Wagner's 'Ring' ends as it began

2022-01-28T03:12:10.568Z

As in previous installments, the best thing about 'Twilight of the Gods' at the Teatro Real is the performance of some singers and the most unfortunate thing, by far, is the musical direction

Brünnhilde (Ricarda Merbeth) next to the corpse of Siegfried (Andreas Schager) at the end of 'Twilight of the Gods'. Javier del Real

There is no choice but to rewind again: for the last time.

A year ago now we left Siegfried and Brünnhilde united in an ecstatic love duet at the Teatro Real after he, a hero who knows no fear, had broken through the wall of fire that protected and surrounded her on top of a rock .

In the Prologue of

Twilight of the Gods

(much better without an article, as Wagner explicitly wanted), we find them again in the same place, almost like a “We said yesterday”.

Before, however, because his infallible dramatic intuition requested it, the German composer introduces us to the three norns, daughters of Erda, weaving the golden rope of knowledge of the world and reading in it its past and its future, including several mentions to the definitively absent Wotan.

It is his, above all, a reflection on time and the only scene in

The Ring of the Nibelung

which comprises the entire history of the cycle, from even before the theft of the gold to the destruction of Valhalla.

As a compendium of what is elucidated here, only Wotan's great monologue from the second act of

Die Walküre comes close,

although the detailed prophecy of the "end of the eternal gods" (almost a

contradictio in terminis

) that sings the Third Norna with the vague premonition of the god of gods.

When the Norns tighten the rope too much in order to know what is going to happen, and when (time again), their threads snap, definitively breaking their primal knowledge while foreshadowing the imminent end of the gods, though not only of them: when the tetralogy concludes, more than two thirds of the characters that have been appearing throughout the prologue and the three days of

The Ring of the Nibelung

are dead, well violently shot down by weapons (such as Siegfried and Gunther in this last installment, both at the hands of Hagen) or consumed by fire. Among those who survive, the majority are the characters, faithful to themselves, who represent the natural order, precisely the one that gods and humans had tried to subvert.

This is where the central premise of Robert Carsen's mise-en-scène must be sought: already at the beginning of the tetralogy we saw —and we have seen again now in his scene with Siegfried— some Rhinedaughters who are not at all resplendent, but rather filthy and ragged in amidst the filth and filth produced by the insensitive human beings of the Anthropocene.

It is that hypothetical end of nature, destroyed by ourselves, that shows its jaws at various times in the Canadian's proposal.

Likewise, there is no other choice but to remember that his production premiered at the Cologne Opera in the year 2000 to be performed in a single weekend, at the rate of two dramas per day.

Two large maps of the city are hung on the walls at the back of the hall of the Gibichungos,

Brünnhilde (Ricarda Merbeth), seated, in the long dialogue with her sister Waltraute (Michaela Schuster) in the third scene of the first act. Javier del Real

Such temporal compression (offering in just over thirty hours four works that require dilating for almost half of that time) serves to largely explain its physiognomy, but the very brief lapses of time that separated then –and in its successive reruns– the end of a performance and the beginning of the next have become the case of the Teatro Real, since that

Oro del Rin

premiered in January 2019, in very long waits of almost twelve months each. And memory, of course, doesn't work the same in the short term as it does in the long term, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that many viewers, assuming they're the same, will inevitably miss some of the many connections Carsen makes between the four works, with common elements and only slightly transformed within an essential and largely shared set design.

Now we see in the prologue of

Twilight of the Gods , for example, almost as a vestige of the past, the bicycle on which the restless, changeable and elusive Loge in
Rhinegold

moved

, as well as the ladder by which they descended Wotan and the god of fire to Nibelheim on that eve of the first journey is the same one that Gunther and his soldiers go down in the third act of the last installment of the tetralogy

The fire that consumes Valhalla is also identical to the one we saw at the end of

Die Walküre

and

Siegfried

, only here it goes out under a surprising

deus ex machina

devised by Carsen, one must think that it is much more optimistic and hopeful than Wagner's conclusive D flat

major

: a regenerating rain that apparently allows Brünnhilde to survive and that could be understood almost as a symbolic advance of that other model of redemption that would put an end to

Parsifal a

few years later.

More information

Beyond Good and Evil

However, Carsen's schematism reaches a perhaps excessive level at the end of the third act, when much of Siegfried's funeral march (a music even more shocking, if possible, when accompanied by a powerful scenic correlate) sounds with the curtain. lowered, almost like a concert piece, as will happen soon after with the final immolation of Brünnhilde, sung alone by the Valkyrie on the proscenium and devoid of any reference or visual support until the fire is revealed. It is understandable that there is no news of Grane, his horse, but it is more difficult to understand that we are deprived of the vision of the two great opposing forces: the daughters of the Rhine, on the one hand, and Hagen, on the other, whose final exclamation (“ Get away from the ring!") is barely heard, although it is clearly read in the subtitles, so ill-advised,poorly translated and influenced by English as usual: to transform, into a Wagner opera, the “

Himmlische Lenker

” that Brünnhilde invokes in the second act in “heavenly leaders” brings them to him.

And why translate “Nibelungs” and refer instead to “the Wälsung”?

Gutrune (Amanda Majeski) and Siegfried (Andreas Schager) in the second act of the opera. Javier del Real

Carsen's mise-en-scène —concise and effective— served the purpose for which it was born well, but it falls short when it is presented in four different seasons, as has been done in Madrid.

Looking back, it leaves few indelible traces in memory (Fafner incarnated as an enormous excavator in

Siegfried

is one of them) and, what is worse, ideological. But the shortcomings of the musical part are much more serious and profound, which accentuates the magnitude of its consequences. Pablo Heras-Casado has faced his first

Ring

and, the deed concluded, it cannot be said that he has ever shown a great affinity with the Wagnerian language. The failures have become especially lacerating on this third day: the longest, the most difficult to direct, the most complex. Already from the scene of the norns its main deficiencies are perceived: the lack of density of the sound, too often more typical of a first reading, a making contact, than of a true interpretation; the attacks are almost always blunt instead of incisive, dry, almost hurtful, very necessary in music as dark and violent as that of

Twilight of the Gods

;

the poor planning and contrast between dynamics, already perceptible from the very beginning of the prelude, with the three orchestral statements, and which reaches its (anti)climax in Siegfried's funeral march and in the last appearance of the theme of redemption by the love, which sounded without grandeur or intensity;

the absence of prolonged tensions, maintained and not broken from time to time, like the Norn string, probably the effect of an excessively short-term direction, more attentive to the small line than to the long design, to

arranging

or marking entrances than to

directing

and

leading

As Chris Walton rightly points out, right from his title, in his magnificent article on the playbill that is distributed at the Teatro Real, in

Twilight of the Gods

everything is “long, long”, and that cannot be managed with myopia and eyes fixed on the score, but with wisdom and a great breadth of vision.

One cannot be too critical with the orchestral filling, or even with the simultaneity of some attacks (the first chord was already staggered), because, to avoid crowding the musicians, trombones, trumpets and tuba are located in four stalls , too far from the pit and on a higher level (the harps and the little percussion, in the boxes opposite, have a much lesser role, although above all the cymbals sound absolutely out of place there).

Even so, here too we must try to differentiate between

execution

and

interpretation .

. The first has brilliant moments, because the Teatro Real's Titular Orchestra, although it will be affected by casualties and last-minute substitutions like any group these days, is a group of extraordinary quality. In Wagner, rehearsals are never enough, despite which all the sections give their best, with brilliant moments starring both the string (which is still forced to play with masks) and the wood and metal (very sure again, Siegfried's horn out of the picture, although his section was much more uneven and there were several pitch blurs). Heras-Casado manages it somewhat better in the central part of the second act, when remnants of the

grand opéra appear

, the choir bursts in for the first time in the tetralogy, and the music, more formalistic and predictable, and much less blackish, becomes paganized by moving from the mythological world to that of banal beings like us: Gunther and Gutrune are, in fact, the first characters fully human of the

Ring

And the double wedding at the Gibichunga court also carries echoes of the more conventional world of Italian opera.

Hagen (Stephen Milling), in the center, in the gibichungos room. Javier del Real

In Wagner, the orchestra is not and should never be a mere accompaniment to the voices: it is an entity with a life of its own, which narrates, explains and investigates as much or more than the singers, in addition to tirelessly lavishing references to the past.

It can never adopt, as has been heard in Madrid, the appearance of an accessory element, a dressing, sounds without direction or meaning, but must become pure dramatic substance intertwined with the scene.

Unfortunately, there are too many moments when singers and orchestra seem to move in parallel: they sound together, but not united;

close, but not contiguous, skin to skin.

The singers solve their ballots as best they can on stage and the orchestra does the same from the pit (with a very strange divorce, repeated not infrequently, between the director's gestures and the sounds that the orchestra actually produces),

Heras-Casado once again benefits from having singers who are much more experienced in Wagner than him, which solves quite a few problems for him.

Andreas Schager, perhaps somewhat less involved and dominating than in

Siegfried

, offers a performance from less to more, very close to the ideal only in the third act, in the scene with the norns and, above all, in the umpteenth narration of past events of the

Ring

that he exposes in the hunt and, already mortally wounded, in his last sentences

before mortem.

The Austrian makes up a naive, thoughtless hero, easy to be fooled by one and the other: he grew up in the woods and is unaware of the intricacies of human nature. Deprived of memory after drinking the potion, his brutality is accentuated and Schager conveys his simpleton character very well. In the scene at the end of the first act in which he takes on the appearance of Gunther, it is Gunther whom we see, mute, after passing through the fire while we actually hear Schager, slightly amplified and located—or so it seems—on one side of the stage. The idea is a wonderful quip by Carsen that helps us get into Brünnhilde's skin much better and participate in her shock and bewilderment.

Two minor roles are admirably served by their singers. Amanda Majeski's Gutrune (with the bearing and manner of an old Hollywood actress) is always in her place, vocally and on stage. She understands the role, not at all brilliant, she makes it believable and Wagner sings with excellent criteria, right from the prologue, since she is also the one who plays the character of the Third Norn, the most eloquent of the three sisters. Michaela Schuster is a magnificent Waltraute in her scene with Brünnhilde at the end of the first act. The voice already accuses an excess of vibrato and lack of brilliance, but, once again, it is perceived that we are facing a pure Wagnerian, powerful stage presence and solid foundations.

Of the rest of the cast, another almost ephemeral presence stands out, that of Martin Winkler as the cunning Alberich at the beginning of the second act in his ghostly appearance during his son's dream.

The impression he leaves now is as good as the one he made on

Siegfried

with permanent vibrato and open, jagged highs, it has neither the strength nor the stamina to convey all of Brünnhilde's many facets: her ecstatic love in the prologue, her fury upon arriving at the Gibichung court, her rebellion against her sister , her eagerness to avenge —together with her own rivals— at the end of the second act, her pain and her immense authority in ordering what to do with Siegfried's corpse, her final immolation (remember: with the curtain down, alone in the face of danger and torn from everything and everyone).