Primal, Powerful and Popular

By Michael Walsh

Since its first performance more than a century ago, Richard Wagner's four- evening cycle of mythological music drama, Der Ring des Nibelungen, has been regarded as the Mount Everest of music, a daunting work that remains the ultimate test of operatic mettle. Despite its imposing demands, the Ring has been scaled repeatedly in the past four years -- at Bayreuth, San Francisco and Seattle, among other places. Last week the Metropolitan Opera took up the challenge, opening its 103rd season with a production of Die Walkure, the first installment of a new Ring.

It is long overdue. The last Met Ring was an unlucky affair directed by Conductor Herbert von Karajan, which began in 1967 with Die Walkure. Karajan had produced only half of the cycle when a labor dispute disrupted the 1969-70 season and he dropped out; the Ring was completed several years later by Director Wolfgang Weber. This current production, designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen and directed by Otto Schenk, is being introduced over three seasons, and will be staged complete in 1988-89.

The five-hour Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) is the second opera in the sequence. Several of the Ring's most appealing characters are introduced, including the doomed incestuous lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Brunnhilde, the warrior maiden whose sympathetic heart causes her to be stripped of her godhood in one of Wagner's noblest, most poignant scenes at the end of the opera. Indeed, Acts I and III are so primal, so powerful and so popular that audiences have cheerfully overlooked the tedium of the second act in order to revel in the Ride of the Valkyries and the Magic Fire Music. As George Bernard Shaw observed, "Die Walkure is endured by the average man because it contains four scenes for which he would sit out a Scotch sermon or even a House of Commons debate."

The Met production is conservative, which is not surprising. Allegorical reinterpretation, the rage in Europe, strikes no sympathetic chords at Lincoln Center, where an earnest conventionality prevails. Schenk and Schneider- Siemssen staged the Met's highly regarded 1977 Tannhauser, a glowing, romantic evocation of the Thuringian countryside, with a sharp eye for naturalistic detail, and their Die Walkure is in the same tradition. Hunding's rude hut in Act I is an enormous wooden lodge, with an imposing tree growing in its center, while the landscapes of Acts II and III are rocky and forbidding. They are not so much sets as illustrations from a handsome coffee- table book, but they capture well the Ring's mythic atmosphere. Schenk's direction emphasizes the physical as well as physiological aspects of the Ring (all the characters are related either by blood or marriage): enemies grapple violently, lovers couple passionately, and Wotan embraces two of his children -- the dead Siegmund, the sleeping Brunnhilde -- tenderly and sorrowfully.

It is common wisdom that there are not enough voices of true Wagnerian weight anymore, but with a cast that includes Soprano Hildegard Behrens as Brunnhilde, Mezzo Brigitte Fassbaender as Fricka and Bass Aage Haugland as Hunding, the Met has done its best to contradict that cliche. (The complaint is really just another way of bemoaning the fact that Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad are no longer around. And in any case, Shaw was groaning about the casts at Bayreuth as long ago as 1896.) Behrens, the star of Bayreuth's otherwise disastrous 1983 Ring, fills the 4,000-seat Met with the same full-blooded and radiant voice she displayed in the 1,925-seat Festspielhaus. In the unsympathetic role of Fricka, the penetrating mezzo of Fassbaender rings out cleanly, and Haugland booms his way through the villain's portentous music.

As the Nordically handsome and dramatically vivid siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde, Tenor Peter Hofmann and Soprano Jeannine Altmeyer make a convincing pair of lovers. Altmeyer soars splendidly, and if Hofmann's voice is now wobbly and shopworn, his matinee-idol looks still make his performance compelling. As Wotan, Bass-Baritone Simon Estes sings persuasively in the agonized god's lyrical passages but lacks the raw power and seductive tonal sheen that the part requires.

Another star is Met Artistic Director James Levine. (With Behrens, James Morris as Wotan and the Met orchestra, Levine will record Die Walkure for Deutsche Grammophon next April.) Act I, the violent mating dance of Siegmund and Sieglinde, crackles with sexual electricity. Act II, the Sargasso Sea of Die Walkure, finds the conductor bogged down during the lengthy interviews between Wotan and Fricka, and later Wotan and Brunnhilde; Levine has yet to discover how to make this music sweep along instead of bump along. That will come with experience. But even now, it is clear that the Met's new Ring is in good hands.