A good opera singer can be effective even without a production. One of the best performances of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods) I ever saw was a concert performance the Washington National Opera put on in 2009 after the company ran out of money for a more conventional staging: The singers were so powerful that I remember it vividly. The Metropolitan Opera is proving this thesis in a different way, at considerably more expense: by offering the complete “Ring” cycle — “Götterdämmerung” plus three other operas — with strong performances despite, and in no way supported by, the $16 million set.
The “Ring” is a story of hubris and stubbornness. Onstage, it offers its own mythological cosmos, almost from creation to the end of the world, centering on the god Wotan, who breaks treaties, tries to weasel out of consequences and learns the hard way that, like any creator, he is bound by the rules of the world he has made and can’t force the people he has created to do whatever he wants.
The Met’s “Ring” production, which started its rollout in 2010, is also a tale of a leader trying to force an issue at tremendous cost. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, was bound and determined that Robert Lepage, the Canadian director, was going to create the greatest and most remarkable “Ring” production ever. By now, I’ve written a number of times about Lepage’s giant unit set, with its high-tech capabilities and lumbering, squeaking attempts to upstage all the singers while it pivots and rolls and does its thing. But while Gelb forced the project through, he couldn’t force the “Machine” to be an effective way of presenting the opera, and he couldn’t force people to like it.
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Still, “Ring” lovers who have shelled out for tickets — there are two more cycles in May — have plenty to get excited about. The centerpiece of this revival is the Brünnhilde of American soprano Christine Goerke. After “Die Walküre,” the second opera in the cycle, I praised her nuanced singing and acting. And she continued through the past two operas, “Siegfried” (seen April 13) and “Götterdämmerung” (seen April 27) singing strongly but never engaging in mere stentorian hammering, bringing every word fully to life and giving so much of herself that she almost ran out of steam in the final seconds of “Götterdämmerung” — had the opera lasted one more minute, she might have had nothing left in the tank.
She also enlivened those around her. This cycle had two Siegfrieds, Stefan Vinke and Andreas Schager, both making company debuts (Vinke in “Siegfried,” Schager in “Götterdämmerung”) and who will each sing one more cycle in May. Vinke began “Siegfried” a little fuzzy and constrained, but he found focus and sounded like a different and quite wonderful singer as soon as Brünnhilde woke up in Act III. Similarly, Philippe Jordan, who conducted the opening of Act III with a clinical detachment, found warmth and feeling and a visceral connection to Brünnhilde’s awakening music, and he finished the act with a bang. Jordan remained something of a cipher to me: very accurate and at times very beautiful, sometimes capable of power, sometimes seeming just to be following directions. But the Met orchestra sounded warm and alive, if a little uncharacteristically coltish at times, eager but a little sloppy.
The rest of the casting was equally strong. Michael Volle, a full-voiced bass-baritone, took the role of the god Wotan in his late-life guise as the Wanderer in “Siegfried,” an upgrade from Greer Grimsley in the first two operas. As for the Nibelungs — the race of evil dwarves who steal the gold from the Rhine, forge it into a ring, lose it to Wotan and spend the rest of the cycle trying to get it back — they were powerfully represented by Tomasz Konieczny, a strong Alberich; Gerhard Siegel as Mime, who raises the orphaned infant Siegfried to adulthood and whose voice threatened to overpower Vinke’s in the first act of “Siegfried”; and Eric Owens in strikingly fine form as Hagen, Alberich’s son, in “Götterdämmerung.” Owens has a special affinity for this “Ring”; his turn as Alberich in “Das Rheingold” in 2010 gave his career a huge boost, and I haven’t heard him do anything in the years since that I liked as much as his Hagen here, strong and evil and sure. (It made me newly eager to hear his Wotan in the Chicago “Ring,” which will run complete in 2020 — also with Goerke as Brünnhilde.)
There was a freshness and naturalness to many of the singers’ detailed characterizations — the appealing goofiness of Schager’s Siegfried, who had a kind of locker-room banter with the chorus of Gibichungs and who used his sword as a mirror while he picked his teeth; or the lyrical beauty of Edith Haller’s Gutrune as she seductively welcomes Siegfried to the Gibichung Hall, not to mention her chilling scream of anguish when she learns of his death, in her outstanding Met debut.
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It wasn’t clear, though, that these interpretations had anything to do with Lepage’s vision of the piece — or, indeed, that he had any vision at all. The whole focus of this production is the Machine, which has become something that moves in the background, its clankings quieter than in 2010 but still evident, and strikes tableaux while the singers act in front of it. It spews out rope for the Norns to spin (Ronnita Miller, Elizabeth Bishop and Wendy Bryn Harmer made a powerful trio of soothsayers); it shows flickering flames around Brünnhilde’s rock; it becomes a boat transporting Siegfried and the horse Grane (a life-size statue) down the Rhine. It doesn’t, however, bring any special insight to the work — indeed, after “Das Rheingold,” each subsequent opera seemed to have less inspiration and more apathy, as if, in the wake of a critical drubbing, Lepage had simply ceased to care.
The end of “Götterdämmerung” is supposed to depict the end of the world, but Lepage, with all those millions of dollars of technology, could do nothing better than topple some chintzy statues. (I was told their heads blew off, but the Machine blocked the view from my prime orchestra seat.) This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper.
And yet the “Ring” continues to exert an inexorable pull — despite bad productions, despite its creator’s anti-Semitism, despite the fact that it represents a huge investment in a field with a dwindling footprint in contemporary society. The “Ring” is one of those works of art that accompany you through life and that continually reveal new bits of themselves with each viewing. At bottom, it’s about telling stories, the creation of myth and how we try to make the stories of our own lives come out right.
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Wotan is trying to create one story — the perfect hero, the predestined lover, the redemption of the world — and the Nibelungs are trying to create another. Whose story wins? Audiences side with Wotan, yet it’s the Nibelungs who are enshrined in the title. The “Ring” is not only about myth, but about its interpretations, and coming to terms with the story you end up with. Goerke, in the last scene, sang poignantly about having finally reached understanding. What a shame that this expensive production couldn’t find any story of its own to back her up.
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