.Opera
Ring of truth
ey Milnes
The extraordinary thing about Gaz Friedrich's new production of Das Rheingold and Die Walkare at Covent Garden is that it actually is new. Over the last twenty years, one Covent Garden Ring has looked much like another, and each has paid tribute to a deadening tradition. The Coliseum Ring is a straightforward and sensitive presentation of the text, and now Professor Friedrich has set about interpreting the work for today, and very much for today. He sees the tetrology as dealing with the
collapse of civilisation as we know it, and — well, enough said. Wagner's cosmogony is only too hideously relevant.
Tradition is thrown out of the stage door into the gutters of the market where it belongs, along with all those rotting cabbage leaves. Friedrich has spent years thinking about the Ring from scratch. The results are to be seen in the copious programme notes, which spill over into a separate (and free) booklet. What is so refreshing (and immeasurably more important) is that he has the theatrical flair to make these ideas• flesh, and thrilling, voluptuous, provocative flesh at that. Gone are the dreary trappings of Wagner on stage: the incestuous twins no longer wear Dutch-doll blond wigs: Wotan has no beard; the characterisation, helped by a variety of intriguing visual references, is newly thought-through.. George Shirley's hip yet sardonic Loge in white jeans and scruffY poncho is e masterly creation, a,s funny as it is uncomfortable; RI' chard Cassilly's sullen, resentful, suspicious Siegmund makes the blossoming of his love all the more poignant; Donald McIntyre s greedy, venial, all-toO-hurnan Wotan marks the final stage in th.e de-Hotterisation of this tole, and it is magnificently sung into the bargain.
What is more, singers do things that they are thought traditionally
not to be able to do. Bert Lindholm's slim and athletic Brtinnhilde scampers about the stage like a deer, runs up and down steps an,(1, scuttles under rocks while still managing to produce a vocal line of Nilsson-like power (if not steady ness). McIntyre sings supreme/Y testing passages while walking on.a moving stage or discarding h!s outer clothing. How inspiring it is to discover that it can be done given proper rehearsal, a responsive cast and a director with an uncluttered mind. Friedrich's visual references MO1 metaphors with exhilarating effect. Weaponry ranges from automatic rifles to bow and arrow. The Rhinemaidens are Vargas girls ia delightful porno-kitsch poses. The Valkyries are hijack-leather-clad vultures. The only trouble with such visual stimuli is that some pass unrecognised by your average Covent Garden audience; I think we all got the Nibelungs' miner's helmets and the Giants' safetY visors, but even some critics thought the latter were sporting space guns instead of clubs. In fact they were toting huge industrial power drills. ("I am glad to saY.I have never seen a power drill. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.") Nor does Friedrich despise the straight coup de th4dtre. The sudden appearance of Wotan and Loge somewhere up in the flies, the ruddy glow and factory clangour of Nibelheim, or the revolting metamorphosis of Alberich into a heaving mass of frog spawn — all these produced just the right frisson. How much he is aided in this bY Svoboda's sets I am not sure. Too often the reaction to such effects as the false stage tilting and turning .pectator October 12, 1974 into a huge staircase is not "how beautiful" but "what on earth can that have cost?". I have a nasty feeling that given a tenth of the rumoured £250,000 budget, Friedrich could have produced more or less the same overall effect. As it is, the general impression is the exact oPposite of Noel Coward's oftquoted advice, since here it is the furniture that knocks the actors over.
Despite the six weeks rehearsal, Lille production is not quite finished.
rom around the middle of Wal7.1-Ire Act 2 there was an improvisa1,orY air about proceedings, witness tile sudden irruption of neatly focused banks of curved Strand Electric clouds or flames with the inevitable vertical break, and the botched finale. But so much had been achieved earlier that I forgive this, on condition that they get it right next summer. About Cohn Davis's conducting I can scarcely bring myself to write. It is not the slow speeds, which Make Goodall sound like Jack Prabham, as the lack of underlying Onward impulse. It is as though he were heeding purely musical rather an
th , dramatic values; all too often aLue dramatic action would come to beeornplete halt, and there would
Mr Davis lingering over some glutinously beautiful woodwind °}1ra-se, or drawing out the feminine endings with fatal results to the dramatic, rhythmic flow. With ,,,e1Trinous respect and much good ,7111 I beg him to rethink his 41terpretation before the complete 3'cles, otherwise I shall certainly fast asleep before he gets half 437 through. But he achieves a fine alance with the singers: every wnrdcan be heard, and that is a verY, very good start.
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