Bühnenweihfestspielkrieg
The Germans have a word for everything except what La Cieca is about to propose, which is why she made up her own Mammutwort for, well, a contest having to do with stage productions, specifically those of Wagner music dramas. (The “consecration” is understood, you see.) The rules and what you can win, after the jump!
Your mission: to choose and to describe to your fellow cher pubes a favorite Wagner production. What La Cieca is looking for from you n the comments section below is an enthusiastic pitch explaining why this production, more than others, fulfills your standards of what a Wagner production should be.
Thus, part of the challenge will be for you to articulate your ideas of what a production is supposed to do, and then give us evidence that your favorite meets those criteria.
Naturally, the use of YouTube clips is encouraged, or, if you find still photos online of moments you want to illustrate, just include the URL of the photo in your comment and La Cieca will insert it in its proper place.
The competition will open immediately and will close at midnight on Friday, January 21. La Cieca’s decision as to the merits of the comments is final and (as you will guess) subject to whim. Impress me!
The author of the best comment will receive a complete eight-DVD set of Der Ring Des Nibelungen
Fanget an!
The Dresden Amen – third act Tannhäuser.
Grazie tanto! I will listen to it now!!
ah, and also in Parsifal (as I suspected…). Whew!
In 2009 I saw the world end twice in two months, which is a lot. But each time was radically different.
The Zubin Mehta-Fura dels Baus-Maggio Musicale Cirque du Soleil / Star Wars-Jetsons version of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung was higher on spectacle but lower on psychologtical depth, while the Jeffrey Tate-Robert Carsten-Fenice production (shared with Koln) was lower on spectacle and profoundly moving psychologically.
I only saw the Florence Gotterdammerg, so I don’t know how the first three operas of their cycle were handled. But I watched the Fenice Ring grow and develop, stumbling through cast changes and delays and still without a Rheingold (until later this year), the first part, which they skipped because of difficulties adapting the Koln sets to the Fenice stage. But the vision has been consistent, both musically, in the hands of Maestro Tate, and dramatically, in the hands of Robert Carsten.
The Carsen sets and costumes are realistic, a war-torn mis-en-scene in which Valhalla is a fabulous penthouse and the Hall of the Gibichungs a 1950′s East German totalitarian moderne.
As the opera opens the Norns, three blind sisters who weave the fabric of destiny, find that the rope has snapped and the future of their universe has ended. In Florence they were suspended, floating above the stage, eerie and magical. At Fenice, they were housemaids in the basement of the universe in which Valhalla was the penthouse, arranging the detritus of the world, wrapping the rope of fate on on picture frames and furniture and bundled slabs of the World Ash Tree as they lament “the eternal knowing is ended.”
When the scene changes to the Valkyrie rock, Siegfried, Stefan Vinke, and Brunnhilde, Jayne Casselman, are still entangled in passionate sex as the sun rises. You get the feeling nothing could stop them, that they are so happy that the world could end without their noticing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t let them.
Siegfried resembles a buzz-cut Marine bear in fatigues, chunky and frisky. Brunnhilde is a blonde vixen, part biker girl, part earth mother, cut from the Jessica Lange mold. Once a demigod, she retains some of her former grandeur, but for the moment she is all human, a woman passionately in love. They cannot keep their hands off each other. And when she gives him her beloved steed, he reacts as if he had just been given the keys to a magnificent new Harley, every boy’s dream come true: the woman he loves and the ride to match.
Nothing this Siegfried did matched the Lance Ryan’s singing suspended upside down, or the astonishingly soaring ease of his final scene after four hours of singing, in Florence, but Stefan Vinke was always musical, convincing, agile and impetuous and passionate. His energy never faltered and he sang his final scenes with the same gripping intensity as the prolog.
La Fenice loved their voices; at the climax of the prolog, they rang true and clear over the orchestra. The size of the space did not extend beyond the effective range of their instruments. They could sing more naturally, less pushed. And Jeffrey Tate is a considerate conductor, always scaling the orchestra so that the voices can be heard. If I were a singer, I would love him. You only realize, at the peak non-vocal moments, just how loud the orchestra can play with the governor off. At the great orchestral-vocal climaxes the voices could be heard as the final layer of a complex sound, but did not dominate, as they could and, sometimes, should.
In Florence’s Teatro Communale the orchestra did overwhelm the voices at times, but Zubin Mehta has grown as a conductor since his earlier days in L.A. when I considered him something of a lightweight. He shaped the music beautifully, and the brutal chords of the Funeral Music were shattering. Tate’s reading was less cataclysmic, but beautifully realized and deeply felt. The orchestra expressed the emotional subtext as the singers acted out the wrenching human drama. Tate and the orchestra got the biggest ovation of the night at La Fenice. (The Venetians love their orchestra, which is a fine orchestra, not a world class orchestra, but an excellent ensemble capable of rising to great heights.)
Jayne Casselman’s transition from ecstatic bride to abject victim of brutal betrayal was filled with physical detail and musical nuance. By the time she reaches bottom and betrays Siegfried, she is Blanche DuBois. Siegfried, drugged with a magic potion, does not remember her; and she just can’t believe it. The horror grows as she realizes that everyone in the room is on the same page as Siegfried and she stands alone, completely and utterly betrayed. Is that not the essence of madness, perceiving the world in a way that everyone else thinks is fantasy? To Siegfried’s fierce oath that he has never known her, she swears even more fiercely that she is his bride and he has betrayed her, even though no one believes her and everyone thinks she is crazy.
But it is only drugged Siegfried who doesn’t believe her; the other main characters know what is going on, which makes Brunnhilde’s apparent paranoia even more siniser. There is, first and foremost, Hagen, who gave Siegfried the potion and conceived the plot against Brunnhilde. In Florence Hagen, Hans Peter Konig, had an amazing barrel-organ bass that was capable of lifting you right off your seat. He was gripping and compelling, his voice is a force of nature. The Fenice Hagen, GIdon Saks, was suave and insinuating, both sly and ominous, handsome and fearsome, but his singing did not eclipse Konig.
The Fenice production did not need gimmicks, laser lights, bungee cords or floating aquaria in which the Rhine Maidens sang, actually submerged, in Florence. This was a fourth wall production and what we watched was taken seriously, literally, and was starkly real. Ibsen vs. George Lucas.
So how, in that framework, do you handle the end of the world? The stage directions are impossible– as Brunnhilde rides her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre the fire rises up, the Gibichung Hall collapses, on high Valhalla burns, and then the Rhine then overflows its banks, everything dissolving in primal chaos. In Florence it was a 60′s-ish son et lumiere affaire, with a magical constellation of bodies writhing in mid-air.
But a strange thing happened at Fenice. The staging, created for Koln, could not be executed on the Fenice stage. Carsten did something I have never seen before.
Brunnhilde stepped forward to the front of the stage and the fireweall slid down behind her. She stood alone in the spotlight, and delivered Brunnhilde’s Immolation Scene as if it were a Shakespearean monolog, a confidence between her and us. It is a mad proposition; everything rides on how convincing the performance is. Nothing is more exposed than standing alone on the stage bearing the entire weight of the drama, stripped of the usual theatrical shenannigans. The miracle is that it worked.
Casselman took us along with her every step of the way, and when the singing ended the curtain rose on an empty stage swathed in mist. Brunnhilde walked stage center, raising her arms as a purifying rain fell. Exaltation. The orchestra told the rest of the story, how love is the ultimate redemption of the world, alpha and omega. In Florence at that point they pushed two massive blocks onto the stage upon which “L’amour” was written when they met in the center. You didn’t need that reminder at La Fenice. You felt it in Brunnhilde’s exaltatation, until she, along with the music, disappeared.
This is a production of Tristan und Isolde from the Opernhaus Zürich, directed by Claus Guth. Here is a video with a few excerpts and Guth talking about the production in German (there’s no full video of this staging):
As Guth says, his production is loosely based on the affair of Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck. This happened in, conveniently enough, Zurich, and the set is based on the interior of the Villa Wesendonck. Isolde is a young woman being forced to marry old businessman King Mark, but escapes with Tristan. The visuals are simple and elegant, and he doesn’t push the historical parallels too far.
The production isn’t concerned with giving all the characters defined places in its 19th-century world. For example, there’s no ship, and it’s unclear what Tristan’s place in the household is (but yes, he’s based on Wagner). But what it does is establish a concrete, realistic, and not Medieval setting for the drama. In my experience, this is rare for Tristan stagings, which are more often abstract. These characters live in a 19th-century world of Victorian social conventions and restrictions, seen in the formal clothes and manners of the characters.
Despite its realistic elements, the events onstage seamlessly mix reality with the world of Isolde and Tristan’s dreams. As characters narrate past events, we see those events played out, as if we are entering their heads. Brangaene and Isolde are doubles, dressed exactly the same in act 1 and black and white reflections of each other in Act 2. Brangäne represents the socially responsible, cautious side of Isolde, while Isolde herself resists. The set is a group of identical and mirror-image rooms on a turntable, used to disorienting effect.
Act 2 takes place in the midst of a formal dinner party. Tristan and Isolde race through the house, sometimes seeing each other in the midst of an unseeing crowd, sometimes escaping into an alternate, empty world, identical to the crowded one but belongs only to them. At one moment, there is a dinner table full of seated guests, moments later they are in an identical space alone. In Act 3, injured Tristan is banished from the house. In his delirium, he finally travels from the street back into the dream dinner party of Act 2. Isolde’s Liebestod is her permanent departure for this alternate world where Tristan has already arrived. But King Mark takes Brangäne’s hand as if she is Isolde and nothing has happened. Only a part of Isolde has died.
It’s always attentive to the text, though it doesn’t stage everything and sometimes uses it in new ways. It’s also suspenseful and exciting. It’s perhaps not the immersive, timeless experience many people want out of Tristan, but I thought it was fascinating and sometimes revelatory.