale, menacing, even poisonous to accomplish what fresh air on its own might not be able. It is certainly refreshing, though it should not be, to have a production that takes class seriously as a form of social distinction, a social barrier, though ultimately it will go beyond that, re-engaging with the opera in all its strange tragedy and tragic strangeness. By grounding itself in the here and now, but also a here and now our society largely wishes to ignore, it challenges, but it challenges further and with brilliant theatricality by the course subsequently taken. 

Rusalka – not strictly her ‘name’, but it is all we have, and ‘the rusalka’ or even ‘the sprite’ would seem unduly pedantic – lives in a shared, ground-floor Berlin apartment, a WG or Wohngemeinschaft, her flatmates the other three nymphs and Vodník (if you prefer, the Watergoblin). She does not fit in with, or has grown distant from, her female flatmates at least; they are so much more laid back, fun-loving, quite happy in their less-than-ideal home of disrepair. Theirs is a working class, it seems, the bourgeoisie simply cannot stomach, however much it might claim to act in its name. But nor, any more, can Rusalka, at least since she has seen signs of the life – above all, the Prince – upstairs. In his modern penthouse with balcony and views across the city including, yet far from restricted to the Fernsehturm and the Rotes Rathaus, he and his appallingly grotesque group of friends, the Foreign Princess (his ex-) included, have ‘made it’. They know each other inside and out, as it were; they probably even vote Green. 

Rusalka, Prince (Pavel Černoch), Gamekeeper (Adam Kutny),
Kitchen Boy (Clara Nadeshdin), and Ensemble

One can see why she would like to escape to that other world, embodied in an attractive, trendily dressed mysterious (to her, though not to us) stranger. For one thing, other than the drugs that may or may not be Ježibaba’s stock-in-trade (what is that fascinatingly beyond-good-and-evil or just-plain-evil neighbour doing?) she is hardly spoilt for choice in alternative paths. Needless to say, an actually existing working-class young woman is the most shocking sight of all to the Prince’s friends and they work immediately to exclude her, the Foreign Princess going all out to rekindle those embers until the culpably weak yet more sympathetic Prince succumbs. No wonder the two sides cannot communicate, at least not until it is too late. For it is important to recognise that Rusalka fits in on neither side of this social divide. She only discovers – and this is entirely faithful to the work – where she might have done far too late. There is, again as in the work, a sort of tragic communion in that the Prince realises too late; he can only do what is right (for him, as much as ethically) by surrendering his life, which, movingly he does. 

In a programme interview, Mundruczó says he kept thinking of Kafka when working on the opera: doubtless a surprising reference for some of us, the Prague connection, albeit intergenerational, notwithstanding. But that may be to fall for outdated ‘national’ histories of music. Why not, after all? It certainly comes into his own in the third act here, where the action transfers less to a house than a cellar of horrors. Having returned to Ježibaba, been scorned and perhaps even poisoned, Rusalka leaves behind the world of social realism in which we imagined we should remain until the end and morphs into an impossible creature, part human, part goodness knows what, although it is perhaps not coincidental that its black suggests the colour of refuse and its disposal. One can and perhaps should read that in social and environmental ways; after all, what could be more of a social issue, what could hit the working class harder, than the destruction of the planet? But the aesthetic is actually quite different; one can read it for ‘meaning’ in that way, but the vision seems to lie beyond that: something spellbinding, from which one wishes to avert one’s eyes in horror at the agony Rusalka is experiencing, yet cannot. It is more filmic than theatrically Gothic, I think, but that choice seems a deliberate decision, again, judging from the interview, to attempt to reach younger audiences with different frames of reference. Whatever one might think of that – I am not sure I am the target audience here – for me it works. It truly unsettles and actually leads us to reconsider clashes between ‘natural’ and ‘human’, or ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ worlds very much as the work does—yet which can become lost if the setting is too folk-like. A sort of deformed, already-dead tree-in-plastic has grown, suffocating and perhaps literally trashing all that approach it.

Rusalka, Prince, Third Nymph (Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein)

Fairy tales, told properly, are dark, even sick, not through a sort of tired, bourgeois exhibitionism – that might be better left upstairs in the deceased Prince’s apartment – but because they tell of dreams, fantasies, delights, and horrors. They are not of the sanitised, commercial world of Disney, but come from a place of sex, violence, and more. The mirror they hold up is truthful because it is distorted, not despite that distortion. This production recognises such twisted truths and turns them into a drama at least implicit in Dvořák’s –and Jaroslav Kvapil’s – work and world. It may predate Freud and Kafka, but it is not without connections and even presentiments. I have nothing at all against a production presenting a single-minded view of a work, incorporating more current concerns, and so on. The work, whatever it may be, will survive. But a particular point of interest here is that the director does not impose a framework, even a related conceptual framework, on the work, but rather presents such a related framework as a way in to experience or re-experience the very strangeness of the work ‘itself’. 

For Dvořák progresses in this score too; even in so late a work as this, written after (!) Pelléas et Mélisande, he does not rest on his laurels. If those laurels are too folk-like for some early on – their loss, but there is no accounting for taste – then they surely will not be by the third act. For me, conductor Robin Ticciati and the superlative Staatskapelle Berlin came truly into their own in this act, opening up a range of post-Wagnerian language and emotion, not just or even principally emotion, extending beyond what I have heard from Ticciati previously (save, perhaps, at Glyndebourne for the dramaturgically unfortunate Ethel Smyth opera, The Wreckers). Not that there was anything wrong with what he did earlier. I initially found it a bit hard-driven, but came to realise that this was probably as much a reading developed in tandem with the production as a conception ‘in itself’ of the score. Lack of what might be thought of as sentimentality – not necessarily so, but that is arguably another matter – was the point. It was not cold, but nor was it a kitsch (or readable as such) tale of forest life. 

Rusalka, Ježibaba (Anna Kissjudit)

The same might be said of performances from an excellent cast, only more so, for there was some singing of ravishing warmth—but not only of that. Making her role debut, Christiane Karg not only traced the journey(s) proposed by composer, librettist, conductor, director, and more; she was instrumental in creating them. Occasionally during the first act, I wondered whether she might be a little under-powered, and perhaps there were a few first-night nerves there, but this was more, I think, a matter of wise marshalling of resources and dramatic trajectory. In many ways, I liked the way the Song to the Moon did not become a stand-alone aria and indeed related strongly to the music surrounding it, but I can well imagine some not having done so. Whatever one’s position on that – mostly a matter of personal preference – this Rusalka grew in stature through shocking experience, a tragic heroine to remember for the denouement. 

There was tremendous acting on her part too. Pavel Černoch’s Prince was similarly, if differently, involving. Despite it all, and partly on account of twin vocal intelligence and beauty, one could not help but like him, and again shared his ultimate tragedy at the close. Mika Kares’s Vodník also grew as his character – and the truth that character told – increasingly gained our sympathy. Anna Samuil offered glamour and refulgence – just the thing – for the Foreign Princess. Anna Kissjudit’s already horrible Ježibaba became all the more splendidly, horrifyingly so on her return, just as the production demanded, without sacrifice to more ‘traditional’ vocal values. Smaller roles and choral parts were all well taken, all contributing to a greater musicodramatic whole. 

As for the audience member who not only booed the end of the first act, but through his failure to stop – I am trying to be polite – seemed determine to prevent the second from beginning, what part of that whole troubled him so much? And why?

Berlin Festtage (5) - Götterdämmerung, 10 April 2023

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Siegfried – Andreas Schager
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Hagen – Mika Kares
Brünnhilde – Anja Kampe
Gunther – Lauri Vasar
Gutrune – Mandy Fredrich
Waltraute – Violeta Urmana
Three Norns – Noa Beinart, Kristina Stanek, Anna Samuil
Woglinde – Evelin Novak
Wellgunde – Natalia Skrycka
Flosshilde – Anna Lapkovskaja
Erda (silent) – Anna Kissjudit

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, designs)
Elena Zaytseva (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Alexey Polubpoyarinov (video)
Tatiana Werestchagina, Christoph Lang (dramaturgy)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe)

‘Alles was ist, endet.’ Erda’s words from Das Rheingold apply both to the rule of the gods and to Wagner’s depiction of that rule, its decline, and its fall. The Ring does strange things to one’s sense of time, time in any case a strange thing to experience. By the time one reaches Götterdämmerung, let alone its end, one both feels one has been through a good deal, to put it mildly, and yet also that it has only just begun. Partly, of course, that is or can be the work’s message too. Wagner counselled Liszt to mark well his poem, containing the beginning and end of a world, not, as sometimes has been said, the world. Those ‘watchers’, men and women (on which Wagner is very clear) ‘moved to the very depth of their being’, who, at least according to his stage directions, should observe Brünnhilde’s final acts and who implicitly remain with us to create a new world, would otherwise have no role. Nor, on one level, would performing and staging the work. Here we were again, though: the end of another Ring, one which had challenged and taught us much, moving us too, even if not always living up dramaturgically to the moments of its highest promise. 

For, if much of Siegfried, especially its first two acts, had left me enthused and eager to find out what might happen next, Götterdämmerung sometimes suggested Dmitri Tcherniakov had lost his way, failing to follow up – or at least electing not to do so – on themes and threads which instead were left hanging. Wagner’s more uncomprehending critics might claim he did so too; we have no need to discuss them further here. The research centre in which the work – all of it, probably – takes place opened up questions of agency and control in which Tcherniakov seemed, at least in part, to have lost interest. If the Norns, whom we had seen throughout, filing away information, seemingly keeping matters in order, are now locked out of proceedings, what does that mean? I could speculate, perhaps fruitfully, yet the production largely seems to abdicate any responsibility it might have to tell, to explain, to suggest.

Hagen (Mika Kares), Staatsopernchor Berlin

The Tarnhelm’s failure again to work, Siegfried looking and dressing like Siegfried, not Gunther, on Brünnhilde’s mountain, could have many potential explanations and implications, yet where were they here? If the world has been disenchanted – fair enough, returning to Adorno and Horkheimer, or indeed many others – where, and I am sorry to bang on about this, does that leave the objects of Wagner’s work (musical as well as verbal and scenic)? It is not always clear to me that that problem has been adequately considered, though I think it could be in a revised production building on what has gone before. Where steps had been taken in Siegfried to suggest Wagner lay beyond any of the characters in setting up the experimental basis for the production, here if anything we went backwards—and it did not, Dallas- or Die tote Stadt-style, seem all to have been a dream.

Hagen, Gunther (Lauri Vasar), Gutrune (Mandy Fredrich), chorus

There are lovely and other telling touches. The return of Erda and ultimately the Wanderer (his cloth cap still somewhere between Chéreau’s Brechtian ‘watchers’ and Wagner’s own carefully curated portraiture) to pay tribute to the dead Siegfried is genuinely moving. Has this particular experiment concluded? In that respect we can, I think justly, draw our own conclusions, however inadequate. Siegfried’s earlier Don Draper-like sprawling on the sofa and a plethora of cigarettes tell their own story of toxic – literally so – masculinity. So too does the basketball court on which Siegfried meets his death. That Gutrune may be drugged too is interesting: perhaps an addict rather than a formal object of experimentation, but is that not in any case part of a broader societal experiment of death and disaster? (Her other treatment is decidedly unsympathetic to the point of misogyny: a pity.) 

And what to make of the ending? I am tempted to say very little. To the text of Wagner’s rejected ‘Schopenhauer ending’ – he rejected it for sure dramatic reason – Brünnhilde approaches Erda, ultimately rejecting a paper bird such as Siegfried had rejected from the Woodbird. She pulls down the curtain, after it has become stuck. Making her own way with a clichéd bag in hand? Doubtless, yet could we, should we not expect more? It did not strike me as a deliberate drama of the underwhelming, a world failing to end, as in Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring, rather a need to do something, almost anything. But perhaps, even probably, I am failing to understand. Tcherniakov’s Parsifal and, more controversially, his Tristan were tauter, more thought through. Is the lack the message? We begin to pursue ourselves, or our thoughts, in circles.

 

More understandably, Thomas Guggeis’s musical interpretation seemed to have tired somewhat. It was still an excellent show, a fine achievement for one at this stage of his career, which would put many others to shame; yet, a few orchestral fluffs (near-inevitable) aside, there were a few more cases where, not unlike the staging, the conductor did not always seem sure where next to turn. There was tremendous playing from the Staatskapelle Berlin led, at its best, by a keen sense of where the score was heading, but there were hesitations too. That, I have little doubt, will change with greater experience. 

Andreas Schager’s Siegfried created the drama before him: tireless, cocksure, yet with a crucial degree of stunted development (Tcherniakov’s toy horse Grane another nice touch). He and Anja Kampe as Brünnhilde once again held the stage at least as well as anyone this century. Mika Kares added Hagen to Fasolt and Hunding, excelling once again in words, music, and gesture. Lauri Vasar (Gunther) and Mandy Fredrich (Gutrune) were not given the most promising hands in Tcherniakov’s conception, teetering on the edge of the merely silly, yet worked to gain our sympathy—and ultimately succeeded, a true sign of excellent artistry. The Norns and Rhinemaidens made fine contributions, though Violeta Urmana’s Waltraute did not make so consistently strong an impression as one might have expected.

Hagen, Alberich (Jochen Schmeckenbecher)

It was, moreover, a joy to welcome back, however briefly, Jochen Schmeckenbecher’s thoughtful, detailed portrayal of Alberich. As so often, one’s thoughts returned to him, dead, alive, or somewhere in between. ‘Schläfst du, Hagen, mein Sohn?’ That near-liturgical question, so alluring to Boulez at work with Chéreau on the Centenary Ring, retains its irrational enticement. In lieu of a more conventional conclusion, that might do.