The Met HD Wagner’s Gotterdammerung

Brunnhilde (Deborah Voight) and Siegfried (Jay Hunter Morris)

Dear friends and readers,

Well, we saw this opera yesterday — all 5 hours and 50 minutes of it.
Some of that was intermission — 2 of about 25 minutes each. A few
scattered thoughts and notes:

I just was overwhelmed — totally won over — when the death of
Siegfried sequence began. It became at once magnificent and yet I burst into tears. The culmination effect could be really felt. Its large simplifications worked. I loved Voight’s performance as the strong selfish woman betrayed. And Jay Hunter is just so appealing. He reminds me of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival — reading about Siegfried even if I know that Wagner was this rebel, on the barricades and have read Shaw on the Ring, the part always seemed Nazi, stupid, militarist, but Hunter pulls off a gay innocent and lovingly noble Parzival so well-meaning my heart goes out to him. Several of the singers, in fact all who had major roles with some nuance did it intelligently and at this close a number of threads and major characters over the four operas were metaphorically brought back.

Over supper we found ourselves trying to remember the other 3 operas & saying perhaps it was justified to have all 4 in a row. Jim said Wagner had created these operas over 30 years. Wagner began with writing an opera on Siegfried’s death and with so many deaths in these operas, he thought he ought to explain how the death had come about and so wrote an opera on Siegfried; then he felt he needed to account for Brunnhilde, and before you know it, he needed a prologue. When he’d finished these librettos, he wrote the music moving forward, from first to last.

But nevertheless, and until then I occasionally fell asleep. To me Wagner music was beautiful until then, most of the time endlessly flowing concert music with the characters’ presences, stories, and songs forming an accompaniment. In previous or traditional operas the music is the accompaniment. But until it became so resonant and seemed to capture depths of sublime tragedy, it was simply background and the psychology and story and dramatic techniques of Wagner as librettist don’t hold me. His idea of a blocked staging is to have two characters stand there and sing at length at one another. The story seems something a 10 year old could read in an action-adventure book. Lord of the Rings is a book for older adolescents. I’m not alone in my dissatisfaction, but admit mine is not based on the music but the piece considered as a play or mythic story told through opera.

In a movie — which this was — costume is of enormous significance in conveying character and meaning. I’d forgotten Wendy Bryn Harmer (Gutrune here) was also the young woman who was sold in Das Rheingold (very painful that, the way she was so abject): most of the images of women are wholly masculinist dreams and their outfits showed this. Actually I didn’t like the costumes of the men much either. Jim called it all rags and rocks. I remember thinking Wotan’s lock of hair over his eye plastered down absurd. This time Siegfried’s costume felt just (I had neutral response) and so too Gunther, Hagan, Gunther but Brunnhilde’s dress looked like schlock from Klein’s — it was probably chosen to de-emphasize Deborah Voigt’s age: she hasn’t a young woman’s body any more so they made her breasts very flat. Wendy Bryn Harmer’s steel bra over a nightgown was just what a man might ludicrously find covers all symbolic grounds (strong and aggressive as well as sexy), but it was indicative of most of the images of women in these plays, not thought through. In one interview LePage said he didn’t want the “heavy German” imagery, but yet wanted to be traditional. So the costumers didn’t know what to do with the Germanic tribal imagery but didn’t think how it reads and although they want to get rid of it and they could have nothing to substitute.

A few years ago we saw a production of Das Rheingold by Francesca Zambello where the all the characters were in 1920s outfits from movies (rather like people on a cruise) and it worked very well. Actors do better when an audience is full and responds intelligently to the play.

Then mise-en-scene and shots. The machine just didn’t cut it. (See Izzy’s blog on undulating planks accompanying the beautiful music, Deborah Voight and Jay Hunter.) We were to think the world was coming to an end and it was more like a suttee. It’s a light and sound show; after all a staged opera is not a movie and Gelb has to give up the idea having computer and being movie-like is dragging opera into the 21st century. The opera as movie is still being staged and that cannot be upstaged. We need to see sets which included grand houses, inside and out, forests, mountains, huge slabs of lighted-steel are no symbolic substitute.

To some particulars: the Rhine maidens. I noticed the first opera had them sliding all the way down & in the interview we were “treated” to the fear they had of this, and how one of them had to be coaxed even with a harness. They did go from top to bottom. This time they went maybe less than 2/3s and no harness. Jim said that if you paid attention they would slide down one plank and climb up another consistently. Each of them. So he guessed one plank had been greased to slide down easily. We never did see the whole of their bodies until they came for bows. I didn’t like that we were supposed to be amused at the Rhine maidens’ fear in one of the interview films. I read somewhere Deborah Voight was almost badly hurt by that machine. And there were stunt men and women where possible. Why should they risk anything either is my feeling.

When interviewed, Eric Owens (a great Alberic, the angry and therefore evil dwarf) said he would have to go to the gym before May (when all four operas are done in a row — to get in you must buy for all four and there is a very high ticket put on this).

There is no illusion on these sets that what is happening mirrors some reality off-stage and the occasional effective large artificial simulacrum (like the iron horse below) was rare.

An irony horse was pulled along by Siegfried with some unexplained ropes helping from the curtain

As to how the opera functions in our world as performance and DVD, Jim reminded me that though Wagner has been coopted by the fascists backed by military fleets of people with deadly weapons, he was originally a man on the barricades. Shaw pointed out Gotterdammerung is an allegory on a world gone wrong which needs replacement. All authority figures ought to be made deeply suspect and a number who came here regularly have killed themselves. We should see what is happening as anti-capitalist fable (as Shaw said). But I felt in this (and other productions I’ve seen) we are invited to contemplate the spectacle of enviably powerful characters inflicting pain and misery on one another with no haven or reform in sight. We are asked to study the religion and respect it. We are to luxuriate in the gods’ silly quarrels. No community worth the word in sight. It’s a police state with a powerful machine to back it up and make its prisons:

The amassing of the male chorus around Hagden (Hans Peter-Konig) does resemble the ruthless use of brutal policing in most states on the globe.

I did like how when all were taking their bows, Jay Hunter shook the hand of the prompter. A telling customary omission: I had never seen anyone do that before. So clever Deborah Voigt followed suit. Hunter presents himself as the country boy with Texas accent far more than he probably is, and it is part of his act to shake the prompter’s hand. There is someone just under the stage, crouched, ready to help any and all actors enact their lines.

I should acknowledge that Izzy was deeply engaged throughout by the music and opera in front of us as really (though less visibly) was Jim.

Ellen