Cut to May 2 and “Heil dir, Sonne!/Heil dir, Licht!“, Brünnhilde’s first lines upon awakening to Siegfried’s kiss, both launched from the upper E-natural. There was the fibrillation, more prominent than before, and it was soon evident that not only was this disturbance present throughout much of Goerke’s range, but that the voice’s presence had receded and much of its color had washed out. She steadied somewhat later in the scene, reached all the notes, and did her best to project some celebrative energy, but the overall effect was deflating for listeners and alarming for the singer. Of course, I can testify to only this single outing. But this sounded like more than just a tired or out-of-sorts evening.

I have still to account for the work of the conductor, Philippe Jordan, and the Met’s orchestra in this glorious music. But since that will bring the first of my older-standard comparisons into play, I’ll enter my brief notes on this thoroughly chewed-over production first. The physical production, it should be noted, is actually by Carl Fillion with the collaboration of the Ex Machina Production Staff, the whole presumably as envisioned by Robert Lepage, who receives one of those “production by” credits (let’s just call him the director). I gladly acknowledge the technical expertise and dedicated work that has gone into this elaborate money-pit of an installation. But:

1. As with Es Devlin’s plastic cubicles for Otello (see the post of 1/18/19) , the basic choices of materials are, to me, incomprehensible. How can anyone listen to this music and come up with spikey metallic planking? The addition of a virtual-world decorative overlay in the form of projections does not mitigate; rather, it exacerbates.
2. At this performance, the contraption worked smoothly enough. The noise of the scene changes, often complained of, was not in evidence. The performers’ navigation problems,  while no more severe than those of, say, the perilous sand dunes of Thaïs, are still distracting, especially in Acts 1 (platform to platform, seemingly arbitrarily) and 3—and there is no place in the repertoire where gingerliness could be less appropriate than here.
3. In Act 2, the projections take us into the world of  Jungle Book, c. 1942, with Sabu.  I liked Jungle Book, c. 1942, with Sabu. In 1942, when I was seven, going on eight. At the opera’s end, one always muses over solutions to the Magic Fire (Anna Russell: “But surrounded mit feuer. Und shmoke. Und shtink.”) Here, worry over negotiation of the sharply raked and remarkably unevocative deck was augmented by annoyance at the flaming planks to either side, a poor substitute for a circle or semicircle of fire, or just a glow. Their nagging presence pulled focus from beginning to end of the scene, without any assistance to illusion.
4. In his most important directorial function, that of helping the actors to fashion credible and theatrically intriguing characters and relationships, Lepage does address one aspect of the challenge—the “humanizing” one. But his choices aren’t always apt. Two of the more inept involve The Wanderer. In the Act 1 Riddle Scene, Volle explored the soup pot, then plunked himself down by the hearth and, as the high-stakes colloquy went on, squeezed a few puffs out of Mime’s bellows (little gusts of shmoke und shtink). Even at his wryest, Wotan doesn’t do that. A heedless, indolent dude does that, and as he does so we watch the scene, which is at once amusing and tense, go limp. The Act 3 Wanderer/Erda scene goes even farther into misguided “humanizing.” After Erda has arisen, not from the depths of the earth, but through the spikey planks, Lepage brings her out onto the forestage. This alone shatters her numinous aura, and removes the distance that should always be part of their confrontation. Now they must try to play out a more intimate dialogue, and this inevitably leads to misinterpretation, a loss of tone.

To be sure, the everyday, normative “human” level is the one on which much of the action must be played. The through-composed, continuous-action model that Wagner created with the Ring has to be through-sung and through-acted; it must show us logical behavior, at the heightened level of sung theatre. But such logical behavior, of body and voice, is that level of interpretation. It’s in the text, if one knows how to search the text; a director doesn’t need to invent it. And if the everyday normative level of reality is the only one worked on in this music drama derived from myth, we have lost the overarching atmosphere of the piece. The visual representation has undercut the transcendence, the “logic of feeling,” so powerfully present in the music and so necessary to the opera’s effect. I think that one source of this mistake, which is certainly not unique to Lepage, is a fear of stereotyping, which in the Ring is reinforced by the presence of different classes of humanoid beings, among which we make discriminations. The history of such discriminations since Wagner’s time is not re-assuring. For instance: Mime is a dwarf. In real life, dwarves should be taken for themselves, as with all individuals, and not assumed to bring with them the qualities that attach to ancient folk stereotypes. In a myth, however, these ancient folk stereotypes are constitutive of dwarfishness, and essential to the fulfillment of such a character’s part in the story. In opera and classical song, we have notable dwarves in Offenbach, in Zemlinsky, in a great Schubert Lied, none of which can be successfully rendered while avoiding stereotypical dwarfishness. The playing must adhere to the character’s archetypal identity, or it does not serve its most basic dramatic purpose. Wagner goes some distance toward endowing Mime with recognizable human characteristics with which we can empathize, and which give the performer much to play beyond the stereotype. But there is too much in Mime’s verbal text and music to try to detach the character from his dwarfish self.