The first instalment of Barrie Kosky’s Ring for the Royal Opera left us with the indelible impression – except for some critics who were bemused or offended by the sight of an elderly, naked woman on stage – of a wizened Erda (conceived here as Mother Earth) desiccated and desecrated through mankind’s exploitation of her natural resources, who watches the sorry tale of her decline. Her exhausted figure continues, silently and suggestively, to stalk the action of Die Walküre, even if Kosky doesn’t sustain the same intense level of theatrical activity or ecological critique as in Das Rheingold. The ideas are still as potent, but carried across a longer period of time, and so inevitably seem more diffuse.
Theatrical irony is indicated at the beginning, before the music even starts, as Erda is seen against the opened-up backstage with a few items cluttered up against the walls to remind us that what follows is, ultimately, a performance. But that drama is largely a lyrical, tragic adumbration of the idea of the burnt world ash tree (Yggdrasil) as the metaphor for the worn out, polluted world – the catastrophe of its raiding by Wotan to create his spear, prompting the whole of the Ring’s narrative, but which is only narrated in its last opera. (It’s sadly apt that this run happens to occur now during the trial of the vandals who felled the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall.)
Such incinerated barrenness is made manifest in the dull facade of Hunding’s hut in which Sieglinde is effectively imprisoned and where Siegmund finds temporary refuge, and in the dead tree trunk itself (just as had been seen in Das Rheingold) in Act Two. That seems to be a fragment of the same monumental tree which stands centre stage in Act Three: the tree from which Erda witnesses the altercation between Wotan and her daughter Brünnhilde, and where the latter is secluded until she will be awoken by Siegfried while it is ensnared by Loge’s flames – here, evidently not a benign force. Even if it’s chronologically incorrect for that tree to have become the ashen chunk seen in Act Two, it nevertheless makes the point that this Ring is a cycle of wearisomely repeated actions, truly imbued with the Schopenhauerian philosophy that influenced Wagner, in that every act of individual will strikes a discordant note against or attack upon, not the noumenal world spirit, but the physical natural order of Mother Earth.
It must be for this reason that Siegmund’s drawing the sword Nothung is not even a temporary cause for hope and assistance at his moment of need but – echoing the musical leitmotif of Alberich’s renunciation of love which also happens to accompany Siegmund’s action – another act of violence, as he draws it out of Erda herself, inciting bloody wounds in her. Deryck Cooke was puzzled as to why commentators had generally referred to this motif as the renunciation of love, given that it recurs at Siegmund’s decisive action and so is meant to forge some connection or reminiscence; he termed it, instead, the motif of existential choice. Kosky’s reinterpretation of the drawing of Nothung tellingly draws it into closer connection with Alberich’s loveless act, then, with the wilfully destructive consequences both turn out to foster. The Freudian, erotic imagery of Siegmund’s grasping the sword is in no way lessened by this ironic reversal of a scene of rape with the deliberate withdrawal of the relevant instrument (rather than its insertion) given Kosky’s overall vision of the sacrilege of nature. Furthermore, it comes at a charged moment in the passionate duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde just after the welcome arrival of renewing spring following the storm (“Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond, in mildem Lichte leuchtet der Lenz”): Erda had appeared with the influx of light with a gift of flowers to the lovers. Nature appears to wreak revenge upon Siegmund’s ungrateful action, and his violation of the natural order in committing incest with Sieglinde, when he staggers to his death at the ash tree fragment after Hunding’s attack, and it oozes with blood.
Otherwise, death and destruction are presented here as an ashen crumbling away into nothingness. When Siegmund disavows Brünnhilde’s invitation to come to Valhalla because Sieglinde won’t be there, the skeletal figure of death he takes from Erda disintegrates into dust in his arms, just as Nothung does in his hands (rather than into still-tangible metallic shards) at the end of Act Two. The bodies of warriors which the Valkyries collect in Act Three are a horde of dirtied, mired skeletons, also ready to dissolve into slime – maybe an implicit condemnation of where the Nazi mythology of soil and blood led to. Kosky says that he hasn’t yet decided whether the conclusion of this Ring will be one of regeneration and redemption, or of nihilism. But this Die Walküre at least – the one part of the tetralogy often admired for its enriching, positive vision of human relationships amidst so much struggle and despair around it – is unremittingly bleak. In this year of Anselm Kiefer’s 80th birthday, it perhaps strikes one that the visualisation of that interpretation in Rufus Diwiszua’s sets shares the spirit of that artist’s work in its gloomy, haunting sublimity which nevertheless engages deeply and constructively with the German cultural past.
Musically, the cast is notably stronger and more persuasive than in Das Rheingold. Christopher Maltman brings a degree more heft to the part of Wotan, even in his humanity, compared with his haughty divinity in the first opera, as he grapples with the conundrum he’s created in the world of mortals. The tentative, almost mumbling way in which he starts his crucial Act Two monologue touchingly evokes the sense of fearfully coming to terms with a situation that has exceeded his ability to control. Stanislas de Barbeyrac is a light-voiced Siegmund, evincing noble fragility and victimhood more than heroism – even if higher notes are strained. The nervous tetchiness of his opening sequences, as he escapes the storm and his enemies, aptly captures the foreboding moments before he crosses paths with Soloman Howard’s Hunding, wielding a gun, and sung with dark slickness.
Natalya Romaniw (replacing Lise Davidsen) as Sieglinde is tenderly expressive, perhaps a touch anonymous or overwhelmed initially, but coming to hold her own in Act Three against the nine vigorously characterised Valkyries. Chief among those is Elisabeth Strid’s audacious Brünnhilde, lithe and steely as she exudes optimism, but also moving as she encounters the twins’ love and when she defends herself before Wotan. Rashness is in the nature of the Brünnhilde of Die Walküre, but Strid already demonstrates the capacity to develop the powerful complexity of the role that will follow in the next parts of the Ring. In the more male-dominated world of Das Rheingold Marina Prudenskaya’s Fricka didn’t stand out as much as she now does here; her calm silvery eloquence marks her out as more idiomatically distinctive among the more extensive writing for female voices in this part of the cycle, as she launches her compelling arguments to her husband that Siegmund must fall. Her lack of hysterical outrage makes her remonstrations all the more effective.
Antonio Pappano conducts an efficient, linear account of the score, which is to say that it flows neatly from one bar to the next. But it lacks an accumulated tension or urgency that can gather the music up into the wider, surging passages of sustained drama, passion, tragedy, or fatefulness that structure the epic sweep of each Act, and which Wagner meant by describing his endlessly evolving orchestral textures as continuous melody. Climaxes come simply as the end point of the sequences within each of those Acts, not so much generated from within the broader, seamless course of their music, however potent individual sonorities or blended timbres are from the Royal Opera House Orchestra. Nevertheless, the production still offers much to stimulate and provoke.
The post Royal Opera House – Wagner’s Die Walküre – with Christopher Maltman, Elisabet Strid, Natalya Romaniw & Stanislas de Barbeyrac; directed by Barrie Kosky; conducted by Antonio Pappano appeared first on The Classical Source.
