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The Ring in Berlin, part 4: Fires Down Below

Jesse Simon
jueves, 14 de julio de 2016
Berlin, domingo, 19 de junio de 2016. Schiller Theater. Wagner: Götterdämmerung. Guy Cassiers, director. Andreas Schager (Siegfried), Boaz Daniel (Gunther), Jochen Schmeckenbecher (Alberich), Falk Struckmann (Hagen), Iréne Theorin (Brünnhilde), Ann Petersen (Gutrune / Third Norn), Ekaterina Gubanova (Waltraute / Second Norn), Anna Lapkovskaja (First Norn / Flosshilde), Evelin Novak (Woglinde) and Anna Danik (Wellgunde). Staastopernchor. Staatskapelle Berlin. Daniel Barenboim, conductor
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Every story needs an ending, especially the Ring which has foreseen its own conclusion since the very beginning. Yet while Wagner was careful to save some of the most spectacular scenes for Götterdämmerung, the final night of his cycle, director Guy Cassiers and his production team never seemed to know quite what to do with them. A number of crucial moments – perhaps none more important than Brünnhilde’s farewell to the world – suffered from a complete lack of energy, and had it not been for the taut direction of Daniel Barenboim, and a wonderful cast led by the consistently excellent Iréne Theorin, the evening might well have been interminable. Instead, it was mostly thrilling.

In the evening’s minus column was a general sloppiness that rose to the surface in several scenes. Neither Siegfried, Hagen, nor Gunther said all of the right things in the right places; mistakes were rarely serious, limited mostly to transpositions of words (and sometimes of whole lines), but they were noticeable. Similarly, not all of the brass section played with flawless intonation (which was somewhat surprising, given how thoroughly they nailed Siegfried and Walküre earlier in the week). Even some of the set changes seemed unsteady.

The most obvious feature in the minus column, however, was the final half of act three, which seems to have been conceived on a day when everyone from the production team had taken the day off. In addition to a director, the programme booklet listed a choir choreographer, two video artists and three dramaturgs … and the best they could do during Siegfried’s funeral march was to have the stage completely black? For a production which had wielded video, dancers and moving sets so freely, the absence of any visuals accompanying the transition to the final scene seemed less profound than simply lazy.

Nor did matters improve. When the Gibichung hall set – a series of terraced illuminated cabinets containing what appeared to be sculptural body parts, which doubled as risers for the choir – returned for the final scene, the vassals just sat there, as if they were waiting for a doctor’s appointment. In the foreground, Hagen killed Gunther, Gutrune wailed inconsolably and Brünnhilde, having more or less given up on the staging by that point, addressed one of the greatest scenes in all of Wagner directly to the audience. The complete lack of anything beyond words and music was palpable.

It was also surprising. Mr Cassiers and his team, if nothing else, had spent the earlier operas sometimes going overboard in their attempts to create memorable images, and one might have thought they would come up with something truly spectacular for the conclusion. They didn’t. Brünnhilde disappeared without fanfare, Hagen followed soon after, the set was yanked offstage, the vassals stared at a video projection suggesting water and, at the very end, a large relief sculpture descended like a curtain at the very front of the stage. Regardless of what it was supposed to mean, it was visually underwhelming.

Fortunately the evening’s plus column proved decisive. The opening scene was one of the most visually arresting of the entire cycle, and carried by three excellent Norns (Ekaterina Gubanova, Anna Lapkovskaja and Ann Petersen, all of whom would appear in other roles). This was followed, later in the same act, by a magnificent meeting of Brünnhilde and Waltraute. The scene was minimal, the video projections were tastefully abstract, and the action was made convincing through the deeply passionate interaction of the two singers. The intensity of that scene spilled over into the subsequent arrival of Siegfried, dressed as Gunther, accompanied by four dancers controlling his cape. Although a similar effect used in the Fafner scene of Siegfried fell somewhat flat, the image of the cape overcoming Brünnhilde was surprisingly potent.

However the evening’s dramatic thrills were powered largely by the singers, and no one gave a finer performance than Iréne Theorin as Brünnhilde. Her tenderness toward Siegfried in the Prologue was touching, and her haughty treatment of Waltraute was convincing, but it was in the second act that she established firm control of the evening. Her appearance at the wedding was a perfect arc of ascent from disbelief to rage, culminating in a ‘Helle Wehr, Heilige Waffe’ that put Siegfried’s similar oath in the shade. Her focused intensity mellowed into something more beatific for her majestic final appearance which featured mesmerising quiet passages (‘Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott’) among the outsized emotions. Her address to Grane was especially moving.

Wagner: Götterdämmerung. Daniel Barenboim, conductor. Guy Cassiers, director.  Berlin, Staatsoper im Schiller Theater, June 2016 Wagner: Götterdämmerung. Daniel Barenboim, conductor. Guy Cassiers, director. Berlin, Staatsoper im Schiller Theater, June 2016 © Monika Rittershaus, 2016

Andreas Schager picked up where he had left off days earlier, delivering an exuberant, cocky Siegfried with his naturally large voice. His farewell to Brünnhilde in the third act was wonderful, even if the sturdiness of his tone didn’t for a moment suggest someone on his dying breath; nor could he quite summon the requisite delicacy for a truly credible woodbird impression. But his brash cluelessness stoked the dramatic fires of the second act and his enthusiastic impatience brought a needed jolt to the first scene in the Gibichung hall. Mr Schager is already a top-tier Siegfried, and one can only imagine that he will continue to improve.

Ekaterina Gubanova had been a good Fricka in Walküre, and on this evening was possibly the finest of the Norns, but it was as Waltraute that she would deliver her stand-out performance. Supported by playing of great solemnity from the orchestra, Ms Gubanova transformed the narrative of Wotan’s decline into something both spellbindingly mythical and oddly human. Falk Struckmann, the only singer to appear in all four of the operas (he sang Fafner and Hunding earlier in the week), also gave a strong performance as the bitter, imperious Hagen. There were a few moments when excitement got the better of composure – his ‘Mir aber bringt er den Ring’ was perhaps overly villainous – and his voice was not as dark-toned as one is used to hearing in the role, but he made up for natural depth with eloquent phrasing.

Neither the Gunther of Boaz Daniel nor the Gutrune of Ann Petersen seemed wholly convincing in their first appearances. Although Mr Daniel made his character credibly ineffectual, the narrow dramatic register of his performance was unable to summon the cross-currents of doubt and ambition that can make Gunther at least somewhat intriguing. He seemed somewhat more confident in the second act, introducing the wedding. Ms Petersen’s slightly hard-edged voice didn’t seem wholly suited to the character of Gutrune, and in the first act there was an awkwardness to her manner. She seemed far more invested in the role during the third act where her anxiety gave way to plausible horror.

Jochen Schmeckenbecher’s final appearance as Alberich, appearing to Hagen in a dream at the opening of the second act, was perhaps the best of the three; the emphatic qualities of his earlier appearances were replaced here by urgency and directness. The trio of Rhine maidens – Evelin Novak, Anna Danik, and Anna Lapkovskaja, all reprising their roles from the first evening – were also a delight, taunting Siegfried with a lightness of spirit, and coming together for tight, well-rehearsed ensemble passages.

It will, by this point, come as little surprise to learn that the evening was held together and pushed toward its inevitable conclusion through the efforts of Daniel Barenboim, whose sense of dramatic pacing had been largely unimpeachable since the opening night of the cycle. Of the four operas, his Götterdämmerung was perhaps the most idiosyncratic, and certainly the most prone to sudden shifts in tempo and mood. Yet even the most obvious moments – the exaggerated pauses before each ‘Weißt du’ of the Norn scene, or the burst of speed at the end of the first act – served the flow of the action, and often yielded surprising insights into familiar scenes.

There can, of course, never be a perfect Ring cycle; the number of variables is simply too great. Yet the individual pieces which formed this cycle tended to be of a very high quality. One may have longed for a more dramatically engaged, more conceptually coherent production, but there were also enough successful scenes and memorable images to keep the evenings at least somewhat satisfying as works of theatre. However if we look back fondly on these evenings in many years time, it will be largely on account of the music. The casts, although not dissimilar from the 2013 cycle, were slightly more consistent; the Staatskapelle played with focus and clarity to rival any of the world’s finest pit orchestras; and Daniel Barenboim showed no sign of relinquishing his position as one of the two or three most exciting Wagner conductors currently working. The Staatsoper’s 2016 Ring cycle was, in every possible way, a musical triumph.

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