Shattering tragedy
Michael Tanner
Die Walküre Royal Opera House On the Town Coliseum The central theme of the Ring cycle is always said to be love versus power, the initial act of disruption being Alberich’s renunciation of love in the opening scene of Das Rheingold. Actually, that ‘preliminary evening’, as Wagner called it, is notable for the absence of love in any form, Alberich’s feelings for the Rhinemaidens being purely lustful. The gods are a cold crew — something no contemporary producer is likely to let us overlook — and by far the warmest character is the giant Fasolt, who loves the goddess Freia helplessly and hopelessly.
It is only in the second drama, Die Walküre, that love not merely makes its appearance, but also in a variety of forms dominates the action and leads to catastrophe after catastrophe, making this whole work a shattering tragedy. Odd that Wagner, in writing the text of the Ring backwards, creates first a world without love, so that we don’t find out what the world which includes it is like until it has allegedly been renounced — and yet the Ring as a whole is arguably made much more moving and valuably complex thanks to this seeming clumsiness of exposition.
For after the terrifying storm which constitutes the prelude to Act I of Die Walküre, and which not only blasts Siegmund into physical exhaustion but also registers the hostility of the human world to his very existence, we have the poignancy of the opening scene, in which Sieglinde’s compassion for his suffering smoothly but rapidly moves into passion for him as lover and, as she comes to realise towards the end of the act, brother. Their painfully short-lived ecstasy gives us a measure of the possibilities for human relationships, with the menacing but hostly correct Hunding standing in contrast: the economy and power of this act are miraculous, an hour in which the ghastly world of Rheingold, physically beautiful but devoid of anything worth caring about, is expanded spiritually and emotionally at the same time as it is compressed into a small and ill-appointed hut.
All that is obvious, but hardly what anyone seeing the Ring for the first time would perceive or conclude from the Royal Opera’s ongoing cycle. Act I of Die Walküre in Keith Warner’s production, with sets by Stefanos Lazaridis, takes place in more or less the same location as the gods were in for Rheingold, though it has become run down. But there is the same black marble, the vast steel curve of a helix, a few huge pieces of furniture — in fact, not anything to suggest a hut in the middle of a forest. Even the more familiar — nowadays — front parlour of a suburban semi has more of the required claustrophobic misery than this murky pile. The setting, though, was only the beginning of the trouble. Antonio Pappano’s conducting of this act began sensitively, the orchestra as always playing superbly for him. But instead of the hesitancy of the first 20 minutes moving into the ever more tense and thrilling scene of recognition and abandonment, things got slacker and slacker, the pauses ever less pregnant, the lack of a groundswell in the orchestra ever more debilitatingly apparent. Katarina Dalayman is a warm-voiced, sometimes thrilling but also over-parted Sieglinde, with no lower notes for her great narration. Jorma Silvasti, the Siegmund, has no plausible heroic tones, and what he has he soon lost. Only the handsome, even raunchy, Hunding of Stephen Milling was of international calibre.
Act II began with dangerously high spirits, as it should, the Brünnhilde of Lisa Gasteen gamely descending a sheer ladder and getting poked in the rear by Wotan to sex up her war cries. Gasteen has the will to sing the part, but she isn’t credible as a youthful goddess. The huge dignity needed for the Annunciation of Death and for the prolonged final scene with Wotan, as well as the slow growth in her understanding of what tenderness and passion might be among mere humans, is not faintly suggested by Gasteen’s acting or singing. Her voice, alarmingly more worn than two years ago in Elektra, has no range of colour; her pitching is approximate.
Though this drama is named after Brünnhilde, it is Wotan who has the largest part, and is presented by Wagner with a complex depth no other operatic character had ever aspired to. At present Bryn Terfel is finding his way into the role, and on the way doing some effective things. Yet I doubt whether this is the part for him, temperamentally or vocally. Needing to harbour his resources, he reminds us how much of the role is meant to be sung quietly. Terfel hollows out his voice, so that it sounds exhausted rather than intimate. And his climaxes are very short-lived indeed. Some of what he lacks is on clear display from Rosalind Plowright, coming into her own as a Fricka of immense presence. That she and Wotan still have some attraction to one another makes their quarrel all the more painful, but Plowright has such withering scorn for the Volsung twins that she exposes the simple lack of interpretation that dogs Terfel’s portrayal. He is not helped at the end when Loge as fire shoots spectacularly round the set and ends up burning in the palm of Wotan’s hand: a semi-jokey gimmick at one of the Ring’s most overpowering moments does betray a lack of seriousness on the part of the production team.
Bernstein’s On the Town is bravely tackled by ENO, with Jude Kelly directing, but it doesn’t come off. The script sounds corny, the songs never achieve the memorable, and the performance, though carefully prepared and with snazzy sets, is lacking in any of the star quality which is the only thing that can bring this musical to enjoyable life. In fact, it comes across as naff, sentences that begin with American accents drooping into English, the total effect being of gaucherie on the part of the performers rather than of the characters they are depicting. There was plenty of laughter and applause, so perhaps this is what the nostalgia people want.
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