The Ride of the Valkyries, from Francois Rochaix’s Seattle “Ring”
The emails continue to roll in, responding to my two Tannhäuser blogs. Here’s one from a former member of the Met orchestra:
“Your two articles pretty much describe what I observed at the Met during my 40-plus years with the Met Orchestra. The best performances I had a chance to experience, and the privilege to be part of, were the ones presenting a complete art form. During these rare occurrences, the sum total created an unforgettable night, bigger than the components would suggest. In particular, then Carlos Kleiber conducted, the whole approach was: everything is organic, it all has to work together. Then you get to Lepage – who was not the only one who didn’t care, by the way. There have been many of those for whom ‘theater’ meant placing the singers where you can’t really hear them.”
Let’s remember that the members of an opera orchestra – a competent one – are not just following the conductor. They’re listening to the singers. Many of them can also see the singers and observe the staging. When you hear those old broadcasts from the thirties and forties, the energy in the pit is nearly bewildering. It’s evident, I would say, that the players love the operas – they’re not just drawing inspiration from a baton. And of course the caliber of the singing was very high.
To again reference Robert Lepage’s Met Ring: Wagner’s Siegfried ends with one of the most psychologically complex love duets in opera. It documents sexual awakening. Siegfried is naïve and immature. Brunnhilde is vulnerable and scared. Over the course of some 35 minutes, they wind up in the same place. Lepage did not even attempt to stage this sequence. The singers weren’t blocked – they stood and sang. At either side, electric squibbles signified the Magic Fire. But both music and libretto tell us that the Magic Fire through which Siegfried has passed is now wholly absent. Lepage’s indifference to music, and to the marriage of music and words, is here absolute.
The most memorable Ring in my experience was staged by Francois Rochaix in Seattle in 1986. I’ve written about it extensively – in The Post-Classical Predicament (1995) and Wagner Nights (1994). It shows how a bold exercise in Regietheater can at the same time remain keenly attuned to Wagner’s synthesis of the arts. I write in The Post-Classical Predicament (reprising a long article “On Staging Wagner’s Ring” in Opus Magazine, April 1987):
“To underline Siegfried’s coming of age, Rochaix inserts a touching pantomime . . . just after Siegfried penetrates the Magic Fire: he envisions his father’s murder, his mother’s death in childbirth, Fafner’s warning, and the Forest Bird’s summons. Fortified by new self-knowledge, he tentatively kisses Brunnhilde. Rochaix’s handling of this long final scene is so honest that for once Siegfried’s astonished exclamation ‘Das is kein Mann!’ is astonishing, not comic. Disregarding Wagner, Rochaix has Siegfried flee his awakened bride; when Brunnhilde sings ‘Wer ist der Held, der mich erweckt?’ [‘Who is the hero who has awakened me?’], he stands, terrified, well outside her field of vision. Brunnhilde’s gradual transformation from goddess to woman, Siegfried’s coming to terms with adult feelings, their growing proximity, mutual awareness, and commitment — Rochaix’s detailed understanding of all of this, his use of blocking and gestural detail to bind the momentous, compressed emotional scenario, is a triumph of creative empathy.
“Many at Seattle found Siegfried’s interpolated pantomime/vision intrusive. The problem is partly Wagner’s; his layoff partway through act 2 of Siegfried created discontinuities in the Ring. In particular, Siegfried and Brunnhilde became somewhat different personalities. Rochaix’s masque intelligently attempts to explain the new Siegfried, whom Brunhilde eventually praises for his loyalty and valor.”
Rochaix had never before directed a Ring production. His preparations, documented in reams of notes and advisories he doubtless shared with the singers, were prodigious. Lepage’s preparations were self-evidently wasted on complexly intrusive stage machinery in service of a Ring made more “theatrical.” Re-reading my Opus essay of 36 years ago, I discover this, by Thomas Mann: “Wagner experienced modern culture, the culture of bourgeois society, through the medium and in the image of the operatic theater of his day. He saw art reduced to the level of an extravagant consumer product . . . he watched with fury while vast resources were squandered, not for the attainment of high artistic purpose, but for that which he despised above all else as an artist: the easy, cheap effect.”
Leave a Reply