Royal Opera House / Everyman.
Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett are two of my favourite things. But I sometimes wish producers of the one could resist the temptation to appropriate imagery from the other.
Scene Three of the new Covent Garden Rheingold has Erda (the Norse Earth mother) buried up to her waist; with goggles over her eyes and electrodes on her body, as the Nibelung (played by children in grotesque masks) extract buckets of liquid gold from the ground.
I mean, we get the point: the Nibelung are exploiting the planet, sucking Mother Earth dry. One of the things the Ring cycle is about is certainly man's abuse of nature. And another thing is men's abuse of women. So the creation of the Nibelung hoard is a physical assault on the Earth-goddess. I get it.
But isn't it ever-so-slightly, I don't know -- obvious? As if you were visualising the single most sublime narrative in the history of the human race in the language of an editorial cartoon? And the whole thing is just a little bit too sexualised. Erda spends two thirds of the production naked. Alberich gets his dick out for the Rhine Maidens and seems to be playing with himself when Wotan drags him back to the gods' mountain. (Is he meant to be ejaculating as Wotan pulls the gold from him?) Granted, the nymphs are meant to be flirtatious and the whole cosmic catastrophe comes about because Wotan commoditised his sister-in-law. (He sells Freia to the giants in return for their constructing his castle.) The text envisages the giants burying Freia in gold: this production, arrestingly, puts her in a bath and submerges her in golden liquid. Alberich is seen licking the stuff of his fingers, making one rather think of Pooh Bear.
The pre-show talk has director Barrie Kosky and conductor Antonio Pappano agreeing that music-drama means just that; the Ring is an incredibly long sung-play and the Rheingold in particular is like a Greek tragedy; in fact, like the satyr play before the trilogy. So they have cast singers who are also capable of acting. They are aiming for drama, not high concept.
There is, in fact, only one interpretative idea in the whole evening, but it's a biggie. Erda, the Norse mother earth figure, is conceptually significant: source of Wotan's wisdom, mother of the Norns and the Valkyries. But in this opening opera, she only appears in one tiny little scene. (She gets a little more stage time in Siegfried, the second part of the main trilogy.) So it is deeply interesting to make her the centre of the whole opera, and, I assume, the whole saga. Before we even hear the famous E flat major chord of the prelude (I looked it up) a very old, very naked lady walks slowly and silently across the stage. Perhaps we are supposed to think she embodies the river that the music describes? She remains on stage in every scene -- sometimes peering out from the scenery, sometimes taking a more active role. She appears to be acting as a waitress or maid for the gods in scene two; she's imprisoned and sucked dry by the dwarves in scene three. When Alberich renounces love and steals the magic treasure in the opening scene, he appears to be ripping out Erda's golden brain; and she stands centre stage in a spotlight as the gods enter Valhalla in the final scene.
Everyone was very amused when the Financial Times' music critic complained that the make up made her look "quite a fright" because we are actually looking at 81 year old former Vogue model Rose Knox-Peeble's unadorned body. She spends a lot of the hundred and fifty minutes standing on the stage with no clothes on, occasionally mouthing other characters' words; sometimes being rotated on a turn-table. Her actual lines are sung from off stage by a singer, Wiebke Lehmkuhl: they take the bow together. It was hugely powerful: in a way it made me think of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece. The stage is dominated, through all four scenes, by a gigantic fallen tree trunk; presumably the World Ash. I think we are supposed to infer that gotterdamerung has already occurred and we are watching the earth-mother remembering the planet's death.
This isn't one of those evenings where you find yourself thinking "But why are Tristan and Isolde hanging about on a railway station?" or "In which sense is the Dutchmen improved by being set in a disused munitions factory in Kyrgyztan?" The gods may have been a Chekovian family out on a picnic (with Loge pinching the canapés) but their personalities and relationships shine through. Even Donner and Froh, gods of thunder and lightning respectively, who barely get ten lines of music between them come across as personalities. Alberich is lustful and sordid and generally disgusting; and Loge pretty much dances through his role, full of the joy of being evil. Wotan was maybe a tad too oafish for my taste; but he doesn't really emerge as a tragic figure until Valkyrie. And Mime, generally exploited and put upon by Alberich seemed rather noble and sympathetic, which bodes well for Siegfried in 2025.
I sometimes forget how much, er, middle Rheingold suffers from. The opening, with the Alberich and the Rhinemaidens, is splendid, but the second scene (in which the gods explain to each other at some length what is going on) only picks up speed when Loge arrives. Similarly, when the action shifts to Nibelheim (dwarf-land) an awful lot of not-very-much happens until Loge and Wotan play their cunning trick on Alberich. (Mime has made him a shape-shifting magic helmet, and they do the time-honoured "Oh, but I bet you can't change into something really, really small" stunt on him. The transformations were left to our imagination: lots of smoke, but no actual dragon at this stage.) Rossini once made a very pithy remark about some Wagnerian sequences being more enjoyable than others.
But everything pushes forward to a mighty final scene: Alberich curses the Ring; Erda persuades Wotan to relinquish it to the giants; Fafnir kills Fasolt and steals The Precious, and everyone processes along the Rainbow bridge to the newly opened Valhalla. This is Wagner at his least subtle best; the grand opera-concluding music seeming to come to a curtain-closing climax on at least three occasions, each time getting interrupted by Loge's cynicism and the voices of the maidens demanding the return of their gold before the gods finally make it to their new home. Actually putting a rainbow bridge on the stage defies the best of producers: tonights version ends with more glittery confetti than has ever before appeared in an English theatre showering the huge Covent Garden stage for literally minutes, leaving a spectrum of glitter beneath the principle's feet. Pretty and clever and an exact, though not literal, match to the grand musical picture.
I really really wish that producers of these live-streamed operas could bring themselves to just point the camera at the empty stage during the orchestral interludes. Naked goddesses and thunder gods wielding polo mallets I can cope with; but I would rather not have Wagner's music reduced to a soundtrack for extreme close ups of the French horn player's fingertips.
It costs silly money to go to Covent Garden so these streamed productions are a gods send to recovering Wagnerians. Covent Garden have made a jolly impressive start with arguably the most theatrically challenging part of the tetralogy, but let's hold our breaths to see if they can sustain this inventiveness into the Valkyrie next year.
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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