Wagner, Das Rheingold: (Premiere) Soloists, Staatskapelle Weimar Conductor: Carl St. Clair, Nationaltheater, Weimar 15.07. 2006 (SM)

  

  
Conductor: Carl St. Clair
Director: Michael Schulz

Sets: Dirk Becker

Costumes: Renee Listerdal

  
Wotan: Mario Hoff

Fricka: Christine Hansmann

Freia: Catherine Foster
Loge: Axel Mendrok
Donner: Alexander Günther
Froh: Jean-Noel Briend
Erda: Alexandra Kloose
Alberich: Tomas Möwes
Mime: Frieder Aurich

Fafner: Hidekazu Tsumaya

Woglinde: Silona Michel
Wellgunde: Marietta Zumbült

Floßhilde: Christiane Bassek
Staatskapelle Weimar

 

  

Perhaps more so than with any other piece of music theatre, when opera houses stage a production of the Ring nowadays, they feel the need to justify their undertaking, if only because of the vast technical, logistical and -- of course -- financial resources required to put on Wagner’s sprawling 16-hour epic. A complete Ring cycle has apparently not been staged at Weimar’s Nationaltheater, in nearly 50 years: justification enough for tackling the work afresh in a reading that, already five years in preparation, will eventually take another two and a half years to complete.

But the directing team seems to want to assert even older claims to Wagner’s chef d’oeuvre. Dramaturg Wolfgang Willaschek argued out that when the composer sketched and wrote the libretto of Siegfrieds Tod in 1848, the work that would eventually become Götterdämmerung around a quarter of a century later, he did so specifically with Weimar and Franz Liszt in mind. It was the composer’s way of thanking Liszt for his support when Wagner had been banned from Germany for his revolutionary pamphlets, Willaschek said.

Perhaps the Weimar team felt it needed the additional pedigree because it chose to unveil the first instalment of its new Ring barely a week before the curtain rises on Tankred Dorst’s eagerly awaited new reading at this year’s Bayreuth Festival. And one can only speculate about the reasons for putting Das Rheingold on as the final new production this season, being performed only once on the very last night before the house closed for its traditional Theaterferien. Was Intendant Stephan Märki simply wanting to test audience and critical reaction to the project before pressing ahead with the rest of it?

If so, he need not have had any reservations. What director Michael Schulz and set designer Dirk Becker have come up with is as exciting and refreshing as anything any of the bigger stages in Germany have come up with in recent years. Unlike many of the recent Ring cycles, Schulz wisely eschews an all-too modernist reading of Das Rheingold. There are no stock market crashes, no corporate magnates. There’s not an executive briefcase in sight.

Not that modern props are completely absent. Fricka serves the other gods coffee from a pump thermos flask, Nibelheim is a huge industrial warehouse and Mime a cleaner fully equipped with trolley and mops.  But it's all done so unobtrusively. There is no laborious "bigger meaning" that Schulz wants to impose on the work and on the audience. Schulz is primarily taking sheer delight in theatre as a medium.

In fact, we're constantly reminded that what we're seeing is nothing but theatrical illusion, expertly conjured up. During the prelude, Wotan and Alberich sit together at a table to watch the Rhinemaidens at their play. And with a knowing wink, Alberich dons his theatrical garb to become a dwarf, strapping shoes onto his knees so make it seem as if his legs are only half their real size. (Schulz was surely tipping his cap at Peter Konwitschny who used exactly the same device for Alberich in his masterly reading of Götterdämmerung in Stuttgart).

Valhalla is a big room, empty expect for a vast dining table, all wonky in perspective as if we were looking at an expressionist painting. That impression is underlined by the set being a stage within a stage, which the stagehands wheel on in full view of the audience. And the set takes on an almost cartoon-like feel to it when we meet the gods: Fricka (Christine Hansmann) could have stepped straight out of a book by Dr. Seuss with her sculpted hair and crazy make-up. Loge looks like some sort of mad-scientist from a 1950s movie.

Fasolt and Fafner are first seen when they lift off the roof of Valhalla and peer down onto the gods below and they stroll and sometimes even run around on stage on modern-day, easier-to-use stilts. When the gods finally walk over the rainbow bridge to Valhalla at the end, they walk into a massive painting, taking their places in a life-size family portrait that hangs on the palace wall.

Schulz is clearly having fun. Like Konwitschny, he's a little boy with a bag of tricks, who delights in expertly weaving that special magic that can only be woven in the theatre. The theme of children at play and a belief in magic is set at the very beginning when, before the Rhine starts flowing, we meet the three Norns played by three little girls. Indeed, once Weimar has finally completed its new Ring in 2008, Schulz wants to rework the production especially for children.

But it's not all fun and games. The scene of Alberich's curse -- with just a bare white sheet as a backdrop -- was blood-chilling in its intensity, with Wotan (Mario Hoff) viciously stabbing Alberich (Tomas Möwes) with his spear before slicing off his finger to get the ring.

Much of the magic might possibly have been lost if Weimar hadn't chosen to stage the work entirely with its own ensemble, and imported some of the globe-trotting troupe of bigger-name Wagner singers instead."We're not interested in the Ring as an event, but as an ensemble piece," Schulz said.And the Weimar ensemble, all young, unspoilt voices, were every inch up to Schulz's expectations and to the demands that Wagner makes of his singers.

Möwes' Alberich was arguably the star of the evening, shifting from the pally 'let's pretend' of the opening scene to the scary, driven, power-crazy dwarf at the end, arm-locking the audience with his muscular voice.

Hoff's Wotan was unusually light of tone, almost tenorial at times, so that the chief-god comes across as hapless, even weak. It'll be interesting to see how Schulz develops the character in the following operas. Axel Mendrok's Loge was lyrical and sweet, fleet-footedly side-stepping the caricature that so frequently befalls the fire-god. Donner, Froh, Fasolt and Fafner were all faultlessly sung. And Frieder Aurich's Mime was almost sympathetic, with his light, attractive tenor.

Among the women, Catherine Foster gave Freia a much fuller-bodied soprano than is usually the case. She'll be singing Sieglinde in Die Walküre and the Siegfried Brünnhilde, as well as Gutrune in Götterdämmerung, which all promise to be a treat.Similarly, Möwes (Alberich) is to take the role of Der Wanderer in Siegfried, while Hoff (Wotan) will switch to Alberich, surely another telling interpretative detail on the part of Schulz.

In Rheingold, Erda scores her vocal points fairly easily, but Alexandra Kloose justly earned her applause with a true contralto voice, voluptuously deep, clear and rich. The Rhinemaidens were all evenly cast and while Christine Hansmann's Fricka was occasionally a little too shrill for my liking, she was an equal match for the other roles in terms of vocal power and acting ability.

Thanks to the relative intimacy of the house, which seats around 800, diction was very good in all roles, rendering the subtitles (which really were subtitles running along the bottom rather the top of stage) almost superfluous.

And in the pit, the Staatskapelle Weimar under its Texas-born GMD, Carl St. Clair, was a joy to hear, with rich, creamy strings, taut, sinewy woodwinds and pungent brass. So, when the final curtain came down, it seemed that all of Schulz's attempts to justify the decision to forge a new Ring in Weimar were ultimately unnecessary: with productions as good as this, you don't need an excuse. You should just go ahead and do it.

Simon Morgan