Thoughts on the HD Broadcast of Rheingold

I slipped into the screening at Yale on Saturday, as the plus-one of a Yale-affiliated friend.

Happily, most of my positive impressions from the live performance were confirmed by the broadcast. The look on Eric Owens' face when he is deciding, inwardly, that he will renounce love and forge the Ring was the most moving moment of the afternoon, for me (granted, I was a little jittery from all that caffeine); Stephanie Blythe, too, was a consummate Wagnerian, modulating her emotional state in synch with the orchestra and carrying herself like a goddess.

The amplification did Bryn Terfel a lot of favors as Wotan. His singing did seem far more relaxed, but it was clear that his mic also did a bit of heavy lifting in the bassier bits. It did Richard Croft a few favors as well, apparently, which I only learned secondhand—at the Prima, his Loge had plenty of ping in the back row of Family Circle, the Met's acoustical sweet spot, but apparently he was inaudible enough at Saturday's performance to earn him a few boos. (I still, for the record, have very little sympathy for anybody who booed.) For the broadcast audience, who'd heard him plenty loud, the boos were mystifying.

And the Rainbow Bridge was GREAT. Really spectacular effect.

Disappointments: Somebody's cellphone went off. (Couldn't tell if it was in the theater or the auditorium. "Ringtone des Nibelungen!" I whispered to my date. Yeah, I know.) Were the projections a little off-kilter at first? (The bubbles were rising not from the Rhinemaidens but a little to their right (our left), and ditto with the pebbles in that same scene.) The sound seemed a little compressed. (The opening E-flat wasn't as soft as it might have been, as some commenters here pointed out, and when the orchestra really boiled over it didn't have that hot, hot intensity of the Met's live brass.) Oh and Terfel's Wotan seemed a bit passive (which is an easy mistake to make to make, since he doesn't spend much of the opera DOING anything, but still exactly wrong—everybody's coming to him for help, after all; Terfel needs to convince us that they've got the right guy. He needs to be a King).

All in all, though, it was a happy afternoon at the opera. Movies. Operamovies. Ohmygod, and Brünnhilde tweeted at me!!!

Okay that's all. Boris tonight!

New Das Rheingold at the Met, You Guys

…The entire proscenium
Is covered with a rippling azure scrim.
The three sopranos dart hither and yon

On invisible strings. Cold lights
Cling to bare arms, fair tresses. Flat
And natural aglitter like paillettes
Upon the great green sonorous depths float

Until with pulsing wealth the house is filled,
No one believing, everybody thrilled.

from "Matinées" by James Merrill

THE RING CYCLE. It is so hard to stage! Can we disentangle the deadly vines of poisonous German nationalism from the ash-tree of Wagner's Nordic iconography, or are they in fact joined at the root (METAPHOR!); can we interpret his narrative coherently (complete with gold-grubbing subhumans and inbred purebred Nordic supermen) without echoing his noxious social values; can we even realize his special effects–heavy stage directions convincingly for an audience to whom 19th-century stage technology—and indeed, to a certain extent, any stage spectacle—is something quaint and alienating?

Let's not forget, people, this is an artist who routinely symbolizes divine power with swans, doves, rainbows and flying horses. So if you think that Wagner MUST be staged "literally," that is if you really think this imagery will resonate with contemporary audiences just as it did with his contemporaries, then congrats on having managed to avoid all contact with the past half-century's most revolting kitsch. I mean,

right?

So what do you do! You can go High-Concept, and try to supplant Wagner's elaborate mythological order with another that challenges the composer's Nordic nostalgia directly, or at least to translate it into a rather less cobwebby set of cultural signifiers (e.g., make Wotan a powerful businessman instead of a king, since nowadays "king" = "tyrant" or "figurehead," never "wise but too-proud leader." And you can try and shed some of the kitschy overtones in favor of something with just a bit of a modern edge to it (e.g., make the rainbow bridge a contraption of neon or lasers or something, instead of a greeting-card rainbow).

The design of Robert LePage's production leans towards the latter of these two approaches. Aside from the much-publicized, high-tech unit set, LePage's designs are largely conservative. He's claimed to have drawn inspiration from Wagner's original costumes, but he's updated them in canny ways—three gods wear muscly breastplates reminiscent of the "dark," "edgy" Hollywood reboot of some superhero franchise ("Well, what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?"), and the special effects are interactive CGI projections.

And LePage's use of the technology is impressive. Loge, god of fire, appears surrounded by flame; when the Rhinemaidens sing, bubbles come out; the gods' movements in Valhalla stir the clouds around them. You've probably heard by now about the glitch that screwed up the rainbow bridge, so that instead of entering Valhalla like they had been spending THE ENTIRE OPERA PLANNING TO DO, AT TERRIBLE COST, AND WITH DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES YET TO COME, they all just kind of peaced out. Anybody who'd seen the pre-production photos of that scene was probably all, "Whoops," and anybody who hadn't was probably a little confused and disappointed. So it was a letdown, and one which slightly overshadowed the amazing coups de theatre the set had made possible earlier—but which, on reflection, were a good deal more interesting than anything that the Met's last production had to offer, visually speaking. Wotan and Loge's descent to Nibelheim dazzled the crowd, and when Donner did his stormclouds-and-lightning thing at the end, it was a fucking thrill. And then the little things: small, brilliant LEDs illuminating the Rhinegold, Loge's fiery fingertips, Alberich's helm, and of course his Ring conveyed Magic Power simply and effectively.

But what he didn't use the technology for was also pretty impressive. Once you've got the stage filled with video screens, you can literally do ANYTHING. "Oh, let's put the Vatican behind them, but it's made out of candy and also there's a mushroom cloud." "I can literally do that!" But if you can do anything, it's worth nothing. We might as well be watching it on TV. Another thing LePage said before this Ring debuted was that he wanted to avoid turning it into Avatar, which I wondered if it might be a subtle dig at the Ring put on by Fura dels baus, an unremitting spectacle of constantly shifting video imagery, stage contraptions and acrobatics: LePage is often content to keep the stage still during the moments when the human drama is supposed to be at the fore; the gods stomp around Valhalla and sing, and the drama is communicated with good old-fashioned blocking—at any given moment in this staging, you can read a character's relationships to everyone else in how and where they're standing—and, yes, singing. (I'll get to the singing in a bit, I promise.)

In some ways, this was the Rheingold of my dreams. In a word, the opera is "elemental": it takes place in the heavens, underwater, and underground; it's about fire and gold and rainbows, pure and intense colors of light. LePage's set emphasizes the vertical strata on which the drama unfolds—divine, human, and subhuman planes of existence—and the "sky" behind it is colored by a single horizontal band of light, glowing behind a scrim, so that (for instance) in the first scene, when the Rhinemaidens sing about their gold's awakening in the morning sun, the blue above them transforms to a golden glow.

One advantage of working from Wagner's costume designs and all of these vertical levels is that the giants didn't end up looking completely retarded, as they do in just about every other production of the Ring ever. Somebody ends up putting Fafner and Fasolt on platform boots with giant latex hands and coneheads and TA DAH, you're looking at John Travolta and Forest Whitaker in Battlefield Earth.

(THEY ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THIS. WHY DO THEY ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THIS.) Instead, LePage gave us giants in slightly chunky costumes standing above and behind the rest of the cast at every appearance, so that a sort of false perspective made them seem Huge and Looming.

I am a total snob, of giants, and this production passed the test. I was a little dismayed when the death of Fasolt earned an unintentional laugh from the crowd; this is one of the trickiest bits of business in the opera. It's so oddly timed—the brothers get the Ring, Fafner kills Fasolt for it, Wotan says "oh snap," and then life goes on. Considering that this Cain & Abel moment (or should I say Sméagol & Déagol moment?) is the greatest act of violence in the entire opera, it's strangely underplayed. It was satisfyingly brutal here: when Fafner hit him with his spear, I thought, "That wasn't hard enough to kill him! That's lousy fight choreography"; then Fasolt moved a little and I was like "Oh whoops he's not dead," and then Fafner beat him some more and finally impaled him, and it was horrifying. Great! Then, as if to reflect the way Wagner and his characters shrug off the murder, the giant robo-set moved in such a way as to unceremoniously dump the body offstage, and he slid down kind of like this. Hmm. Well, It was an ingenious gesture, and I'm sorry it didn't come off as dramatically as it should've.

There were also laughs during Alberich's transformation into a dragon, which I was a little uncomfortable with at first, even though this actually is supposed to be a funny scene. Again, the laughs come from Wagner's own timing, and I probably shouldn't have worried about it—it's not a bad dragon. (The toad is even more low-tech—it's not even a puppet; it just "hops" onstage and is captured.)

I guess part of the reason I was uncomfortable is that Alberich, in this production, is not the stupid little clown we're used to seeing; in fact, he's fucking terrifying. I didn't want to read any reviews of this performance before writing this, but I couldn't help running across this one:

and, yup. You'll recall that I last saw Eric Owens threatening to destroy the world in Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at the New York Phil; he was pretty scary then, and he was even scarier this time. He was funny when he had to be—scrambling up the pebbly CGI shoal to chase the Rhinemaidens—but his humiliation was also painful to watch, and when he promised to take his revenge upon the Earth, it was all too believable. (It helped that the boiling intensity of James Levine's brass section seethed up out of the pit straight up to the back row of the Family Circle and SCALDED MY FACE OFF at this point.) He is my new favorite Alberich, I think. He and LePage created a really terrific villain.

All of the singers were champs, really. Bryn Terfel, sharping and hollering a little in the lower register, is maybe not a born Wotan, but as my friend Maury pointed out afterwards, who is nowadays (COME BACK JAMES MORRIS), and whatever the condition of the low notes, all of the high notes were magnificent blasts from the Terfel Trombone. The Croft brothers, Sid and Marty Dwayne and Richard, were superb as Donner and Loge respectively—especially Richard Croft, whose voice has a far sweeter sound than the role requires. Freia's distress, as sung by Wendy Bryn Harmer, was affecting, and the star of the evening (for me) (and, from the sound of the applause, for a lot of people) was Stephanie Blythe as Fricka—her huge, well-controlled sound was all one could ask for.

What else. Anything else? I mentioned James Levine was fantastic. But he seemed so frail, going up to get his applause! I still can't think too hard about what will happen to the Met when he's gone. Somebody get him some more golden apples, STAT. We need him back in godlike health. Receiving applause mixed with a boo or two, or a few, Robert LePage—that's the way it goes, I guess, when you chuck the most beautiful set at the Metropolitan Opera and replace it with a malfunctioning wall. Well, whatever, HATERS.

I saw all your favorite movie stars in the lobby: Patrick Stewart, Anjelica Huston. That's all of your favorite celebrities, right? I think that's all you need. Just two. And of course your favorite critics—James Jorden, Alex Ross, Seth Colter Walls, Zachary Woolfe. Oh and poet/librettist J.D. McClatchy was there, with his partner, superstar book designer Chip Kidd! McClatchy's translations of Mozart libretti are actually coming out in a single volume shortly, and I sent away for a review copy, so with any luck I'll be reviewin' it for you very soon, and I promise to be BRUTAL, because that's the highest compliment, right? (The second highest compliment is that I didn't quote any more of the above Merrill poem, since I think McClatchy is Merrill's literary executor and so if I quoted the whole thing without permission he could come to the record shop where I work and slap the discs out of my mouth.)

AND FINALLY, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that I have finally acquiesced to the urgings of my friends and added a NEW T-SHIRT DESIGN, designed to piss off (a) the people who tell you you're not allowed to enjoy Wagner's music because he hated Jews and (b) the old worm-eaten bigot himself, whatever afterlife he's gazing up at us from:

That's funny, right?  I'm not in trouble, right?  Anyway it's also the perfect shirt to wear next time you tell this guy to KNOCK IT OFF.

NOT HELPING

I have heard great things about the Seattle Ring Cycle. Word is, it's that rare production that manages to be as beautiful as it is faithful. People are always saying that such a thing should exist, but like the Arabian phoenix, no one has actually seen it. Anybody reading this going to catch the cycle in Seattle? Anybody know if there's going to be a video or something? (Everybody's making videos nowadays!) Anyway, this a pretty exciting time for me to be getting to know Wagner, with all these Ring Cycles cropping up. Seattle! Next summer, L.A.! Then, the new Met production! The L.A. Ring, which I've mentioned here before (1, 2), is apparently drawing some controversy because some attention-hogging professional whiners in local government have proposed, "in a bewitchingly Oulipian move" (Guerrieri), that the Wagner Festival celebrating L.A.'s first-ever production of the Ring be dedicated instead to the works of other composers who were not as anti-Semitic. This is funny because EVERY SEASON OF THE L.A. OPERA is dedicated chiefly to the works of other composers (this is L.A.'s FIRST RING CYCLE, remember?)—increasingly, to the works of composers suppressed, ruined or killed by Nazi Germany. And, as would seem to be the hip trend in politics nowadays, the arguments of these fanatics are padded with nice fat lies. Like, the festival is a celebration of Wagner the MAN, not Wagner's MUSIC (in fact, there will be discussions of Wagner's anti-Semitism as part of the festival). And, putting on a Wagner festival will make L.A. a tourism destination—FOR NAZIS!!1! Because, apparently, there is nothing skinheads love more than to sit through hours and hours and hours of opera. Oh but wait. Via Slog, there's this genius— —who smiled for a photo (since deleted from his Twitpic) by Zach Carstensen of The Gathering Note, a Seattle blog closely covering the Ring and surrounding hullabaloo. (Cick to reveal homeboy's face, if you must.) Upon a moment's reflection, one realizes that this person is probably not an actual neo-Nazi. Nazis tend not to be big on pony-tails, and that swastika armband is missing a swastika. He must be protesting something? Because dressing up as a Nazi is a great way to make people think about your MESSAGE. He's objecting to Wagner's anti-Semitism, maybe. Or to Wagner's touchier detractors (see above). Or Obamacare. One of those, probably. (I wrote that yesterday. Checking the comments at Gathering Note today, apparently his armband read "HSS"; Hoosier State Skinheads maybe? Still seems... unlikely...) Anyway, the commenters at the above Slog link suggest that this may be one Richard Berthold, retired classical history prof., but I cannot confirm; if it is not, I apologize to Richard Berthold for the unwitting slander, as the person photographed above is a douchebag. If anybody went to the Seattle Rheingold the other night, did you see this guy? Did anybody get him to explain himself? Why didn't security throw his ass out? Or at least force him to change into a sweatsuit or something? Let me know.

The Ring in 300 Words

Attention, everyone: THIS is how you review an opera for the newspaper. The Post's James Jorden gives us the plot (one sentence), a critique of the production (two sentences), an evaluation of the conductor (one sentence), and an assessment of the various singers' musical and dramatic performances (most of the review). And of course, along the way, a Child's Garden of Zingers:

Director Otto Schenk's widely admired production follows the stage directions literally, achieving the elaborate but unconvincing realism of a theme park. Instead of pondering moral issues, the audience marvels that styrofoam can be made to look so much like granite. ... Half a century on the operatic stage has hardly dimmed [the legendary Placido Domingo's] lustrous tenor; unfortunately, neither has it refined his gibberish German.

and for the win:

World-class bass René Pape (Fasolt/Hunding) sounded tentative, even timid. The "Ring" is no place for sissies.

Side note: Is anyone else weirded out by how terrific Domingo's Wagner singing is at the age of 68? There are dudes literally half his age who would sell their souls to sound this good. Here he is in L.A., via Tim Mangan:I can't help but wonder if, gathering dust in an attic somewhere, there is a painting of him in increasingly awful voice.

Aw C'mon Heck Yes

More images are coming out of the L.A. Opera's new Ring Cycle, directed by Achim Freyer. I find the insane Mexican cubist puppet show aesthetic of this whole thing immensely appealing. I wish I were there. Full gallery of Walküre stills at Tim Mangan's house; more images here.

People Who Do Not Like Wagner

(1) John Eliot Gardiner said the following to the Gramophone:

"I really loathe Wagner—everything he stands for—and I don't even like his music very much." Pressed on why, and why he won't perform it: "It's like you have a palate that you've developed over the years to distinguish between the best Burgundy and Côtes-du-Rhône—then you're suddenly given this appalling Spätlese that's actually got a fair dose of paraffin in it as well, and sheep drench—I think your palate would be ruined. That's my fear."

(2) Arthur Szyk, Jewish caricaturist of the fascist era, drew this deafeningly furious picture of Wagner as proto-Nazi (click to enlarge, slightly), and it makes Gardiner sound like Herbert von Karajan. Read more about Szyk in this Times review.

Wrong Answer

Live Broadcasts for Dead Audiences

This Met Tristan backstage (and onstage!) drama has me so excited. I wonder if somebody is out there working out some kind of chart or graph of every configuration of Debbie Voigt and Ben Heppner and Gary Lehman and John Mac Master and Robert Dean Smith and Richard Dean Anderson (pictured) that has been onstage in the course of this run. I think Peter Gelb wanted to make history with this show, putting Voigt and Heppner onstage together—and he has made history, albeit not the sort he intended. Boos! Vomit! Head trauma! Oh, yeah, and apparently some frickin' excellent singing, some of it from relative unknowns. I'm awfully jealous of everybody who's caught one of these performances—reading Maury's report on Heppner actually made my heart beat a little faster. (And not just because I made a meme!!!) Which means I'm jealous of JoJo, who made it to the Met HD broadcast of the Voigt/Smith Tristan (Voigt/Smith? Have I got that right? I lost my scorecard). These new theatrical opera broadcasts are a dazzling experience. I was a bit skeptical until I actually saw Hänsel at the Mall of the Victor Valley in Victorville, CA with my mom on New Year's Day. All the musical goosebump-moments came off, the production was visually splendid, the acting was gripping and true (except for the Witch—sorry, Langridge), and my mom finally knows who Christine Schäfer is. I've had less intimate and exhilarating moments in the actual house—and unlike watching the broadcasts on a little TV set in an empty living room, there was an audience there with me, old folks and parents with children, granted not a BIG audience (this was Victorville, CA), but when the curtain came down I heard a half-dozen pairs of tiny hands applauding, little kids who had come to see their first opera and loved it. They loved it! I saw them smiling and laughing afterwards, after that grim conceptual opera production! My other HD broadcast adventure was the new Peter Grimes, which I saw in nearby Branford, CT. This time, the auditorium was PACKED. "You're the only people here under fifty!" one audience member said to our party, and it was dismayingly close to the truth. Again, it was a phenomenal experience: the camerawork was great, as it was in Hänsel—and as I am told it was NOT in Tristan—which may have actually been the best way to experience the gratingly monotonous set design and choral blocking of this new production. But that's a relatively minor complaint, since the singing, acting, and playing all knocked me out. I was literally in tears by the first Sea Interlude. I finally understand what everybody's going on about when they go on about Peter Grimes. I only wished that I'd seen more people my own age there. God knows I love all these damned indie rock, R&B, electro, whatever albums that the kids are listening to these days. So how come they're all so resistant to any music written more than ten years before they were born? What will it take to get their asses in these seats? I don't know, but I'm thinking Gelb is on the right track. Look how this HD thing is catching on—after hearing me & Mom rave about Hänsel, after seeing the broadcast repeated on TV, this morning my dad went to hear La Traviata rebroadcast from La Scala. He went to see it here, at the new movie theater in Apple Valley, CA. Okay, it's not actually on that map, since like I said it's a pretty new theater, but you get the idea: it's in the middle of fucking nowhere. Note the trailer park directly southeast. This is how you get people's attention, is by sending important productions—a beautiful Hänsel, a world-class Grimes, a historic Tristan, directly to communities who might otherwise lack the resources or even the inclination to seek out this kind of event on their own. (Oddly, the La Scala broadcasts cannot be seen anywhere in Connecticut.) On the wrong track? San Francisco Opera. When I griped to a Friscan friend of mine about Pamela Rosenberg's departure, he pointed out that she fulfilled only one half of a world-class opera company's dual mission: to serve and expand the global opera audience (check) and to serve the existing, local audience of opera lovers and supporters (uh oh). So, fair enough. But David Gockley is making the opposite mistake. In place of Rosenberg's pioneering new-music repertoire (Adams, Ligeti, Messiaen) and adventurous new productions, he's giving listeners an uninterrupted diet of more of the usual. And having gotten his prestige commission (Glass's Appomattox) out of the way, the only new opera he's offering out of San Francisco is the American Tonal Melodrama (Heggie, Wallace) that's always served up to mollify local subscribers—even as his expensive new HD editing suite makes the opera's global mission that much more important. Most heinously, the HD broadcast of Appomattox? Dropped. Now the only twentieth-century opera on the schedule is La Rondine. And that doesn't count.

Hey!

Remember, everybody, you read this joke here first. Get your own material, Kosman!

Life Imitates Wagner

Try not to think too hard about the implications. UPDATE: Gawker calls bullshit, here. Never trust a nobleman.