THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Sam Shirakawa attended the opening performance of this season's run of Siegfried at the Met, on Saturday afternoon/ Here's his squib:

SIEGFRIED

METROPOLITAN OPERA
18 APRIL 2009 Season Premiere

Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs has, in my view, two major inciting incidents. The first takes place in Rheingold, when Alberich curses love and steals the ring. The second incitement happens in the third act of Siegfried, which the Metropolitan Opera mounted for the first time this season at Saturday’s broadcast matinee -- the penultimate installment in the first of three Ring Cycles this season. Wotan’s mortal grandson challenges him at the proverbial crossroad and breaks his spear, thereby ending the god’s control of the world he created.

None of the nine Ring productions I’ve witnessed makes much of the spear-breaking. Except for a lightning flash in some stagings, it’s over in a blink. Wagner doesn't make much of it either: no anguished soliloquies, no Mozartean ensemble numbers, not even a da-da-da-dum from the orchestra to denote Destiny Descending. And yet, it marks the Beginning of The End, for which Wotan longs during his tortured narrative in Day One of the saga. Siegfried is now at liberty to go his merry way and do whatever he wants.

So what’s a liberated, horny teen love-child of an incestuous union to do? Commit incest, of course. And who better to guide him through the ins and outs of banging, than the archetypal Older Woman, namely his equally virginal but knowing great-aunt, Brünnhilde. (We’re not privy to the party that proceeds after the curtain falls on Act Three, but presumably, they know instinctively what goes where, when it comes to doin’ what comes unnaturally.)

Siegfried has occasionally been dubbed the “happy opera” of the Ring Cycle, given it’s flame-throwing dragon, chatty bird, nasty ogres and Sleeping Beauty. But while it has its sanguine moments, it’s really a somber setup for the six-hour tragedy to come in Day Three of the saga.

I’ve often complained that Siegfried has too many men barking at each other for far too long, before we get some feminine ear candy. But thanks to James Levine’s priorities, which places cantilena always at the top, we heard some wonderful singing from the guys bickering and bellowing during the first two acts on Saturday afternoon.

For me, the big pleasure of the afternoon was Christian Franz, making his Met debut as the eponymous hero. I’ve heard him several times over the past couple of years -- mostly in Berlin -- and was little impressed with his tendency to bark out phrases for emphasis, in much the way you expect from the Drum Major in Wozzeck. While he still yelps out some notes, this is essentially an all but reborn Christian. A Heldentenor in the Melchior vein Franz is not, but who is? Nearly always tone-perfect, he managed to maintain the requisite energy for this killer role all the way from the Forging Scene to the exhausting Awakening Duet at the finish.

The second major pleasure of being in the house on Saturday afternoon was hearing and seeing Irene Theorin as Brünnhilde. The role is comparatively small, but its pitfalls are huge, and Theorin avoided them all. Appearing even more radiant than she had looked in Walküre, she soared confidently from strength to strength, making the fitful transition from goddess to woman seemingly effortless. Hers is not a mega-voice, nor is it an emotional button-pusher like, say, Susan Boyle’s. But it shows a telltale sign of emerging major Wagner sopranos: a predisposition for grandly invigorating the dynamics Wagner prescribes. Its grace under pressure and the two bang-on high Cs reminds me of how Gwyneth Jones sounded all too rarely.

The sound of James Morris as Wotan/Wanderer was focused, on pitch and by turns effectively condescending in the Quiz Scene with Mime, cunningly brutish in dealing with Alberich, and just plain desperate in Wotan’s big scene with Erda in the third act.

Robert Brubaker is a bit tall to qualify as a dwarf, but his unctuous way with a whine makes him a memorable Mime. Richard Paul Fink turns Alberich into a fascinating portrait in slime.

It struck me as unfortunate that the role of the Fafner in dragon form (sung off-stage) prevents John Tomlinson from singing on stage. If his days as a top-notch Wotan and Sachs are behind him, he still has plenty of mileage left to portray backbench Wagner heavies.

The much-missed Lili Chookasian spoiled me for anybody else singing Erda, but Wendy White brings a dark, slender imperiousness to her brief appearance scolding Wotan for making a mess of Everything. Lisette Oropesa as the Woodbird sounded as if she had been placed too far off-stage, but the young native of the Big Easy has the right stuff for bigger things to come.

The legendary Wagner conductor Reginald Goodall often said the big challenge in taking on the Ring is finding the right basic tempo. After years of imposing phlegmatic pacing on his readings of late Wagner, James Levine at last has found the right basic tempo that works for him and his listeners. And the relatively brisk pacing he’s taking currently enlivens the tetralogy immeasurably. You can feel the pulse arching over the entire work. There is finally a sense of inevitability in his Ring that makes it Levine’s Ring once and for all.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

TOXIC ASSETS

Sam Shirakawa attended the Opening Night of this season's run of Das Rheingold at the Met on Wednesday evening. Here's his squib:

Das Rheingold

Season Premiere 25 March 2009
Metropolitan Opera

If Das Rheingold is on the boards, it must be springtime now and Ring time again at the Metropolitan Opera. Otto Schenk has returned to supervise the final incarnations of his grandly representational production dating from 1987. The new version of what one critic has called “the ultimate mini-series” is set for 2010 and promises to be something entirely different.

This year, there are extra performances of Rheingold and Walküre to supplement the usual three cycles beginning at today’s matineé broadcast and continuing through early May. Expect to hear a lot of Japanese, German, Brit-English and Russian spoken during intermissions. Even in these wretched economic times, the Met remains Mecca for financially intrepid Wagnerites.

The first performance of Rheingold this season turned out to be only the 150th time the company has mounted the work -- by far the least performed of the four Ring operas.

Many of the singers who appeared at the premiere of this production have long since retired, but in an age when change happens too fast and too often, it is comforting to many to have James Morris back once again as Wotan. The incursions of time have diminished his vocal powers, but he was able to summon the requisite strength at the most critical moments -- especially in “Abendlich strahlt der Sonne Auge” -- the god’s articulation of relief at the completion of Valhalla. The rest of the cast was about as fine as money can buy these days: Yvonne Naef (Fricka), Wendy Bryn Harmer (Freia), Jill Grove (Erda), John Tomlinson and Franz-Josef Selig respectively as Fafner and Fasolt -- all in fine form. In a cast of equals Kim Begley (Loge), Richard Paul Fink (Alberich) and the trio of Lisette Oropesa, Kate Lindsey and Tamara Mumford as the Rhine Maidens were incandescent.

The other holdover from the production’s premiere, of course, is James Levine. Of some 20 odd times I’ve been present to hear him conduct Rheingold in the house, Wednesday evening’s performance was arguably his finest to date -- primarily because he seems to have discovered, finally, the recondite magic and sad sense of wonder in the work, which he palpably missed in his previous excursions into Nibelheim.

All of which led me to reflect afterwards on what take-away the performance may have offered. If nothing else, Rheingold, indeed the entire Ring, is about the Grand-Daddy of all Toxic Assets. The forged ring ultimately ruins everybody in a cumulative tidal wave of devastating collateral. The dire warnings of this intermittently hummable tale, adumbrated so seductively in swathes of wicked harmonies, continue to go unheeded, as the world sucks itself into the Augean stables of fiduciary feculence.

Sooner or later, though, what may get even worse gets better: We are, it seems, living out the Shakespearean-Wagnerian Dialectic. But how long in really real time is the journey between that deceptive E flat pedal which begins the infelicitous tetralogy in whose midst we now find ourselves -- and our arrival enfin at the redemptive D-flat Major coda that only the love which transcends understanding can win?

© Sam H. Shirakawa