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.