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.