So let me tell you about the very controversial RING CYCLE we have been watching.
The director, chosen specifically for controversy, has never directed an opera, and according to a well placed inside source, had to be told by the singers that lines couldn't be performed in certain ways because they were being sung. The singers pretty much are in open rebellion, and appear to be mostly hitting their marks and “parking and barking.”
Das Rheingold was set in a motel on Route 66. It opens with the Rheinmaidens drying their underwear. There are goings on in bedrooms and bars, and video being projected simultaneously of seemingly random stuff. When Valhalla is seen it is a sleazy room in the motel and it opens with Wotan having sex with Freia. Indeed, he has sex with almost everyone in the opera, though not, it would seem, the men. He screws Erda in the toilet while the gold is being loaded to ransom Freia, who has been tied to the bed. Almost everything that happens in Rheingold makes no sense, but I soon realized that the director did not intend for it to make sense. He is basically pulling a fast one on these poor deluded Wagnerites who waited 10 years for their tickets.
So the solution - close your eyes and be treated to the most spectacular singing, orchestral playing, conducting, and operatic acoustic on earth...
Walküre was a little more directorially palatable, with a gorgeous set (only later do we learn it is actually supposed to be an oil refinery in Azerbaijan). We discover the location too late for it to affect our enjoyment. An enormous threshing machine of some kind pops onto the scene during the final scene, distracting us all by wildly threshing in the wrong rhythm during Brünnhilde's entreaty. Hunding carries a human head on a pole - I loved that! - but for some reason, Wotan's farewell kiss to his daughter becomes blatantly erotic and she struggles violently, implying, perhaps, a history of incestuous abuse. Copies of Pravda bury someone alive, and Brünnhilde is surrounded by burning hay. Love that too!
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In between Walküre and Siegfried came a day of incredible angst because I was a victim of identity theft and I spent the day cancelling credit cards and filling police reports.
I could really sympathize with Richard Wagner's identity being stolen too....
I haven't seen Götterdämmerung yet, but Siegfried so far takes the cake. The gorgeous love duet was interrupted by a herd of crocodiles who demanded to be fed, and devoured the hapless woodbird who was a sort of gigantic, corpulent Las Vegas cockatoo figure, and Erda actually simulated fellatio on Wotan so convincingly that I thought I was watching a Times Square peep show. The bear, who in Wagner's opera appears for 5 minutes, is in the whole first act as a half naked man with a chain around his neck who does a willd head banging dance in time to the anvil, and meanwhile reads books (and burns them) and frequently washes in the forge water.
The dragon is never a real dragon in modern productions anyway, but here is a long haired rock idol with groupies in a tawdry shopping mall connected to a crocodile-infested subway station. The crocodiles also eat a giant umbrella. Siegfried kills him with an assault rifle ... the smell of gunpowder filled the theatre. Wonder why he bothered to forge the sword. Oh and there is a silver trailer in front of Mount Rushmore, which is decorated with the heads of Lenin, Stalin, Marx and Mao.
The booing began the minute the last chord cut off. It was loud. It was pretty much universal. Boy, did the audience EVER hate this director's concept - if you can call it that. Then the singers emerged and the conductor, and the cheering was incredible. Everyone could feel what they put up with and how they managed a brilliant musical performance in spite of it all, the equivalent of composing a sonnet and illuminating it on a vellum manuscript while sitting in a septic tank full of shit.
The most disappointing thing about this Götterdämmerung is really that the world doesn’t end at the end. Indeed, nothing much happens at all. Brünnhilde runs around dousing the universe with gasoline, but she doesn’t light it. The world doesn’t burn up, the Rhine doesn’t overflow, and — worst of all — the enormous New York Stock Exchange set doesn’t crumble to rubble as we were all hoping it would. Brünnhilde’s 20-minute farewell to the universe turns out to be much adieu about nothing. Even a guest appearance by the perambulator from Battleship Potemkin adds little more to the mix than just another tired cliché, though it is amusing to watch a half-naked man eating raw potatoes off it.
Which is a pity, since Götterdämmerung begins so promisingly with the three Norns performing a santeria ritual, smearing blood on the walls of some sleazy backstreet voodoo shrine, and features other great moments such as a bloody corpse in the trunk of a shiny mafia-looking car, Siegfried being clubbed to death with what looks like a baseball bat or length of lead piping, and a random person waving a large red cloth. A kebab stand was the meeting place for many of the key characters, allowing the director to comment heavy-handedly on the middle east, and we learned that throwing a chair is directorial shorthand for being “mildly annoyed.”
One of the most remarkable moments was when Siegfried gives Brünnhilde the ring, and she gives him her horse. The horse was in fact a Teddy bear, and as she is telling him how the horse will even ride with him through fire, Siegfried examines it, apparently trying to see if it has a penis.
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Booing was not quite as bad as on the night of Siegfried, but then nothing was as risible as the crocodiles.
To be honest, it is amusing to make fun of the Regie but in spite of it all, Götterdämmerung was wildly enjoyable mostly because conductor Marek Janowski and his lightning tempi, whipping the legendary Bayreuth orchestra up to a frenzy, kept everything dynamic with a profound sense of Wagner’s architecture. Singers were outstanding ... Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde was impressively cavernous and thrilling though starting to lose pitch towards the end of the immolation scene. At times, the way she cut through the Wagnerian textures was absolutely spine-chilling. Stefan Vinke as Siegfried was impressive as well.
What I hope for one day is a truly revolutionary AND evolutionary Ring. One in which there are both startling new ideas and a profound understanding of Wagner’s score. Present company excepted, however, I’m not sure there are any artists able to, or even who want to, deliver such a product. It really is time to make sure the Thai Ring Cycle gets finished, and even established as a regular item on the world’s Wagner travel menu.
Congratulations! Well done! Well deserved :)
@somtow
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