San Francisco Opera: the Ring is coming!

(from left to right: baritone Brian Mulligan, director Francesca Zambello, Music Director Eun Sun Kim, General Director Matthew Shilvock)

Yesterday afternoon in the Taube Atrium Theater, adjacent to the Opera House, San Francisco Opera made it official: Der Ring des Nibelungen is returning, with three full cycles in June 2028, along with stand-alone Rheingolds &  Walküres in preceding seasons. This announcement was not exactly a surprise, as the Verdi / Wagner project inaugurated when Eun Sun Kim was hired as Music Director implicitly would have to include the Ring, but there are now definite times, & at least some definite performers. What was a surprise, & almost a shock as far as I was concerned, was General Director Matthew Shilvock's statement that this would be the first full Ring cycle in the United States since the pandemic. But thinking for a moment about the dates, maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised, as it takes years to put together a Ring cycle (hence yesterday's announcement, years in advance of the performances) & the pandemic really wasn't that long ago: depending on how you calculate its end, maybe four years? And so much has happened since then, most of it ranging from bad to very very bad. (So I at least am grateful to have a Ring to look forward to.)

Kim of course will be the conductor, & this will be her first full Ring cycle. (During the Q&A after the presentation, Lisa Hirsch asked if Kim would be the first woman to conduct a full cycle in the United States, & it looks as if she probably will be.) Francesca Zambello's production will be revived (& probably, to some extent, revised, just because that's how these things go). Our principal singers were also announced: Brian Mulligan as Wotan (his first full Cycle in the role), Tamara Wilson as Brünnhilde (making her company debut), & Simon O'Neill as Siegfried. It's probably just me, but when they announced the "three" principals, I thought, "Wotan, Brünnhilde, & . . . who is the third lead?" Haha, so much for The Hero. (Personally, I might suggest Alberich as #3.)

Music director Eun Sun Kim

You can get such details as are currently available here on the Opera's website. Here are some highlights, or maybe odds & ends, from the presentation:

We were fed, which is always important at these things! Various sausages (beef, chicken, & vegan), cut in half  (not lengthwise, the other way), served on rolls, with mustard & sauerkraut available, very tasty, as well as thick pretzels, all very Bavarian, along with wine, beer, soft drinks, & sparkling water. Everything ran smoothly, on time, & was well coordinated (anyone who's been involved in any level in such presentations knows how impressive this is).

The large scene behind the panelists showed various logos (San Francisco Opera, the 2028 Ring logo) or various scenes from earlier productions, or shots of the performers. It was all appropriate & visually interesting, engaging enough to be useful but not obtrusive enough to be distracting.

Shilvock led a discussion with Kim, Zambello, & Mulligan. Each gave some highlights of her or his history with the Ring. Each mentioned, in their own ways, how different Wagner is from the rest of the repertory: a different level of engagement & intensity. Zambello noted that "obviously I love Verdi – look at my last name!" but directing Wagner is different. Both she & Kim noted that the musicians performing Wagner are ones who really want to be there. I was struck by the underlying theme (a leitmotif, if you will, & I guess we must) of the sheer physical difficulty of performing these lengthy & demanding works. Kim mentioned the shoulder strain of the musicians, Mulligan mentioned the daunting level of details involved in something like Wotan's Act 2 "soliloquy" to Brünnhilde in Walküre. Zambello mentioned at that point that that's where she & the conductor act as coaches, helping the singer break things down into less overwhelming segments of a few minutes each. Pacing yourself as for a marathon was repeatedly mentioned.

There was even some consideration of the physical demands on the audience: when asked what one, needed to attend a Ring, particularly for the first time, Kim immediately responded, "A good cushion." I was amused by the echo of Nilsson's advice for singing the big Wagner roles: "Wear comfortable shoes." Kim's remark came from her experience as an assistant conductor at Bayreuth, home of famously excellent acoustics & famously uncomfortable seating. Other than that, people (in the audience as well as on stage) offered varied perspectives on how much "homework" (reading the librettos or some sort of analysis of the Ring, studying the different leitmotifs) was helpful or even necessary. Some vouched for just jumping into the deep end (another sports metaphor).

Zambello was asked what moment in the Ring was most difficult to stage, & she immediately said, "the end of Götterdämmerung." The music is a lot to live up to. All panelists talked about how thoroughly the music guides one through the works, but also about how difficult it is to live up to the music. Shilvock asked the three which role they would ideally play. Kim didn't give an answer, but Mullligan immediately said Hagen, which I thought was an interesting choice, & Zambello said it would have to be Brünnhilde: she even has the name of Brünnhilde's horse on her car's license plate. When discussing her staging of the Ring, Zambello mentioned that it had been described as a "feminist" Ring, but, she pointed out, that's what Wagner wrote. I've also heard other Ring stagings described as "feminist" & I'm never clear what exactly that means in this context, as that interpretation is inherent in the material: no matter what you think of Siegfried, it really is Brünnhilde who is the key to the Cycle.

director Francesca Zambello & General Director Matthew Shilvock

There were some interesting questions from the audience; Joshua Kosman asked Mulligan about putting together the three Wotans: is there a development in the character, or do you approach each opera separately? Mulligan responded with his view of the arc of Wotan's development. I think it was then that he said Wotan's passionate outburst to Erda in Siegfried was one of his favorite moments in the role: the true love duet in the Ring.

Zambello had mentioned working through staging by way of character, which is how you turn moments from potentially mechanical exposition into something more dramatic. Scene 2 of Rheingold in particular was discussed as, in her terms, "a one-act play"; Mulligan mentioned the concentration necessary to keep up with all the overlapping exchanges of information in that scene. The Ring, for all its vastness, is often quite intimate (I was surprised by this initially, until I realized how much of it is based on Greek tragedy, which also mostly uses only a few individuals at a time in the dramatic scenes).

One questioner asked how many people had, like him, come to Wagner through Anna Russell. About ten had, but I noticed when he mentioned Russell, Kim looked puzzled & whispered something to Shilvock: time moves on, & it's been decades since Russell performed; it seemed likely to me that Kim had not heard of her. If she does look up the comedian's famous, or once famous, routine (in which she mostly just recites the plot of the Ring: "I'm not making this up, you know!") I wonder what she'll think of it. Unfortunately there was no follow-up question asking about What's Opera, Doc?

There were questions about the number of leitmotifs (someone in the audience offered I think it was 176 as the answer), & about how many musicians in the orchestra were new since the last Ring was done in 2018 (quite a few of them, apparently). Mention was naturally made of the great extra expense of putting on the Ring, which of course is one reason for announcing the performances years in advance, to allow for the necessary fund raising. And there was a question about the promised ancillary events: would they include some sort of partnership with our local WNBA team, the Valkyries? That too will be revealed as June 2028 draws closer.

Ring swag! Each attendee was given a branded tote bag.

San Francisco Opera: Parsifal

Where do you begin with Parsifal? Where can you end?

I was at the first performance of San Francisco Opera's current revival of Parsifal. As usual after one of the major Wagner works I reeled out afterwards, needing several days to adjust to what we so blithely, amusingly, & thoughtlessly call "reality". That's Parsifal, a work that has run like a leitmotiv through my inner life. I saw the Opera's previous staging, by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, a quarter of a century ago; my major memory is of Kundry at the end, wandering down the railroad tracks that were a prominent feature of the staging (intended as an echo of the Shoah, I think), heading towards . . . a life redeemed from the guilt that oppresses her? a death that relieves her of sin, sorrow, & regret? An ambiguity, among the work's other ambiguities, that can haunt the susceptible. It's the image that unwittingly stuck in my mind: Kundry, the conflicted, the wounded, the mocker & helper, finally free to wander off. That was several years before I started posting here, so I can link to no thoughts from the time. For other encounters with Parsifal, including  the famous Syberberg film & the notorious "bunny" staging at Bayreuth, I offer an early post of mine, which you can find here.

I guess I should just start by saying that the current San Francisco production is very fine, very rich, very thoughtful, & would repay repeated visits, but, at the risk of sounding like Mme Verdurin in Proust, I wasn't sure my life could take it. Eun Sun Kim, who conducted, is proving once again that hiring her is one of the best recent moves the Opera has made. Her continuing Verdi / Wagner project is a source of prospective joy & hope. She apparently is the one who insisted that even before the music begins the house lights be turned completely down so we, the audience, can sit for a moment in initiatory darkness. Unfortunately, there were a number of audience members who of course had to have their goddamn cell phones out & on until after the music had started, because we, as a culture, are shallow. That's not a strong enough word, but I'll let it go. The intention of darkness & silence was there, & it was a powerful one, again, to those susceptible.

The staging by Matthew Ozawa is elegant & evocative. It has a ritualistic feel & a fairy-tale look that suit the story & leaves what we're seeing open to ruminative & variant, even contradictory, interpretations. In the first & third acts, the arching Gothic columns turn into tree trunks & back with fluid ease; the colors are dark, with brighter splashes, including a trio of dancers in scarlet (Gabrielle Sprauve, Brett Conway, & Livanna Mailsen, with stately movements by Rena Butler; they added quite a bit to the ritualistic aura of the production). The Flower Maidens in the second act made a particularly lovely scene, in shades of green, teal, pale blue, & yellow, glowing softly against a midnight blue-velvet background; it looked like an illumination by Edmund Dulac.

It was such a striking moment that I regretted the failure in Act 3 to provide the contrasting field of Good Friday flowers; instead we were given the Act 1 set, a bit decayed like the Knighthood of the Grail, but glowing with the redemption offered by Parsifal, who takes up the Grail rituals – actually, in this production, offered by Parsifal with Kundry who stand together, united, both in flowing white robes. I know some who objected to this change to the libretto. I was fine with it. It's a union & liberation of anguished forces, a redemption offered regardless of sexuality. Kundry herself is such a fascinating figure. In Act 1, here, she wears an odd sort of feathered outfit that made her look like a misfit bird. (For some reason, the two young women seated in front of me found this cause for chuckling, which I did not understand. They disappeared during Act 2, but to my surprise they returned for Act 3.) It's an evocation of the natural world that flows into the potential meanings of this staging (a misfit bird, like the swan Parsifal shoots, though perhaps he is the one who is the misfit there). Kundry was performed with intensity by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner.

All the roles, though, were filled with intensity by an excellent cast. Gurnemanz, the garrulous gatekeeper, who, like many such insiders, speak with authority & even compassion but can't quite comprehend those who are outside his organization (hence his dismissal of the awkward & he thinks uncomprehending Parsifal at the end of Act 1) was powerfully presented by Kwangchul Youn. Falk Struckmann was a perversely forceful Klingsor; I'm always surprised by how short this role actually is, given his miasmic presence in the opera. The suffering of Amfortas, he of the unending wound, had searing intensity in the performance of Brian Mulligan. And Brandon Jovanovich as the holy fool . . . this may be the role he was born to play. He has a presence both authoritative & innocent; you can easily see him as both the heedless country bumpkin of Act 1, the swan-shooter, & Act 2's troubled, searching, ultimately compassionate man who rejects Kundry's sexual advances but still offers her a loving understanding, & Act 3's firmly focused & mature Knight. He sings with purity & piercing empathy.

Parsifal is an interesting revision of an earlier Wagner hero, sort of a Siegfried 2.0. It was Bernard Shaw who pointed out the shift in Wagner, from a hero who was a dragon-slayer to one who is rebuked for, & regrets, shooting a swan in flight. There is the same alienation from conventional society, the same pang in him because of that alienation, his ignorance of his background &, especially, of his mother, that source of life & knowledge. Parsifal, though, is without what often strikes us as Siegfried's thoughtless arrogance, those Ubermenschy qualities that ring unpleasantly in 21st century ears. Parsifal listens. He considers. He is open to others, which is how he frees both them & himself.

Personally, I've always thought of Parsifal as one of the great examinations of the odd inextricable mixture of the spiritual & the sexual, a search for a cathartic synthesis of animal & angel that might count as, if not redemption, at least peace. I think Amfortas's wound, the unending, unhealable wound, is sexual desire. That's why the crucial moment in the opera is when Parsifal rejects Kundry sexually but still is open to her with compassion, as a suffering being. (This is the moment, in Syberberg's film, when the young man playing Parsifal is replaced by a young woman: I see his intention, despite the dubious gender assumptions.) Klingsor, like the Church Father / heretic Origen, castrated himself (allegedly, in Origen's case); that's one way of trying to avoid the struggle of fitting sexuality into life, but ultimately not a satisfying one (I think of Cleopatra's conversation with the eunuch, in Shakespeare's play, where he confesses that desire remains: "I think of what Venus did with Mars"). Wagner was clearly a person for whom eroticism was a guiding  force (think of Tristan!); his music, with its sinuous, insinuating, opiate lines, argues for the inescapability of our urges. Did he solve it, in Parsifal? Did he dissolve the erotic in the religious & the ritualistically religious into the redemptive, in a five-hour dramatization of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila, freeing us from our trammeling flesh? Is there even a possible answer to this question?

Perhaps the plenitude of Parsifal is to prompt questions, & offer nothing but suggestions of possible answers.

San Francisco Opera: Tristan & Isolde

I was at the first performance of San Francisco Opera's superb production of Tristan & Isolde, & went again, last night, to the second.

As I said to someone (actually, no doubt more than one person) before the performance, there are opera fans, & there are Wagner fans, & though there's a Venn Diagram intersection there, the two are not really the same thing. I'm tempted to add another category, those for whom Tristan is itself set apart, even from the rest of Wagner's works. Tristan is not an opera, nor (pace the Master & his acolytes) a music-drama: it is a psychic derangement; it is flesh (infused with never-ending yearning, & deeper & more powerful than anything our actual poor little meat-machines can manage) transubstantiated into sound, swelling, cresting, subsiding only to tumesce forward, stretching endurance almost beyond comprehension; it is an auricular opiate &, like the products of the nodding poppy, it can nauseate some while leaving others disoriented (on a spiritual as well as physical level) for days, while they still long for another dose. Like Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo, it is an artwork with an imperative message: You must change your life.

This is, of course, not an easy command to follow, or even to comprehend; hence some of the discontent this disturbing, titanic work leaves in its wake. During my first performance, those seated around me were rapt; on the second, there were the usual gaggle of operatic whisperers & crinklers of cellophane. I would gladly have beaten them to death, my only defense being: "Your Honor, they were crinkling during Tristan!" The usual intermission exasperations – people moving too slowly, standing obliviously in some obviously inconvenient spot, expressing their stupid opinions too loudly – filled me with more than the usual rage. We all seem so much less significant in the light of this work (A judgment from which I do not, of course, exclude myself.) This is . . . not a healthy way to approach life.

Tristan, though, is not a "healthy" work, whatever that might be, unless having your little boat upturned, throwing you into more than usually stormy psychic seas, counts, in some long run, as healthy. The Wagnerian penchant for extremities – greatest of heroes, weakest of cowards, most wondrous of women, deepest of betrayals – is here in full force, & it doesn't take long after the initial movement of Eun Sun Kim's masterly baton to pull us into this worldscape. Here betrayal is the deepest truth, day, strikingly, with its sunlight & openness, is the enemy of all we long for, & night what we pine for unceasingly (that is, if "we" are pulled into the psychological orbit of the two lovers; some no doubt resist). Night isn't even our day-following hours; it is death, but not even death, oblivion but not quite that; it is some sort of cosmic universal force, darkly centered in a somehow joyous non-existence (is this bliss because we experience oblivion, or is the bliss so intense as to swirl us into a state of oblivion?).

I overheard someone during an intermission talking about "well, when two people are very much in love", as if, had things fallen out a bit differently, Tristan & Isolde would be picking out china patterns & shopping for a nice little castle somewhere. In this work love & sex stand in for something mightier than our little awkwardnesses, as with angelic intercourse in Paradise Lost, where the heavenly lovers:

obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restrain'd conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.

(Book 8, ll 624 - 629)

The world keeps intruding, though, usually in the form of King Marke & his court; in this production, directed by Paul Curran, the first act ends (after the lovers have downed the death/love potion that gave them permission to act on their deepest desires, & they need to be forcibly separated from their embrace of each other by the faithful Brangäne & Kurwenal) as a white-clad, somewhat ghostly looking Marke, elevated on a mobile platform, moves toward them from behind. At the end of the second act, the lovers' ecstatic duet ends abruptly with the sudden return of King & court, led by Melot, who has accused Tristan of betraying his King & loving uncle. The third act would end with Marke uniting the two, except Tristan has died & Isolde sweeps aside Marke & the rest of the world with her enraptured Liebestod (only to have the world sweep that aside for us, the audience, who must stagger out of our seats & wander back through crowded streets & noisy trains to the theatrical sets we call reality).

We, of course, can revisit the experience not only through our imperfect memories but also through the many recordings easily (maybe too easily) available to us. Though every note of the score (performed uncut in this production) may have sunk into our psyches, there is still a freshness & force to hearing it live, even in our days of dozens of recorded choices, especially with playing as dauntless & inspired as the Opera Orchestra's. I can only imagine how mighty, how intoxicating, this work appeared to those experiencing it in the opera house in the days before recording, when only rumor, piano reductions, or the occasional excerpt performed in concert could give people some idea of what was involved. (Even for us, though, there are new things to notice; this time I was particularly struck by Wagner's astute & careful use of the sparkling harp.)

Even so, excerpts, piano reductions, even recordings, can't give you a full sense of the experience. Sitting through it is part of it. The music keeps unrolling gloriously, perverse in its beauty; even Brangäne's second act warning to the lovers to beware floats above them like a celestial benediction. Are we hearing it as they hear it, as a beautiful sound that doesn't quite reach them? Wagner is careful not to ridicule or dismiss King Marke & his Court, or the other representatives of the world, such as the Steersman in the first act & the shepherd in the third. Marke has a touching monologue about Tristan's betrayal, one that gives us some sense of the depth & dignity possible in being merely, or "merely", human. The interior perspective of the lovers is not the only, or even perhaps the best, way of seeing things. One can long for rapturous annihilation while still realizing there might be other, though perhaps less grand or deep, possibilities. These cosmic forces are too difficult for us to live with in our daily way.

This famously or notoriously interior & lengthy work presents considerable challenges in staging; this production makes astute use of touch – the characters mostly stand apart from each other, so a hand on a shoulder (as Isolde's on Tristan's when she urges him towards the potion) or two hands slowly joining (as during the heedless lovers' second act duet) carry considerable force. Astute use is made of lighting, in harmony with the longing for darkness / night / oblivion of the lovers; when they first drink what Brangäne has given them, they fall to the floor & the already dim stage suddenly goes dark as the unfolding music suspends them & us in transformative time; as the light returns, isolating the two of them in its white pools, they slowly reach their hands towards each other, coming close to contact.

The pale walls – high, with windows up above, criss-crossed by timbers – that portray the interior of the ship in Act 1 return in Act 3's delirium & isolation, only this time hung askew, deranged, smashed: a society of shipwreck. Act 2 has more formal white walls, a bit palatial looking, with a large tree in the front: only the tree's branches are stubby, knotted; the tree, which is all a lovely silver, slants to one side. It is beautiful but thwarted, frustrated. Tristan's costumes are mostly modernish, a sort of suit & white shirt; Isolde is in a long green-gold robe, like a Celtic princess, & Brangäne in a similar robe of sort of a maroon. Marke wears a long pale tunic, hovering somewhere between medieval & contemporary. When Melot & company rush in at the climax of Act 2, they are accompanied by soldiers looking very medieval in chain mail & dark red velvety tunics. It's a striking effect, given the sudden intrusion of a storybook-medieval look. But even Tristan's more modern garb, which helps set the hero apart, suits the ambiguous time-setting; this is a world in which swords & magic potions are plausible, but also a psychological / spiritual / mythic world beyond the clanking of such plot devices.

The whole cast was strong – beyond strong; dazzling, given the sheer physical demands of this work. Christopher Oglesby, as the singer of the haunting sea chantey in Act 1; Thomas Kinch in the small but striking role of Melot; Christopher Oglesby as the loyal shepherd in Act 3 & Samuel Kidd as the Steersman; Kwangchul Youn as a dignified, touching King Marke; Wolfgang Koch as a gruff & loyal Kurwenal (faithful to his hero Tristan, even if he doesn't always understand Tristan the lover); Annika Schlicht as a compassionate, anguished Brangäne: all superb. But of course separate praise is due to the tireless Simon O'Neill as Tristan, whose anguished hallucinations in Act 3 blazed forth; & to the powerful, brooding Isolde of Anje Kampe, whose glorious Liebestod was the only fitting conclusion to the eveing. Eun Sun Kim shaped a clear, deep, & rich sound. (The English horn soloist, Benjamin Brogadir, also deserves highest praise!)

Twice I've been, & twice I've staggered dizzily out, spending the day (or days) afterwards with what felt like a hangover: listless, headachey, discombobulated. Yet I'm thinking of going again, if I can, tossing aside such worldly concerns as my parlous financial state & the physical & psychic after-effects. Look, I could quibble or carp about things here & there in particular performances or staging moments, but what would be the point? It would be like rating the ecstatic visions of a mystic saint. Tristan is a miracle, & as such it is impossible to stage perfectly, as we do not live in a miraculous world, but it's difficult for me to imagine performances that come closer to the unrealizable goal. This has been artistically a very successful year for San Francisco Opera.

San Francisco Opera: Lohengrin

The swans pulled Wagner's Lohengrin into the War Memorial Opera House this past month; I was at the first performance (only to be felled a few days later, in an unrelated (I think) development, with COVID). Many of the participants were new to the work: Music Director Eun Sun Kim was starting her annual exploration of Wagner for the company with this performance; Julie Adams was making a role debut as Elsa & Brian Mulligan as Telramund, Judit Kutasi was making company, American, & role debuts as Ortrud, Thomas Lehman made his company debut as the Herald. so that leaves Simon O'Neill as Lohengrin & Kristinn Sigmundsson as Kind Heinrich as the only experienced hands (I have been informed that Mulligan did play the Herald about ten years ago).. From the conviction, power, & intensity of the performances, however, you'd never know that this work was new to most of them. From the moments the first diaphanous suspensions of the Overture floated out above us to the thundering finale four & a half hours later, the performance was a musical triumph.

The production by David Alden, new to San Francisco but previously seen in London & Antwerp, left me less convinced. One extremely odd choice was the very low level of lighting on stage – everything seemed to take place at 4:00 in the morning (the original lighting designer was Adam Silverman, & the revival lighting designer was Simon Bennison; I assume their designs were suggested, coordinated, and/or approved by Alden). A few scenes were brighter, mostly through the use of spotlights from the sides, but they didn't really focus attention; sometimes a singer's lower half was brighter than her top. I had been told several times to watch the lower balcony on the left, in the box nearest the stage, at the end of the 2nd Act; by the time that rolled around I forgot to check & the lighting certainly didn't do anything to highlight that Ortrud was up there glaring (I was told later that that was what was going on). At the ending some of the action was simply invisible (& I had an excellent orchestra seat; I heard from a friend in the upper balcony that things were even less legible up there). I barely saw Elsa's brother appear, & that was mostly because I was looking for him; I have no idea how Ortrud ended. Four & a half hours is a long time to be plunged in twilight.

I guess it's not entirely unsuitable, practical questions of visibility aside, as the world of Lohengrin is very much a twilight world of liminal boundaries & shifting hopes & moods. The music is often questing & uncertain, & when it's definite, it is perhaps a bit overly definite, in the way of people trying to convince themselves as well as others. Brabant is between royal houses, between military alliances, threatened by outsiders but also by insiders, as Ortrud an adherent of the old gods, dragging Telramund (& I assume others) with her, struggles against the newish ways of Elsa & the mysterious nameless knight.

The idea here is that King Heinrich, using the Swan Knight to unify the kingdom, is building a military state. Given the tensions from the conflicts in Ukraine as well as Israel & Gaza, Company Director Matthew Shilvock felt the need to come out before the performance to warn us about the militaristic themes. But the theme of Heinrich's growing military power fit oddly onto the narrative> How many people are following the King's political & military machinations rather than the struggles of Ortrud, Telramund, Elsa, & the Knight?. & that sort of military ambition seems more likely to be the ambition of a much younger man than the veteran Sigmundsson. The look of the production was very much mid-century European, with overlays of Art Deco stylization on Triumph of the Will-style pageantry. The second act was dominated by what I have to say was a stunningly effective statue of a stylized swan on a pillar (though I did hear the swan was maybe too far back & too high up to be visible from the second balcony). At the finale there were gorgeous red, white, & black swan banners that came hurtling down when Lohengrin had to reveal his name & therefore his departure from the scene.

The portrayal of the Herald also was difficult to figure out in this production. He seemed to be a wounded veteran of some sort, with a prosthetic leg (if I was seeing the costume clearly, & I'm not sure I was – he seemed to have some touches of medieval armor over his more contemporary uniform). He almost shoots Elsa with a crossbow towards the end, though again it was a bit difficult to tell what exactly was going on & why. At one point he stands off to the side & pointlessly smokes a cigarette, which is just silly.

& the Swan Knight is supposed to be a force for Good, not a cover for rising fascism – right? But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe the production was saying something astute & I was the one missing the point. Perhaps Lohengrin's "goodness" is less definite than I had been assuming. The whole Cupid & Psyche "you must not ask my name" angle has, if I'm recollecting my Wagneriana correctly, always sat a bit uneasily among the Master's Acolytes: could the creator of Brunnhilde, Isolde, & other powerful women really think that Elsa should meekly accept such a strange & unexplained condition? Even though Elsa is a more ethereal, dreamier character than many other Wagnerian heroines (Julie Adams did a good job of making her a bit otherworldly without seeming like a simp), shouldn't she at least . . . know her husband's name? Once she forces the issue, misled (or guided) by Ortrud, her knight confesses what we in the audience have known all along: his name is Lohengrin. What none of us knew is that the Grail sends its knights forth, but they are not allowed to speak their names or missions; if they do, they must return. & the reason for that is . . . well, a continuing mystery. We are assuming that our tenor is a hero, & therefore on the side of Good. But we don't really know that, as we don't know where he's come from or who sent him. Perhaps such a messianic figure could indeed easily be appropriated for morally ambiguous political purposes. Perhaps the world of the Grail Knights is too "Good" for our world. Or perhaps our world has moved beyond the sort of redemption that can be offered by a singly heroic Grail Knight?

Boston's Lohengrin-inspired swan boats, from my 2017 visit.

Poem of the Week 2013/21

Richard Wagner's 200th birthday is on 22 May, two days from today. Here is a current American poet offering refractive tribute to his continuing cultural vitality:

Rhinemaiden

Who are you, fair-haired lady,
Dissecting me with blue stares?
Why do you watch me only?

Here on the streets of Cologne,
Across the seats and peopled aisles
Of the Strassenbahn, alone

On evenings in the Alstadt,
Near the twilight Cathedral,
You probe and etch my dark heart.

Though Tristan clasps your prim form
As you navigate the crowd,
I rivet you. Am I charmed?

Is it my caramel flesh,
Or the black gloss of coiled hair,
The gnome's goatee – or anguish

In the eyes? Perhaps you see
James Meredith sprawl – shotgunned –
Or hear Dizzy Gillespie

When you watch me. Can I know
What I am beside the moon:
The darkness or a shadow?

I sing your beauty, lady.
For I can never touch one
Foreign as the moon to me.

D L Crockett-Smith

The poem starts with a basic evocation of the public spaces in the German city Cologne, with the hint of a possible romantic encounter with an interested stranger, but as it begins its second half (in the fifth of eight stanzas), we become gradually aware that it's more about alienation than union. Even in a foreign country the narrator cannot escape his American experience and his consciousness that it shapes the assumptions made about him by others. He feels himself marked out, set permanently apart, by the eyes of this European woman (or women; he mentions several locations in which he has been "dissected with blue stares," so either he's running into the same woman several times or, what seems to me more likely, "she" is a stand-in for all the ultimately unknowable German women with whom he's had such fleeting ocular encounters). Her gaze turns out to be mostly clinical, a dissection, with a curious assumption that his "dark heart" is reflected in his dark skin. Like the Volsungs, his race sets him apart.

Yet he is also projecting his cultural assumptions on to her – she ultimately remains "foreign as the moon" to him. He assumes she is prim (it is actually her "form" he calls prim, but form can imply essence and conduct as well as shape, and the word hangs over her trim figure). But he also associates her, since she is German, with the music of Wagner (just as he is associated, in his own mind and, he thinks, possibly in hers, with the black American jazz of Dizzy Gillespie, though he clearly has knowledge of other kinds of music), and the association with Wagner connects her, despite her primness, with the erotic possibilities of Tristan. But even more than Tristan, it is the Ring that hangs over this poem: not just in the narrator's being set apart like the Volsungs, but in his association with Alberich, the gnome who could be seen as having "anguish in his eyes," the "schwarz [black] Alberich" forever cut off from the love of his desired Rhinemaidens.

Collections by D L Crockett-Smith may be found here; I took this poem from The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad.

the Nina Stemme show

Though an unfortunate need to accept realities of time and money kept me from seeing a full Ring Cycle at SF Opera last month, I did get to see the first cycle Gotterdammerung thanks to a very kind and generous host (muito obrigado, caro Primo!), and so I did end up piecing together a full cycle over the years (here are my thoughts at the time on Rheingold, Walkure, and Siegfried; it’s certainly possible, especially with the first two, which I saw a year or two ago, that director Francesca Zambello adjusted the staging for the full cycle). As predicted, if I couldn’t attend a whole cycle it was sure to be a smashing success, and indeed everyone has been raving, so, you know, you’re welcome, everybody.

This was of course supposed to be the American Ring, but that bit of branding has gradually dropped off and now it’s mostly described as an environmental Ring. To me it’s been more of a grab-bag Ring, with bits and pieces of various other concepts or stagings from the past couple of decades; there’s some Americana, some eco-awareness, some feminism, some updating, some bleak-post-industrial settings, some capitalist critique, some concentration on character psychology; if there’s a presiding bird it is not Wotan’s ravens but rather the magpie.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. The Ring is capacious and there’s nothing wrong with a staging that is more of a synthesis than an innovation. In short, there’s something for everybody except those trolls who feel that any staging that alters Cosima’s sacred writ is a blighted travesty, and even they get the pleasure of denouncing the sacrilege and its implied destruction of all that is good and holy in the sacred realm of art etc etc. The audience was mostly enthusiastic and attentive, though there was one horrible old woman directly behind me who bore a startling resemblance to Dame Edna’s bridesmaid Madge, though unfortunately unlike that perpetually silent companion she did speak at least once each act before lapsing back into a more considerate silence.

The long prelude and first act (insert here the obligatory reference to its being longer than Tosca/Rigoletto/Boheme) were very nicely staged. The three eloquent Norns (Ronnita Miller, Daveda Karanas, and Heidi Melton) were outstanding as they wandered wondering among the blinking computer lights and cables that cleverly took the place of their threads of destiny.

Ian Storey was a fine Siegfried and he even looks like a slightly older version of Jay Hunter Morris, who sang the title role in his eponymous opera. I was at the performance in which Storey lost his voice in the second act (I heard he was having some health problems that left him seriously dehydrated) but he was restored for the finale. I’ve already noted that for me the duet at the end of Siegfried is the one part of the Ring that always drags; its continuation in the first act of Gotterdammerung is starting to feel the same way to me (on the other hand, I’m always riveted by the scene in which Waltraute begs Brunnhilde to surrender the ring).

I think the problem is that Wagner originally intended the erotic conjunction of Siegfried and Brunnhilde to be the source of the world’s regeneration but as he grew older gradually switched his focus to the more interesting matters of Wotan’s struggle and Brunnhilde's evolution, so we’re left with beautiful (but psychologically conventionally operatic) love duets that can’t really bear the thematic weight put on them. After composing the sublime and destructive love of Tristan and Isolde, how can you pretend that a love duet is going to save the world, or even the burning lovers themselves?

So all was going well up to the first intermission. The usually sure-fire second act starts, and immediately there’s silliness: the scrim shows what turns out to be the snow and static of a TV set, and it rises to reveal Hagen with a remote control, lounging on a bed, flirting with Gutrune. There’s no real reason for the remote control, which is the sort of arbitrary “Look Ma, I’m updating!” gesture common twenty years ago, when you’d see Hamlet pull out a cellphone for no reason – that sort of thing. Then Hagen took a pill. “I’ll bet it’s Viagra!” announced Madge behind me. Thank you, Dotty Parker, and I guess with a zinger like that you just can’t wait for intermission cocktails at the Algonquin round table.

But that was the kind of jokey atmosphere set by the staging. And that was a consistent problem throughout the cycle; whenever Zambello could go for horseplay and hijinks, she would. This too is a frequent occurrence in contemporary staging; I realize there is a fear of old-fashioned “park and bark” or “stand and deliver” stagings, but sometimes, especially when you’re dealing with gods and heroes, the appropriate and natural thing really is for them just to stand there and sing. The tomfoolery set the wrong atmosphere and there was much laughter during the act, from people who are clearly more easily amused than I, your haughty correspondent. I’ve never seen the usually terrifying and menacing scene between Hagen and his father Alberich fall so flat.

The problem I had with the "degradation of the environment" theme was that most of the evidence of degradation was frankly too beautiful to seem a shame: those black-and-white projections of tall thin factory smokestacks looming up through the swirling smoke and mist seemed mysterious, silvery, and evocative instead of depressing. Mime’s trailer in Act 1 of Siegfried, its shelves lined with brightly colored packages of processed food, looked like a fun piece of pop art. Gotterdammerung Act 3 opened with the disheveled Rhine Daughters, now in brown rags, picking up empty plastic water bottles from the piles littering the riverbed. Madge behind me seemed to feel this was the ne plus ultra of regie-theater outrages. My problem with it was that with the strong white light shining behind the clear bottles, they were glowing and sparkling with light in a way that made them look like an installation at MOMA; I half expected to see a label announcing that the work “raised issues of the commodification of natural resources” so we could nod sagely before heading down to the museum shop.

The characterization of Gutrune (Melissa Citro) was quite interesting; she was kind of a blowsy sex kitten, heading past her prime, instead of the usual mild average woman manipulated and crushed by Hagen’s machinations. This was an intriguing idea, but the more traditionally gentle version would have worked better for Zambello’s conception of the finale, when Gutrune, who now is rather arbitrarily compassionate about Siegfried and Brunnhilde, joins the other women in the cast in the whole burning/inundating/regenerating finale. That music takes your soul and wraps it around your viscera and squeezes until you can hardly breathe, and the thing is that just about anything you stage to it will, in the moment, look not only convincing but moving and profound.

After the immediate glow, however, you become more aware of faultlines in the staging: it’s inherent in the material that it is women (Brunnhilde, with the help of the Rhine Daughters) who redeem the world, but it's not just any women; whatever Wagner meant by redemption, and whatever audience members take it to mean, it is simply not coming from the Gutrunes of this world, who will continue to long for and chase after power and social success, or at least the possessors of power and social success, as they always have. To effect the sort of change Brunnhilde effects, you must be extraordinary, well above any Gutrune in understanding and generosity – a hero, in fact. Flattening the distinction between the two completely misses the point. But then I've sometimes wondered about the depth of Zambello's understanding of the Ring.

I’ve saved the best for last: not just Runnicles’s perfectly balanced leadership of the indefatigable orchestra, but mainly the noble and radiant Brunnhilde of Nina Stemme. Sure, there was the occasional minor mishap but of the sort one mentions only to show that one is not uncritical. On the whole she was powerful and gleaming throughout. It was quite a coup for San Francisco Opera to have Stemme’s first full Ring cycle, and if she’s not the current world-wide gold standard for the role, I’d love to hear the woman who is. When people boast in future years that they were at this cycle, it will be because they heard Stemme's Brunnhilde.

(above is a wandering Rhine Daughter)

the imperfect Wagnerite

On page 18 of the program for San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle, Francesca Zambello says in her Director's Note:
". . . Wotan gives up an eye to build a mansion he can't afford. . . "

Uh, no, that's not what happens: Wotan has lost his eye in exchange for "gaining wisdom" at the World Ash Tree (I believe he also claims he lost his eye to gain Fricka, or at least that's what he tells her; maybe that counts as "gaining wisdom"). In exchange for building Valhalla, he actually promises to give up to the giants Freia, the goddess of love and eternal youth. This is an important difference because: (1) he doesn't make a sacrifice of his person to build his visionary fortress, he offers something (more precisely, someone) he doesn't really have the right to offer; and (2) he essentially makes the same deal Alberich made to forge the Ring, sacrificing love and youthful happiness for power and authority.

I don't want to be one of those people, but this isn't an abstruse or minor point, since Wotan's need to weasel out of his bargain leads him to steal the gold (and the tarnhelm and the Ring) from Alberich, and is therefore the engine that sets Das Rheingold and the rest of the cycle in motion. It seems like a pretty big misstatement for the director of a Ring cycle. If she had some obscurer meaning in view, I wonder what it was.

third time's the charm

When last we left our Wagnerian hero, he was pondering what step to take, and the fates of gods and men hung in the balance! Then I saw on-line the perfect center-section front-row aisle seat available for yesterday’s Siegfried, and, armed with a mighty discount from the Wagner Society of Northern California, I took the step of buying the ticket (“here’s your beee-yutiful orchestra seat!” said the friendly woman at the box office) and spending five hours in the dark on the one sunny day of this Memorial Day weekend.

It turned out to be time and money well spent. After the relative disappointment of Francesca Zambello’s productions of Rheingold and Walkure, who would have thought she’d do so well with the most problematic opera of the cycle. It’s still very much in line with the traditional Shavian/Chereauvian view of the Ring as an analysis of capitalism, but often striking and even beautiful even as it portrays destruction and greed.

Siegfried and Mime live in a half-trashed trailer amid an industrial wasteland, surrounded by the detritus of consumer capitalism, in sort of a survivalist’s no-man’s-land. Siegfried (Jay Hunter Morris) strides in with his lumbering bear, to the terror of Mime (David Cangelosi). The bear is uncredited in the program, but he got his own solo bow at the end, which was charming. He reappears at the very end of the first scene, rooting around the trailer and finally running off when he finds a bag of potato chips. This is funny and even adorable, but also nicely illustrates the pervasive theme of nature corrupted.

I’ll admit that one thing that led me to buy a ticket was curiosity to see how they handled the dragon: he’s a large, oil-spewing, chugging machine, with giant sharp tractor-claws; and if he looks a bit silly and old-fashioned as well as threatening and dangerous, that also is suitable. Once Siegfried kills him, Fafner (Daniel Sumegi) emerges in his old giant form. As he lies dying he cradles Siegfried in his arms as he warns him of the treacherous Mime, a nice and ironic touch for a hero who has been looking for the loving guidance of a parent and a giant/dragon who has cut himself off from all living contact until his hour of death.

After killing Mime and tossing him on the pile with Fafner, Siegfried pours gasoline on them and is about to burn them when the Forest Bird (Stacey Tappan) dissuades him. Before he leaves at the end he’s made enough moral progress under her guidance to make sorrowing gestures over their corpses. I thought the gasoline was a bit much until I saw that it was there for the sorrowing, conciliatory moment: the Forest Bird is the first feminine, not to say Eternal Feminine, voice we’ve heard, and Siegfried reacts to his first exposure to this quality, which he's been yearning for without knowing it.

One of the problems with Siegfried is that in the original conception of the Ring he was the star, and then was gradually pushed aside by the more complex and interesting characters of Wotan and Brunnhilde. It's too easy for him to come across as a bully and a lout, so I think the physical violence needs to be kept to a minimum; there was way too much manhandling and shoving and threatening of Mime by Siegfried. He’s an active adolescent but anyone able to sing the role is going to be, and of course look like, a fairly beefy middle-aged man, which gives a different effect. (There was also some odd manhandling of Erda (Ronnita Miller) by Wotan; sometimes it really is better just to have characters stand there and sing – does the rule of the gods really need to put a drowsy woman in a wrestling hold?)

Siegfried's false fathers had appeared earlier in the act: Alberich (Gordon Hawkins) brooding destruction, obsessing over his wrongs and his hoped-for revenge, muttering and pushing a shopping cart like the other victims of capitalist society we see daily on the streets around us – his shopping cart filled with Molotov cocktails and other incendiary devices, a shopping cart full of the simmering and dangerous resentments of those who have lost the world. And Wotan (Mark Delavan) strides in and out, proclaiming that he has willed the end and welcomes it yet not able to resist opposing Siegfried. Wotan is just profoundly (an adverb I choose advisedly) confused. (The surtitles should have retained the moment when Wotan refers to himself as "light-Alberich" as opposed to the dark Alberich who rules the Nibelungs.)

The colors of Act 2 were particularly beautiful; after all the flat grays and occasional browns we had the glowing green windows of the shed behind which lurked Fafner, and then the burnt-orange and rust-red of the sauntering Forest Bird, in frock coat and boots like an eighteenth-century forester (though it was potentially confusing I think for first-timers who didn’t come in knowing that this young woman was actually meant to be a bird). And then the whole stage is flooded with green light and forest visions and Siegfried rushes off to find his promised companion.

Another thing that led me to buy a ticket was this: every other time I’ve seen Siegfried, it’s been part of a cycle, and every time, I find the final duet with Brunnhilde (Nina Stemme) to be (I know, let the wrath of the Wagnerites descend!) just too damn long. So I’ve always wondered if that reaction is merely part of the natural cycle of sitting through something like the Ring Cycle (as if there’s anything else like the Ring Cycle!) or if I would have the same reaction seeing the opera on its own.

I had the same reaction. Though intellectually I can understand why Brunnhilde has to struggle to accept her new human nature, I always get exasperated when she first throws herself at Siegfried and then backs away from him (though no doubt we also need to see that he is winning her as much as she is winning him). But physically, I’ve pretty much had it by then, and keep shifting my numb lower half in my seat. I can also see that, beautiful and necessary as the duet may be, and as refreshing as it is after all the gloom and brooding to hear two lovers’ voices, it is also a descent into the conventionally operatic, however sublimely done.

Musically as well as visually and dramatically the afternoon had a lot going for it. Donald Runnicles paced the orchestra brilliantly, and when they hit the richer sounds of Act 3 they still had a lot to give. Jay Hunter Morris, with blonde goatee and spiked-up, punk-looking hair, probably looked as much like Siegfried as anyone who can sing the role can look. His voice had a nice youthful timbre, which meant that occasionally he, like Delavan, sounded a bit underpowered, but then I was sitting in the front row right in front of the brass and percussion; perhaps they sounded different from the higher seats (as the man sitting next to me, also a front-row aficionado, said: “If you want perfect sound, buy a CD!”). I also noticed that Siegfried and Wotan sing over the brass I think more than the others.

Delavan is physically imposing (though not, I think, very tall), and he continues to be an interestingly tetchy Wotan. There is a lot to irritate the moody father of the Gods! He sounded strongest in his Act 3 scene with Erda, so perhaps he was pacing himself. Erda was given a magnificent presence by Ronnita Miller, who had a majestic air and a deep, rich voice. She actually sent chills down my spine, not once but several times! Stacey Tappan was a pretty-voiced Forest Bird, cocking her head birdlike; and Stemme, though not the subtlest actress, sang (not shouted) beautifully with the exhausted Siegfried. David Cangelosi had a clear and almost bell-like voice as Mime; his cartwheels and general jumping-around were about as endearing as the whiny Mime is going to get. Hawkins and Sumegi were solid and striking in their appearances. The audience was extremely and understandably enthusiastic by the time Siegfried and Brunnhilde joined in their final clinch.

fun fact of the day

Gilbert & Sullivan's Trial by Jury was originally intended as a curtain-raiser for the Carl Rosa Opera Company's English premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin.

Well, both involve disputed brides. . . .

This astonishing bit of information is from Gayden Wren's book A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan. He cites as his source Jane Stedman's W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre and duly notes that "it certainly seems an odd pairing to a modern ear." Indeed it does! There are many oddities here, one of them the thought that Lohengrin on its own would not be a substantial enough evening. . . .

What Becomes a Legend Most, part 2

Yesterday I saw Berkeley Opera's final performance of The Legend of the Ring, their revival of David Seaman’s abbreviated adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen. On the whole I enjoyed it, particularly the singing, and the abridgement is quite skillfully done. I can see why a small but very adventurous company like Berkeley Opera would enjoy adding the Ring to their series of operatic adaptations, and it’s great for the singers to get a chance at these roles in a small house, but honestly I’m a bit uncertain who the intended audience is.

At nearly four hours, it’s much too long for most children, and it was left in German (with English surtitles), and while four hours of German opera may be less daunting than the sixteen or so of the full cycle, I pretty much believe that anyone who is interested in the Ring Cycle should just jump into the deep end of the pool – I’m not saying you should get tickets to Bayreuth without hearing a note, but CDs of the operas are as the sands on the shore, and every few months it seems there’s a new staging available on DVD, and the number of books on Wagner is by no means decreasing (my usual recommendation for anyone interested in embarking on the Ring is a combo platter of Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, for a social and economic interpretation, and M. Owen Lee’s Turning the Sky Round, for a more psychological approach, or you could even hunt down a copy of the graphic novel), and individual operas, particularly Die Walkure, are staged on their own fairly often, and why wouldn’t you pick one of those more obvious starting places, one that gives you a better sense of what Wagner is about?

This adaptation reminded me of seeing a great novel (particularly something long and Victorian) made into a movie – much of the texture and oddity and the little moments of characterization that made the novel great and worth the time are pared away in the interests of moving the plot from point A to point B. Many of the missing moments here – Erda’s shocking and abrupt entrance to warn Wotan to surrender the Ring, the Rhine Daughters’ cry from the watery depths as the gods ascend to Valhalla, the Wanderer’s game of riddles with Mime – are not only there to make philosophical or psychological points: they’re also stunning, exciting moments of pure theater. The adaptation unrolls the plotline smoothly from beginning to end, but who goes to the Ring Cycle for the plot?

And Wagner wasn’t really interested in the story for its own sake. And he wasn’t interested in people who weren’t willing to commit themselves to his vision. Music Director Jonathan Khuner wrote in the programbook that the Ring “does scare away the faint-hearted.” But it’s supposed to. Like the fire around Brunnhilde’s rock, the Ring’s reputation – for length, among other things – ensures an audience of heroes. (For the purposes of this discussion, I’m defining “hero” as “someone who can spare a week and several thousand dollars to sit in a theater”). You either have the experience of the Ring that Wagner intended, or you don’t. Training versions really don't convey what it's like being immersed in that experience.

Here’s one thing you miss: the sense of Time. Not just the sense of having gone through something that is distinctly an event, but the wonderful way in which, as the story moves forward, the stories we are told also move backwards, so that as we near the destruction of Valhalla, we see the Norns and hear about the World Ash Tree at the beginning of creation. Nature in general gets short shrift here, which further reduces the richness of this universe and its meanings. Erda is gone, and Spring barely glances in the window of Hunding’s hut (let alone throws open the door), and there are no forest murmurs and no Rhine journey. Maybe that was why the portrayal of the Forest Bird as a silly woman chatting on a cell phone annoyed me; it was one of the few chances to add in the natural world, and I didn't want it played for cheap laughs (and if they were going to go there, wouldn’t a bird be tweeting anyway?).

I was considering the Forest Bird and her cell phone the major directorial miscalculation until Gunther showed up – hunched over, blinking, afraid to touch a weapon – played, in fact, the way Mime is usually played. This is just wrong. Gunther is a king and a warrior, and his music tells you that – yet he still falls short of the hero Siegfried. That’s the point. You don’t get that if you play him as an obvious coward. And if he were the nebbish portrayed here, it’s unlikely that Siegfried would have heard the fame of “Gibich’s stalwart son” up and down the Rhine, or would want to be his bloodbrother.

Other than those unfortunate decisions, the staging (by Mark Streshinsky) ranged from effective to outstanding, particularly in the use of shadow (to the left and right of the open center stage were screens, on which location shots could be projected, or which could be backlit to show the action in striking silhouette). There was one directorial innovation I loved (or, as the old man behind me exclaimed loudly, “They changed it!”): at the end, when Brunnhilde has lit the funeral pyre, Loge the fire god returns, retrieves the Ring from Brunnhilde, and hands it back to the Rhine Daughters as the waters rise. One kisses him in thanks, and even though his “gosh, she kissed me!” expression was a little cartoony, the exchange nicely captured the theme of love and power as Loge fulfills his promise to the water sprites. It would have been even better if the adaptation had made more of a point at the beginning that Loge had made this promise, but still it was very nicely done.

The orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Khuner, was a little ragged, particularly in the brass, and underpowered; there are moments (particularly, I noticed, when Siegmund is involved) when the music should swell and spill ecstatically, and that just wasn’t happening. The singers, each playing multiple roles, were the real prize and purpose of the afternoon. Of the women, Christine Springer (Wellgunde and Brunnhilde) and Valentina Osinski (Flosshilde and Fricka) were both solid, though Osinski’s voice has sort of a metallic edge, but my favorite was Marie Plette (Woglinde, Freia, Sieglinde, the Forest Bird, and Gutrune) whose strong and free voice was beautiful in a different way in each role.

Stephen Rumph, a singer new to me though not to Berkeley Opera audiences, brought a crisp stage presence and a clear bright voice to Loge and Mime (it was nice to hear Mime sung instead of snarled), and I hope to hear him again. Bojan Knezevic (Alberich and Fasolt), Dean Peterson (Fafner, Hunding, and Hagen), and Jay Hunter Morris (Froh, Siegmund, Siegfried) were all excellent in their varied roles, but Richard Paul Fink (Wotan and Gunter) was the dominant voice among the men, as a Wotan should be. As mentioned earlier, I didn’t care for the characterization of Gunter, though he sang it well, but it was as the half-blind god that he really came through: Fink is fairly short, but solid enough to be physically imposing, and he brought both power and nuance to the role – I’d like to hear him in it when he gets a chance to deliver the Walkure Act 2 monologue, and the complete farewell to Brunnhilde.

Berkeley Opera’s new theater is a vast improvement over the Julia Morgan, even though it’s clearly not designed for an elderly audience: there’s no center aisle in the auditorium, and the narrow aisles get clogged very easily with the slow-moving. It’s certainly an easy walk from the El Cerrito BART station, once you figure out which direction you’re going in (I had to ask seven people before one of them knew where Ashbury Avenue was; of course there was no attendant at the station I could ask). Since they, after renaming themselves in true Wagnerian style – they are now the Berkeley West Edge Opera – have an exciting season coming up,* it’s good to know where they are.

Perhaps I would have been a little less impatient with certain aspects of the show, which on the whole I enjoyed, if the seat to my right hadn’t been occupied by one of those squat old women about half my size who hog the armrest. The minute the music started her mouth flew open and every breath came out with a weird whistling snort that might have indicated sleep except her eyes, Hagen-like, seemed open. The snoring, if that’s what it was, was broken during the second half when she very loudly chewed the cookie she wasn’t supposed to bring into the auditorium. And yet none of that was as irritating as the old man's occasional comments. Snoring I can understand, but there's no excuse for talking in a theater.

* Their new season isn't on their website yet, but according to brochures available at the show, they are performing Handel's Xerxes, conducted by Alan Curtis, on November 13, 19, and 21; an adaptation of Carmen called The Carmen Fixation with Buffy Baggott on March 5, 9, 11, and 13 2011; and a new opera by Clark Suprynowicz and Amanda Moody, Caliban Dreams, with John Duykers, on July 30 and August 5 and 7 2011.

what becomes a legend most

The electric opening night of San Francisco Opera’s production of Die Walkure seems to be turning before our eyes into one of those legendary evenings at the opera where all the moving parts click together and you’re so grateful to be there, which is lovely except I was at the third performance, and despite much that went right (in particular the excellence of the orchestra) it was vocally a rough night for most of the singers, and the production, which is the second installment of Francesca Zambello’s “American” Ring, is a very mixed bag. So I couldn’t help wondering if some of the ecstasy being expressed around me last Saturday wasn’t in part wishful thinking. We want our legendary evening too! And we don’t go to the opera house for sad reality to interfere.

So when the irritating old man in front of me, who expressed his Wagnerian credentials by conducting along with Donald Runnicles during all the loud parts and then whispering excitedly to his pinched-face wife, exclaimed after Act 1 that he had never, ever heard it performed better, I had to wonder if he'd ever heard it at all. Did he really not hear Christopher Ventris start to run out of gas right at Wintersturme and then flub badly what should have been the bright, ringing end of the act? Ventris recovered for Act 2, and I generally am not one of those opera fans who lives only to deduct points if the singers don’t spike the landing, but he was having noticeable problems.

And Mark Delavan, though he gave an interestingly tetchy performance as Wotan, was hanging on by his vocal fingernails by the time he was bidding lieb wohl to Brunnhilde. I seriously wondered if he was going to make it. We had been warned by David Gockley before the curtain that our Brunnhilde, Nina Stemme, was suffering from a viral infection but would sing anyway, begging our indulgence; as is usually the case under these circumstances, not that much indulgence was called for and ironically she sounded in quite good shape, though perhaps holding back a bit at points. Eva-Marie Westbroek as Sieglinde was in gleaming vocal shape throughout and truly lived up to the wonderful opening-night reports.

Raymond Aceto as Hunding and Janina Baechle as Fricka were both vocally fine, but bore the brunt of directorial miscalculations. Fricka was done up like one of Helen Hokinson’s club ladies, only not endearing. It’s easy to play Fricka as a bossy dowager, but this misses something crucial in her character, which is that she knows and loves Wotan so well that she can always laser in on the flaw he's trying to dream away in his grand schemes. She is the one who forces him to confront the reality of his power: it’s limited by the very agreements that create it. If your power derives from a hierarchy, you can’t undercut the hierarchy without losing your power. She is not bad, or even limited – she sees further into the realities of power than Wotan does. But that insight makes her deeply conventional – to maintain her own power, she is a defender of the status quo.

Same with Hunding, which is why he calls on Fricka for vengeance when his wife runs off with her brother/lover. Hunding and Fricka represent a conventional order that needs to be broken. But if you portray them as "bad" it implies that without them things would be just fine. How can we question our own Hunding/Fricka tendencies if we can separate them out as simple villains in a melodrama? Melodrama is about a clear moral order being restored. And Wagner is about moral order being confused, questioned, reversed, replaced.

When Hunding retires for the night, he snaps his fingers to order Siegmund over and chains him to the tree. It seems very un-Siegmund like to submit, even unarmed, to such humiliation. But it’s also un-Hunding-like. He’s not a bully or a coward, at least by the conventions of his world. He declares that the laws of hospitality are sacred, and he truly means that, and so does Fricka. He will observe them faithfully and then hunt Siegmund down as soon as he is no longer a guest. This is the orderly, rigid world that the Walsungs defy.

And we should maybe be a little disturbed at the incestuous Walsungs, and provoked to thought about conventions we take for granted. Siegmund and Sieglinde aren’t simply good victims in a melodrama. They’re troublemakers. I think Zambello made the whole set-up too simple (not that she's alone in this).

The whole idea of an “American” Ring, though it certainly sounds enticing, seems to me so far a bit of a fizzle. (My reaction to the earlier staging of Das Rheingold is here.) Given the nature of American society, an "American" Ring is pretty much going to fall into the classic Shavian/Chereauvian economic interpretation of the Ring. (Maybe the most American thing about the Ring, and the reason Shaw couldn’t quite contain Gotterdammerung in The Perfect Wagnerite, is the way what starts out as economic and political analysis turns into a tale of spiritual freedom and redemption, just as many American reform movements start out based on politics and economics and end up being about personal fulfillment and self-actualization.) So what distinguishes the “American” Ring from the average “capitalist” Ring is mostly kitschy touches like the busy décor of Hunding’s hunting lodge, with its deer heads and jacquard elk pictures and all the rifles (and speaking of all those rifles, they make Nothung look a little silly: why is the sword such a big deal when either Hunding, Siegmund, or even Sieglinde could pull a gun off the wall? It reminded me of the scene in Indiana Jones where the large grinning man does a lot of fancy threatening work with his whip and Jones just pulls out his pistol and shoots him. The age of heroes can't co-exist with firearms, as any reader of the Orlando Furioso knows.)

Some things work spectacularly well: the Valkyries parachuting into the beginning of Act 3 provide exactly the theatrical excitement and visual panache Wagner wanted for the wild warrior women. I liked having Fricka appear during the fight to make sure order was preserved. To my surprise, since I generally don’t like the distraction of live animals on stage and also generally find dogs really unnecessary creatures anyway, I loved the two hounds streaking across stage preceeding Hunding as he chases the runaways in the middle of Act 2.

Other moments left me moved but puzzled. The slow procession of military men, in a variety of American uniforms and carrying large head shots of dead heroes, is quite moving, especially when you learn, as you won’t from the program, that the photos are of real American servicemen killed in our current wars. It’s also quite distracting, since it takes place during the Annunciation of Death, when the focus should really be on the exchange between Siegmund and Brunnhilde. His renunciation of Valhalla since Sieglinde will not accompany him is not only his most stirring and truly heroic moment, it’s a key moment in Brunnhilde’s development from a somewhat cartoony hoyden to the mature and loving woman who says farewell to Wotan and accepts her fate. The focus really needs to be on their exchange. Also, with all due respect to the servicemen pictured and the individual decisions that led them to their collective fate, it’s difficult given the circumstances to see them as straightforward heroes and not as victims in various ways of America’s disastrous and immoral wars of aggression, only I’m not quite sure the staging really intends to raise such questions about their heroism and what it means. I wish Zambello had staged the scenes with Hunding and Fricka so as to evoke this kind of ironic and unsettled questioning.

A very good evening, but apparently and understandably not quite up to the first performance. Well, that’s live theater. I’m glad some excitement has returned to San Francisco’s upcoming complete Ring, though; between Achim Freyer in Los Angeles and Robert LePage at the Met, it looked as if San Francisco was again falling behind more adventurous companies.

And you may tell yourself, This is not my beautiful house!

I saw Francesca Zambello’s “American” Das Rheingold when it premiered at the Washington National Opera two springs ago; the revival at San Francisco Opera is also to some extent a revision, and I think in some ways an improvement.

In DC I felt that the production went overboard with the projections, so that they began to seem not an aesthetic but an economic choice. I understand that the Ring is incredibly expensive to put on, but you can’t really look as if you’re scrimping even if you actually are. I thought the landscape projections both during the scenes and during the musical interludes were nicely done and effective (“That’s the Sierra Nevada!” the old man next to me helpfully announced as we were traveling up to Wotan), but I thought, as I did in DC, that when Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to turn himself in a giant serpent, it just looks cheap to use a giant projection of a snake, especially when the picture breaks over the apertures in the Nibelheim mine. I can’t say I cared for the opening space shots during the prelude, either; the visual echoes of sci-fi movies (which have larger budgets and sharper effects anyway) are unfortunate, and aesthetically entrancing as the rings of Saturn are, they don’t really link up to anything in the music: it’s the creation of the world, sure, but the Prelude pretty clearly gurgles and swirls towards a water-borne creation, and when that music reappears with the Rhine Daughters or Erda you need that link to earthly elements, not outer space, and when the waters rise at the very end and swamp the world, you need that sense that they are circling back onto the very first notes of the prelude, long before. Given the very visual nature of our culture, it’s a shame to neglect the power of a completely dark theater with no stimulus but the rippling music.

The first scene is simplified and improved from the DC production. My memory of that set is of a fairly elaborate gold-mining structure off to the right, with the three Rhine Daughters looking semi-prostitutey in white nineteenth-century bloomers and camisoles, and the Rhine gold (always referred to in the surtitles for some reason as “pure gold”, as if we can’t hear the singers calling it “Rhine gold”) was a large billowing quilt top of sheer golden fabrics. I had mixed feelings about the quilt, since quilts are made of scraps and the Rhine gold needs to be untouched and unformed until Alberich steals it. I thought the switch in San Francisco to a seamless piece of the sheer gold fabric was effective (though the quilt blocks in the earlier version did suggest rich farmlands viewed from the air, which was a nice touch even if I was the only person who thought that) and led to some nicely picturesque effects when the Daughters billowed it aloft or when Alberich wrapped himself in it. After he steals it, the gold reverts to its usual stage form as heavy-looking sacks or glinting rocks.

Alberich still enters dressed as a prospector, which neatly brings not just an American but a local twist to the theme of exploiting and despoiling nature. Maybe because there was less of a camp they seemed less like camp followers, but the Daughters (Catherine Cangiano, Lauren McNeese, and Buffy Baggott) seemed less like whores and more like frontier women this time around. I liked the power of Richard Paul Fink as Alberich, though his voice was sounding tired by the end of the evening, but he was competing with my memory of the mighty Alberich of Gordon Hawkins in DC. I don’t know if this was deliberate or not, but casting a black man like Hawkins as Alberich – the despised, rejected, and angry Other – in the context of an “American” Ring lent a really powerful and troubling subtext to the role, an element that Fink, through no fault of his own, doesn’t bring to the part. (In the same way the usual casting of children as the laboring Nibelungs gained an extra resonance in the light of America’s long history of child labor, which continues in the reliance of American corporations on the poorly paid labor of overseas children.)

This was clearly not a Wagnerian audience; the chatter – please, people! the Master’s music is playing! – during the gorgeous interludes between acts made me think it was maybe just that worst of all opera audiences, the ones who don’t pay attention until The Big Aria, when they suddenly turn into highly critical connoisseurs. Lucia is next week, kids! I don’t know why anyone who cares enough about music to pay those prices and give up an evening would lose a single moment of those rapturously beautiful sounds (the orchestra was in outstanding form) listening to their own voices instead. Maybe they figured the incredibly noisy scene changes meant open season. I’ve actually never heard noisier scene changes anywhere. I really knew it wasn’t a Wagnerian audience after the performance while standing in the immensely long line for the basement men’s room: “That’s it,” one older guy was saying. “They need an intermission.” What a candyass. Try sitting on those Bayreuth seats for the show and then I might sympathize. Or not. I think the whole “Oh my God no intermission” thing is psychological anyway. Plenty and too many movies these days run two-and-a-half hours, even without the previews and soda commercials and dancing snack items singing Let’s Go Out to the Lobby, but people don’t feel trapped in quite the same way. You can get up and leave during a movie without causing quite as much disturbance. But if people can sit for two-and-a-half hours of Sex and the City or Transformers, it’s clearly not too much of a physical burden to sit through an uninterrupted Rheingold as the Master wished.

Probably the most notorious element of the DC production was Erda’s appearance garbed as an American Indian maiden (check any package of Land o’ Lakes butter and you see the costume). You may have heard that the Indian maiden is gone, but that is not the case. She’s just switched regions, from the fringed fawn-colored dress decorated with bright beads and eagle feathers of the Plains Indians to the gauzy white cotton fabric and silver squash-blossom jewelry of the Southwest, a more understated costume that tends to lose the effect, so that I can see why those sitting in the back thought Erda was just dressed in her usual flowing, vaguely Earth-Mothery garments. I had mixed feelings about the original costume and also about the change. On the one hand, I hate the use of ethnic groups as symbols rather than individuals, and the sentimental and erroneous stereotype of American Indians as a simple and harmonious part of nature is pretty annoying. On the other hand, the resonance created by an African-American Alberich also occurs with an American Indian Erda, and though positive racism is still racism, there really is a long history in the United States, dating back to the nineteenth century (to around the time when the Indian nations stopped being violent threats and started being conquered remnants) of seeing the Indians as nobler (because less complicated and more in touch with nature and the basic elements of life) than their white conquerors. Also: the costume is visually stunning, not only in itself but in contrast to the leisure-class white suits and gowns of the bright gods. You lose the effectiveness and the contrast when Erda looks like just a funkier version of the gods. Neither the DC nor SF Erda really overcame the costume; I found Jill Grove the vocal disappointment of the night, fairly hooty and underpowered. Elena Zaremba in DC had a better sound but the wrong demeanor; Ms S of DC had accompanied me and when I ventured the criticism afterward that Erda had smiled too much, she said, “Yes, she seemed very pleasant.” Indeed she did, as if she were the nice neighbor lady down the street who had just shown up with a covered dish to welcome the gods to their new home, along with some common-sense advice about the looming end of all things. Erda’s appearance is one of my favorite moments in the entire cycle, so that may account for some of my disappointment.

Zambello did a really nice job directing the gods and giants. Fafner (Gunther Groissbock) and Fasolt (Andrea Silvestrelli) enter on a cross-beam lowered from the ceiling, and the costume designer (Catherine Zuber) did a terrific job making them look like giants without burdening the singers with stilts. They were a mix of nineteenth century laborers and creatures of myth, on big elevated shoes and in denim overalls, with their shoulders and arms padded for muscle (very effectively and carefully done, in fact, so that they actually looked as if they had the right bulging muscles there instead of just cotton padding), their arms ending in metal hooks and claws instead of hands. Froh (Jason Collins) and Donner (Charles Taylor), despite their bravado and threats of retribution, showed clearly in their curved posture and discomfort when the giants approached them that they felt effete and useless next to them; and beneath the arrogant swagger of the giants (with Fafner suitably the more aggressive) they conveyed a sense of being outclassed, out-thought, and out of place in the bright palace they had built.

Freia (Tamara Wapinsky), in a fascinating insight, gradually returned Fasolt’s love, so that she had to be torn away from him after the giants were given the stolen gold. I’ve never seen this relationship staged like this, but it makes sense – she’s the goddess of love, and why wouldn’t she reach out to someone who so clearly loves her; for all of Siegfried’s and Brunnhilde’s declarations of smiling love and laughing death, neither says or does anything as profoundly moving as Fasolt’s declaration that he cannot bear to give up Freia as long as he sees even the glow of her hair or the glint of her eye. (Once again the exchange of gold for Freia is staged absurdly with the goddess lying on the ground being covered by sacks, instead of standing up and having them piled in front of her, so that the poor singer is trapped down there, being covered – and not even completely, as required for the scene to make sense – with props, until she has to find some more or less clumsy way to get out from under all that.)

Some of those at opening night mentioned to me that they found Jennifer Larmore’s Fricka a vocal size too small; that may have been the case, but if so she had adjusted by the second performance, when I heard her. She gave a precisely etched comic performance of an entitled and frustrated upper-class housewife, from the moment she forces Wotan (a powerful Mark Delavan) awake by thwacking him with the rolled-up blueprints of Valhalla on through to her triumphant entry into the hall, despite the dead Fasolt and the lamenting Rhine Daughters. When Loge (played as a suavely ironic lawyer by Stefan Margita), for whom she had openly expressed her dislike, praises the love of women above all things, she gives him a wonderful look of ironic bemusement and surprise, and her approach to him after that is brittlely flirtatious. She has a wonderfully sharp-elbowed and determined walk when she’s angry and wants to get something out of someone, usually her husband. It was an amazing comic performance, and if I found myself marveling at it some times and disagreeing with it at others, it’s because Fricka is not a comic role. Yes, she is a narrow-minded and conventional woman, and she is as complicit as any of the gods in the building of Valhalla and the theft of the gold – you can’t be a goddess of the hearth without a hearth, and her sense of entitlement is only strengthened by her spouse’s failure to stay at home like a good husband – but she is also always correct. There’s a lot to be said for the rule of law as opposed to grand but shaky schemes, if you want to draw a parallel to American political life today. She is always the first to perceive and accurately point out the fatal logical flaws in all of Wotan’s schemes while he’s still brushing the facts aside as troublesome details, to be dealt with later. Though she plays a necessary role, nobody likes a rulemeister, and it’s just as well to emphasize when you can the moments when Fricka is softer and more sympathetic.

A couple of times Zambello brought characters on stage at moments when they aren’t usually there. Loge appears at the very end of the first scene, as an eyewitness of Alberich’s escape with the stolen gold. I found this unnecessary; he pretty clearly says to the gods that the Rhine Daughters have told him what happened, so there’s no real need to have him stroll on at the last minute to see it, especially since most of what he relates (about the curse on Love, the forging of the Ring, the dominance over Nibelheim, and so forth) are things he isn’t seeing at that moment anyway. It seems like a solution to a staging problem that doesn’t really exist. I did like the physical as well as vocal reappearance of the Rhine Daughters at the end; they obviously are important to the scene, and their lament from the waters is one of the prized moments in the Cycle; it wasn’t entirely necessary to see them in person, ragged, bedraggled, and with imploring hands outstretched, but it was effective, especially since it gave Mark Delavan the chance, with a troubled, dismissive gesture, to emphasize once again Wotan’s tendency to form grand schemes at the expense of the reality he can’t quite dismiss from his sight, as he finally turns his back on them and Loge to bring up the rear in the procession of the gods, who march up what looks like a ramp to a luxury liner, giggling and sipping champagne with the exquisitely refined and appealing frivolity (a quality better conveyed in this production than I have seen it before) that will doom them.

When we left the DC production, Ms S kept saying, “But did you think it was American?” And you may notice I keep putting “American” Ring in quotation marks. As I said back in DC, it makes some sense that a Ring that starts out in late nineteenth-century America will in many places look awfully European. The changes in this production from the original DC staging make me think that further and deeper thought is being given to the themes as the Cycle progresses, but so far, the use of local scenery is not that different from Stephen Wadsworth’s forests-and-mountains-of-the-Pacific-Northwest staging for Seattle, and the presentation of the gods and giants as late-nineteenth-century robber barons and labor is not that different from any of the Shavian (or Chereauvian) interpretations. I didn’t see the Walkure when it was staged at DC, so I don’t know how the "American" theme develops. I’m curious to see how it plays out in the entire cycle; at this point it looks like an interesting but not crucial approach, though this production is well worth hearing and pondering.