'Das ende, das ende!'

I've heard that the most difficult scene to stage in all of opera is the end of Götterdämmerung, which concludes Wagner's monumental Ring of the Nibelung, because so many things have to happen in a very short span.

In 84 bars (about 3-1/2 minutes):

• Siegfried's funeral pyre is lit, and Brünnhilde jumps on her horse and rides into the fire, carrying the Ring and proclaiming her devotion to Siegfried. 
• The Gibichung Hall, where most of the shenanigans of Götterdämmerung have taken place, collapses into ruins. 
• The Rhine overflows, and the Rheinmaidens swim in to claim the Ring from the pyre. 
• Hagen, who was born and raised for the sole purpose of reclaiming the Ring for the Nibelung Alberich, plunges into the water screaming "Zurück vom Ring! ("Away from the Ring!")
• As one of the Rheinmaidens holds up the Ring in triumph, the other two grab Hagen and pull him under the water, drowning him. 
• In the distance, Valhalla can be seen burning, with all of the gods inside.

From that point, the orchestra takes control, reminding us in magnificent Wagnerian style of the heroism of Siegfried and the compassion of Brünnhilde, that the era of the gods has passed and that a new era has dawned.

I've heard that to pull off any production of the Ring successfully, the director has to work out that final scene of Götterdämmerung first. If you can do that, everything else in this four-opera, 18-hour spectacle can fall into place. 

I fear that Robert Lepage, director of the current Metropolitan Opera production of the Ring, didn't do that. In developing his concept, he seems to have been preoccupied with getting his Machine to work and meeting the stringent deadlines of getting that first performance of Rheingold onto the Met stage. In performance, it almost looks like the staging of the end of Götterdämmerung was an afterthought.

Here's what happens:

• Grane, Brünnhilde's steed, is represented by a mechanical horse, which works OK when it's accompanying Siegfried on a boat on the Rhine. But when Brünnhilde makes her ultimate sacrifice to save the world, she climbs up on this metal contraption and is pulled slowly toward the pyre -- hardly an epic gesture of selflessness.
• There's no representation that I noticed of the Gibichung Hall collapsing, which Wagner intended as a physical analogy for the end of the corrupt Gibichung line. Plenty of productions leave this out, as that point is kind of obvious, so I have no quibble with Lepage doing the same.
• The flooding of the Rhine is projected on the Machine, and the Rheinmaidens hold up the Ring. But then Hagen, who's been standing over to the side for all this, kind of stumbles into the slightly lowered area just in front of the Machine, clumsily grabs for the Rheinmaidens, and then they do an utterly unconvincing job of drowning him.
• The Machine's planks reposition themselves, and instead of Valhalla burning with all the gods inside, we see on top of the Machine various statues of the gods, which crumble. Kind of anticlimactic, especially when it's accompanied by some of the most climactic music ever written. At least the statues just crumbled. I understand that in the very first performances of this, the heads of the statues exploded, one by one, in a rather cartoonish ending for one of opera's great dramas.

In the final bars, we see the Machine bathed in blue making a wave motion. This is the first image we saw at the beginning of Das Rheingold, representing the primeval waters of the Rhine, and it's return at the very end of Götterdämmerung is quite effective. Too bad what leads up to it didn't really work. 

What's particularly disappointing in all this is that with all the things they can make the Machine do -- all the shapes it can take, the wonderful projections, the grand size of the thing -- they couldn't come up with anything that made the audience go "Wow! That was like the end of the world!"

A lot of controversy is generated by directors these days, especially in productions of Wagner, by moving around the time and place of the operas, "deconstructing" them, adding unnecessary elements, emphasizing some "message," using shock just so people will remember them, even in some cases changing the story, and all the other trappings of "regietheater." I've long contended that what directors should be doing is using the marvelous techniques and advanced technology that are available today, and that weren't there in the 19th century, to tell Wagner's story! Don't try to impose a different story on Wagner's music. Your "genius" in making such attempts pales in comparison to his theatrical genius. If you have your own story to tell, write your own damn opera. Don't burden Wagner's music with your pathetic ego trip, which your apologists defend as "artistic expression."

That said, it's obvious to me that Mr. Lepage set out to do exactly what I've suggested, and for that he deserves praise. He wanted to create a new and fantastical way to tell the story of the Ring, and let the audience take something new from Wagner's story. For the most part, I think Lepage's Machine succeeded. And certainly it's true that no production of the Ring is "perfect," because of its inherent size and complexity. But for whatever reasons -- time, money, having to worry more about the Machine than the production -- he wasn't able to get this Ring as close to perfect as we've come to expect from a house like the Met.

I'm really glad I got to see this production of the Ring so close to Wagner's bicentenary. Despite some problems with the Machine and the production, it was a thrill to hear it performed by such excellent singers and the superb Met orchestra. To all involved: "Heil!"

The boy from East Texas who never learned fear

My bicentenary pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to see Wagner's complete Ring of the Nibelung was a musical treat. While the production and Robert Lepage's noisy Machine may have fallen a little short, the cycle I attended was extremely good, musically.

The Met orchestra under Fabio Luisi seemed only a blip down from where it was a few years ago under James Levine, who I think is one of the great Wagner conductors of our time, especially when leading this, one of the great Wagner pit bands. Luisi took things a little faster than Levine in several places, which was refreshing, although I've always greatly admired Levine's interpretations of Wagner.

Of course, the Ring requires a huge cast to cover all the gods, giants, Nibelungs and all their offspring. Some noteworthy performances from the cycle I saw in late April and early May:

• Mark Delavan made his Met debut as Wotan this year. He sang powerfully and portrayed magnificently the head god's majesty as well as his very human weaknesses.
• Stephanie Blythe as his wife, Fricka, brings sympathy and emotion to her character, who is too often portrayed simply as a shrew.
• Gerhard Siegel played Mime with just the right balance of making you feel sorry for him and hating his evil intentions.
• Richard Croft as Loge was better than I expected. This is a role that doesn't require a huge Wagnerian voice, and I'm sure it's a fun role to play.
• Hans-Peter König was the only singer to appear in all four of the music dramas (none of the characters appears in all four). His often-sinister bass served him well as Fafner the Giant in Das Rheingold, Hunding in Die Walküre, Fafner the Dragon in Siegfried, and Hagen in Götterdämmerung.
• Simon O'Neill and Martina Serafin made an almost perfect Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre.
• The Scottish tenor Iain Paterson has the sound, the good looks and just the right amount of royal arrogance for the feudal lord Gunther in Götterdämmerung.
• Soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer was both sincere and gullible as Gunther's sister, Gutrune. I wonder when we'll get to hear her in a more substantial Wagnerian role, like Sieglinde?

I have become a big fan of Eric Owens as Alberich. This American bass-baritone is a superb singer and actor with a commanding stage presence. He really brings out the pure evil of the character. Alberich appears in three of the four parts of the Ring, and with each one his time onstage gets shorter. I heard that Owens once complained (in jest) that he's the title character of the whole shebang -- the Nibelung who forged the Ring -- and yet in Götterdämmerung he appears onstage for all of 10 minutes out of a 5-plus-hour performance!

And then there's Siegfried, the lad who never learns fear. Jay Hunter Morris hails from Paris, Texas, and he's essentially a big ol' redneck with a wonderful, thick, down-home East Texas drawl, who just happens to sing opera. But when you put him on the Met stage, you'd think he was born and raised in the heart of Bavaria. He doesn't have the really big heldentenor voice for which this role was intended, but he knows when to hold back and when to let go, so by the end of a five-hour performance of Siegfried, he's barely lost an ounce of stamina. And you can tell he's having a blast acting his part, which he does very well.

One thing I always listen for in any Götterdämmerung performance is the incredibly treacherous vocal leap that Siegfried has to take in the last act, when he's calling out to the hunting party. It's an octave leap to a high C, and I have heard many very good heldentenors miss it completely -- it is, after all, coming near the end of a very long and demanding role. Morris nailed it (as he did in the HD telecast in 2012), perhaps not as forcefully as you'd want, but he did nail it. And he does it by singing it exactly as Wagner wrote it -- with an eighth-rest right before the high C, which gives the singer just enough time to adjust his voice for that cruelly high note.

At the end of the night, when the cheers come raining down for Morris, he always acknowledges the orchestra, as many singers do, but he also always leans over and extends his hand into the prompter's box at the foot of the stage, shaking hands with another of the many professionals who support the singers and other musicians at the Met. Morris is nothing if not gracious.

The Met presented three Ring cycles this year, and as often happens, the headliners in the major roles sang in two of them, with other singers getting their chance on the stage of the Big House in one of the cycles. For Delavan, Morris and Owens, that meant skipping the third cycle. The marquee Brünnhilde (she's on all the posters and promotional literature) was Deborah Voigt, but she sat out the middle cycle, which is the one I attended.

I've always wanted to see and hear Voigt in a live performance. She was long heralded as the up-and-coming dramatic soprano who would eventually step into this most demanding of roles. I wonder if she just waited too long in her career to do it, or I've heard that her weight-loss surgery of a few years ago affected her voice. But hearing her on the radio and reports from those who've heard her in the house leave little doubt that she isn't really up to the part.

The Brünnhilde in this cycle was Katarina Dalayman, who was superb. Despite a little bit of a shriek in her highest notes, she did a remarkable and very enjoyable job, from her treacherous opening Valkyrie Battle Cry to the closing Immolation scene.

The third act of Siegfried is always tough because Siegfried has been onstage singing for several hours before he awakens Brünnhilde, who's coming in fresh. Dalayman's big sound was a little mismatched with the smaller-voiced Morris, but they pulled off their exhilarating duet convincingly.

And the chorus in Götterdämmerung? Well, it's the Met chorus, which is simply the best. And choral writing was one of Wagner's strong suits -- too bad he didn't do more of it.

NEXT: Das ende

'The Ring' in a railroad freight yard

In commemoration of Richard Wagner's 200th birthday, I recently attended a performance of The Ring of the Nibelung at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

This is the Met's relatively new production, directed by Robert Lepage, that's sometimes referred to as "The Machine Ring" because the set for the entire four-opera marathon consists of a 45-ton series of 24 aluminum planks that rotate on an axis and can be manipulated into almost any needed shape -- from the waters of the Rhine River to a rocky mountaintop to a dense, lush forest to the inside of a feudal castle. Creative use of interactive projections on the planks and effective background lighting make the Machine an amazing piece of stagecraft worthy of the Met and this monumental work of art.

Theoretically.

The main problem, to my amateur senses, is that it's very noisy! Anytime it moves, there's clanking, creaking and banging. It might have actually worked better if Lepage had changed the setting from Wagner's mythological prehistoric time to a modern-day railroad freight yard! Weirder Ring productions than that have been attempted, unfortunately.

In 2009, I saw Seattle's "Green Ring," with its naturalistic and realistic sets. That production also was set in mythological time. At one of the post-performance Q&As with Seattle Opera's knowledgeable and entertaining general director, Speight Jenkins, an unsuspecting audience member thanked Mr. Jenkins for presenting what he called a "traditional" Ring. Speight was furious!

"This is NOT a traditional Ring," he insisted. A "traditional" Ring, Speight said, would be what he saw at the Met in the early '50s, with a forest represented by trees painted on a background rather than Seattle's forest of realistic-looking onstage trees. And more important, the singers in those days simply came out and stood while singing their part -- they made little effort to act. And one of the Seattle production's many strengths was how the singers brought out and developed the characters' personalities.

In New York, the Lepage Machine, while creating marvelous images for the visual sets, too often takes us back to those days of "traditional," static opera by restricting the singers in interacting with their colleagues. The giants in Rheingold, for example, are separated and elevated by the Machine's set from each other and the gods they're bickering with, which makes their abduction of the goddess Freia look contrived. Sometimes the Machine does get out of the way and let the singers act, but their space is always limited because the area in front of the Machine, which cannot move up- or downstage, is a fraction of the Met stage's generous proportions.

Another problem with the Machine is that it occasionally malfunctions. I consider myself quite lucky that it didn't break down during the cycle I saw in late April and early May.

Lepage's Rheingold was chosen to make its much-hyped debut on opening night of the Met's 2010-11 season. At the end of the opera, the gods are supposed to cross a rainbow bridge and enter their new home, Valhalla. The effect was quite spectacular when I saw it last month. But at the end of that first performance, the bridge was nowhere to be seen, and the gods just ambled off into the wings to some of Wagner's most stirring music. Oops.

More recently, I listened to this season's radio broadcast of Rheingold shortly before my trip to New York. When the head god Wotan and the demi-god of fire, Loge, head down to the caves of Niebelheim, where they intend to steal the Ring, stunt doubles walk down a brightly lit stairway in another very cool effect. But at that point in that Saturday matinee broadcast, there was a loud thud, some clanking, then voices talking frantically, and finally someone saying something about "the conductor," although the music never stopped. Very odd. A friend in New York who attended the performance reported that a malfunction kept the stairway bit from happening, a stagehand had to walk onstage (can't be good if that happens!) to push part of the set back in place, but then a section of it was hanging down in front of the Machine as the next scene was about to begin. When someone told bass-baritone Eric Owens to go ahead with his upcoming entrance, he protested that he couldn't see the conductor. Thus the voices heard on the radio broadcast. Amazingly, conductor Fabio Luisi and the Met orchestra didn't miss a beat, Owens and tenor Gerhard Siegel made their entrances, and somehow the set snafu was resolved. But it made for some tense moments in the house.

The quality of this production was varied -- sometimes the Machine and its accompanying effects were superb, as when it showed all the creepy critters crawling through the forest where Siegfried has grown up, or the "overhead" view of Brünnhilde lying asleep surrounded by fire at the close of Die Walküre.

At other times it fell short. In the very first scene, a little more convincing theft of the Rheingold would have been nice, rather than Alberich with a sack scampering up the Machine's planks to the top of the set while the Rheinmaidens just sit and watch. One sings "Haltet den räuber!" (which pretty well translates to "Stop! Thief!") but they make no effort to actually stop him as he walks right past them.

The end of Act II of Götterdämmerung is supposed to be one of opera's great "awkward moments." Brünnhilde, Hagen and Gunther have just sung their great trio (wait! a trio? in Wagner? yes, it's true, he broke his own "rules," and quite well, I might add) plotting Siegfried's death, each of them with a different reason for it. They are all quite serious at this moment, but who comes in at just the wrong time? Why, it's the happy Siegfried, Gutrune and the wedding party! It would have worked much better with an obvious glance or two between the characters that just hinted at "Oh, it's you. Plotting your death? Uh, no, we'd never do that!" In this production, the plotters just appear kind of grumpy as they take their places in the procession and the curtain falls. The final music of this scene is the sinister motif of the evil Hagen, played by the low strings and bassoons, but there's no acknowledgement of that onstage.

The interactive projections were quite ingenious at times. When the Rheinmaidens sing in the first scene of Rheingold -- they're supposed to be underwater -- bubbles are projected on the planks just behind them at exactly the moments and in exactly the places that they sing. And when one of the characters puts his hand in a projection of water, it realistically ripples out. All a very clever inclusion of technology that really sets the Machine apart.

An audience favorite is the eight Valkyries riding their flying horses during the "Ride of the Valkyries" music. Each sits astride one of the Machine's planks as it bobs up and down like a hobby horse, and as they "land" on the Valkyries' Rock, they slide down their plank one by one as if they were coming down a playground slide. Kind of hokey, but if any scene needs a little humor and hokeyness, it's this one.

Despite the Machine's shortcomings and a few production disappointments, this was actually a quite enjoyable Ring, and the main reason for that is that musically, it was superb (at least in the cycle.I attended).

Check back soon for a rundown of the performances. For rail yard workers, the Met's cast, orchestra and chorus did a masterful job of putting this train together.

Happy 200th birthday, Herr Wagner!

If you could invite anyone, living or dead, to your ultimate dinner party, who would it be?

It's a fun question whose answers can give a peek to a person's interests and beliefs. Historical figures, deceased family members, religious figures, current political, entertainment or business figures often make such lists.

My friends and family might be a little surprised at who most definitely would NOT be on my list: the 19th century German Romantic composer Richard Wagner. They know I have long been an ardent disciple of Wagner's music. He was undoubtedly the most influential composer of the late 19th century: For good or ill, he changed forever the way Western music was composed, played and even listened to. His operas/music dramas permanently changed how music is used in the theater and have always exerted a strong influence on music for film.

But away from the world of music, he was a thoroughly despicable little man. Today we'd call him sleazy. He'd be your dearest BFF, as long as you continued to "loan" him money, or a place to live, or your wife. Once that ended, you'd be among his legion of enemies, which included entire races of people who for whatever reason he thought were conspiring against him. He had no morals.

That dichotomy of unmatched musical genius and deeply flawed character are what have kept Wagner among the most controversial figures in history.

But today, we can set aside that controversy and celebrate the work of a man who has given many of us so many hours of musical pleasure and inspiration. On May 22, 1813, Richard Wilhelm Wagner was born into a dysfunctional theater family in Leipzig.

So I'll put on a recording of Act I of Die Walküre, or maybe the last scene of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg or the "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde -- too many superb examples of his work to choose from! -- cut myself a piece of birthday cake, lift a glass of good German wine, turn toward Bayreuth and wish Herr Wagner a happy 200th birthday!

And be grateful that I won't have to put up with that asshole at my dinner party.

Getting ready ...

I have not posted on my blog for a month, and for that I apologize. During this time, I've been to New York to see a complete performance of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, attended a Dallas Symphony all-Wagner concert and listened to a live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra from Carnegie Hall, which opened with a Wagner prelude.

You get the idea. Lots of Wagner, and there's a reason for it. And on Wednesday, I'll start what will likely be a flurry of posts on all of the above events and more.

In the meantime, study up on singing "Zum Geburtstag viel Glück!"