"Here
we are, in for another six months of caterwauling," he began complainingly.
"Not a shade of difference between this year and last, except
that the women have got new clothes and the singers haven't got
new voices."
Edith
Wharton, The House of Mirth
That's
one way of looking at it, of course, but even by operatic standards,
Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is always a huge undertaking
(pun not intended). This budget-priced boxed set comes from
the 1991 production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff at the Bavarian State Opera
and the recording is live (as are most extant versions of the Ring,
given the expense and trouble it takes to stage the full cycle.)
 Wolfgang
Sawallisch (left) is at his finest, drawing on his massive experience
to bring out the drama, and the result is a persuasive account of
live theatre caught on the wing. This also brings some drawbacks
of its own, like unavoidable stage noises from props and footsteps.
More importantly, there is sometimes a very perceptible change of
audio perspective as singers move about the stage, which means that
voice qualities do change, rather abruptly at times, between reverberance
and dryness.
The
fidelity of the digital medium does help in focussing the sound,
however, and the quality of the recording remains quite listenable
to (even throughout fourteen hours), if not an outright excellent
accomplishment. The audience is unexpectedly very quiet, and if
not for the atmospheric quality of the vocal recording, one might
not even guess that this was recorded live.
Das
Rheingold gets the cycle off to a good start with a charming
opening scene with the trio of Rheinmaidens and Alberich: Wellgunde's
diction is remarkably clear and first impressions - always so important
- are good. The Rheinmaidens' flirtation with Alberich is beguiling,
although there is an inexplicable drop in volume just as the Ring
is revealed.
The
Bavarian State Orchestra immediately stamps its authority on the
music-making, be it the comical depiction of Alberich's sneezing
on horns, the grand sweep of motivic ideas as the dwarf ascends
the rock to steal the Ring, or the heavy treads of Fafner and Fasolt's
entry. Sawallisch and his musicians are in top form - not just here,
but throughout the entire cycle.
Critically,
the role of the orchestra as underlying psyche of the onstage drama
is superbly rendered - for instance, their psychological counterpoint
(in the form of interjected motifs) as Loge's state of mind as he
unwinds his craftiness in Scene Two is spot on. On such a scale
of production, there are some hitches to be expected: the musical
descent into the underworld, with its eighteen anvils, is ruined
by excessive reverberance, although the return trip is clearer (albeit
slightly softer in volume).
Robert
Hale as Wotan has, at times, a slight nasal characteristic but his
is a fine depiction that gets the listener frustrated with, and
then in sympathy with the travails of Wotan. Jan-Hendrick Rootering's
Fasolt perhaps does not have as deep quality as one might expect
from a giant, but Robert Tear really hams up his role as Loge, ranging
from whining nasal to sly cunning to throaty arrogance. Some credit,
too, to Nancy Gustafson who makes the best of the thankless "bimbo"
part of Freia, as well as Hanna Schwarz, who delivers Erda's longeurs
with much empathy.
More
interestingly, Alberich and Mime here - recurring characters in
the later operas - start off sounding identical and perhaps would
be of no especial interest for those just listening to this opera
standalone. However, as their characters evolve in the following
evenings, there is a concerted effort by Ekkehard Wlaschiha and
Helmut Pampuch respectively to portray these changes - Alberich
becoming a bitter schemer longing for his precious Ring; Mime turning
into the single-minded single-parent who ultimately gets undone
by Siegfried.
The
single instance of ruinous audience noise in the cycle - at least
bad ebough to be disruptive - occurs here during the dour transformation
of Alberich into a dragon. The orchestral tone-painting of clouds
and the Rainbow Bridge (in lieu of Donner's visual abjurations)
at the conclusion is magical, and Sawallisch has no qualms in letting
everything go to bring the opera to a stunning conclusion.
 Die
Walküre remains the most popular of the four operas in
the cycle; it's not that hard to see why, with its humanistic and
readily accessible characters, not to mention showstopping scenes
of grand opera. Where Das Rheingold was noble in its opening,
here the curtain-raiser in media res of Siegmund's flight
is one of sheer excitement - it takes the creak of a floorboard
to remind one that this is still a live recording.
The
orchestra continues its good work from the previous opera - the
Siegmund-Sieglinde love theme on solo cello and clarinet is as evocative
as any one might expect to hear. The bass trombone representing
Sieglinde's anxiety when she looks at the tree later on in the scene
also deserves mention.
As
Siegmund's subconscious, the orchestra is always sympathetic to
Robert Schunk's vocalizations, especially in his "escape" soliloquy.
Schunk himself plays the part well: defiant unregret as he explains
his origins, turning into dramatic narrative during the battle for
the maid, and finally stoic grief about the tragic outcome of the
skirmish. In fact, in the Spring Song - coming after more than an
hour of singing - Schunk still sounds earnest; one might even say
exuberant and over-ripe !
Sieglinde's
tale of the gatecrashing Wanderer is perhaps not as gripping as
Schunk's account, but Julia Varady does make a good attempt nonetheless.
Her soliloquy in the Third Scene of Act Two begins with much ardour
for her lover, only turning "sour" as she tells Siegmund to leave
her, leading to a near-hysterical hallucination sequence - Varady's
star turn.
Hildegard
Behrens, perhaps the foremost Brünnhilde of our day,
reprises her most famous role here (as she has often done on other
Ring productions). As one might expecte, she slurs her high
C-sharp Valkyrie whoops at the opening of Act Two, but any criticism
would not be so much about "cheating on the slurs" than not giving
the whooping notes their full time-values. Still, she does make
a heck of an entry and all could be forgiven in view of her demanding
tessitura to come, not just in this segment but also the
remaining ten hours or so of the cycle.
Marjana
Lipovsek as Fricka is an excellent moral conscience (if one may
be permitted to oversimplify the Freudian perspective here). The
gloom as Wotan bemoans his entrapment in fetters of his own doing
and the dread that he cannot forfend his own destiny and the downfall
of the gods is very palpable - underlined here by equally dire orchestral
accompaniement.
Robert
Hale's performance at this pivotal point of the cycle is superlative,
only surpassed later at the close of the opera as he kisses Brünnhilde's
godhead away at the loss of a beloved daughter, coming after Behrens's
impassioned lamentation and pleas for mercy. The following Zauberfeuermusik
is enchantingly tossed off - but then, this is no less than what
the Bavarian musicians have been performing throughout.
The
famous Ride of the Valkyries at the start of Act Three isn't
very stormy at its onset - but before one should complain, the excess
vigour of this party-piece is reserved for the final climatic iteration
of the "Ho-jo-to-hos", as eight women in proverbial horned helmets
and spears do vocal battle against a full orchestra at fortissimo.
It is arguably the nosiest scene in the entire operatic cycle.
 Siegfried
is in some ways the most foreboding opera of the quartet, with its
dense structure and somewhat unlovable characters. René Kollo,
making his first appearance as Siegfried, starts strongly in the
best Heldentenor fashion, so much so that one might be forgiven
for worrying whether Kollo would be able to sustain such a level
for the next three hours (to say nothing of four hours the following
night) !
RIGHT:
"Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens" (1888-9) by Albert Pinkham
Ryder.
Listeners
following with the score will discover that Kollo hits a number
of wrong notes as ersatz hammersmith during the forging of Notung
- but he is, after all, a tenor foremost and percussionist a distant,
distant second. Equally notable is the humorous episode where Siegfried
mimics (or makes an attempt thereof) the forest birdcall on an off-key
oboe, with the audience surprisingly restrained in their laughter.
Helmut
Pampuch's Mime - a repetitive and thankless part - is also excellently
portrayed, dripping with anticipation as he arrives, after slogging
through a lifetime of raising Siegfried, within grasp of attaining
the Ring, and later stricken with fear as he talks about Fafner
the dragon. While his initial homily about raising the boy wins
our sympathies, Pampuch then goes on (and with some degree of levity)
turn our feelings against Mime when the dwarf's truly calous and
evil intentions are revealed in the quasi-comical scene where his
thoughts become vocalized. We are left with very little sympathy
by the time Siegfried strikes him down.
Wotan,
the once-proud being in Das Rheingold, is here a very changed
character. With no hint of fatigue from earlier exertions, Robert
Hale continues his intrepid portrayal of the Wanderer. Admittedly,
there are parts where the Wanderer's laughing banter sounds rather
contrived - but then, this is opera. The fully orchestral
action-painting of Siegfried's combat against the dragon is thrilling.
Julie
Kaufmann's Waldvogel comes as refreshing as a drink of cool
water after two hours of continuous male singing, even if there
is a degree of "unwarmed-up-ness" in her blithe and sprightly soprano
voice. The same problem also faces Hildegard Behrens, who takes
on Kollo in what could only be described as the "anything you can
sing, I can sing louder" 45-minute vocal match in Act Three - only
that the soprano starts fresh and the tenor has been singing for
the last two hours. One does wonder what the composer was thinking.
Nonetheless,
Brünnhilde here is rather sweetly-voiced, especially in the
ravishing love motif (popularized in Siegfried Idyll). However,
a hint of struggling and exhaustion can be heard in Siegfried's
part towards the end of the Act Three (and the opera), an indication
more of the prolonged difficulty of this role than any deficiency
on the part of the tenor.
Wagner
and His Operatic Women
 One
might just wonder what is it with the Teutonic attitude towards
women ? In Götterdämmerung you find Siegfried,
Hagen and Gunther discussing marriage and "winning women"
as simply a process of getting there and carrying them off.
Describing it as a form of legalized kidnapping and rape would
not be putting it mildly, and the woman's personal feelings
- as Brünnhilde can attest - are of no importance at
all.
Above:
Wagner and wife, Cosima.
Consider
the fact that Brünnhilde begins the opera already as
Siegfried's wife. (In fact, she was already destined to be
his even before he was born, but let's ignore that for the
moment.) This little fact doesn't seem stop a drugged Siegfried-masquerading-as-blood-brother-Gunther
from walking through fire, taking Brünnhilde's troth
- the Ring - by force, and then dragging her back to
the cave - alright, hall - to wed the real Gunther (and making
poor Brünnhilde, if only technically, a bigamist.)
Gutrune,
the half-witted sister of Gunther, doesn't seem to have much
of an opinion of her own, either. "Advised" by her brother
and half-brother, she is told to love Siegfried and plots
to enchant him with a love potion, even before she meets him
in person. Her girly scream (in this production, at least)
when she finds out that Siegfried is dead makes for good stage
drama, though.
In
her defence, later on, when Brünnhilde repudiates Gutrune's
claim on her Siegfried and calls her his "leman" -
an archaic but essentially unflattering word to use on a lady
- at least Gutrune has the decency to admit what she did was
wrong and turns on Hagen, calling him a traitor. Hagen, true
to form, shrugs her accusation away like water off a duck's
back.
Clearly,
love and marriage are not synonymous in the world of Teutonic
opera. The women are all fantastically unlucky or ill-fated,
and most, if not all, of them die, in one way or another.
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Götterdämmerung,
although (or perhaps because of it being) the longest of the entire
cycle, arrives as a dénouement. With a forty-minute
Vorspiel (Prelude) dominated by the three Norns setting the
scene in an extended form of "Last time, on Der Ring...",
this gargantuan opera clocks in at over four hours.
The
orchestra is still in fine fettle - the segment found in concert
halls as Siegfried's Rhine Journey here receives a fine account,
even if after three long evenings, there is just the last bit of
brio missing. The Funeral Music, coming three hours
later, gets a suitably gloomy workout under Sawallisch.
The
most revealing aspect of Götterdämmerung, however,
are the slippages (from exhaustion) which occur in the vocalists:
miscueing entries by the odd beat, "cheating" upward slurs instead
of hitting high notes cleanly, more liberal applications of tempi
and rubato. Coming from a live recording of four long operas performed
on successive nights, one can hardly blame the singers for this
- Wagner's demands on his singers are extreme, and by this point,
one can expect little more than everyone going onstage, belting
out their lines until the musical marathon ends.
Still,
there is no missing the drama here, even allowing for the unlovable
(and typically Wagnerian) characters: the heroic Siegfried tricked
into betraying Brünnhilde, the cowardly yet greedy Gunther;
the excessively stupid (or docile) Gutrune. Incidentally, Siegfried-as-Gunther
doesn't even bother to disguise his voice: if the audience can accept
a papier-maché dragon, they can certainly pretend
that Siegfried's voice has been magically disguised as Gunther even
though the singer is way past it to even attempt this subterfuge.
Hagen,
voiced by Matti Salminen, comes across as the perfect anti-hero
- the so-called "villian you love to hate". Robert Tear's Wotan
is now much more sober, even as he mopes around in Valhalla awaiting
the final armaggedon. Alberich's cameo does much to show us yet
another aspect of the dwarf than the love-forsaken, power-crazed
creature we saw in Das Rheingold - well, he still is all
these things, but at least now his role in precipitating the events
of the Ring is brought around full circle.
The
big choral numbers, appearing in this cycle for the first time,
add their gravitas to the production, although a great deal
of the detail is muddled by resonance: the mike pickups for individual
voices clearly don't work as well as with groups. Lisbeth Balslev's
Gutrune, already a thankless part, is not helped by unclear diction
as well as a rather limited characterization - or perhaps this is
to conceivably make the audience accept that it would take
a magic potion for anyone to fall for such a dullard.
The
highest kudos must surely go to Hildegard Behrens, who admittedly
gets the best part here as Brünnhilde - from the opening raptures
of love, to the brutality of the quasi-rape and theft of her troth,
to the relentless determination of a wronged woman out to set things
right (and destroy the universe while she's at it). While her co-star
René Kollo exhibits signs of fatigue, Behrens paces herself
better and manages to draw on her seemingly bottomless reserves
of energy, right up to the final act of Brünnhilde's immolation.
There
is no libretto enclosed - a minus for first-timers looking to really
get inside the operas - although including all the text in all the
major languages would run to a very thick and heavy programme
book(s) and possibly put it out of the budget price range. (The
full-score libretti of the Eulenberg Edition comes on five volumes
totalling 4362 pages.)
 Instead,
a detailed blow-by-blow account of the story, including background
material of actions occuring between the operas, is provided and
cued to individual tracks. Another point to be made is that the
two central operas could have been issued on three CDs each rather
than four, but the additional discs do allow entire acts to fit
more comfortably onto individual discs.
Left:
Richard Wagner,
painting by Franz Seraph von Lenbach, 1882.
As
Ring cycles go, this one is a winner. The orchestra is unbeatable;
the soloists on the whole are excellent (bar the odd weak link);
Sawallisch the Wagnerian is at the peak of his form. At this price,
it is a bargain for those seeking to acquire their first set (especially
those who have previously sampled the highlights and are now ready to move on to the big
thing.) As of this writing, unfortunately, there is no "highlights"
disc from this collection. For those who already have a complete
Ring, this is an inexpensive alternative and certainly well
worth listening to, if only for the quality of the orchestra.
BENJAMIN
CHEE
is glad to finally return to his cable television movie channels.
899:
15.2.2001© Benjamin Chee
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original texts are copyrighted. Please seek permission from the
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