No, not another account of Richard Wagner's generally miserable stays in the city.
Just last year, a Parisian friend was passing the poky, dark entrance to the courtyard where the composer once had rooms on the Rue Jacob in St Germain des Pres. For once, the locked front door had been left open. She couldn't resist the chance to see yet another of Wagner's many temporary homes. But once inside, she realized that she had no idea just which apartment had been his. A current resident was crossing the courtyard.
"Excusez-moi, Monsieur? Can you tell me where Richard Wagner lived?" The man thought for a moment, frowned, then said, "Why, you just look on the letter box. The apartment number will be under his name." A lovely thought - that a hundred and fifty years on, that letter box might still be there, elegantly calligraphed missives dropping into it, while the utility bills and junk mail fill its neighbours.
A few blocks away on the quays of the Seine across from the Louvre is the Hotel du Quai Voltaire. Wagner stayed there too, as did Sibelius, Camille Pissaro, and Oscar Wilde among others. Last year, for my birthday on January 22nd, I had, what I thought was the brilliant idea of renting Wagner's old room and celebrating right there, where according to the hotel reception, he worked on part of Die Meistersinger. I'd have to verify that with Britain's Wagner experts, Messrs Millington or Spencer ,but until I do, the idea of sleeping in a room that might have been the birthplace of the great quintet or even a few bars of the prize song is beguiling. Alas, last year, the builders were in the room - boom boxes and bum cleavage are not quite what I had in mind. Still, it's a plan to file away for a future grey Paris winter.
Monday, 31 March 2008
Monday, 24 March 2008
Absolute Happiness – Ben Heppner and Wagner at the Salle Pleyel
Absolute Happiness – Ben Heppner and Wagner at the Salle Pleyel
Ben Heppner missed the live Met broadcast of Tristan und Isolde on Saturday. Robert Dean Smith, his replacement did a fine job. But I felt a little nostalgic for big Ben from BC – especially given a stunning concert performance of his that I attended in Paris just over a year ago. Heppner gave two Wagner concerts in Paris last year – within 2 weeks of each other and at two different venues. The first at the Theatre des Champs Elysees featured Siegmund’s glorious music from Die Walkure.
I had arrived in Paris a couple of days earlier and had noted the dates. But, in an extraordinary moment of stupidity, managed to miss this first concert. I knew where it was, I’d noted when it was. Then I went off for tea and very delicate little French pastries at La Duree on the Left Bank and somehow, I got addled. When Ben Heppner was greeting spring over on the Right Bank, I was standing in the frozen pizza section of the Montparnasse Monoprix wondering whether to go for a good solid Margarita or throw in a bit of pepperoni for good measure. Next morning when I wandered to the theatre to try for a ticket and found that all that glorious sound had gone off into the ether the previous night, well, had there been a nearby bench, I would have sat down and wept.
All was not lost. Heppner was coming back to the Salle Pleyel and this time he was bringing Tristan with him. I got there on the right day and got a good seat. But I wasn’t that excited. I prefer the joy of a young Siegmund greeting spring and love to the mournful, drawn out delirium and death of Tristan. I knew that Heppner had had a few health problems. And I had no expectations from a dramatic point of view. This was a concert performance. The man would have to stand there in a tux, alone, in front of an orchestra and make us believe that he is raging, brooding, wounded Tristan - yearning unto death.
I was sitting next to a small bird-like French woman in her mid-eighties. We had a minor skirmish when I complained about my uncomfortable seat and she accused me of being a typical Parisian whiner (?!). Then the Orchestre National de Paris played the Parsifal prelude. My neighbour turned to me with tears in her eyes and said “Cette musique, c’est le bonheur absolu.” Absolute happiness. “On a de la chance de le savoir.” Yes, she was right. We are both lucky to know how much this music can add to a life. Then Ben came and Ben sang. But he didn’t just sing. He stood there in that stiff dinner jacket and white tie and turned into the dying Tristan before our eyes. The big old boy from British Columbia morphed into this wild, tormented, tragic hero.
The audience in the Salle Pleyel leapt to its feet. And the French aren’t generous with their standing ovations. Another French friend of mine, a gifted concert pianist has described his experience of discovering Wagner as comparable to the initial stages of falling in love. I’ll save that for another entry. In the meantime, I wish Ben Heppner a speedy recovery. With less than a handful of Tristans on the planet, we need them all – particularly one who can do what he did on that December night of ‘bonheur absolu’ in the Salle Pleyel.
Ben Heppner missed the live Met broadcast of Tristan und Isolde on Saturday. Robert Dean Smith, his replacement did a fine job. But I felt a little nostalgic for big Ben from BC – especially given a stunning concert performance of his that I attended in Paris just over a year ago. Heppner gave two Wagner concerts in Paris last year – within 2 weeks of each other and at two different venues. The first at the Theatre des Champs Elysees featured Siegmund’s glorious music from Die Walkure.
I had arrived in Paris a couple of days earlier and had noted the dates. But, in an extraordinary moment of stupidity, managed to miss this first concert. I knew where it was, I’d noted when it was. Then I went off for tea and very delicate little French pastries at La Duree on the Left Bank and somehow, I got addled. When Ben Heppner was greeting spring over on the Right Bank, I was standing in the frozen pizza section of the Montparnasse Monoprix wondering whether to go for a good solid Margarita or throw in a bit of pepperoni for good measure. Next morning when I wandered to the theatre to try for a ticket and found that all that glorious sound had gone off into the ether the previous night, well, had there been a nearby bench, I would have sat down and wept.
All was not lost. Heppner was coming back to the Salle Pleyel and this time he was bringing Tristan with him. I got there on the right day and got a good seat. But I wasn’t that excited. I prefer the joy of a young Siegmund greeting spring and love to the mournful, drawn out delirium and death of Tristan. I knew that Heppner had had a few health problems. And I had no expectations from a dramatic point of view. This was a concert performance. The man would have to stand there in a tux, alone, in front of an orchestra and make us believe that he is raging, brooding, wounded Tristan - yearning unto death.
I was sitting next to a small bird-like French woman in her mid-eighties. We had a minor skirmish when I complained about my uncomfortable seat and she accused me of being a typical Parisian whiner (?!). Then the Orchestre National de Paris played the Parsifal prelude. My neighbour turned to me with tears in her eyes and said “Cette musique, c’est le bonheur absolu.” Absolute happiness. “On a de la chance de le savoir.” Yes, she was right. We are both lucky to know how much this music can add to a life. Then Ben came and Ben sang. But he didn’t just sing. He stood there in that stiff dinner jacket and white tie and turned into the dying Tristan before our eyes. The big old boy from British Columbia morphed into this wild, tormented, tragic hero.
The audience in the Salle Pleyel leapt to its feet. And the French aren’t generous with their standing ovations. Another French friend of mine, a gifted concert pianist has described his experience of discovering Wagner as comparable to the initial stages of falling in love. I’ll save that for another entry. In the meantime, I wish Ben Heppner a speedy recovery. With less than a handful of Tristans on the planet, we need them all – particularly one who can do what he did on that December night of ‘bonheur absolu’ in the Salle Pleyel.
Saturday, 22 March 2008
Tristan und Isolde live from the Met - but please DON'T pass the popcorn
On this freezing March Easter weekend, my Saturday looked to be perfect – a dress rehearsal of Carmen at the Royal Opera House in the morning and, if the tube is behaving, a quick lunch and onto the Metropolitan Opera’s live transmission of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill.
I discovered these broadcasts last year in Vancouver. On Canada’s West Coast, the time difference has us up early – 10.30 for a normal opera, 930 for a Wagner. This has one huge advantage in our downtown cineplex. The popcorn concession for regular cinema has not yet opened. Muffins are available and coffee – both measuring very low on the Richter scale of noise made while being consumed. Then, during Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, one lone man wandered downstairs during the second intermission and found the fatal popcorn. Surely the noisiest foodstuff known to man –a Richter eight or nine – so why do we sell it during a cinematic performance that demands that we hear?
Daniel Barenboim discussed the current disdain for hearing and listening in last year’s Reith lectures and, perhaps, when Jack Black is crashing through his latest dysfunctional screen-life, none of us need to hear the details. But when that man made his way up the aisle in the Vancouver cinema last year, clutching his bottomless (they are always bottomless) bag of popcorn, I knew that Puccini was going to come out the worse for the encounter. Manon Lescaut, alone in that notorious ‘desert outside New Orleans’, started to sing “Solo, (crunch) perduta (crackle) abandonnata (rustle – sound of hand rummaging deep in bag for the buttery bits at the bottom.) And unlike the sweet wrapper that takes a mere whole aria to unwrap, popcorn never ends. Popcorn in cinemas has to be the closest mankind will come to a brush with eternity.
But I kept faith in the culture of Old Europe. Corn, as any geographer will tell you, is an American crop so, even if we have succumbed to this very American snack while we watch a Hollywood film, surely the Gate in Notting Hill, must know that you cannot eat popcorn during Wagner? Oscar Wilde was right about many, many things but very wrong about Wagner’s music. It isn’t so loud that you can talk through it (I paraphrase). Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with its endless yearning, its great ocean of desire, (and not for more butter and plenty of salt) is full of silences, pauses, great orchestral drawings in of breath before we are carried ever upward to Wagner’s unique form of ecstasy.
Oddly enough, the young woman at the concession stand at the Gate understood this. She was obviously not an opera goer but she had realized that ‘popcorn and opera don’t go together.’ Alas, her manager apparently does not agree. And so I walked away crestfallen from the Gate. At 30 pounds a seat, I wasn’t going to risk it. So here I sit back at the house listening to Radio 3, very sorry that I missed Deborah Voigt and the Met debut of Robert Dean Smith. For cinema managers who need guidance on this matter here is a quick list of acceptable opera foods if we really must, and it would seem that we really must, be stuffing something into our mouths at every waking moment of our day.
FOOD THAT YOU CAN EAT AT A MET BROADCAST IF YOU SIMPLY MUST:
Soup (no crusty baguettes to go with it mind!) , pureed vegetables, lightly scrambled egg but no bacon, fruit compote, yogurt (but not with bits of fruit in it – particularly not pineapple or any kind of apple) chocolate mousse – milk, dark or white – is always acceptable but no slurping your spoon.
DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT EATING:
Popcorn, crisps, bagels, kit-kats, crunchie bars, snickers, raw carrots, courgettes or peppers, battered fish, fried chicken, steak and kidney pie.
Cinema personnel requiring further information should feel free to contact me at :thesinginghouse@gmail.com
I discovered these broadcasts last year in Vancouver. On Canada’s West Coast, the time difference has us up early – 10.30 for a normal opera, 930 for a Wagner. This has one huge advantage in our downtown cineplex. The popcorn concession for regular cinema has not yet opened. Muffins are available and coffee – both measuring very low on the Richter scale of noise made while being consumed. Then, during Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, one lone man wandered downstairs during the second intermission and found the fatal popcorn. Surely the noisiest foodstuff known to man –a Richter eight or nine – so why do we sell it during a cinematic performance that demands that we hear?
Daniel Barenboim discussed the current disdain for hearing and listening in last year’s Reith lectures and, perhaps, when Jack Black is crashing through his latest dysfunctional screen-life, none of us need to hear the details. But when that man made his way up the aisle in the Vancouver cinema last year, clutching his bottomless (they are always bottomless) bag of popcorn, I knew that Puccini was going to come out the worse for the encounter. Manon Lescaut, alone in that notorious ‘desert outside New Orleans’, started to sing “Solo, (crunch) perduta (crackle) abandonnata (rustle – sound of hand rummaging deep in bag for the buttery bits at the bottom.) And unlike the sweet wrapper that takes a mere whole aria to unwrap, popcorn never ends. Popcorn in cinemas has to be the closest mankind will come to a brush with eternity.
But I kept faith in the culture of Old Europe. Corn, as any geographer will tell you, is an American crop so, even if we have succumbed to this very American snack while we watch a Hollywood film, surely the Gate in Notting Hill, must know that you cannot eat popcorn during Wagner? Oscar Wilde was right about many, many things but very wrong about Wagner’s music. It isn’t so loud that you can talk through it (I paraphrase). Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with its endless yearning, its great ocean of desire, (and not for more butter and plenty of salt) is full of silences, pauses, great orchestral drawings in of breath before we are carried ever upward to Wagner’s unique form of ecstasy.
Oddly enough, the young woman at the concession stand at the Gate understood this. She was obviously not an opera goer but she had realized that ‘popcorn and opera don’t go together.’ Alas, her manager apparently does not agree. And so I walked away crestfallen from the Gate. At 30 pounds a seat, I wasn’t going to risk it. So here I sit back at the house listening to Radio 3, very sorry that I missed Deborah Voigt and the Met debut of Robert Dean Smith. For cinema managers who need guidance on this matter here is a quick list of acceptable opera foods if we really must, and it would seem that we really must, be stuffing something into our mouths at every waking moment of our day.
FOOD THAT YOU CAN EAT AT A MET BROADCAST IF YOU SIMPLY MUST:
Soup (no crusty baguettes to go with it mind!) , pureed vegetables, lightly scrambled egg but no bacon, fruit compote, yogurt (but not with bits of fruit in it – particularly not pineapple or any kind of apple) chocolate mousse – milk, dark or white – is always acceptable but no slurping your spoon.
DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT EATING:
Popcorn, crisps, bagels, kit-kats, crunchie bars, snickers, raw carrots, courgettes or peppers, battered fish, fried chicken, steak and kidney pie.
Cinema personnel requiring further information should feel free to contact me at :thesinginghouse@gmail.com
Friday, 21 March 2008
Wagner's Death in Venice
Richard Wagner lived the last months of his life in the Palazzo Vendramin on Venice’s Grand Canal. He died there of a heart attack on February 13, 1883.The room in which he died is open to the public, along with two other rooms on the mezzanine of the palazzo which these days serves as the winter quarters of Venice’s casino.
Wagner drew on mythology as the inspiration for operas such as the colossal Ring of the Nibelungen, and his own life and death are wreathed in myth and fantasy. Was he, as was claimed, the best-read man of the nineteenth century? The subject of more books than any other person except Christ. A womanizer? Had an argument with his wife Cosima over Carrie Pringle, a young Scottish soprano, set off the heart attack that would kill him? Did Cosima really hold him in her arms for 24 hours after he died?Romantically inclined visitors to these rooms in Venice even claim that, when the breeze from the canal blows in the right direction, you can still catch the scent of one of Wagner’s favourite French perfumes.
All that is sure on the guided visit to the Wagner rooms is that they contain replicas and some originals of the composer’s manuscripts and letters (including one from father-in-law Franz Liszt) a copy of the couch on which he died and that, while you wander, some of the most sensuous, luminous, transcendent music ever to issue from a human brain will be playing in the background.I think that’s quite enough for one Saturday morning in Venice.
Guided tours only – on Saturday mornings. Reservations should be made by phone on Fridays between 10 and 12am at + 39 349 5936990. The tours are free but with a donation suggested. Address: Palazzo Loredan-Vendramin-Calergi, Cannaregio - Venezia
Wagner drew on mythology as the inspiration for operas such as the colossal Ring of the Nibelungen, and his own life and death are wreathed in myth and fantasy. Was he, as was claimed, the best-read man of the nineteenth century? The subject of more books than any other person except Christ. A womanizer? Had an argument with his wife Cosima over Carrie Pringle, a young Scottish soprano, set off the heart attack that would kill him? Did Cosima really hold him in her arms for 24 hours after he died?Romantically inclined visitors to these rooms in Venice even claim that, when the breeze from the canal blows in the right direction, you can still catch the scent of one of Wagner’s favourite French perfumes.
All that is sure on the guided visit to the Wagner rooms is that they contain replicas and some originals of the composer’s manuscripts and letters (including one from father-in-law Franz Liszt) a copy of the couch on which he died and that, while you wander, some of the most sensuous, luminous, transcendent music ever to issue from a human brain will be playing in the background.I think that’s quite enough for one Saturday morning in Venice.
Guided tours only – on Saturday mornings. Reservations should be made by phone on Fridays between 10 and 12am at + 39 349 5936990. The tours are free but with a donation suggested. Address: Palazzo Loredan-Vendramin-Calergi, Cannaregio - Venezia
Seattle Opera Re-opens - The American Bayreuth?
“Seattle is a city that is given to earth tones,” says Speight Jenkins, general director of the Seattle Opera. “I’ve never liked that. So when we were remodelling the opera house,I told them that I didn’t want an earth tone in the house.”
Seattle Opera’s general director Speight Jenkins is a man of immense passion and enthusiasm and one of his greatest passions is for the work of Richard Wagner. So when his newly renovated opera house re-opened on August 2 with a performance of Parsifal,it came as no surprise to see a Rheingold rainbow in the form of a light show playing on the metal arches and scrims that project from the façade.
As for the interior decor, Speight Jenkins got his wish – he usually does; there are no earth tones to be seen in the building that has emerged from the shell of the old theatre. Instead the curving glass façade, the silvery grey of the foyer and the teal green seats in the auditorium itself all reflect the colours and moods of the surrounding Pacific Northwest with its rains and ocean and forest. That same natural setting contributed to the first Seattle Ring back in the seventies when company founder, Glynn Ross, another passionate Wagnerian, realized that the region’s mountains, lakes and forests were reminiscent of the Alpine landscapes that inspired Wagner.
When he also realized that, apart from New York’s Metropolitan Opera,no other North American house was mounting a full Ring Cycle, he took a very courageous leap and, to the astonishment of the opera establishment, launched the complete Ring of the Nibelungen in his small, geographically remote company. The tradition grew with the arrival of Speight Jenkins and went on to encompass other Wagner operas. Today, with the exception of Bayreuth itself, Seattle Opera has become the opera house most enamoured of Wagner’s work. After the 2001 Ring Cycle, the Times Literary Supplement said that “Jenkins’ version of the great Nibelungen Cycle reaffirms his company’s stature as North America’s pre-eminent Wagner house.”
In the land of Microsoft, Boeing, Starbucks and Grunge rock, the locals have caught Speight Jenkins’ enthusiasm and flock to performances of the difficult German genius’s music. And Jenkins does not patronise his public. Productions are sometimes traditional, more often modern and, in the case of the current Parsifal, more than a little ambiguous in their interpretation of Parsifal’s meaning. Jenkins and his company do, however, provide a variety of lectures, symposia, free CDs etc to prepare the public for what they will see. And, if they still have any remaining questions after the five hour performance, Speight Jenkins himself hosts a question and answer session. In the old theatre that was held over a cup of coffee in the foyer. Now there is a lecture hall specially set aside for the purpose.
Microsoft has sponsored the new season. Wagner, who in his lifetime, struggled endlessly to obtain the patronage of the rich and successful of his world, would be amused but probably not surprised to see that the most contemporary citizens of one of our most modern cities have taken it upon themselves in the 21st century to support him.
Seattle Ring Cycle 2005
Seattle Opera - McCaw Hall
Wagner
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN G.Grimsley, S.Blythe, RP Fink, M.Plette, S. Milling, G. Saks, P.Kazaras, T. Harper, E.Podles, R. Berkeley-Steele, MJ Wray, J. Eaglen, A. Woodrow. Dir: R.Spano. Dir.esc: S. Wadsworth. 7,8,10, 12, 15, 16,18,20, 23, 24,26,28 August
Seattle loves Wagner and has been presenting Ring cycles in the city of Boeing and Microsoft since 1976. Director Stephen Wadsworth has repaid that love with a green and loving Ring. Green in the realistic sets – the gods dwell in a forest glade based on a local beauty spot. And loving in the relationships between these oh-so-human deities – Wotan and Fricka exchange frequent embraces between marital arguments. Conducting his first Ring, Robert Spano brings finely judged pacing, sparkle and weight to an orchestra that benefits from the excellent acoustic in the renovated McCaw Hall. The other major debut is Greer Grimsley in his first Wotan. He has an oaky, tireless bass- baritone that occasionally echoes the sublime George London. His Wotan remains a work in progress, lacking a little in presence as if Grimsley does not yet believe that he is the god of all the gods.
Richard Paul Fink’s powerful, assured Alberich commands the stage in Rhinegold. In the opening scenes he has to compete with the production’s stunning Rhinemaidens – suspended on harnesses, swooping, soaring and somersaulting as they sing. Stephanie Blythe’s glorious mezzo brings warmth and compassion to Fricka but the most dramatic moment belongs to Ewa Podles’s Erda who emerges out of the mossy forest floor to bring her own brand of velvet-brown, sexy contralto comfort to the troubled Wotan.
In Die Walkure, Margaret Jane Wray’s thrilling, laser-like soprano lacks the doomed Sieglinde’s vulnerability. Wray is surely just passing through Hunding’s hut on the way to Brunnhilde’s summits. Siegmund on the other hand, as sung by Richard Berkeley-Steele is lyrical and tender but lacks the heroics necessary for Die Walkure’s great sword declamations. The immense Stephen Milling is a stentorian, menacing Hunding. Seattle loves Jane Eaglen’s Brunnhilde. And when she is singing full throttle this reviewer loves her too but there is a worrying gap in the middle range of her voice that renders it almost inaudible at times. Alan Woodrow’s Siegfried acts with jaunty confidence and humour, singing heroically if not always beautifully but growing in vocal stature to deliver a moving death scene in Gotterdammerung. In the revised (since 2001) immolation scene, the cavorting Rhinemaidens reclaim their Ring as the grey, ageing gods rise on a pedestal amidst the smoke of Valhalla’s ruins. Wotan and Fricka embrace - recalling bad Hollywood films where family values must survive but by now we don’t care for the rapturous love theme brings with it the pristine forest of Rhinegold. Now fresh shoots grow on the logs. In Seattle’s green Ring, beyond the destruction caused by gods and man nature returns, nature endures.
Wagner
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN G.Grimsley, S.Blythe, RP Fink, M.Plette, S. Milling, G. Saks, P.Kazaras, T. Harper, E.Podles, R. Berkeley-Steele, MJ Wray, J. Eaglen, A. Woodrow. Dir: R.Spano. Dir.esc: S. Wadsworth. 7,8,10, 12, 15, 16,18,20, 23, 24,26,28 August
Seattle loves Wagner and has been presenting Ring cycles in the city of Boeing and Microsoft since 1976. Director Stephen Wadsworth has repaid that love with a green and loving Ring. Green in the realistic sets – the gods dwell in a forest glade based on a local beauty spot. And loving in the relationships between these oh-so-human deities – Wotan and Fricka exchange frequent embraces between marital arguments. Conducting his first Ring, Robert Spano brings finely judged pacing, sparkle and weight to an orchestra that benefits from the excellent acoustic in the renovated McCaw Hall. The other major debut is Greer Grimsley in his first Wotan. He has an oaky, tireless bass- baritone that occasionally echoes the sublime George London. His Wotan remains a work in progress, lacking a little in presence as if Grimsley does not yet believe that he is the god of all the gods.
Richard Paul Fink’s powerful, assured Alberich commands the stage in Rhinegold. In the opening scenes he has to compete with the production’s stunning Rhinemaidens – suspended on harnesses, swooping, soaring and somersaulting as they sing. Stephanie Blythe’s glorious mezzo brings warmth and compassion to Fricka but the most dramatic moment belongs to Ewa Podles’s Erda who emerges out of the mossy forest floor to bring her own brand of velvet-brown, sexy contralto comfort to the troubled Wotan.
In Die Walkure, Margaret Jane Wray’s thrilling, laser-like soprano lacks the doomed Sieglinde’s vulnerability. Wray is surely just passing through Hunding’s hut on the way to Brunnhilde’s summits. Siegmund on the other hand, as sung by Richard Berkeley-Steele is lyrical and tender but lacks the heroics necessary for Die Walkure’s great sword declamations. The immense Stephen Milling is a stentorian, menacing Hunding. Seattle loves Jane Eaglen’s Brunnhilde. And when she is singing full throttle this reviewer loves her too but there is a worrying gap in the middle range of her voice that renders it almost inaudible at times. Alan Woodrow’s Siegfried acts with jaunty confidence and humour, singing heroically if not always beautifully but growing in vocal stature to deliver a moving death scene in Gotterdammerung. In the revised (since 2001) immolation scene, the cavorting Rhinemaidens reclaim their Ring as the grey, ageing gods rise on a pedestal amidst the smoke of Valhalla’s ruins. Wotan and Fricka embrace - recalling bad Hollywood films where family values must survive but by now we don’t care for the rapturous love theme brings with it the pristine forest of Rhinegold. Now fresh shoots grow on the logs. In Seattle’s green Ring, beyond the destruction caused by gods and man nature returns, nature endures.
Seattle Ring 2001
The Ring Cycle - Seattle Opera -13, 14, 16 and 18 August 2001:
Long before Boeing , long, long before Microsoft, the city of Seattle lived off lumber from the great forests that cover its nearby mountains. And then came word that gold was to be found in those same mountains and desperate men thronged to the town. In their wake, came women brought in to be married off , not always willingly, to these wild woodsmen. For a while Seattle mined the gold miners selling them provisions before they set out on an invariably vain quest out into the unwelcoming forests where even today bears still roam and occasionally show up in suburban back gardens. A hundred years ago the centre of the original city was much lower and parts of this underground world can still be visited beneath the hollow sidewalks of downtown’s Pioneer Square.
Dark forests, mountain summits, bears, gold, unwilling wives and a hidden underground world. Is it any wonder that the Seattle Opera has established itself as one of the leading proponents of Wagner’s Ring Cycle? When General Director Speight Jenkins was casting around for a director for this new Ring production seven years ago, he expressed a wish for a “green Ring” in a naturalistic setting that would correspond to the surrounding Pacific Northwest landscape. His team of director Stephen Wadsworth, designer Tom Lynch and lighting director Peter Kaczorowski has given us a Ring that after years of Rings in space-ships, tunnels, Victorian drawing rooms is refreshingly free of any concept. From the moment of the exquisitely realized Rhine Maidens entry on to the scene ( securely attached by harnesses and moved around on wires by hidden helpers in the flies, the fearless and excellent singers swoop and dive and turn several complete somersaults 20 feet above a stage of iridescent deep-water blue), Wadsworth draws us so deeply into the emotions and psychology of Wagner’s characters both divine and mortal that no additional theories need to be grafted on to this colossal work. Stick with us, the whole Seattle team seems to be saying , with these gods and mortals and the nature that we now know so well and Wagner’s epic will flow as naturally as the Rhine itself. It does. The longeurs that this spectator has so often experienced in the first act of Gotterdammerung were absent. And even Siegfried, often a low point for any but the most dedicated Wagnerian, was the fastest-moving and most engaging that I’ve every experienced.
Lynch’s beautiful naturalistic sets from those watery Rhine depths up to Brunnhilde’s rock and the frozen winter world of the Norns support Wadsworth’s strong dramatic reading. The characters kiss and hug a lot in this Ring. Wotan, Phillip Joll, and Fricka, the wonderful, opulent-voiced Stephanie Blythe, continue to embrace and show genuine affection as they sing through their conflicts in Walkure’s Act 2. At one point he courts her with a flower picked from Valhalla’s slopes. A cynic could call this a West Coast “touchy feely” Ring but by showing a still-loving if disenchanted Fricka, Wadsworth gives this often shrewish character a pivotal role as the moral centre of the drama. When the gods ascend into Valhalla, Fricka holds back anxious and unsure. When her wish for Siegmund’s death is granted, she is there on stage to witness his end.
Wadsworth has said that he doesn’t want any of the women in the Ring to appear to be victims. And certainly the two most likely candidates, Freia, (Maria Plette) the gentle goddess of youth and Sieglinde, the doomed twin (sung with warmth, power and beauty by an utterly secure Margaret Jane Wray) are both feisty, independent women. Faced with a brutish Hunding who makes a point of imposing his kisses on her in front of Siegmund, this Sieglinde sweeps the table clear of all its symbols of her imposed domesticity before running off to share a night of love with her brother.
As the cycle progresses, British soprano, Jane Eaglen’s Brunnhilde emerges as a warm, loving Wonder Woman character. Both General Director, Speight Jenkins and Wadsworth have expressed the opinion that the supposed “redemption through love theme” that closes Gotterdammerung is more a celebration of Brunnhilde. Vocally the clarion-voiced Eaglen is increasingly worthy of celebration, particularly in Gotterdammerung where with Nilsonesque assurance she commanded the stage from the moment of her entrance. On the previous two days, the contrast between her loud and soft passages was occasionally too marked. Under Wadsworth’s sensitive coaching her acting has improved tenfold since I saw her Brunnhilde in a Scottish Opera Ring several years ago.
A cruel twist of fate helped to make this a woman’s Ring. In what could be the worst nightmare of any opera house director attempting to present the tetralogy , Speight Jenkins lost his Siegfried, the longest role in the cycle. Canadian tenor Alan Woodrow, who sings regularly at ENO, was the hope of many as a great new heroic tenor. But, alas, 24 hours before his debut, he tripped over a treadmill while accompanying his wife to the gym and severed a quadriceps muscle. Unable to walk, he sang through the first cycle from the wings while his cover, English tenor, Richard Berkeley-Steele, acted his part on stage. Jenkins later decided that this would be an unsatisfactory solution for the two remaining cycles and with some extra coaching from the director, the valiant Englishman went on to sing a part for which he had never rehearsed with an orchestra.
He showed no sign of nerves and if not quite a heroic tenor, he acted with ease and agility and gave us the rare sight of a slim, strong, youthful Siegfried.
The British contribution to this Ring was completed by Welsh baritone Philip Joll in the role of Wotan. Lacking in some majesty and a lot of volume in Rheingold, Joll summoned the necessary warmth and power to make Wotan’s Farewell the essential emotional climax of the Ring that it must be if the rest of the cycle is to move us.
Outstanding male performances came from Richard Paul Fink as Alberich and the exciting young Danish bass, Stephen Milling, as a volcanic, menacing Hunding and an equally stentorian but deeply vulnerable Fasolt.
Replacing an ailing Armin Jordan, Franz Vote conducted a sensitive, balanced Ring that perhaps lacked fireworks and was occasionally let down by the horns but grew in assurance as the days progressed.
At the end of their previous Ring Cycle, Seattle Opera earned admission to the Guinness Book of Records by staging the biggest fire on a public stage. Wadsworth and Lynch decided, wisely, that they could not follow such spectacle. Instead the scene literally flows from a distant, smouldering funeral pyre behind a carved wooden screen in the Gibichung palace, to a brief glimpse of the gods in the depths of the Rhine and on to the rebirth of nature and life as new young trees appear on the slopes of what could be Seattle’s own Mt Rainier.
A few final words on the driving force behind this Ring, the extra ordinary general director, Speight Jenkins. Where in Europe would a general director conduct a question and answer session on anything pertaining to the Ring day in question? On each performance day, Jenkins arms himself with a microphone, stands in the foyer of his theatre and for 90 minutes, answers the most obscure and erudite questions. When he was preparing this Ring, Jenkins asked for a commitment from his production team to return in 2005, 2009 and 2013. On this first showing, they have given us a Ring that confirms Seattle’s emerging reputation as an American Bayreuth. Tickets sell out a year in advance so mark those dates in your calendars now.
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