Kirov Ring Siegfried all photos Natasha Razina
Fact: more books have been written about Richard Wagner than about any other topic, apart from the Bible.
Fact: Wagner's chief work, The Ring of the Nibelung, has influenced stage works, orchestra works, and later, newer genres (like movie soundtracks) ever since its first performance in 1876.
Why is the Ring so popular? Why is it every opera director's dream to supervise a production of this 14-hour (not counting the intermissions) work? Why do opera lovers all over the world, from German speaking audiences to Europeans to Americans to Asians and Australians, continue to flock to performances of this one-of-a-kind music orgy, this (as Thomas Mann called it) “ringing pageant of the world's beginning and end?”
My own explanation would be: obviously, the music itself is utterly magnificent; but even though that includes (besides sensuous instrumentation, gorgeous webs of musical motifs and — at the time of composition — unnumbered innovations in harmonic development) those brilliant orchestral introductions and interludes even non-opera going concert audiences the world over know (like the Ride of the Valkyries), that isn't the whole story. After all, other nineteenth century opera composers wrote stirring music; Wagner's Italian contemporary, Verdi, attained popularity much faster, because of his wonderful yet so accessible melodies. What is the hidden element, the additional dimension in the Ring?
Simply put: its message. This is not contained in an “operatic plot” (usually consisting of a tenor-soprano-baritone triangle); the message is philosophic, and may be reduced to the formula “you must choose between exercising power and experiencing love.” The dilemma of the chief protagonist (who is here not a tenor but a bass baritone) is his unwillingness to choose, his attempt to have it both ways. Since, in this universe-as-metaphor, he is the chief of the Gods, this dilemma has tragic consequences on a gigantic scale.
Wotan, more commonly known as Odin, has sacrificed one of his eyes to gain wisdom and power; his power is embodied in unbreakable laws, which are carved as runes into the haft of his world-governing spear. But his ambitions and desires threaten to overturn the laws he has made; and so he seeks another kind of power, the power of gold. In order to get it, he steals the Ring from another ambitious character, the dwarf Alberich; Alberich has paid the price for attaining power over the gold, by renouncing love for ever; only one who does this can forge the gold and make the Ring. But now the passionate Wotan, unwilling to forgo love, steals the Ring; and he continues pursuing his favorite pastime, love. From these wanderings spring his daughters, the Valkyries, and also a human race, the Volsungs, who — Wotan hopes — will help defend his power against his enemies. But in doing all these things he has broken the law again and again; and he has not been able to keep the Ring, which is passed to others who are, one by one, killed by envious rivals for the gold's power.
Wotan cannot escape the web woven of his own compromises and lies; he must sacrifice his son Siegmund, and eventually wills his own destruction at the hands of his grandson, Siegfried. His realization that his great work, the edifice of the universe, is doomed to destruction occurs in act two of the second opera (The Valkyrie) — less than half way through the cycle; his struggle to accept this fate provides much of the ensuing drama.
How can these ideas be expressed musically?
As Wagner is the only “big” (that is, played all over the world) opera composer who wrote his own texts, his operas — or music dramas as he preferred to call them — achieve a synthesis of music and libretto unmatched in the operatic literature. Words and music arose in his consciousness simultaneously, and allowed him to infuse his text with melody, his melodies with ideas. The score of the Ring is an intricate construction in which practically every instrumental line is based on a “theme” —the labels of the themes were added by later interpreters and publishers (like the sword theme, the dragon theme, the anvil theme; or the “Gods' need theme” or the “love renunciation theme”) but the density of thematic material yields more information the deeper one penetrates it. George Bernard Shaw refers to this as “a Beethovenian inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.”
It is important to remember that the themes themselves only provide the building materials of the score; Wagner's true genius is his ability to interweave the motifs, and also to transform them, as the situations or characters or ideas they represent change over the course of the 4 operas. Wagner wrote about his own view of synthesizing music and words for purposes of the drama; music is the female half of drama that cannot tell the story until impregnated by the male half, the text. Once the text has provided the intellectual key to the themes, it is quite possible to have extended orchestral passages without text — namely, the preludes and interludes — which nonetheless achieve great eloquence for the listener who can identify the themes and their interrelations. A classic example is the interlude in the prologue to the fourth opera, Siegfried's Rhine Journey. While it is a lovely composition, enjoyed by concert hall audiences quite innocent of the plot, it is really a narrative about (among other things) Siegfried's exuberance, about the love of Brünnhilde, about his adventurous spirit as he embarks on the Rhine, and about the dark fate that awaits him at his journey's end. The most famous interlude, the Funeral Music, played after Siegfried's murder, recapitulates themes from all four operas; it is truly “program music,” but through the association of the texts, this music truly tells a story, evokes a philosophic dialogue, in a way quite impossible for the many other composers who experimented with tone painting.
Since the Ring is based on Wagner's own melange of mythic materials (the Norse Poetic Edda, the Volsungasaga, the German Nibelungenlied, and others), there is an atmosphere of ancientness, a primeval veil over the story; but the whole idea is to embody the philosophic content in a metaphor. While this makes it possible for stage directors to do practically anything they like with the archetypical characters, it results in piling one metaphor atop another; which can be confusing to opera audiences who don't know the Ring too well, and annoying to those who do. Wotan in a dinner jacket, Valkyries on motorcycles, Rhine maidens as street walkers, we've seen it all.
A particularly galling example I saw was the celebrated Bayreuth 1976 production, in which the gods were costumed as 19th century bourgeois ladies and gentlemen. When Wotan, speaking of his son Siegmund, says things like “I roamed the woods with him wildly” it just doesn't fit what you see. The fact that the stage director has him taking the Spear of World Rule in hand while outfitted like a character from Madame Bovary does not help matters. Watching four operas in a row bristling with such incompatibles can be a trial for the audience.
And now, a new production from St. Petersburg; New York's number one Russian maestro, Valery Gergiev, brings us his Mariinsky Theater production, designed by Georgy Tsypin.
Here is a short excerpt from the St. Petersburg Times, June 2003:
“Tsypin's minimalist, highly compelling sets — which, he says, ‘aim to reflect our era of clones, genetic experiments and mutations’ — from Siegfried and Götterdämmerung now form the visual link between the four operas, and in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre he continues with his predilection for giant figures and bold, basic color schemes. The megalithic figures create a prehistoric environment for the story, and also reflect it in the way their positions change through the cycle.”
Shaw, in his The Perfect Wagnerite (preface to the 4th edition, 1922) wrote:
“I must admit that my favorite way of enjoying a performance of the Ring is to sit at the back of a box, comfortable on two chairs, feet up, and listen without looking. The truth is, a man whose imagination cannot serve him better than the most costly devices of the imitative scene painter, should not go to the theater, and as a matter of fact does not.”
So what should the curious spectator of today do? Go and see it, any chance you get. But try to get hold of a translation of the text first, and read it carefully; the more intricately you can follow the conversation on stage, the more you will get out of it. You might even catch the moment in Rheingold when one of the characters refers to himself as “the Lord of the Ring.”
The published photos of the Kirov Ring show an archetypal approach by the designer, which is all to the good. It is actually refreshing, after the many European interpretations which place the action on the moon or in a brothel or in a school classroom, etc. Perhaps the Russian producers have managed to retain a sense of myth.
Fact: No staging concept, however wacky, has ever managed to ruin the Ring for the audience. (Or let's say, ruin it completely.)
Kirov Ring Cycle 2007
Lincoln Center Festival and the Metropolitan Opera co-present Richard Wagner's
Der Ring des Nibelungen, performed by the Kirov Opera under the baton of
Valery Gergiev, acclaimed artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.
Michael Hurshell is an American conductor currently living and working in Europe. His recent engagements include concerts with the Slovak Philharmonic (Rachmaninoff and Saint-Saëns), the Warsaw National Philharmonic (Penderecki), the Northwest German Philharmonic (Bruckner), appearances in Hannover and Dresden, as well as opera engagements in Düsseldorf (R.Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos and Mozart's Cosi fan tutte) and Duisburg (Verdi's Rigoletto). He lives in Dresden, where he teaches conducting at the Carl-Maria-von-Weber Conservatory.
