On leaving the final performance of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ring Cycle last night, I felt as I imagine Marathon runners do after they cross the finish line: light-headed, exhilarated and tired. I’m playing show tunes today to recover.
This was my third viewing of the complete Ring. The first two were over 20 years ago in the Seattle Opera’s traditionalist production, with faux-Teutonic sets and costumes, along with attempted adherence to Wagner’s impossibly ambitious stage directions. When Seattle switched to a more “innovative” version, I saw its Walküre and decided that I was too old-fashioned for Wotan as an insane 19th Century composer squabbling with Fricka his shrewish hausfrau. As for the televised Chereau Ring, I changed channels in horror as soon as the Rhinemaidens emerged from under their hydroelectric dam.
The Lyric Opera’s production is non-traditionalist, though not in the flippant Chereau fashion. There are many anachronisms. A few of them are pointless and odd, such as Hunding’s brandishing a rifle. (He doesn’t think to fire it at Siegmund.) Most, however, fit the abstract, stylized stagecraft.
Suggesting, rather than trying to literally portray, the operas’ spectacular events works well most of the time. Especially striking were the opening tableau of Das Rheingold, where the Rhinemaidens “swam” on wires behind a gauzy blue curtain, and the huge, metallic Fafner (worked by 20 extras). Less happy was the entrance of Brünnhilde and her sisters bouncing on trampolines, which evoked laughter from the audience. The Ring has its funny moments, I know, but the Ride of the Valkyries is not supposed to be one of them.
The great virtue of the production is that, unlike the other modernist ones that I’ve seen, it didn’t distract from the music; yet that virtue exposes a problem. Wagner didn’t intend for music to dominate the Ring. It was to be a complete work of musical theater, where words, staging and acting were also essential to the overall experience. If that ambition was ever realized, it isn’t, so far as I can discern (and I confess to being no true aficionado, so I may be wrong), even attempted any more.
This deemphasis of all elements except the singers and the orchestra reflects, I suppose, what stage managers and performers want to do, and what opera goers will pay for. Still, it doesn’t seem necessary. Stage technology has advanced to the point where the effects envisioned in Wagner’s stage directions could be largely realized, and the operas could be sung in English, using Andrew Porter’s scrupulous, highly singable translation, to enable the audience to follow the story in greater detail. (Super-titles help with that, but the Lyric’s omitted, I would estimate, a third or more of the lines.)
The risk is that those who attend closely to Wagner’s words will find the philosophy of the Ring distasteful. Indeed, one reason why the music has been given precedence may be a feeling that the work is proto-Nazi, a celebration of the amoral superman in his struggle against aristocracy and capitalism. That certainly may have been the composer’s intention, but, each time that I see or hear the cycle, I am struck by a very different moral that emerges from the tale, regardless of what Wagner consciously meant.
Siegfried, “free” by virtue of being cut off from law and tradition, does not do anything with his freedom. Instead, he is directed or manipulated successively by Mime, the Forest Bird, Brünnhilde, Gutrune, Gunther and Hagen. The one decision that he perhaps makes on his own – to refuse to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens – is disastrous, though it, too, may be another’s, reflecting the will immanent in the Ring. (Like Tolkien’s, it is hard to give up.) Unsupported by the archaic civilization that he despises, the “superman” has no basis for action and therefore is steered by external forces. His desire to do “good” without knowing morality leads only to destruction. The last stage direction of Götterdämmerung reads (in Porter’s translation):
From the ruins of the fallen hall, men and women, in great agitation, watch the growing firelight in the heavens. When this reaches its greatest brightness, the hall of Walhall is seen, in which gods and heroes sit assembled . . . . Bright flames seize on the hall of the gods. When the gods are entirely hidden by the flames, the curtain falls.
The Old Order dies, but no New Order is born. There could hardly be a better parable of the futility of rejecting the accumulated wisdom of the ages for the sake of a revolutionary future.
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