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.