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Rheingold
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26
Nov 2004 (Fri) Pre-"Rheingold" 1pm
Right now it's Friday afternoon, November 26th 2004, and I'm in the
lobby of the Adelaide Festival Center (right) waiting for the
second cycle of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen to begin. I've
finally made it to my first Ring Cycle (which is not a setting on a
washing machine). I've been going to concerts and operas for a long
time now, and always have had to listen to everyone else tell me
what a Ring Cycle is going to be like. (You've never been to a Ring
Cycle? Hey, guys, Benjamin here has never been to a Ring Cycle.
You're gonna make new friends with your neighbours. It's going to be
a blast.)
This year I've finally done it. After a lifetime of listening to
people talk about it, I've made it to the mother of all operas.
Plus, there's lots of other things going on. The hype, the gossip,
the publicity and the expectation. I'd booked my tickets, flights
and accomodation a year in advance, and it's a bit sobering now that
the date has finally rolled around. From what I've heard, there's
lots of cutting-edge production design and theatre effect, and an
equally impressive budget to match.
I've tried my best to avoid getting spoilt, avoiding the previews
and reviews, but what with all the media coverage and word-of-mouth
churning around, it's been difficult to not catch glimpses of the
staging and designs. Almost every article and interview trying to
sell the show seems to make the promise that it's going to be an
awesome production, and therefore creates the expectation that you
will not be let down, to evoke in the audience, even before anyone's
heard the first note or seen the first view of anything, that it
cannot be anything but a resounding success. The thing is, any
expensive project is an extremely powerful, implacable piece of
advertising which can create the widest possible public awareness
about itself. Even if you're not going to pay the money to watch it
(which goes from $600 to $1500 for the entire cycle), you will
inevitably hear about it somehow. You just can't escape it.
In the
lobby, Lisa Gasteen (left) is signing autographs at the
merchandise shop. I had the opportunity to watch her perform the
title role of Richard Strauss's Salome last year at the Opera House,
and now she's here in Adelaide singing Brünnhilde (who doesn't
appear in Rheingold, which is why she can take the time out to do a
signing.) A pair of crutches is leaning next to her desk, and her
left foot is heavily bandaged - this is really an unfortunate time
to suffer such an injury, but nobody's heard any word about her
pulling out. Like the Abba song goes, super trouper.
There's tons of merchandise available here: T-shirts, polos, vests,
caps, wineglasses, bags, artworks and gold etchings. Overpriced. I'm
looking around at the people around the lobby, a humming ectoplasm
of humanity. Small round conference groups, clutching glasses of
champers and milling like rugby scrums. Sartorial fashions range
from tea party dresses and casual short-sleeves to cocktail dresses
and black ties (even in the 38-degree sun.) Nobody seems to be, on
purely visual evidence, younger than me. It is entirely possible
that we are the youngest people here. There is a blast of brass from
the staircase landing leading up to the Upper Circle. An ensemble in
police uniforms is playing a smorgasbord of Ring themes, to
scattered applause, as people begin to deectoplasmize and ooze into
the auditorium.
We do likewise. I've heard a lot of good things about this
auditorium. An acoustic enhancement system called LAERS was
installed back in 1998 when the first Ring was staged here, and it's
been retuned and overhauled for this cycle. In the pit the orchestra
is making the usual noises, and there is prominent signage warning
us that Rheingold will begin in complete darkness. These
performances are being digitally recorded for subsequent release,
and later, I find out that it's supposedly the first-ever SACD
recording of the Ring, to be issued as a 15-CD set at a whopping
$450 per. Ouch.
The lights go down, and so it begins.
26 Nov
2004 (Fri) "Rheingold" 2pm
|
Rheingold
Woglinde Natalie Jones
Wellgunde Donna-Maree Dunlop
Flosshilde Zan McKendree-Wright
Alberich John Wegner
Fricka Elizabeth Campbell
Wotan John Bröcheler
Freia Kate Ladner
Fasolt Andrew Collis
Fafner David Hibbard
Froh Andrew Brunsdon
Donner Timothy DuFore
Loge Christopher Doig
Mime Richard Greager
Erda Liane Keegan |
Darkness, total
absolute darkness. I squint my eyes and try to get accustomed to the
darkness, watching for a flash of light or glimpse of colour, but
it's all null and void. I'm actually thankful for the warning signs,
because the near-privation of all visual and aural sensation is
primevally scary.
Somewhere, out in that abyssal void, first as a hint, then a
vagueness gradually taking shape, the subterranean rumble of E-flat
on basses and cellos as a faintly discernible theme - the motif of
the Rhine - begins to take shape, 136 bars of ascending notes
depicting the movement of the waves. Next, sounds of running water,
not proverbially allegorical but real liquid, flowing, dripping,
splashing. This must be the vaunted water curtain which everyone has
heard so much about, although it's still too dark to see anything.
Then there is light: a blue portal of lights lining the entire
stage, like a picture frame, within which all the action occurs. The
water curtain covers the entire front of the proscenium arch stage,
huge pieces of smooth, translucent plastic on which a torrent
ceaselessly pours downwards in some breathtaking splendour. (Yes,
I'm holding my breath. You just do.) Behind the water screen, the
glow of gold against a bluescreen gradually revealing the eponymous
Rhinegold as the music continues to swell, distend, evolving from
formlessness into melodic form and shape. Immediately you can tell
that this production is something different. The water curtain
effect itself is nothing new - you see them all the time at
airports, malls, buildings - but the concept behind its application
here to represent the bottom of the Rhine is ingenious.
Action. Woglinde bursts through the water curtain, first giving
nonsense words, leading into alliterative sounds: "Weia! Waga! Woge,
du Welle! walle zur Weige! Wagalaweia! Wallala weiala weia!", before
Wellgunde and Flosshilde chime in with actual dialogue. Natalie
Jones, who sings Woglinde, was briefly my classmate for a semester
at postgraduate school, and I'd also seen her earlier in the year as
the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute, so it was not a
little thrill to see her giving the very first notes of this cycle.
It's a small world.
It's
hard not to like the Rhinemaidens: they have great tunes, if
slightly ditzy (they have one role in life to perform, and fail
utterly at it in the opening fifteen minutes of the opera). To say
nothing of the Rhinemaidens in this production, in goggles and
form-fitting wetsuits unzipped down to the navels, swim bra tops
worn on the outside. Alberich, the central villain of the Cycle,
must go to the same fashion consultant as the ladies (viz Stephen
Curtis, costume designer) for he is in a sharply-cut broad-lapelled
vest overlaid with a leather coat which Neo from The Matrix would
kill for.
The interaction is very adult, and pretty much sets the tone for the
entire production. In their horseplay with Alberich, the
Rhinemaidens ride Alberich hard - literally. The gestures of breast
grabbing, hip grinding and dominatrixesque spanking are more funny
than offensive and bearing in mind that Alberich is not a funny
person, at that. But it also all happens very quickly, faster than
we have time to catch our breath and if the director Elke Neidhardt
and her design team was out to make an impact, they achieved it.
Are they being deliberately provocative, or even iconoclastic? When
Fafner kills Fasolt after Alberich's curse on the Ring starts to
take effect, Fafner wears the Ring on the middle finger, and gives
all the gods the obscene gesture. (Which is funny in a darkly
humorous way.) The concept of the primeval earth mother Erda is a
buxom lady with one nurturing, swollen breast unveiled. And what to
make of the Tarnhelm which, for all intents and purposes, is really
just a leather fetish bondage mask? (I'm going to let other
commentators analyse the subtext behind that.)
Following in Wieland Wagner's footsteps, the designers selectively
chose which of Wagner's stage directions to follow and ignore: the
open mountain-top of the gods' respose was replaced with a
sanatorium of plastic reclining chairs, underlit by a floor of white
fluorescent lights. Fricka sports a beehive hairdo, Wotan wears a
T-shirt with a silkscreened bird-of-prey on the front, Donner in
sports jacket with "ZACK" emblazoned across the back, boxing glove
in one hand and cricket bat in the other. And the two giants are
simply dressed in soiled construction overalls and vests, making
their bass-stomping entrance on a motorized cart painted in
undescribable grey.
(above:
Nibelheim, Alberich and Mime in the middle. Alberlich's the
tall one)
To describe Wotan and Loki's descent into Nibeleim in detail would
take far too many words, so I'll try with just three: Star Trek
transporter. The use of children as screaming Nibelungen in slavery
was a clever touch. The sequence where Alberich transforms himself
into a dragon - so often stumbling points for productions reduced to
pantomime creatures - displayed set designer Michael
Scott-Mitchell's artistry in stagecraft as the upper half of the set
was rigged to display a clockwork firedrake, manipulated by the
Nibelung children in segments on poles, like in a traditional
Chinese dragon dance.
I
very much appreciate Stephen Curtis's use of colours in his
costumes: blacks for Alberich and Mime (right), whites tinged
with grey at the feet for the gods, the greytone gradient changing
between operas as the gods shifted between moral poles. Erda in
dusky earthtones, obvoiusly, and the Rhinemaidens in electric
swimgear blues and blacks. Some of the sartorial subtext would be
more subtle: in Die Walküre, Brünnhilde wears a silver overcoat (a
metaphor for Valkyrie breastplate?) in which she would wrap the the
shattered Notung and give to Sieglinde, and in turn passed down to
Siegfried (in Siegfried), who inherits and wears this
overcoat-as-armour, killing Fafner the dragon, and bringing it back
full circle to its original owner when he discovers the sleeping
Brünnhilde on the doughnut-shaped rock.
Doughnut rocks. Clockwork dragons. The abstracted stageset stylings
of Michael Scott-Mitchell and Nick Schlieper delivered with sheer
visceral, visual impact. I love the water curtain, although staring
for extended periods at a fluorescent stage is headache-inducing,
and having the Rainbow Bridge as a flight of pearly white
fluorescent steps leading up to a portal flanked by fluorescent
pillars somehow didn't give the impression of the gods ascending
into grandeur, than self-admittance to a mental asylum.
John
Bröcheler turns out to be a superb Wotan, as is John Wegner as
Alberich and Richard Greager as Mime, in roles which they would
reprise in days ahead. Elizabeth Campbell's Fricka is played as the
nagging wife, reductively one-sided in the limited role here, but
she will give the character more depth and substance in the sequel,
Die Walküre, where Fricka becomes a vocal conscience in Wotan's
dilemma in choosing between love or power.
(left: Wotan and family)
Elapsed time so far: 2 hrs 30 min.actual running time, 2 hrs 30
mins total running time (i.e. with breaks).
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