WAGNER SYMPOSIUM

Today’s Symposium, hosted here at the hotel across the street from the opera house where I’ve been staying, proved quite interesting; William Germano, of Cooper Union in New York, spoke fascinatingly on “Wagner in Pieces,” that is fragmentation/breaking things or making them whole, particularly with respect to recording excerpts of Wagner’s music. I’d never noticed before that halfway through the cycle, Old Nothung is destroyed by fire and flood to create New Nothung the way the entire universe is at the end of the cycle. Then Jean-Jacques Nattiez, author of the wonderful book Wagner Androgyne, spoke about the Chéreau production of Bayreuth 1976, with which he was closely involved, and in particular took us through the DVDs explaining all those things which the camera didn’t quite pick up. In the afternoon, we heard from Wayne Gooding, editor of Opera Canada, with a history of singing Mime, Alberich, and Hagen (including some very old stuff which I’d never heard), and a round table panel of singers from the production. The audience started to hijack the conversation to crab about the non-representational Siegfried they’d seen the day before, although it was hardly the right forum since none of the directors nor company artistic staff were there. The singers did the best they could!

THAT’S NOT SIEGFRIED!

I was disappointed with yesterday’s Siegfried production, which had the one nice feature of starting at 2 in the afternoon so we were out in time for dinner (risotto with shrimp down the street from the opera house). Because not only did it seem to me the audience wasn’t going for it, I found the entire approach wrong-headed on the following counts:

Set in a dream-world. The idea, I’m assuming, was to focus on the psychological issues in the story; Freudian or Jungian or whoever readings of the fairy-tale opera as about psychological growth. Well, maybe. But you can do that in any kind of production, so long as you have the text and the music. The dream-world set here seemed principally to afford the virtue of cheapness. There were two beautiful set pieces, for Act One and Act Two, and just a big pile of supers for Act Three. It was all black and white, and although the imagery was occasionally beautiful, the longeurs were vast.

Moreover, a ‘dream-like’ mise-en-scène--think films like Cocteau’s Belle et la Bête, or Buñuel, or Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland, or Robert Wilson or even Beckett--in my experience this approach usually either puts the audience to sleep or makes them work really really hard. The staging keeps contradicting the titles; the audience didn’t pay to have to reconcile each contradiction, to be constantly wondering “Now why did they ignore that part?”

Siegfried is a comedy. Now, we have Wagner’s word for it, and I’m not insisting! I’ve been to wonderful Siegfrieds that don’t try really hard for comic effect. I’m just saying, there needs to be a lightness, a joie de vivre about the experience. Which was so extremely lacking in the theater yesterday I was ready to scream. I was scared to take a note or two on the piece of paper in my lap, for fear the sound of the paper crinkling might disturb the silence-of-the-dead that reigned in the audience. Not a giggle at Siegfried’s pathetic oboe/reed blowing; the only levity they allowed themselves was a chuckle at “Ich will dem Kind nur den Kopf abhau’n!” and (depsite not having a title) a smirk at “Das ist kein Mann!” Not to toot our own horn, but when we did a production last summer, which certainly didn’t TRY to be funny, the audience was laughing most of the way through the show, having a great time. It can be funny and touching at the same time. I believe that’s what Wagner wanted.

The real issue yesterday was a strangely pale presentation of the central character. Christian Franz can certainly sing the piece, beautifully. But his greatest moments are sottovoce, long and pianissimo and exquisite and usually incredibly sad, when he’s longing for his mother or complaining to the bird about his loneliness. He didn’t give us a trace of the lusty hothead youth, the reckless, ADD teenager--which, again, is what the show is about. When he’s not bursting with energy (whether because the director told him to do everything in slow-motion, like a dream, or because he’s playing to his strengths, which include exquisite preciousness but no balls-to-the-wall wild excitement) this show doesn’t add up to much. Because of the dream-like staging, we didn’t get close enough to any of the other characters to care about them. So it ended up, as I say, being a disappointing day.

Today, Toronto’s great Ring Symposium #3! And on to the end of all things tomorrow.

SO THAT’S WHERE HE GOT THE IDEA

Tonight, eager to take a night off from the sound of huge German Romantic music with big voices singing in German, I went over to Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall for...Beethoven’s 9th! (My friends who are going to the Kirov Ring in Orange County next week are going to hear Boris on the off night between Walküre and Siegfried. Now that’s just plain crazy.) It’s part of the newly invigorated Toronto Symphony’s fall presentation of all the Beethoven symphonies, and I was especially eager to go when I found out that Brett Polegato was the bass soloist. Brett made his Seattle Opera debut last fall as Henry Miles in Jake Heggie’s End of the Affair, and I think he’s an amazing performer. That particular role, played by Peter Cushing in the old film of Graham Greene’s novel and Stephen Rea in the more recent film, was never so sympathetic and melancholy as when Brett embodied it. He wowed Seattle with a beautiful lyric baritone, at the time; but I wondered how he would cope with the bass range of the Beethoven 9th. Turns out he has the bottom notes, too, although the important thing about the bass in the B9 is the surprise beginning must be glorious, with the “O Freunde! Nicht diese Töne” recit--Brett’s was--and, amid shouts of “Freude!” from the vast chorus, you have to do a nice job singing everybody’s favorite tune, the Ode to Joy, the first time we hear a full vocal statement of it. Brett’s a brilliant singer, due back in Seattle before long, and led the charge of four fine Canadian soloists in a wonderful performance of this symphony.

It turned out to be a good thing to hear midway through Wagner’s Ring, because of my oft-repeated assertion: Wagner picks up where Beethoven left off. Beethoven’s 9th is halfway between a ‘normal’ symphony, like his 5th, and Wagnerian music drama. And Wagner’s musical language, in the Ring, has more in common with Beethoven’s 9th than it does with any opera of the day. Everybody likes to say that tomorrow’s opera, Siegfried, is the 3rd movement scherzo of a 4-movement symphony, as though the Ring were really a big Beethoven symphony. Maybe it is; but if so, it’s the 9th, writ even larger. (I think in terms of time the 9th is shorter than any one act of the Ring!) The Ring shares with the 9th a wild profusion of different formal references, its chaotic, organic structure, its self-conscious pushing the extremes, trying for heights and depths of emotion and experience--not to mention specifically musical things like the dense motivic work, the tendency to enjoy weird and unexpected harmonies, and the expansion of the orchestra and the extreme difficulty of the writing. I’m sure the Bellini-esque ‘endless melody’ of Beethoven’s third movement was a great influence on Wagner in daring to write those long musical paragraphs which we Wagner fans so enjoy.

Wagner himself was a huge champion of Beethoven’s 9th, which was written in 1824 but really just baffled audiences until Wagner started conducting it twenty years later. Here’s a teaser from my famous screenplay, Monster God: part of the sequence where Wagner, assisted by his close friend Theodor Uhlig (a violinist in his orchestra), presents the 9th as Kapellmeister in Dresden in 1846. Minna and Wagner were infertile, and they knew it. Bakunin really said what I have him say.

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INT: LEIPZIG, SAXONY: MUSIC LIBRARY: AFTERNOON: SEPTEMBER, 1832:

YOUTH WAGNER, 19 years old, is copying music out of an enormous score onto loose sheets of staff paper.

WAGNER (VOICE-OVER, YEARS LATER, TO UHLIG):
I heard it at a Gewandhaus concert in Leipzig, when I was a student. Reissiger was right, it emptied the hall. But I couldn’t believe what I heard. I spent a week copying out the score, not sleeping...I wanted to understand how it all fit together. I thought I was Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods.

Beethoven’s 9th MONTAGE. WE HEAR the opening of the first movement, and see:

A. YOUTH WAGNER copying out the score. CLOSE-UP on the pen, scratching ink across the paper. CLOSE-UP on his eyes. The open 5ths of the opening.
B. BOY WAGNER watching the strings tuning up in the park, gaping in awe. But we’re hearing Beethoven’s Ninth.
C. WAGNER enacting Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”: he climbs the top of a snowy mountain peak and gazes out on frozen infinity.

WE HEAR music from the second movement. MONTAGE continues:

D. WAGNER rehearsing the orchestra. He is inspiring, likeable, easy to follow. He tells a joke and the orchestra laughs; even KARL LIPINSKY, the concertmaster, cracks a smile.
E. KIDS running around Dresden putting up posters on the sides of buildings: “PALM SUNDAY GALA CONCERT, SYMPHONY No. 9 BY LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN”

WE HEAR music from the third movement. MONTAGE continues:

F. WAGNER and UHLIG, working late at night in WAGNER’S study. UHLIG is playing the theme at the piano, WAGNER is conducting. Lots of passion in the room. They are falling, platonically, in love.
G. WAGNER and MINNA, having dinner at UHLIG’S house with the violinist and HIS WIFE. Toasting, clinking glasses. A NURSE brings in UHLIG’S 3 year-old SON and baby DAUGHTER for good-night kisses. Love flows freely in this family. WAGNER notices. He takes MINNA’S hand beneath the table. Deep sorrow between them.

WE HEAR the chorus singing the main tune of the Ode to Joy. MONTAGE continues:

H. WAGNER at podium, in Dresden’s Frauenkirche, leading huge forces in the Palm Sunday Gala performance. Huge orchestra, chorus of at least 200. Audience is packed. WAGNER is leaping about like Leonard Bernstein.

INT: DRESDEN, SAXONY: FRAUENKIRCHE: AFTERNOON: APRIL, 1846:

End of Beethoven’s Ninth. The crowd goes wild--leaps to their feet, screaming, waving, blowing kisses, throwing shredded programs down from the top of the church.

WAGNER is exhausted. He turns around to face them, accepts applause, shares it with the performers. Tears in his eyes.

INT: DRESDEN, SAXONY: FRAUENKIRCHE: AFTERNOON (LATER): APRIL, 1846:

WAGNER is standing in front of the first pew, receiving accolades. Most of the crowd is still swarming around them. UHLIG approaches with another man.

UHLIG:
Wagner, I have someone I’d like you to meet...Hans von Bülow. He’s a pianist.

HANS VON BÜLOW, 20 years old, another dour-looking young man, is beaming on WAGNER. He doesn’t usually beam on anyone...but he can’t help himself.

VON BULOW:
Maestro...what a performance! What an honor, to be here!

WAGNER
Thank you, young man!

But the conversation cannot begin. WAGNER is grabbed, spun around, and vigorously embraced by a giant bear of a man: MIKHAIL BAKUNIN, the hairy Russian anarchist.

BAKUNIN:
Glorious!
(kisses Wagner's cheek)
Magnificent!
(kisses the other)
Almost makes one believe in God! I tell you, if all the music ever written were to burn up, in a great apocalyptic fire that would soon consume the earth, this symphony must survive! Even if they have to die for it! Beethoven’s Ninth will live forever!

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Anyways, I heard it all, tonight, in a very nice performance. Roy Thompson Hall (or maybe it was just where I was sitting) doesn’t support the dynamic range of the new opera house; I did want the pianos to be more pianissimo, and the really loud stuff (about a minute into the first movement, for example) to hurt. (It didn’t.) But I can’t fault any of the playing, and Peter Oundjian certainly did a wonderful job at the podium--a few tempi I’d never heard, in the last movement, but they all worked.

Tonight’s was a Gala Performance; I wasn’t the only Ring patron there, and there were plenty of money people who’ve just put down the company’s deficit and apparently a few politicos as well. The evening began with a rousing rendition of “O Canada”, which always reminds me of Ralph Wiggum at Model U.N. in The Simpsons. I was kidding Brett about this, at the reception later on, when another Canuck joined him in teasing me about the ever-decreasing strength of the American dollar. Bizarrely enough, this fellow turned out to be Fraser, the famous boy soprano who saved Seattle Opera’s 1993 Turn of the Screw, now a strapping 20-something countertenor who had just been singing in Lord of the Rings: The Musical! here in Toronto, and the three of us had a little Seattle Opera reunion. In case a photo turns up in some Seattle Opera publication in the near future, remember, you read about it here first.

THE CANADIAN VALKYRIE

Switching directors one night into a Ring cycle exacerbates the already remarkable difference between the first two operas. Everyone knows that Walkure has always been the most popular opera of the Ring; I've never had so glaring an illustration of why that might be the case as tonight and last night. Rheingold, given all the stars are properly aligned, is still next-to-impossible to stage successfully; Walkure, given great opera performers, is one of the most affecting things in the history of the human race. Last night, we had a Rheingold directed by a designer--thus, some interesting ideas in the set, at least in the first three scenes, but really not too much else to speak of. Nothing about the humanity of the characters and how they interact (admittedly the text doesn't give you a heck of a lot to work with, but good directors and performers are resourceful). Tonight, we had a Walkure directed by one of the great Canadian film directors, Atom Egoyan (born in Egypt, Armenian descent, raised in Canada), whose The Sweet Hereafter moved me so strongly, when I saw it in the theater nine years ago, that I still remember the emotions I felt vividly--even though I never saw it a second time.

That same feeling already occupies the sound and the space in the first scene of Walkure--a life very remote, northern, cold, dull, aching, unspeakably sad. Life defined entirely by the awful mystery of death. From Egoyan's film I had somehow filed that feeling away as definitively Canadian; I was thrilled to recognize it in his Canadian staging of Walkure. The director/designer of Rheingold gave Egoyan a unit set, reminiscent of the basic space of Rheingold, with the door to Valhalla at the back and lots of lights and scaffolding everywhere. A great tree had been chopped down, with a chainsaw, probably somewhere in some frozen forest in northern Canada; it lay in three huge pieces in the center of the raked stage, with rubble from its crash and dirt and mess everywhere. Sieglinde and Hunding apparently lived in this crater; they were scavengers, like the humans in a Matrix or Terminator film, living an existence of astonishing deprivation (physical and emotional). Even Siegmund, who owned suspenders, seemed to be better off than the two of them...at Hunding's entrance, I wondered if Egoyan had been trying to riff on the contemporary hip street kid look, since he was wearing an extremely tattered hoodie and had about five bike messenger bags strapped around him.

That was it. That was the set, the look. The Valhalla people were dressed as they had been last night, all in black all the time. Acts 2 and 3 took place in the same spot. And it was one of the best Walkures I can remember seeing.

It was great because Walkure doesn't need much, in the way of production elements! The third act, admittedly, is a challenge; it opens with the Ride, which ought to be spectacular, contains an incredibly complicated scene with ten individuals in conflict, and closes with Magic Fire, which ought to be spectacular too. But the body of the Act 3, like all of Acts 1 and 2, is a conversation...two or three people sitting around talking. It doesn't really matter WHERE they do that, so long as the conversation is good.

It's good when you have strong performers and a great director who can shape their work. We had all that tonight. I didn't know any of the six principals (I knew some of the Valkyries), but they all had strengths, and in collaboration with Egoyan they all played to their strengths. Hunding, played by the bass who did the appealing Fafner last night, was totally credible as the kind of guy you might find in the Yukon, or the Northwest Territories, scrounging for a living and not really to blame for the fact that his world encourages him to do what he does to Sieglinde. The twins were less touchy-feely with each other than I've often seen, but again I found it credible as people in a world of extreme emotional deprivation, where intimacy and touching are simply not permissable. With that in mind, the few times they did touch were that much more powerful, and the end of the first act--Siegmund cuts Sieglinde's fingers with Nothung as he sings "Bluhe denn Walsungenblut!" and we see the blood and hear her gasp, and then she wipes the blood on her face as she kisses him--was overwhelming. Although Fricka was colder than I'd prefer, and Brunnhilde a little too mature already for my taste (Steph and Jane spoil me), their scenes with a wonderfully sympathetic Wotan were touching and compelling. In particular, Brunnhilde's and Wotan's reactions to the long speeches they make to each other in Acts 2 and 3 define good opera acting. It's worth flying across the continent, I find, to watch Brunnhilde curl up into a fetal ball for protection, quivering with horror, when her father screams out for "Das Ende! Das Ende!"--an end which, we know, she will eventually be the one to give him--or to notice Wotan sobbing with joy as Brunnhilde explains to him what happened when she talked with Siegmund, and then catch himself and start snarling at her (and watch HER reaction to that, and so on). Great acting is being wide open and available to your scene partners--and that we had, in this Walkure, in spades.

Last night I heard Das Rheingold here at the Canadian Opera Company’s brand-spanking new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. It’s so new the street in front of the building is still under construction, causing traffic nightmares almost as bad as the jam on the narrow stairs down from the lecture space! (There’s no lecture hall, but rather a tiered area up in the lobbies, with glass walls looking onto the street, where a University of Toronto lecturer last night played through a list of motives before the show.) But I forgive traffic problems at a company that’s doing a Ring the right way--with way too many education events! These little pre-show motif reminders are simply the tip of the iceberg. They’ve had a huge symposia series, backstage tours, Wagner movie nights, and (I’m particularly glad to see) lots of events for kids, including a huge Ring summer camp program. Their publicity is admirable. Since I got to town everywhere, not only are there banners on every street lamp and ads on every bus, all the random Joes I’ve talked to--cab drivers, waiters, a person at the waterfront--know it’s here, it’s happening, it’s OUR TOWN.

But a Ring is not, in the end, about its education events, no matter how much I might like that to be the case. Is it about singing? About music? About the choices made by directors and designers? What shall I go on and on about? This particular Ring is extra special in that it is taking the new theater for its maiden voyage; and because of the odd design team structure. Rheingold was designed and directed by Michael Levine. He has designed the other three operas, too; but he worked with three different directors. (Something like this happened in Stuttgart, a few years back, and in Riga, recently.)

So: first things first. It’s a lovely theater! Very small, very simple, not ostentatious by the slightest stretch of the imagination. But bright, open, pleasant spaces, lots of slightly tan wood. And excellent acoustics, at least (last night) from Row R. With a great performer like Richard Berkeley-Steele as Loge, I could hear and understand every single word. The clarity of the orchestral playing was remarkable; I confess I heard something last night I’ve never before heard in Rheingold, a jazzy trumpet riff reminiscent of Mahler, accompanying Loge’s complaint to Wotan in Scene Four “But then I won’t be keeping my promise to the Rhinedaughters!” “Schlimm dann stehst mit mein Versprechen!” That’s been there all these years, and I never noticed it?

I was happy to run backstage afterwards and greet some old friends from Jet City, Richard Berkely-Steele, Richard Paul Fink, Tom Truhitte, and Julie Makerov, an unusually compelling Freia with a great vocal presence. (She was our Rosalinde last winter.) There’s lots of people here I don’t know, but I’m working on that this week! Strange thing about the whole cast--before last night I had never seen a Rhinegold where Fafner was the most appealing character.

In terms of Mr. Levine’s contributions, the greatest single drawback was a lack of differentiation among the gods. Who are these characters, anyway? Costumes were vaguely late Victorian, mostly black and white, and I talked to people in the audience who couldn’t distiguish, for instance, Fricka from Freia from Erda from the many other ladies onstage--they all wore severely black dresses. It felt to me as though he must have run out of time or money midway through the last scene: Erda had no entrance to speak of, she just wandered on; there was no storm and no rainbow, and Valhalla was a small space which opened between two panels at the back of the stage.

Earlier in the production, Levine had had some really remarkable ideas. The Rhinedaughters are constantly referring to the “Bett” of the riverbed; he took that literally, and opened the opera in a billowy space that’s all sheets and pillows. Wotan, center stage, sound asleep in his bed. The three Rhinedaughters emerge out of the sheets, have a pillow fight with these weird balloon-like slow-motion pillows, and Alberich tries to crawl up out of Wotan. By the end of the scene he’s emerged, but he can’t move very fast, and most of the scene he and Wotan were stuck together like Siamese twins in all sorts of weird attitudes. The sheets are lit bluish at the beginning, but they turn all gold after a sudden cue at the first renunciation motif.

Similarly, the Valhalla of Scene Two and Nibelheim were kind of interesting. We had what Weta Workshop in New Zealand would call a ‘big-ature’ of Valhalla. There was a central rotunda (think US Capitol Building) which flew down and into place (supers/dancers took it off its ropes and set it where it belonged on a table) while others wheeled on tables with lots of extra wings (think Versailles), which took up most of the stage. At each of the turns and corners in the model castle there was a tower--they reminded me at first of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, with all those minarets, then as I looked closer I thought of Toronto’s own CN Tower, which is just a few blocks away. Whatever it is, it’s far and away the most phallic Valhalla I’ve ever seen.

After Scene Two, the extras wheel most of the model away, but they bring the center section with the rotunda forward. A catwalk flies down, with Alberich upon it, and he drapes the sheet he stole from the river over the castle. Valhalla is now wrapped in a protective gold coating--no way it’s getting any STDs. Alberich uses it as his hoard, throughout Scene Three, masturbating with the minarets when he’s fantasizing about raping all the goddesses. The magic tricks were kind of fun: to turn invisible, he simply put on the gold helmet; he was wearing gold, and so blended into this great gold heap. That itself was lame, but was a good setup for the dragon--he puts on the helmet, and the big thing under the sheet starts wiggling here and there, in a kind of mysterious and gross way. Then, when he’s the frog, something under the sheet is hopping. All in all, it was a more explicitly sexual Nibelheim scene than I can remember (“Oh, can you be large? What about small?”) in a dreamlike and unsettling way.

We just took a city bus and harbor boat tour. Off now to high English tea! More late tonight.

I'm about to head off on yet another RingTrek, this one a jaunt up to Toronto for the third round of the Canadian Opera Company's first-ever production of the tetralogy, inaugurating their new home. So watch this space! Hopefully there will be more, here, in the week to come.

Updates on issues left dangling at the end of my last great WagnerQuest:

The screenplay to "Monster God" is coming along; we're past the "Morning Confession" letter and about to ship out to Venice. It's already way too long, as should be expected with this particular composer.

My young nephew got a gift from me in the mail the other day, a two-cd kid-friendly version of the Ring, along with a set of P. Craig Russell's cartoons for his very own. According to his dad, it went over well; he holed himself up in his bedroom for three hours, listening to the discs and studying the pictures, and then, when they were listening to it in the car, didn't want to get out because that would interrupt the story. I believe his parents have now taken out a hit on me...time to leave the country!

And of course Seattle Opera's first ever "International Wagner Competition" was a great hit with the public, and we plan to do it again in a few years. But there'll be more Wagner before then!