Two items of recent Opera as Opera news: First, the video of my April 15 conversation with Dean Fred Bronstein of The Peabody Institute in Peabody’s Dean’s Symposium series, in which we discuss some of the book’s themes relative to opera’s professional and educational future, is now up and running. Video and audio quality is excellent. Here is the link, which will also be posted on my media page. This series has had other distinguished guests, whose conversations are available in the archive, that I’m sure many readers will also be interested in. And second: Opera as Opera has chalked up another important review, by Mike Ashman in The Gramophone, the English-speaking world’s oldest record magazine. He of course has his own perspective and reservations, but his well-written review is in the main supportive, and ends with a strong recommendation. This brings to four the number of positive reviews the book has received in UK, following Stephen Hastings in Opera, Robert Matthew-Walker in Musical Opinion Quarterly, and Nils-Goeran Olve in The Record Collector, in addition to the fine thought piece by Richard Fairman in The Financial Times—excellent penetration for a book of this sort. 

I devoted my last post to exploration of the name character of this opera—troublesome as he is for many—and how he came to be fashioned as he is, at least on paper. And I mentioned that the cast of this season’s Met revival seemed promising, which is one way of saying that by contemporary standards it looked good—also on paper. I’m sure that when you read little expressions like “at least on paper” or “by contemporary standards,” you are hearing a cautionary, faint-praise tone. If so, your hearing is accurate enough. But before getting to some serious qualifications about performance and production and the relevance of standards other than contemporary, let me stipulate first that the male side of this cast gave a great deal of pleasure, and second that these roles are hard—hard to sing, hard to act on the two planes (call them the “real-life” and the “archetypal” planes) that must always be present, and hard to fuse into the singingacting unit that Wagner sought and that all dedicated performers have pursued for a century and a half or so; and further that the orchestral demands, particularly with regard to the dramatic involvement Wagner wanted from his “bandsmen,” are equally challenging. The two tenor parts are, in both their opportunities and their difficulties, extreme, and while Brünnhilde has but a single scene, there is contained within it just about every task that can be set to a dramatic soprano.

To begin with the gladder tidings (I report on the performance of May 2), and to work our way from the lesser to the greater demands—which, as chance would have it, is from the bottom up, Fachwise:

Fafner: This was Dmitri Belosselskiy. He was a solid Wurm in last season’s Luisa Miller, and he was solid here, too, which is to say that his voice had the appropriate density of color and sufficient size, that he sang steadily and on pitch, and that he hit the staging marks of the production’s dying-dragon concept (see below).

Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen has blown through town once more, for the last time (we are promised) in the production conceived and directed by Robert Lepage. Of that, I had previously seen just the Götterdämmerung, and that only through the good offices of a friend who happened to have a spare and affordable ticket. This negligence had nothing to do with negative anticipation of Lepage’s efforts. Reports about it had been universally condemnatory, but I fear no production, and have learned many times over that the general opinion isn’t necessarily my own. Besides, for me it is performance, not production, that is the key, and it was the prospect of a work I love deeply, and with whose performance potential I am acquainted, falling so far short of that potential as to be only a distant echo of itself, that kept me from entering the Ringnut sweepstakes first time around. As it transpired, Fabio Luisi led a solid orchestral rendering of Götterdämmerung, which (as  with any of the Ring operas) provides considerable reward in itself; and Deborah Voigt, although clearly intended for Gutrune rather than Brünnhilde, at least made an energetic stab at the latter. Apart from that there were only those distant echoes, and I thought that yes, the production’s a clunker, but that isn’t the real problem at all.

This time the announced singers, on the basis of my limited acquaintance with them, seemed more promising. So I decided I’d try to see Siegfried, the least-performed segment of the Ring. Not easy to do, but I did eventually ransom two seats for one of the three performances, looking forward to hearing the music live once more and, perhaps, arguing the opera’s case. There are a number of reasons for the relative unpopularity of Siegfried, and we’ll encounter them as we proceed, but I think the main one is simplicity itself: many people don’t like the protagonist, Siegfried of Siegfried. I’ve seen the mere mention of the name induce cringes of revulsion from confirmed opera lovers, and recall as culturally informed an observer as Michael Feingold (the valuable longtime theatre critic of The Village Voice, among other things) writing that though he liked Wagner’s music, he couldn’t get close to the Ring because of the nature of this character. Since I think this is an unnecessary obstacle, I am devoting this first of two installments on Siegfried to exploration of the eponymous hero. I could as well write about Brünnhilde, whose evolution is in the end more determinative than Siegfried’s; or Wotan, whose rise and fall governs the story for over half the cycle’s length; or even Alberich, the principal antagonist, whose potent resistance carries through directly into Götterdämmerung, and indirectly to the very end in the person of his fearsome son, Hagen. But though these characters can sometimes give rise to parodistic amusement, they don’t induce repugnance. So it’s Siegfried himself who will be the focus here. I’ll discuss how everything turned out for all concerned in this season’s revival in the next post.