Warm Days for Wagner Knights

By Michael Walsh

Peter Hall and Georg Solti combine on a controversial Ring

All Europe has been sweltering this summer as temperatures have soared into the 90s. But the hottest spot on the Continent last week had to be the small West German city of Bayreuth, site of the annual Richard Wagner opera festival. Inside a broiling, stifling Festspielhaus, an elegant first-night crowd shed its tuxedo jackets along with its customary solemn decorum as it watched, with growing disappointment, impatience and finally anger, a new production of Wagner's 16-hour, four-evening German myth, Der Ring des Nibelungen, by two British knights, Director Sir Peter Hall and Conductor Sir Georg Solti.

Bayreuth, located 41 miles northeast of Nuremberg in the gently rolling Bavarian countryside, is a rumor mill that makes Washington, D.C., look like a Trappist monastery. Long before the curtain went up on Das Rheingold, which opens the cycle, the cafes were humming with musical gossip: Tenor Reiner Goldberg, Solti's original choice to sing the difficult role of Siegfried, had been fired (true). Soprano Hildegard Behrens, the Bruennhilde, had quit (false). The Hall production, with sets by Designer William Dudley, would be the biggest fiasco since ... well, since 1976, when Patrice Chereau scandalized the good burghers with his iconoclastic, neo-Marxist Ring.

True, alas. But whereas Chereau's epater le bourgeois production eventually was seen as a bold, original interpretation that one could take or leave but not ignore, Hall's is something else again. It lacks precisely the quality that defined Chereau's work: a conceptual framework.

Hall, 52, has explicitly rejected Chereau's revolutionary premise ("The Ring does not say that to me at all"), but offers in its place only the unremarkable notion that Wagner "elevated a fairy tale into adult myth." In staging the production, Hall said, he would try to follow closely the composer's own detailed stage directions to return to a romantic Ring. This faithfulness to the original--what the Germans call Werktreue--is admirable and, in this day of extravagant operatic reinterpretations, almost avantgarde.

"I believe that a production should try to be as complex and contradictory as possible, and not give any one point of view markedly," says Hall. But the Ring, one of the most ambitious artistic engineering projects in history, needs strong, consistent guidance if a production is not to degenerate into a series of pretty stage pictures. Characters must be sharply focused, their complex relationships made clear. They cannot be allowed to wander aimlessly across the stage, as Hall lets them do in Rheingold, or strike arbitrary, stylized postures: Wotan singing to Bruennhilde while lying flat on his back in Die Walkuere, for example.

Some of the settings are indeed pretty, like the opening tableau of Das Rheingold, in which three nude Rhinemaidens swim in a pool of water, reflected vertically by means of mirrors so that it appears they are frolicking in a deep river. But there are inexplicable departures from the prevailing neoRomantic ethos, born of the director's fascination with stage gadgetry. For the Ride of the Valkyries in Die Walkuere, Hall straps four warrior maidens to a slowly descending platform, while beneath them their sisters prepare the naked bodies of dead heroes for consignment to Valhalla. This mothership scene seems to have unaccountably wandered in from a production by, say, George Lucas.

"Doing all four parts of the Ring in a single summer is, of course, quite impossible," says Hall, rightly pointing out the difficulty of mounting four new major productions at one time. But the ability to do the quite impossible is a prerequisite for those who would tackle Wagner. After all, Wagner did it himself.

Hall's increasingly evident failure to produce a coherent view of the Ring rankled the highly critical, proprietary audience as the week progressed. Lusty boos began echoing through the acoustically perfect Festspielhaus (designed to Wagner's specifications) at the conclusion of Die Walkuere, reaching their apogee at the end of Goetterdammerung. Both Hall and Dudley, who had refused through the week to take curtain calls, were jeered when they finally came onstage--accompanied for protection by Solti, the entire cast and the Bayreuth orchestra.

Some of the singing, too, came in for heavy criticism. Bass-Baritone Siegmund Nimsgern has a rich resonant voice but brought little sense of Wotan's majestic agony to his portrayal. After Das Rheingold and Die Walkuere, he canceled his appearance in Siegfried and was replaced by a weak Bent Norup. Poor Manfred Jung, the substitute Siegfried, is physically unprepossessing and vocally inadequate to this most heroic of heldentenor roles, which demands both strength and stamina. Although he gave it a game effort, especially in Goetterdammerung, Jung put one in mind of Scholar-Critic Ernest Newman's acidulous remark that too often Siegfried gives "the impression of a man whose mental development was arrested at the age of twelve and has been in custody ever since."

Still, there were a few bright spots amid the prevailing gloom. Tenor Siegfried Jerusalem (Siegmund) and American Soprano Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde) made a hot-blooded pair of incestuous lovers in Die Walkuere, and Baritone Hermann Becht's Alberich was powerfully sung. Hildegard Behrens unleashed her blazing, radiant soprano as Bruennhilde, the fallen Valkyrie whose ultimate sacrifice defeats Alberich's evil and purifies the world for the coming new order of man.

Presiding over the music in magisterial fashion at his Bayreuth debut was Solti, 70. The manic drive and headlong energy that once characterized his Wagner have since been tempered by a lyrical impulse that has broadened and deepened his interpretation, although he has lost some of his electric excitement in the process. When, as for much of this Ring, there was nothing compelling to look at onstage, the listener could always concentrate with pleasure on the primary motivating force of Wagner's unique vision: the music.

--By Michael Walsh This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.