Alemania
The Limitations of Magic
Jesse Simon
Of the four works that make up the Ring, Siegfried
might be the most difficult to stage. While the third act can coast on vocal
great performances alone, the second presents the director with the challenge
of creating a dragon that looks if not terrifying, at the very least not
ridiculous; and in the first act one is forced to contend with a series of
largely undramatic episodes, peppered with large dumps of backstory, and
culminating in the real-time reforging of Siegmund’s shattered sword. Given
director Stefan Herheim’s previous successes in realising the most
conspicuously magical episodes of Rheingold and delineating the subtle
character drama of Walküre, one had high hopes that he might even be
able to pull off the impossible task of creating a Siegfried that didn’t
drag in its opening acts.
Alas, it was not to be. Mr Herheim’s new production of
Siegfried – which, due to a long series of pandemic-related
reschedulings, ended up being the last part of the Deutsche Oper’s new Ring
cycle to appear on stage – had plenty of strengths and a few of the sudden
recontextualisations that have made the previous instalments so memorable; but
it also seemed less willing to challenge the text. A relatively straightforward
retelling combined with a few technical glitches resulted in an evening that
felt oddly subdued compared with the sparkling highs of the other three; for
the first time in the cycle it felt that the staging was struggling against the
boundaries of the opera rather than riffing on its themes.
Wagner: Siegfried. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Stefan Herheim, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, November 2021. © 2021 by Bernd Uhlig.
In the course of the first two operas, Mr Herheim had
created an intricate world with its own distinctive vocabulary and logic. There
was a group of recurring elements – the piano, the suitcases, the white silk
sheets of varying sizes, and the silent chorus – but in each new scene they
were reconfigured slightly and put to different uses. In the first two acts of Siegfried
all the elements were accounted for, but having placed them on the stage Mr
Herheim seemed reluctant to push them further. The suitcases rising to reveal
Mime’s workshop and the appearance of Fafner were both duly impressive but the
constant visual inspiration that gave the other operas their infectious energy
seemed, on this evening, to be in shorter supply.
There were, as always, moments of arresting
brilliance, but for the first time in the cycle they were interspersed with the
occasional misstep. Mime’s workshop was made claustrophobic by the vast
assortment of horns hanging from the ceiling, and the horn theme was picked up
again in Fafner’s lair. Yet the sword-forging scene, surely one of the opera’s
most obvious opportunities for a conceptual shake-up – or, at the very least,
some dazzling stagecraft – was oddly restrained, although Mime cooking in time
with Siegfried’s hammer blows had the pleasing (if perhaps unintentional)
side-effect of calling to mind the encounter between Sachs and Beckmesser in
Act 2 of Meistersinger. Siegfried’s idealised imagination of his parents
had a pleasing innocence, but the decision to replace the wood-bird with a
young boy seemed a remarkable lapse in judgment.
Wagner: Siegfried. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Stefan Herheim, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, November 2021. © 2021 by Bernd Uhlig.
The characters also seemed less rigorously defined. In
Rheingold, Mime appeared as Wagner, and the notion of the Ring’s
composer as an unwitting (or at least only partially-witting) architect of
German nationalism was, if not original, at least well-handled. At the
beginning of Siegfried, Mime was still dressed in Wagner’s recognisable
side-whiskers and purple beret, and anyone who had been there for the first two
nights must have been intrigued to see where Mr Herheim was going to go with
the idea. Certainly the promise of a meeting between Wotan ‘the director’ and
Mime ‘the composer’ held tremendous potential, and there was perhaps a clever
irony in associating Wagner with the one character in the cycle for whom Wagner
himself seems to have had the least affection; but ultimately Mime stuck mostly
to the script, fawning and plotting without doing anything especially
Wagnerian. Siegfried, too, was played remarkably straight, less bratty and a
shade more sympathetic than usual, but still headstrong, naive and slightly
bland.
Only in the third act was there the sense that the
staging was once again running at full steam. The conclusion of Wotan’s
encounter with Erda was a genuine shock, a moment of undoing far greater than
his subsequent defeat by Siegfried; and while the final scene, which saw the
reappearance of the silent chorus, was drawn directly from the Zabriskie
Point school of externalising sexual desire – the emotionally-confused
couple were surrounded by an orgy of writhing bodies – Brünnhilde’s slow
acceptance of her newfound mortality was rendered with such nuance that one
could easily forgive the surrounding action.
Wagner: Siegfried. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Stefan Herheim, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, November 2021. © 2021 by Bernd Uhlig.
Among the evening’s vocal performances, Iain
Paterson’s Wanderer seemed the most consistently engaged and engaging. His Walküre
Wotan is always a delight, but the sense of resignation and acceptance that
presides over the Wanderer’s three appearances in Siegfried seemed to
bring out a warmth of tone and ease of manner well suited to a god who knows
his time is almost up. His answers to Mime’s questions struck a perfect balance
between lofty and conversational, and in his superb encounter with Alberich his
august grace was cut with a wry fatalism. Ya-Chung Huang’s Mime was also an energetic
presence, wiry, paranoid and delightfully malevolent. If some of his
line-readings in the first act occasionally came across as too emphatic he
rarely veered into overt caricature, and in his excellent final scene he laid
bare Mime’s evil intentions with convincingly casual malice.
As in Götterdämmerung, Clay Hilley mixed vocal
heroics with passages of surprising restraint. While his Siegfried lacked
nothing in power or stamina – if anything the third act was the strongest part
of his performance – many of his most impressive moments arose from sudden
turns of lyrical tenderness; the hushed realisation that Siegfried was
responsible for his mother’s death was a touching moment of introspection
amidst an otherwise barbed opening scene, and the dying away of his second
‘Erwache’ while attempting to wake Brünnhilde offered an elegant encapsulation
of his newly discovered vulnerability.
Nina Stemme’s Brünnhilde sounded energised from the
outset. As in Götterdämmerung there were occasional moments when one became
too aware of the technique that powered the performance, and there were one or
two entries that seemed less than secure; but these were largely insignificant
next to her extraordinary understanding of the text and ability to render
Brünnhilde’s long arc of emotional tumult with clarity, assurance and immediacy
of feeling. The smaller roles received generally strong performances: Jordan
Shanahan’s Alberich brought urgent energy to the confrontation with Wotan that
opened the second act; Tobias Kehrer infused Fafner’s death with nobility and
regret; and Judit Kutasi conveyed perfectly the trance-like implacability of
the recently awoken Erda.
If Siegfried is arguably the least engaging
part of the cycle as a work of drama, Sir Donald Runnicles made a persuasive
case for it containing some of the best orchestral writing. The prelude to the
second act was magnificent, an understatedly perfect evocation of forest gloom,
and there were numerous similar moments throughout the evening: the Wanderer’s
arrival and Mime’s terror at the ‘accursed light’ in the first act, the
graceful woodwinds that summoned daylight to the forest floor in the second,
and the reverent high strings that accompanied Siegfried’s arrival at
Brünnhilde’s rock in the third were all superbly rendered. Only in the
sword-forging scene and the third act prelude did the prominence of the brass
intrude upon the balance and clarity that presided over so much of the evening.
One of the grand themes running through Mr Herheim’s
Ring cycle has been the limited power of the director in the face of a text; a
director may act the role of a god, but he remains answerable to a greater
immutable authority. If the first two acts of Siegfried were the least
engaging parts of the cycle as a whole, it may simply have been the staging
coming up against the limitations of the work itself. Mr Herheim nonetheless
did everything in his power to keep the opening acts interesting through the
richness and variety of his imagery; and as we revisit his cycle in the years
to come and become more familiar with the myriad overlapping ideas on which it
is built, Siegfried may yet reveal itself to be the equal of the other
evenings.
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