AWAY FROM THE RING!

Zuruck vom Ring, Hagen's final cry (the last line of the cycle), is an instruction rarely followed by Wagnerites. I managed to get away from the ring at the end of Gotterdammerung last night, at least for a few days until I get back home and get back to work on my screenplay; then in January we'll be doing Rheingold in our Young Artists Program in Seattle; and more full productions will be around before long. I kind of like having one piece to go back to again and again; but perhaps it works in this case because it's so vast, of course it's going to be different each time. Sometimes successful, sometimes not, often partially so, as was the case this week.

We all enjoyed Gotterdammerung quite a bit yesterday. Tim Albery directed, the only one of the four directors in this production with a great deal of opera experience. Good that they gave him the one that really is an old-fashioned opera, after all! But he did a great job--lots of really interesting dynamics and relationships and moments--and I'm curious to see more of his work. The cast made a strong ensemble, and worked well together; I should single out for praise the really strong and watchable 3rd Norn, Birgit Beckhem, the Gunther, John Fanning, the Gutrune, Joni Henson, and of course the glorious Alberich of Richard Paul Fink. In Gotterdammerung, of course, the chorus and orchestra also get to shine. It's an enormous ensemble show, and this great civic festival of Toronto's Ring is nothing if not an ensemble.

I think the other thing we all appreciated so much yesterday was how this production wrapped everything around and really became ONE Ring cycle, despite its many directors. I can't tell you anything about how it happened, but we got lots of echoes of things we'd seen earlier. The light of Loge, for instance: Rhinegold and Walkure had been littered with little metal light fixtures, and yesterday we had Loge lights (one red exit sign onstage for the Norns to talk about at the very top), a big ring of Loge-fire of red exit lights, which flare bloodily at the audience at the end of Act One, and one hanging light, set violently swinging by Gunther as he's about to rape Brunnhilde.

Or the black Valhalla dresses. After the scene in the Rhine, severe Victorian-type women had wrapped the Rhinedaughters in matching severe black 19th century dresses, with corsets and bustles and everything. Then, in W3, the Valkyries wore these dresses, contrasting with the white of the body bags in which they lugged their heros around. In Gotterdammerung, Brunnhilde is dressed like a modern career woman (and she's dyed her hair) but she keeps her old Valkyrie dress on a form in her one-bedroom apartment...until the scene with Waltraute, immediately after which she rips it in shreds. At which point Siegfried/Gunther enters to assault her. Then, at the very end of Act Two, after the trio, all these women wearing all black come in and surround her, each holding out part of a white wedding dress--and it's an unmistakeable reference to death, to all those black-clad Valkyries with the guys in the white body bags from the other night at Walkure.

Or the Rhinedaughters, who come in at the top of Gotterdammerung Act Three looking exactly like the Norns, with black overcoats and black hats. But they strip, after their little "lei la la" trio, down to these very sexy white slips, and suddenly have blue drag queen wigs. They all pile into Brunnhilde's bed, for the scene in which they flirt with Siegfried--and between the blue of the hair, and the sheets of the bed (Flossy does a little strip tease for him, in silhouette behind a sheet held up by her sisters) we're back in the basic space of Rheingold Scene One. Later in the scene the girls go offstage for a quickchange, come back dressed as Norns, and then strip onstage again, this time revealing white dressing gowns almost exactly what they had on in Rheingold Scene One. The point is, it's nice to have all those pieces line up, and finally connect the dots.

There were plenty of other felicities of the production, but the one that was the biggest deal for me came out of the talk William Germano had given the day before, about fragmentation and breaking things in pieces and trying to put them back together. This felicity (I'm assuming) was due to the genius of Tim Albery, the director; at the end of Act One, Siegfried singing downstage right and Gunther walking the part (not really lip synching, but clearly moving as Siegfried's puppet), there's a horribly violent assault of Brunnhilde. Gunther tears the apartment up, throws over the chairs and table, glass shatters everywhere, he sets the light swinging, and directs Brunnhilde upstage to the bed. Then, Siegfried (with Gunther miming it) sings the line to the sword about "Protect my brother's bride"--and Gunther goes up to the bed, Brunnhilde cowering behind it, and very clearly places the sword, hilt towards the audience, in the center of the bed, just as the orchestra is playing the new version of the falling sword octave. I'd never noticed it before, but then again I'd never thought about Germano's topic before yesterday. That's an intermediary version of that motif--usually "No-thung! No-thung!"--but here the emphasis is on the second note. It develops from this form into the two strong steps of the funeral march; and the reason is, Siegfried is killing himself by slicing his own marriage bed in two. He breaks apart what ought to be together. Wagner said it again and again, Siegfried and Brunnhilde each by themselves are nothing, together they become a full person. But here, for the sake of this false friend whom he values more than he does his wife, he gets a divorce. It's a very strong visual image to go with that fearsome musical image, and I encourage all directors to steal from Albery!

Anyways, we had a lively discussion after the performance yesterday, over Indian food (don't think I was going to Toronto and not enjoying some find Indian, as well as Malaysian and Moorocan and Italian and a few other yummy cuisines), and scattered to the nine winds today. (I'm finally posting this overdue entry Monday night, back in Seattle.) We're AWAY from the ring--but not for long!

Many thanks and congratulations to the Canadian Opera Company for their great accomplishment.

A WHITE NIGHT BEFORE A GOD’S TWILIGHT

When I saw Gotterdammerung at Bayreuth, ten years ago, I had spent the night previous up all night with a rowdy crowd of German youth associated with my host, the supertitles guy at the Nürnberg opera. Well, I think I did get a few hours’ sleep, eventually, on the floor of this house under construction where they were squatting. It didn’t make sitting on those uncomfortable Bayreuth seats any easier, although the performance remains fixed in my memory for many musical reasons (visually/dramatically it was pretty stupid). Götterdämmerung this afternoon will have been preceeded (it’s 8 am as I type this) by a similarly wakeful night--Schläfst du, Hagen, mein Sohn?--at Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s first ever “free all-night contemporary art thing” (that’s how it’s billed--the ancient Icelandic parliament used to be called the "Thing"), based on similar civic celebrations--first in Paris four years ago, then in Brussels, Rome, Riga, Montréal, Madrid, and now Toronto.

What is it? 130 installations of all kinds of art, most of it contemporary, most of it kind of weird and challenging for stodgy old opera-goers like me, in every corner of a city, open to the public from 7 pm last night to 7 am this morning. Go to www.livewithculture.ca for more details. Whatever it was, it was a happening, and I’m thrilled that I happened to be here to witness it--even if it means I’ll need more than the usual amount of coffee today at Götterdämmerung!

My own Nuit Blanche experience is easily summed up, since I’m much older than I was ten years ago (far more than ten years older) and can’t really do the all-nighters anymore. I was out till 1 or 2 something, and then got up again at 6 to see things getting wrapped up and watch the sun come up over Toronto’s weird and wonderful Town Hall. Among the exhibits I got to see were the Art Gallery of Ontario open to the public, with a special collection centering around civic issues including some really fascinating 20th century Canadian paintings; OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design, open to the public, with exhibits of work (mostly multimedia) by alumni. The public, I should mention, was all of Toronto’s most tragically hip: they wore uniforms of jeans and hoodies with corduroy blazers, and many were as scruffy as I. The exhibition out on Queen St. “Position Yourself in a Network of Possibilities”, basically a 70s disco dance floor created out on a busy sidewalk, attracted bouncy high schoolers all night long (although it looked like the adults stayed away in droves); “In Pursuit of Happiness” was a large installation featuring two actors and lots of plastic, taking up most of a boulevard median. I didn’t think it’d be worth it to wait in line for hours to get into to Darren O’Donnell’s “Ballroom Dancing”, which seemed to be a middle-school dance, with lots of inflatables, to which adults were invited.

I was interested, however, by Adrian Blackwell’s “Model for a Public Space (speaker)”, a round spiralling bleacher around a central performance space, and beneath a tarp, would have made Richard Wagner’s eyes pop out. (Blackwell defines himself as an anarchist in terms of social hierarchy--he objects to the cultural forces that try to push all artists to greater and greater heights of individuality and celebrity, since that makes collaborative art kind of weird. True! But what are you gonna do? Here we are, across the street, putting on in the Ring perhaps Toronto’s biggest ever collaborative art endeavor--and one artist, Mr. Wagner, at the center of it all. Since this opera company has no General Director but rather a Music Director, the conductor Richard Bradshaw, it’s no accident that there’s no one stage director for the Ring--too much power in one person’s hands! Wagner himself would have had a flurry of contradictory opinions about the questions Blackwell asks, as do education personnel at opera companies worldwide.

Perhaps the most interesting piece was “Roy and Silo’s Gay Divorce, 2006”, a public swimming pool done up with a looping ‘video operetta’, in six chapters viewed in six different spaces, with lots of balloon penguins floating in the pool and all sorts of stuff with frisbees and Penguin books. When I went back past there this morning, it was all roped off by the fire department, so I hope nothing untoward happened. I can barely begin to describe this ‘piece’, except to say it was a typically witty, fractured gay take on questions of marriage, community, homelessness, literature, public order, nature, and lots of other stuff, featuring a naked copywright lawyer singing and showering backwards and two penguins crooning a weird German duet-rewrite of Isolde’s Liebestod, with a very freely translated set of titles. I guess you can do that.