Siegfried is, everyone agrees, the hardest of the Ring dramas to bring off. The first and almost insurmountable problem is that the title role is one that almost no one can sing, and one of which even on recordings there are very few wholly satisfactory accounts. Lauritz Melchior, the only tenor with the adequate size and beauty of voice, and the sensitivity, when he could be bothered, to employ them to the full, never recorded the role complete, his only ‘live’ preserved performance being heavily cut. The most one can hope for is a more-or-less decent account, and they are rare.
The other chief problem with Siegfried is that, coming after the emotional intensities of Die Walküre, perhaps the most straightforwardly involving of all Wagner’s works, it is likely to seem somewhat remote, Siegfried’s process of learning how to be a hero through forging a sword, slaying a dragon, incidentally killing his foster father, insulting and vanquishing the Ring’s central and most complex figure Wotan, even going undaunted through sheets of flame to awaken the first woman he has seen with a kiss, belonging more to the realm of fairy tale than myth.
The semi-concert production of Siegfried which Opera North is touring at present doesn’t make light of these problems, but it deals with them more satisfactorily than any fully staged production I have seen for a very long time, and provides a more enjoyable and moving evening than I had dared to hope for, even taking into account the superb two previous accounts of the Ring dramas that it has produced in the past two years.
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