For months, Frank Castorf had given only brief indications
of what was to lie behind his concept for the bicentenary Ring for Bayreuth: it was to deal with oil and globalization. As
far back as February 2012, the Intendant of Berlin’s Volksbühne referred in an
interview in Die Welt to Russia and
America as antipodes in his version of the story, with Germany sitting
somewhere in the middle. He spoke also of a desire—quickly and predictably
vetoed by Kirill Petrenko, the conductor of the cycle—to make changes to the
score and the libretto. Castorf had turned down previous invitations to direct
opera exactly because of this inflexibility, so the Ring seems a particularly perverse choice for him, presenting as it
does a complex, tightly-woven, self-reflexive and -referential web of music and
drama.
Unable to make changes to the text, then, the director opted
largely to ignore it, with Wagner’s work apparently becoming a trifling
obstacle to the telling of his own story (seen at the final cycle, on August
22, 23, 25 and 27 at the Festspielhaus). Castorf’s own professed aim to produce
theatre that is not easily reducible into anything so literal-minded as a
coherent narrative added another layer of confusion. And matters can’t have
been helped by what seems to have been a chaotic rehearsal process: apparently
only nine days could be spent rehearsing Das
Rheingold, but vast swathes of Die
Walküre, in particular, gave the impression of being even more fatally
under-prepared.
In a programme essay, Castorf argued that the fragmented
nature of the rehearsal process, with acts and scenes addressed more according
to practical necessity than artistic choice, became part and parcel of the
production’s aesthetic. The use of video (by Andreas Deinert and Jens
Crull)—projecting a mixture of live action and other filmed material onto
whatever surfaces presented themselves—apparently underlined this by
emphasizing the way that TV encourages us to hop from the key moments of one
large-scale drama to those of another at the touch of a button.
However, I can’t have been alone in suspecting that such
theoretical justification was hastily mobilized after the event to try and
dignify poor stagecraft and largely absent Personenregie—after
all, the distinction between deliberate fragmentariness and straightforward
ineptitude is largely a chronological one. Castorf’s sensible central idea of
oil as modern-day gold, meanwhile, came and went, offering the director little
inspiration after having apparently dictated the bizarre and, one assumes,
deliberately perverse choices of location and time for each instalment. The
Tarantino-esque Rheingold was set in
the Golden Motel, above a petrol station on Route 66 some time in the late 20th
century, the prelude accompanying the Rhinemaidens lazily taking their knickers
off a washing line as Alberich sat back on a sun lounger; Die Walküre was set on a primitive oil well in remote Baku,
Azerbaijan in the early 20th century—a caged bird looked on as Act 1 unfolded,
and a derrick was uncovered to nod perfunctorily through some of Wotan’s
farewell. The last two instalments returned to the later 20th century: Siegfried’s action was split between a
socialist Mount Rushmore (a slightly Verdi-like Marx, alongside Lenin, Stalin
and Mao) and Berlin’s Alexanderplatz; Götterdämmerung’s
switched between sordid backstreet Berlin and Wall Street, where a meticulously
recreated facade of the New York Stock Exchange was unveiled shortly before the
final scene—take that, capitalism! That it was doused in petrol but left unlit,
I couldn’t help cynically assuming, was a touch of ambiguity dictated more by
depleted budget and deficient theatrical imagination than anything else.
Castorf’s ill-focused polemicizing, when superimposed upon
Wagner’s own infinitely more sophisticated and eloquent critique of capitalism,
created a sense of tautology that effectively neutralized the whole thing. The
literalness of Aleksandar Denić’s hugely complex and detailed revolving sets
fitted uncomfortably with the slippery imprecision of the oily concept. In a
production saturated with far too many fleeting, unrelated and undeveloped
ideas to catalogue, the occasional detail in Wagner’s staging that Castorf did
doggedly follow—counting out Freia’s weight in gold, an anachronistic Notung—stuck
out awkwardly. The ugliness of it all, banishing beauty and all but the basest
humanity, meant we also lost the powerful critique of the dehumanizing power of
industry.
But Castorf’s greatest error was to portray all the
characters of the tetralogy so vaguely and unsympathetically. Few of them
seemed aware of—or indeed the least bit interested in—the story unravelling
around them. Wotan, Loge and Alberich reclined lazily on deckchairs during the
final scene of Rheingold, for
example, and during Wotan’s great monologue in Die Walküre Brünnhilde was more interested in rearranging furniture
than in anything her father had to say. The almost constant use of film served
as a further distraction at this point and throughout. The projections of live
close-ups, filmed by a mixture of hidden and deliberately visible cameramen,
represented a promising innovation, carried out with impressive organization.
But additional footage—hints of oily orgasm accompanying Sieglinde and
Siegmund’s duet, for example, a Gollum-like figure pawing a blood-caked blonde
during the Act 3 duet of Siegfried, or Hagen wandering through a forest during
the Funeral March—added further counterpoint to already baffling stage action.
The result was frustrating, unrewarding sensory overload.
Unsurprisingly, Wagner’s music came out of it badly, left to
stand alone, referring only to itself, occasionally coinciding with a striking
image to give it momentary emotional weight in the manner of high-class film
music. That Petrenko’s conducting seemed to hit its stride during Siegfried might have been due to the
fact that the whole of that opera’s first act was free of projections, with
only an uncredited actor, who featured prominently in all but the second
instalment, distracting from a relatively conventional double act between Lance
Ryan’s rather inelegant but admirably reliable Siegfried and Burkhard Ulrich’s
vivid, lanky Mime. Here, suddenly, the orchestral sound seemed sharper and
better focused, while the details of Petrenko’s reading registered more
clearly—particular care was taken with voicing of wind chords towards the lower
instruments, and there was telling subtlety and economy elsewhere. Throughout Götterdämmerung the orchestra’s
contribution gained further in quality, with Petrenko managing to communicate
the growing sense of inevitable tragedy, in spite of Castorf’s production.
In the circumstances, the cast had managed extremely well in
Rheingold. The action was constantly
extended beyond those engaged actively in the drama at any point, with the
projections showing Fasolt and Fafner (the eloquent, suited Günther Groissböck
and the appropriately implacable Sorin Coliban, in singlet and dungarees)
rough-housing the gas station attendant before their arrival upstairs, for
example. The minor gods appeared in a variety of suits (Adriana Braga Peretzki
was the costume designer), Norbert Ernst’s slightly underwhelming Loge in red,
nervously flicking a lighter on and off, joining the solidly-sung Donner and
Froh of Oleksandr Pushniak and Lothar Odinius. Claudia Mahnke (Fricka) and
Elisabet Strid (Freia) seemed only one part of this oversexed, gangland Wotan’s
harem, joined at the close by the Ur-tart that was Nadine Weissmann’s richly
expressive Erda (she returned for a sordid, if amusingly-staged, encounter with
the Wanderer in Siegfried).
As Wotan, Wolfgang Koch was impressive. His smooth
bass-baritone benefited from the kind Bayreuth acoustic but occasionally left
one longing for more edge and heft. Koch is a fine actor but he was wasted in a
production that robbed the god of his complexity, never clearly defining who he
was or what motivated him (Castorf managed to render the Ring itself, let alone
what it represents, largely irrelevant, and never clearly outlined the gold-oil
parallel). The same went for Martin Winkler’s Alberich, whose incisive singing
and vivid acting needed more by way of directorial foundation. Even Anja
Kampe’s wonderfully free-voiced and impassioned Sieglinde seemed hampered,
while Johan Botha’s solid but inexpressive Siegmund was unable to do much
during their duet when slumped, in what seemed like a rare instruction from
Castorf, on the ground between a couple of hay bales.
Mirella Hagen was joined by Julia Rutigliano and Okka von
der Dammerau to make up the Rhinemaidens, and her Forest Bird—in magnificent
winged showgirl costume—was accurate but a touch brittle and soubrettish; and
it was typical of the production that Siegfried ran off with her (having saved
her from the jaws of a passing crocodile) at the end of the opera, only to
reappear happily shacked up with Brünnhilde, in Mime’s trailer, at the start of
Götterdämmerung.
Attila Jun’s bass seemed surprisingly soft-grained for
Hagen, but it had the necessary darkness. The singer’s German could be
indistinct, but he was an impressive presence, and portrayed the thuggish
backstreet gangster fearsomely. Mahnke returned as an eloquent Waltraute, and
did what she could to move us and Brünnhilde with her account of a Wotan we’d
never really cared about.
Allison Oakes’s Gutrune—a beehived ’60s housewife who is
given a Messerschmitt threewheeler for her wedding—and Alejandro
Marco-Buhrmester, as Gunther, made solid contributions, as did Franz-Josef
Selig as Hunding. Oakes, Dara Hobbs, Mahnke, Weissmann, Christiane Kohl,
Rutigliano, Geneviève King and Alexandra Petersamer were the Valkyries, Von der
Dammerau, Mahnke and Kohl the Norns.
Ryan gamely did what he was told—including much clambering
around Marx & Co.— but was burdened with an unengaging, unlikeable
characterization of Siegfried. Catherine Foster perhaps came off even worse:
her Brünnhilde was very much left to her own dramatic devices. And her entrance
at the start of the Immolation Scene, at the top of a staircase encased by
walls, can have been visible only to half the audience (the sets were generally
very high and wide, and Castorf explored their extremes with little regard for
sightlines). Vocally, the British soprano occasionally sounded polite and
underpowered, and the voice sometimes veered slightly off pitch and became
occluded when she did sing full out, but this was an admirably secure
performance, sung with rare musicality.
Ultimately Castorf has produced a Ring that is too incoherent and inconsistent to be truly
transgressive or challenging. Worse, for vast swathes, it was simply
uninvolving and, frankly, boring. Castorf apparently subscribes to the old
cliché that opera audiences are hopelessly reactionary—and those at Bayreuth
especially so—and might have interpreted the boos at the end of the first cycle
as evidence of having successfully épaté
the stuffy bourgeoisie. Some of the booing might indeed have come from
conservative elements, but much of it must surely have been because this
production was half-baked, marred by incompetence and ill-thought-through.
Let’s hope that at least the Wagner sisters can appreciate the difference.
Certainly the two other productions I was able to catch this
year seemed like masterpieces of stagecraft and conviction by comparison—Hans
Neuenfels’s notorious but brilliant Lohengrin,
I think, largely because that’s what it is (August 26). Jan Philipp Gloger’s Der fliegende Holländer (August 24) was
less than enthusiastically received when unveiled last year, but even this,
quite likely tightened up in the interim, seemed refreshingly inventive and
stylish in the context. At least it did once the dark opening scene had given
way to the garish playfulness that came with the arrival of the Steersman (a
beautifully lyrical and sweet-voiced Benjamin Bruns) and his perky,
perma-tanned air-steward crew, and Mary (the excellent Christa Mayer) and her
no less perky factory workers. Samuel Youn remains slightly overparted in the
title role (and hampered, dramatically, by a wheelie suitcase throughout),
Franz-Josef Selig was a robust Daland and Tomislav Mužek a beautifully
mellifluous Erik. The main change came in the form of Ricarda Merbeth’s
gloriously secure and focused Senta. Christian Thielemann brought out the best
in the orchestra, securing playing of striking power and flexibility.
The one change from last year’s cast in Lohengrin came with the return of Petra Lang as a brilliantly
unhinged Ortrud, the only singer across all the performances I attended to
offer truly rafter-rattling vocal power. Klaus Florian Vogt’s ethereal
Lohengrin and Annette Dasch’s extraordinarily well-acted Elsa were joined by
Wilhelm Schwinghammer and Thomas J. Mayer, both somewhat light-voiced, as
Heinrich and Telramund, the latter risking being upstaged by Youn’s supremely
confident Herald. There were signs of tiredness from the orchestra in the
prelude, but otherwise they played beautifully for Andris Nelsons, and the
choral passages were a highlight, as they had been in Holländer. Neuenfels’s production, meanwhile, gave a masterclass in
how a director can force a radical reinterpretation of a work without negating
it—largely as a result of simply listening to the music. Castorf might have
learnt a thing or two.
