Blind sticks ignoring Wagner

2022-10-11T16:28:48.818Z

Dmitri Tcherniakov's new production of 'The Ring of the Nibelung' for the Berlin Staatsoper comes to an end with a 'Twilight of the Gods' out of focus and poorly assembled with the previous days

Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe) hugs the corpse of Siegfried (Andreas Schager) at the end of 'Twilight of the Gods', the third and final day of 'The Ring of the Nibelung' in the new production premiered at the Berlin Staatsoper.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

From Sunday to Sunday, the Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin has performed the feat of, in these times, staging a new production of

The Ring of the Nibelung

, the greatest challenge imaginable for any opera house.

It has also done so without the participation of the one who was and was called to continue being its main architect, Daniel Barenboim, the greatest living Wagnerian director and the main person responsible, at the same time, for the fact that the Staatsoper, whose director he arrived for only three years After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has reached the highest level of excellence in its history and has become a benchmark European theater.

What was to be an early gift for his impending eightieth birthday must have become a source of frustration for him on an unimaginable scale.

This was elegantly implied just before the Götterdämmerung

performance began on Sunday evening.

, the last day of the tetralogy, the mayor of the Staatsoper, Matthias Schulz, who wished the Argentine director and pianist a speedy recovery.

His brief intervention was followed by a very long applause.

Anja Kampe (Brünnhilde) and Andreas Schager (Siegfried) dance happily and nonchalantly at the end of the Prologue to 'Götterdämmerung', still unaware of the immense tragedy to come. Monika Rittershaus

As could be predicted after

Siegfried

, Dmitri Tcherniakov did not keep any ace up his sleeve, or any rabbit in his hat, to try to give meaning and interest to his scenic proposal, perhaps because he himself had imposed so many restrictions on himself, so much fidelity to a driving idea whose limitations had become increasingly evident, that its room for maneuver was minimal, if not non-existent.

Das Rheingold

It was already clear how, in a somewhat confusing way, he had decided to transfer the action to what he named the Center for Scientific Experimentation of Human Evolution, ESCHE for its English acronym (a nod to the ash tree in the world of the mythological story): a detailed plan of the facilities of this

Forschungszentrum

has faithfully accompanied us throughout the prologue and the three days.

Rhinegold

small scenarios of this research center commanded by Wotan tirelessly succeeded one another.

In one of them, the meeting room where he negotiates with the giants Fasolt and Fafner, six gilded busts on the back wall reflected this same scientific line: Saint Albert the Great (a man of science as well as a theologian), Pierre-Louis Maupertuis ( first president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences), Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, Gregor Mendel, and Gregory Bateson (cybernetician).

However, sixteen hours after learning about ESCHE, at the end of

Götterdämmerung

, the practical implications of this display of scientism and this

name-dropping

are still not understood or, if you prefer, because the names were not written anywhere,

bust-dropping

More information

Beyond Good and Evil

Like many of his colleagues, Tcherniakov forgets that his viewers, in addition to seeing his inventions or quips on stage, also inevitably hear the original text.

And although hundreds of librettos can be criticized —with all justice— for being irrelevant, routine, formalistic or attached to a tradition that is not always desirable, the poems of Wagner's dramas are certainly not part of that sack, to which he granted primordial importance and whose authorship was always arrogated.

His second wife, Cosima, even wrote to a singer the following: “If something has to be sacrificed, it is the music that must be sacrificed to the text and not the text to the music”.

To the director Felix Mottl he confessed: “The tendency of our art comes from the drama.

The Bayreuth stage offers us the drama transfigured by music”.

The music critic Heinrich Porges, for his part, stressed the importance of the text, of the drama: “It was only here that Wagner absolutely achieved his goal, in the fact that, as he says, the richest orchestral language should not, to a certain extent, be heard or noticed, but should grow with the drama organically to form a whole.

Which brings us back, to conclude the little excursus, to Cosima (which is like saying Wagner) and to the transcendence of the text and the stage action: “I can't help it: a good orchestra and good choirs are very good, but if the action on stage does not make us forget everything else, then the performance is a failure, no matter how much they sing and play like the angels in heaven”.

“It was only here that Wagner absolutely achieved his goal, in the fact that, as he says, the richest orchestral language should not, to some extent, be heard or noticed, but should grow organically with the drama. to form a whole.

rather, it should grow with the drama organically into a whole.”

Lauri Vasar (Gunther, seated), Mandy Fredrich (Gutrune), Mika Kares (Hagen) and Andreas Schager (Siegfried) in the second act of 'Götterdämmerung'.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Tcherniakov achieves just the opposite: we take refuge in music and song because the drama, the true drama to which Wagner aspired, after going through his laboratory and his creative metamorphoses, becomes watered down, incoherent, sprinkled with little unnecessary jokes ( why this eagerness to make people laugh when the humor is completely out of place?) and, what is worse, ineffective.

Götterdämmerung

is, like

Das Rheingold

, a violent and black work, very black.

At this point, we have already given up that Tcherniakov confers minimal relevance to the natural element, completely absent from the scenic conception, even though it is absolutely essential in Wagner's conception.

His three norns turn out to be those doubles of the daughters of the Rhine who had been accompanying us since the prologue, always mute and hieratic.

Time has passed for them too and now they appear to us old, ailing, wizened, in front of ESCHE's long shot, after we have seen Siegfried and Brünnhilde in bed during the instrumental prelude, in the same apartment that had previously been Sieglinde and Hunding, in

Die Walküre

, and Mime and Siegfried, in the second day of the

Ring

They don't spin, of course, and they do quite a bit by staying on their feet, although the funny thing here, when the fate of the world is at stake, is that the third Norn falls asleep sitting in a portable chair: as much as it seems to bother him, Tcherniakov he again gets rid of any mythological remnant with a stroke of the pen.

Then, after the dialogue between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, he leaves with Grane (who we already knew was a tiny and colorful stuffed horse) on his head as a hat (the umpteenth extemporaneous joke), thus again influencing the Tcherniakov's vision of the hero as a big boy and, more than naive, a bit simpleton, when not directly stupid.

In the court of the Gibichungos, the same spaces already known from ESCHE reappear, but the passage of time has replaced the wood with marble and now the dominant color is a neutral gray.

The chairs in the semicircular auditorium are no longer made of wood, but orange plastic.

You have to imagine that, in Wotan's absence, it is now Gunther who is in charge of the research center, but this particular also seems irrelevant.

Hagen (Mika Kares) and Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle), father and son, in the scene of the second's supposed appearance during the second's dream at the beginning of the second act of 'Götterdämmerung'.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Later, Siegfried's third act encounter with the Rhinedaughters (again transmuted into nurses) takes place in a so-called "stress lab", which leads to something even worse in the second scene of the third act: an impromptu basketball practice at the ESCHE reception (the basket is above the door) instead of the original hunting party.

There, all the gibichungos dressed in shorts, white socks, sneakers, emerald green shirts (with the names of Siegfried, Hagen and Gunther on their respective backs, another sign of unnecessary self-referentiality) and caps of the same color, death occurs. of Siegfried at the hands of Hagen,

devoid of any hint of grandeur or drama and with sonorous inconsistencies —authentic detonations for any attentive spectator—, between what is heard and what is seen.

Siegfried's corpse will then be deposited on the stretcher in the small stress laboratory, where they will all parade successively: Norns, daughters of the Rhine, Wotan (with the same physical appearance as

Der Wanderer

Siegfried

)

and even an Erda now also suddenly aged.

The ravens to which Hagen refers just before killing Siegfried in the middle of the basketball court are, of course, not to be seen, but what is totally inconsequential is that Brünnhilde sends them to inform Wotan, her lord, when he, by Tcherniakov's capricious decision, is present on stage during the Valkyrie's long monologue.

Is this, as we are sometimes led to believe, giving maximum primacy and paying attention to the smallest details of the text?

Is it not rather perfectly avoidable inconsistencies?

At the end, without fire (and without the markers that had simulated it until now), we see Brünnhilde, alone, with a small travel bag, on the empty stage and in the dark while the text of what is known as Schopenhauer's ending is projected in the background. , the concluding verses of the monologue of

Siegfrieds Tod

that Wagner rewrote in 1856 after the impact of the discovery of his compatriot's philosophy.

Its last verse, “

enden sah ich die Welt

” (“I saw the end of the world”), was the one used by Deryck Cooke to title his study of the tetralogy and here that projection, at the quintessential climax of the entire tetralogy, it works again only as a pseudo-intellectual wink for initiates and devoid of any dramaturgical relevance.

Basketball game at the ESCHE reception that will culminate in the death of Siegfried (Andreas Schager, on the left, in a light bathrobe) at the hands of Hagen (Mika Kares, in the center, under the basket).MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

As if all this were not enough (and the list could be considerably lengthened), Tcherniakov still has two more small blank flares reserved for us: the solo appearance of Erda during the instrumental epilogue making the mechanical bird that had handled the Bird of the forest flap its wings in

Siegfried

, imagine that as a symbol of Brünnhilde's newly acquired clairvoyance, raising her arm as the plan of the ESCHE premises is projected for the umpteenth time, finally dissolving into an explosion of pixels, although the unfortunate research center (which had generated so many expectations at the beginning, but which then inexorably disintegrates like a sugar cube) had already been dead for a long time, and more than dead, for all intents and purposes.

The musicians came out once again to the aid of the stage disturbances.

Andreas Schager and Anja Kampe (she also sang the Dusk

Brünnhilde for the first time on Sunday

) were once again the winners.

As they are human, in both of them the accumulated fatigue of the efforts and demands of previous days was perceptible, but already in the prologue they attacked, practically cold, but without fear and with determination, the

"Heil!"

conclusive (an A Flat him, a Do her).

Tcherniakov does not allow them to delve much into the psychology of their characters, although her composition manages to convey more nuances, since the Russian's Siegfried, as has been pointed out, is almost always a goofball anchored in his days as a wild and naive child in middle of the forest with Mime.

In his final scene, Kampe showed true greatness and drew as much expressiveness as possible (the circumstances being what they were) from his final monologue.

ESCHE's stress lab is too small for all the characters who crowd around the corpse of Siegfried (Andreas Schager).MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

On the opposite side of Gibichungs and Nibelungs, in his third role in the

Ring

, after Fasolt and Hunding, Mika Kares gave life to a Hagen more fearsome for his appearance than for his vocal blackness: he still has a long way to go to transmit all the nooks and crannies of the character, much more complex and demanding than the previous two.

Nor was Lauri Vasar up to his Donner in

Das Rheingold

and his Gunther lacked malice, subtlety, and darker colors.

However, the greatest weaknesses of the trio were those of Mandy Fredrich as Gutrune, inaudible in many moments and with an unpleasant timbre: her character, who is not the most clearly outlined by Wagner, went practically unnoticed.

The veteran Violeta Urmana was a Waltraute with many vocal problems, especially due to an already difficult to control vibrato, too many color changes and too confused German.

Much better than any of them, despite the briefness of his speech, was Johannes Martin Kränzle's Alberich, practically naked and convincing in any of his body gestures, no matter how minimal, dazzling in the intentionality he knows how to imprint on each word. (each syllable,

even) and with a Wagnerian style to teach in schools.

Singers like him make a performance great, although everything that surrounds it leaves much to be desired.

Compliant, and little more, the three Norns, surpassed in everything by the daughters of the Rhine, among whom Anna Laprovskaia shone again.

Even without saying a word, Michael Volle was once again the center of attention as Wotan in the third scene of the third act: he and Kränzle, as great veterans, and Schager and Kampe, as Wagnerians of the next batch and already very seasoned , have provided the greatest joys of this intense week.