THE SPECTATOR
H ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY•LEISURE OPERA
Nouvelle Wagner
RODNEY MILNES
The most significant fact about the new production of Twilight of the Gods by Sadler's Wells Opera at the Coliseum is that it is sung in English. Andrew Porter's new version is clear, simple and, after a shaky start on the first night, mostly audible. However well you may under- stand German, however familiar you may be with the original text, hearing it in English makes for greater immediacy, greater relevance, and gives the work the status, not so much of a 'stage festival play' (Wagner's term), something loftily removed to be seen but once a year, as that of a thundering good bit of music theatre.
So it seems a pity that Sadler's Wells, as though lacking the courage of their convictions, do not simply stick to the long accepted English title but use Giitterdanz- nzerung as well, and in large antique type, which puts one in mind of Visconti and his troubles in another medium, and rather plays into the hands of those who, for reasons best known to themselves (or their doctors), will insist on finding Nazi con- -notations in The Ring. The only character with whom the most starry-eyed National Socialist could have identified his move- ment is Siegfried, and look what happened to him. If there is any place for Nazism in Wagner's cosmology it is down among the Nibelungs and their revenge-crazed Albe- rich, and the evil that he represents is, like original sin (if such there be), something present in all of us.
Twilight, the culmination and climax of the tetralogy, in some ways suffers more in isolation than the other parts. If you have not witnessed the steady disintegra- tion of moral authority, in the person of Wotan, compromised by temporal power, then the contrast in the descent to the level of humans and the mess they make of the— world they have inherited is less marked. But the drama is compelling enough on its own terms, and for the most part con- vincingly realised at the Coliseum.
The musical side is safe in the distin- guished hands of Reginald Goodall. His greatest achievements are an overall pace which allows the singers to get the words out naturally and . without undue hurry, and a balance between pit and stage that enables them to be heard. He also has the secret of the Wagnerian orchestral climax, which is, roughly speaking, make 'cm wait for it. The big moments, as it happens, are well worth waiting for. Apart from moments of flabby ensemble and the odd muffed entry—first night nerves—the orchestra plays magnificently for him.
The performances that both Mr Goodall and the joint producers, Glen Byam Shaw and John Blatchley, have elicited from Rita Hunter and Alberto Remedios are quite astounding. They were good in last year's Valkyrie, but their achievements here are on quite another level. Miss Hunter does not, like some other Briinnhildes, just sing the loud high notes and let the rest look after themselves: her line is evenly spread and her breath control exemplary, and lustily though she may hurl out the big stuff, there is much beautiful soft singing Alberto Remedios (Siegfried), Rita Hunter (Briinnhilde) in 'Twilight of the Gods' as well. She not only gets the words across, but gets them across in a manner that sug- gests that she is fully aware of their mean- ing, and the calm dignity of her acting underlines this awareness.
Mr Remedios manages to make Sieg- fried's gullibility endearing rather than irritating, and his bearing and appearance (even in a peek-a-boo leather jerkin) is convincingly heroic without being aggres- sively so. Like so many of the false heroes the. world casts up—like Che .Guevara— Siegfried is only wholly sympathetic when he's dead. Mr Goodall's thoughtful, measured reading of the Funeral Music happily avoids the bombastic.
Clifford Grant's Hagen, though finely sung, is not yet so clearly focused, and I think the Gibichung pair (Norman Bailey and Catherine Wilson) are made a bit too sinister. They can surely be weak without being so decadent., I don't imagine- that even a hero as naïve as Siegfried would fall in so readily with a gold-lame, booted oddball—an interpretation of Gunther markedly at. odds with Mr Bailey's four- square singing.
The mechanics of the production work well, except when they get tangled up in the decor, but the self-consciously savage comportment of the Vassals, doing. their Stone Age bit by numbers, is less than convincing. At least they react to what is going on, and they sing heartily.
How nice if I could stop there, but when it comes to decor there seems to be a hopeless jinx attached to Wagner and you only have to mention The Ring for designers to go utterly berserk. If I didn't know that Ralph Koltai was a fine (and influential) designer who has done much distinguished work for the National Theatre, the RSC and indeed Sadler's Wells, I might be tempted to suppose that what he has done for Twilight was part of some elaborate practical joke.
Space and flexibility are the prime re- quirements, and there is precious little of either. The shiny tilted black backcloth reflects everything on stage and becomes extremely irritating, and its very black- ness precludes the vital contrast between light and dark. The raised circular acting area has so much, clutter on it in the pro- logue that Siegfried and Briinnhilde can effect only the most stilted of leave-tak- ings, and the best set is that for the forest when it is emptied of everything save for a pile of those small spherical objects that sum up my reaction to the designs.
Is it not possible in 1971 to devise some manner of scene-changing without bring- ing in the house curtain, which kills the music even when Mr Goodall is conduct- ing it? Why a new set for the Valkyrie's Rock when there was already one in last years' Valkyrie? The waving blue ribbons for the waters of the Rhine might have seemed like a good idea at some planning stage, but when it became obvious that they hindered any contact between Sieg- fried and the Rhinemaidens they should have been scrapped. • The Rhinemaidens themselves are in shiny cocktail gowns with trains (tails?). swaying and titupping about behind their ribbons like sonic nightmare vision of three tiddly Madame Butterflies doing an underwater ballet. Gunther's Prince Vali- ant wig (which anyone might have fore- told would look bizarre atop Norman Bailey), the Two Million BC chorus with maces and clubs, and the prop flowers all showed an out-of-place comic-hook influ- ence: but everything pales before Wal- traute's costume, which looked as if Alberich had been caught half way through a sex-change operation. It says much for the professionalism of Katherine Piing that she consented to wear the wretched thing. Perhaps Mr Koltai thought that after one and a half hours of music we all needed a good laugh. He got it from me. But it's a bit tough on Wagner.
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