How should you feel at the end of a Ring cycle, before — at any rate if you’re a reviewer — starting to list the pros and cons? Nothing very simple, obviously, but some kind of exaltation, of however confused or complex a kind. Famously Wagner had severe problems with the conclusion to the cycle: in the very first version he had Brünnhilde freeing the Nibelungs, including Alberich, and leading Siegfried and Grane up to Valhalla, where the gods, too, were to survive. Drastic modifications ensued, so that by the time he arrived at the version of the text that he set to music, there is no mention of the poor Nibelungs, Alberich remains the only important character still alive, the gods go up in flames, Siegfried is not revived, and as Brünnhilde urges her horse Grane into the flames, she is in a state of advanced delusion, singing of being married to Siegfried in mightiest love, etc.
Yet the music that Wagner wrote for the closing ten minutes of the Ring seems to be more suitable for his first ideas than his last. Wagner, though a pessimist by conviction, was an optimist by temperament, a most appealing combination. So the final scene of the Ring has it both ways, though since the music is so much more powerful than any staging I or, I suspect, anyone else has ever seen, we are happy to share Brünnhilde’s delusion and feel uplifted as the motif that used, mistakenly, to be called ‘Redemption by Love’ steals in and then concludes the whole work.
It has become common for directors to indulge in a tentative message of hope, so that while, with any luck, we get plenty of flames and crashing beams, and suggestions of the overflowing Rhine, a young child or two creeps on to the stage and suggests that, whatever the future may be, there is one. Whether we feel as we do at the end of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, ‘Now it’s the little one’s turn’, with a decidedly gloomy intonation, or that perhaps the next time round will be less of a hopeless mess, is up to us.
Keith Warner offers a fairly cheerful alternative, with a youth standing on a great vertical ring and suggesting at the least a positive attitude. It’s one of the more satisfactory moments in a production that is full of puzzling and often merely idiotic moments. At the end of the Wanderer’s great scene with Erda in Act III of Siegfried, for instance, when according to Wagner Wotan rises to the height of willing his own destruction, he actually runs her through with his spear — as, previously, he has Siegmund and Hunding, all in sharp contradiction to Wagner’s text and intention. That spoilt what was otherwise a very impressive performance of that scene. For Bryn Terfel, giving his first performance as the Wanderer at the Royal Opera, was superb both in singing and in acting on a platform that was constantly tilting at the most unfriendly angles; and Maria Radner was a sonorous, drowsy Erda.
It was, too, one of the finest stretches of Antonio Pappano’s conducting: he revelled not only in the enormous motivic complexity of the scene, but also in its shape and in its immense climaxes. Elsewhere, most of the time, he exhibited his customary attention to detail, the textures were sometimes a revelation — for example, the orchestral introduction to Siegmund’s Spring song — but he pulled Wagner’s punches, and that quality which makes sitting through a complete cycle in a short space of time so incomparable, of gigantic momentum and cumulative power, was largely lacking.
This was mainly a Ring of moments. The production, which seemed to lack any overall direction and to delight in mischievous novelty, added to the wrong sense of disintegration.
However, with the orchestra on such stupendous form, and some individual performances of distinction by some of the leading singers, it was a Ring which offered more rewards than buffets. As I’ve indicated, Bryn Terfel was everything a Wotan should be, and it was especially exciting to note how easily the full tone, the intelligent inflection, the domination of the stage, came to him.
In the latter two dramas there were other performers on his level: John Tomlinson’s tireless and terrifying Hagen, and his uncle Mime, a really great performance from Gerhard Siegel. The prelude to Act I of Siegfried, which gives a psychological portrait of Mime without parallel in opera, was realised in every particular when the curtain rose: pitiable, terrified, malignant, ingratiating, absurdly ambitious, desperate to hoist his ever-flagging self-esteem, he had it all. And in Götterdämmerung Mihoko Fujimura was a shattering Waltraute. It is one of Wagner’s biggest gifts to a singer, a narration of harrowing events set to supreme music, and it’s over after 20 minutes. Almost every
Waltraute is fine, but Fujimura seems to have entered the part to an uncanny degree.
Stefan Vinke, a new name to me, was Siegfried. I can’t say he thrilled me, but he didn’t do anything ugly or vulgar, and he stayed the course in both dramas. It would be wonderful to expect more from a Siegfried, but also foolish, since a tenor who can fulfil all one’s hopes for Wagner’s hero comes along once every half-century at most. Warner could have done more to help him, but Pappano proved, as usual, a sympathetic accompanist.
Susan Bullock’s Brünnhilde, which had been disappointing in Die Walküre, was considerably worse than that in Siegfried. Neither she nor Siegfried were helped by the ridiculous staging of this scene, taking it in turns to pop out of a small door and then retreating behind it, standing as far apart as possible when they were both in sight — I know that Brünnhilde and Siegfried pay very little attention to one another for much of it, but this was absurd. Worse than that, though, was the thinness of Bullock’s tone and her straining after high notes. One began to dread the last drama, but fortunately she was in far better voice, and coped with much of the role adequately. But she was lacking in presence, either as goddess or ex-goddess.
Still, one way and another the Ring nearly always impresses and moves more than almost any particular performance of it, and that was certainly the case with this cycle.
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