Der Ring des Nibelungen
by Richard Wagner, conducted
and directed by Valery Gergiev.
Presented by the Lincoln Center
Festival and the Metropolitan Opera,
New York, July 2007.
It is ironic, to say the least, that the emblem of opera in the popular imagination is a fat, blonde-haired woman wearing a two-horned helmet. The image comes, by way of cartoons and parodies, from Wagner’s Ring, but Wagner himself would have been the last person to view his great work as the essence of opera. He thought what he was building in this eighteen-hour, four-evening piece was precisely not opera, but a rebellion against opera as he knew it—a fresh form that required a new name (something along the lines of “music drama”) and that could not be performed in a standard opera house, but needed its own special festival setting. That Bayreuth in particular and Wagnerism in general have hardened into the strictest of operatic traditions is an irony which would not have been lost on the composer, for the oppressive and finally triumphant power of rules, even or especially in the face of the deepest individual desire to break them, is one of the Ring cycle’s central themes.
Yet the Ring does succeed in breaking the rules, remaking the form, time after time, and differently every time. For if a ring or a cycle by definition suggests the endlessness and eternity of a circle, this Ring and this cycle make their mark by coming, each time, to a distinct conclusion. And while the cycle will inevitably start up again—at another time and elsewhere, or perhaps even in the same place—the specific performance you have witnessed will in every case be unique and unrepeatable.
This kind of fleeting existence characterizes all live performances, of course, but very few build it into their structure and meaning as consciously as Wagner’s Ring does. “Fleeting,” though, hardly seems the right word for such a massive, prolonged, exhausting artwork. That the Ring takes place in time and over time is something no audience member can forget. It is an endurance test of sorts, and its delirious excitements are balanced by—perhaps, in part, even created by—its unavoidable longueurs. The work as a whole is necessarily flawed, filled with loose ends and ridiculous premises, begging deep philosophical questions and demanding excessive forebearance of both a psychological and moral kind. And although it is more the product of a single consciousness than any other opera we have (for Wagner not only developed the plot, wrote the libretto, and composed the music, but also designed the lighting, specified much of the scenery, and generally imprinted himself on every aspect he could), it is also, because of its very massiveness, the piece that most reminds us how many sensibilities go into staging an opera. One cannot direct a definitive production of the Ring, any more than one can live a perfect life: there are just too many variables to control, and too much room for slippage.
Part of the reason the cycle has this curiously self-contradictory quality may have to do with the way it was created. In constructing the plot, Wagner began at the end, with the death of his hero Siegfried. He then realized that in order to understand the full significance of Siegried’s death, we would also need to know something about Siegfried’s youth, so Der junge Siegfried (eventually called just Siegfried) was tacked on in front of Siegfrieds Tod. Still unsatisfied, he described Siegfried’s incestuous parentage and immortal grandparentage in Die Walküre, which he also used to introduce the figure of Brünnhilde, the fallen goddess who would ultimately become Siegfried’s bride. Finally, he wrote a prologue, Das Rheingold, which set out the origins of the golden ring itself, and explained how all the complications in the ensuing three operas arose from its theft.
All this work on the Ring “poem,” as he called it, took place from about 1848 to 1852, during which time the story grew darker and darker — perhaps, some people think, because Wagner’s radical hopes for the European revolutions of 1848 had panned out so badly by the time of Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup. Or maybe he had simply gotten older, gloomier, and less starry-eyed. For whatever reasons, he made a major change in the conclusion of the opera’s text: whereas his first idea had been to let the immortal inhabitants of Valhalla live happily ever after once they’d returned the cursed ring to its rightful owners, the Rhinemaidens, he now condemned the gods to complete destruction. And with the conversion of the fourth opera’s title from Siegfrieds Tod to Götterdämmerung — usually translated as Twilight of the Gods — Wagner seemed to signal that his central interest had shifted from the fearless, foolish Siegfried (fearless because foolish, since he doesn’t know what fear is) to the tragic, compelling Wotan, the Zeus-like god whose initial, deeply regretted errors ultimately bring down his whole race.
When a close friend of Wagner’s pointed out to him, soon after the Ring poem was completed, that it didn’t really make sense for the gods to be destroyed after the stolen gold had been returned to the Rhine, Wagner acknowledged that it didn’t make lawyer’s sense, but that the audience would nonetheless feel the outcome to be inevitable. (I owe the discovery of this anecdote to Bernard Williams’s excellent essay “The Elusiveness of Pessimism,” which can be found in his posthumously published book On Opera. This brief article is the single best thing I’ve read about the Ring, though Ernest Newman’s solid The Wagner Operas and Michael Tanner’s witty little Wagner are also extremely useful.)
As it turns out, one of the obvious reasons for this sense of inevitability lies in the music, though in fact the music had not yet been composed at the time Wagner made that remark. Having written the text backward, he was to write the music forward, over the course of the succeeding two decades, and the man who came up with the complex orchestration of Twilight of the Gods in 1873 was leagues ahead, technically as well as chronologically, of the youthful figure who began composing Das Rheingold in 1853. So if the masterful music of the fourth opera assures us that the gods have to die—in ways that echo what it has been telling us all along—we are likely to believe it.
“Can Fulvia die?” says Cleopatra upon hearing of the death of Antony’s wife, in Shakespeare’s play about those two larger-than-life lovers. It is witty of her to ask that question about a mortal; it seems much odder to ask it about a god—as Wagner does, in a very Shakespearean way, about Wotan—since the answer to that question would seem to be definitional: they are called immortals, after all, because they don’t die. On the other hand, we are psychologically prone to viewing the ancient polytheistic gods as somehow more “dead” than the monotheistic deities who continue to wield power over their present-day adherents. On an intuitive level, at any rate, we understand what it might mean for gods to die, or die out; and Wagner is capitalizing on that feeling when he chooses the old Norse gods as the basis for his plot.
He is also building on another kind of intuition that is deeper and more frightening: our irrational conviction that we ourselves are going to live forever, mingled with our undeniable knowledge that we are actually going to die. “All that exists, comes to an end,” says Erda, the Cassandra figure of the Ring. We know this to be true on a scientific level (we know, that is, that entropy governs the universe), and yet we can’t bear to believe it. Wotan, whose convictions span the same incompatible range as ours, is thus a likely vessel for our sympathy. He is the most mortal of gods—what other god would wear an eyepatch, for Chrissake? — and he is the most nobly remorseful of tragic sinners. He goes from the heights of arrogance to the depths of sadness, and then to something like resignation, and eventually to utter absence, so that we only learn of his final days through hearsay—all in the course of four evenings or a god’s lifetime, whichever ends first.
Which brings us, at long last, to the Gergiev Ring. This production by the Kirov Opera of the Mariinsky Theatre, which has been touring the world since it premiered in Russia in late 2002, landed in New York last July. Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky’s amazing director, supervised the production and also conducted every performance; he shares credit for the “concept” with George Tsypin, a well-known Russian artist who is also the set designer for this Ring.
What this degree of Gergiev control means, first of all, is that the music is for the most part superb. Nowhere do loud instruments drown out weaker-voiced singers; nowhere do slack or impatient rhythms interfere with the emotion of what is taking place onstage. The musicians and the singers are all part of a single ensemble that is used to working together, and the result is a seamless web of excellent performances, mixing and mingling the various vocal and instrumental talents without showcasing one above the other. Because this is a non-star opera system, we get no sense that imported prima donnas are hijacking the vehicle; and because this is a European rather than American opera company, the talents of the performers include acting as well as singing.
So the drama and the music, in the cycle I saw, were both at a very high level. The lighting was pretty good, too. It was not Wagner’s prescribed lighting, but given the changes in lighting science since 1876 (fluorescent, neon, and halogen bulbs have all come in since then, as have intensive urban street-lighting, moving-picture photography, and atomic bombs, along with wave-particle theory, laser physics, and various other investigations into the nature of light), the lighting Wagner specified would not carry the same meaning for our eyes as it did for that first Bayreuth audience. Gleb Filshtinsky’s lighting for this production used elements of light-show and projection, but mainly it depended on shifts in color that beautifully reflected the shifts in the music.
The same cannot be said for the sets and props, which often seemed to come from outer space. (Literally so: the three huge, gaunt, semi-human figures that Tsypin had overseeing much of the action looked like nothing so much as outsized Martians, or perhaps Kon-Tiki figures left on earth by outsized Martians; and Fasolt and Fafner, the two giants in The Rhinegold, appeared to be a cross between tanks and robots, harking straight back to Soviet science fiction.) Worst of all were the costumes, for which I guess Tatiana Noginova must take the blame. Brünnhilde and her Valkyrie sisters wore unflattering black robes and ghastly pulled-back hairstyles; Fricka’s seemingly unremovable hat looked like a Danish Modern hourglass combined with a plastic egg-timer; the evil dwarf Alberich was dressed like a Punch-and-Judy clown, and his brother Mime like a tinker; and the villainous, deep-voiced Hagen paraded around, inexplicably, in a floor-length, bodice-hugging dress. Even for people who had witnessed the Kirov Ballet’s costuming atrocities of the 1970s (it used to be very strange, watching those perfect dancers clothed in terrible taste), these Ring outfits seemed unnecessarily bad.
Yet it was the costuming, finally, which gave the clearest hint about Gergiev’s interpretation, the strongest clue to what he was after in this version of the Ring. It was the costuming, in particular, of Wotan — one of the few characters who did not look awful in the clothes assigned to him — that woke me up to the brilliance of Gergiev’s conception. But first I need to step back a minute to explain a critical dispute.
The action of Das Rheingold, and therefore of the whole cycle, is essentially set in motion when Wotan steals the gold — along with the magic ring that has been made out of the gold — in order to pay off the two giants who have built Valhalla for him. (It is true that the gold had already been stolen from the Rhinemaidens by the Nibelung Alberich, who had his blacksmith brother forge the ring for him; but that theft alone would not have doomed the gods, as Wotan’s did.) By Die Walküre, the second opera of the four, Wotan has come to regret this reckless act tremendously, and you might say that he spends the rest of the cycle paying it off. As the series progresses, we watch him become more and more serious, care-laden, and sorrowful. We also see him lose everything he loves — his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde, his brave son, Siegmund, his heroic grandson, Siegfried, his belief in a glorious future, his youthful immortality, and finally the ill-gotten Valhalla itself. He starts as someone who glories in his own absolute power, but over time he begins to realize that the best he can hope for is a world run by people who are not under his control. He turns, in short, from a believer in raw will to someone capable of severe self-doubt and admirable self-renunciation.
The critical dispute, then, is over how to present Wotan in the first opera, before he becomes the evidently conscience-ridden figure of the second. Michael Tanner complains that “recent productions of the Ring have portrayed Wotan from the start as merely decrepit, morally and even physically… The result is that Wotan appears, in Das Rheingold, as nothing more than a politician, and Valhalla is downgraded to Wall Street, or some similarly debased underpinning of late capitalism. Furthermore, it means that the Wotan we meet in Act II of Die Walküre is to all intents and purposes a different person.” For Tanner, this kind of interpretation threatens to wreck the opera, because it creates a radical disconnect in the figure who otherwise represents the moral and psychological center of the piece.
But what if it is Wotan himself who takes the view that he has become “to all intents and purposes a different person”? What if this is not a distortion imposed on the unruly plot by a simple-minded director, but a difficult and painful self-transformation wrought by a god who had previously been led to believe that everything in his life would be eternal?
That is the line that Gergiev follows in his Ring, taking his cue from Wotan’s long narrative monologue in Die Walküre, in which he basically recapitulates the plot of Das Rheingold. These summaries of previous action, which take place throughout the Ring cycle, are sometimes taken to be excess explanation that Wagner carelessly left in even after he had decided to write the corresponding plot material into a prior opera. But this is ridiculous, for it implies that the composer — who made every note fit the dialogue — never bothered to re-read his completed script. In each case, these explanations or retellings perform a specific psychological function, both for the character (he or she is now interpreting things anew) and for us (because we find we feel differently, even about events we ourselves have witnessed, when we are told about them from someone else’s perspective later on).
In the course of Wotan’s lengthy narrative about the events that landed him in his current fix, we come to respect and even admire him in ways we never could have imagined. For one thing, he is telling the story to his daughter Brünnhilde, revealing his weaknesses and confessing his faults to someone he loves. “Words that are never said to someone else remain unspoken forever,” he says, justifying both his own immediate confession and the whole Wagnerian convention of these repeated narrations. He then goes on to tell her about his theft of the gold from the Nibelungs, an act which sprang from his regrettable need for luxury and outward display. “Away with splendor and pomp!” he concludes. “Now I have only one wish—to end it.” He asserts that he will leave “what I now detest, the hollow pomp of the gods, to the Nibelung’s child” — that is, to Hagen, who in some odd way becomes the Wotan figure of the fourth opera, the opera from which Wotan himself is absent.
What made this line of argument persuasive, coming from Gergiev’s Wotan, was that he actually looked like a completely different person in each of the operas. Alexei Tanovitsky, who played Wotan in all three, entered Das Rheingold looking something like the Italian supermodel Fabio. The personification of “splendor and pomp,” this Wotan had long, flowing blonde locks, was dressed all in white, and swept around the stage with an energy that verged on the manic. He was also extremely handsome, and taller by at least half a head than anyone else onstage. When he returned the next night in Die Walküre, he seemed to have shrunk — perhaps because he was now stooping a bit, or perhaps because he was only slightly taller than Olga Sergeevna’s powerful Brünnhilde. In this second opera, he was dressed in black, he had dark hair and a noticeably receding hairline, his face looked craggy rather than handsome, and he even moved differently, with a kind of cautious deliberation. Everyone I talked to that night presumed we simply had a different singer in the role — and when I pointed to the name Tanovitsky in both programs, they shrugged in confusion, as if to say: “Who knows what these Russians get up to?”
He was again transformed for the third opera, Siegfried, though this time the change was not as extreme. Here Wotan became the black-clad, greying Wanderer, with an eye-covering floppy hat to disguise his trademark patch. That much is traditional, but what was not part of the script was the way this heretofore eloquent bass singer softly and almost hesitantly rendered his lines. What sounded to some griping critics like repressed vocal chords or an exhausted voice was in fact a purposeful artistic decision: this Wotan was resigned, weary, tired of eternal life, a passive onlooker rather than an active force — and his voice reflected that.
Only the knowledge that it was all coming to an end could restore him. When he swept off his hat for his great abdication scene and finally began referring to himself in the first person instead of talking about “Wotan” in the abstract, his full-throated power came back. Siegfried the half-mortal hero “will waken Brünnhilde, the child you bore me,” he sang to Erda, “and she will wisely do what she must, redeeming the world at last.” He then urged Erda to sink back into slumber and “dream of my downfall.” And that was essentially the last we saw of him. (Gergiev, in yet another departure from tradition, declined even to show us Valhalla burning at the end of Götterdämmerung; he simply had Brünnhilde walk off into a deep blue light, as if water, not fire, had finally won out.)
Wotan’s ability to change — his willingness, in fact, to embrace change — is what distinguishes him from every other immortal character in the Ring (except Brünnhilde, and she only changes after she loses her immortality). In Gergiev’s version, this was particularly noticeable in relation to Fricka, Wotan’s wife. Dressed all in stiff white, with her permanently implanted white hat, she looked and sounded exactly the same in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. As sung by Larissa Diadkova, she was an impressive figure, especially in the second opera — but she was also rigid and unappealing, the embodiment of the kind of “lawyer’s logic” Wagner deplored when speaking to his friend about the plot. It is precisely Fricka’s inability to change that Wotan focuses on in his heated discussion with her. “You have never learned what I concluded,” he sings to her, “to imagine that things could happen for the first time.” The basic premise of her argument is that the gods can only remain in power forever if they are governed by the rules that Wotan has already laid out: this is why he must destroy Siegmund and rein in Brünnhilde (both of them his children, we might note, by women other than Fricka). He, on the other hand, is already foreseeing the end, already imagining a new kind of hero who could defeat and defy him. He longs for the freedom of not being all-powerful.
The only problem with Gergiev’s interpretation of the Ring — and I am not sure it is a problem — is that the cycle peaks at Die Walküre. Audiences have always loved this opera the best of the four (it is the only one routinely performed alone), and I think they may well be right. After that, we get declining amounts of Wotan and increasing amounts of Siegfried, who makes a very poor substitute. This one-dimensional hero of the last two operas, born only to kill a dragon, kiss a virgin or two, and then gallantly die, barely seems to have any personality at all, especially in comparison with his complicated grandfather. If he is characterized by anything, it is (as Bernard Williams astutely remarked) “his limitless—one might almost say clinical—guilelessness and his destructively simple view of what it is to achieve anything.” It is not surprising that he easily submits to Hagen’s mind-altering potion, for he barely has a baseline character from which to depart. He cannot change, as Wotan does, because he has nothing to change from.
There is some evidence that Wagner himself grew bored with his hero Siegfried—at any rate, he had to take a twelve-year break in the midst of composing Siegfried and refresh himself with Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. And yet the music of the last two operas in the Ring is as lush and beautiful as anything in Die Walkürie — more lush, I feel, and more beautiful, many other people think. But there are no characters in these later operas as gripping as the fatally enmeshed pairs who populate the previous work: the brother-and-sister lovers, Siegmund and Sieglinde; the father-daughter team, Wotan and Brünnhilde; and the battling spouses, Fricka and Wotan. In the later works, Brünnhilde has become a mere handmaiden to the unworthy Siegfried; Alberich and Mime are exaggerated stage villains; and even Hagen, though he is a rather fascinating figure (he lurks beautifully, in Gergiev’s production), is not the sort of person you can pin your heart on. So the glorious music, utterly emotive and interior in its methods and effects, seems to have no adequate object in which to locate itself. If sentimentality (at least, in literature) is caused by the excess of authorially imposed feeling over earned sympathy, then one might say that there is something sentimental about Wagner’s music for the last two operas in the Ring. And without a psychologically complex central character — which Wagner himself has trained us to want, and even need — the last half of the plot can occasionally make for slow going.
Yet the sense that we are wading through the aftermath, exerting ourselves to get to the end, does not actually damage the experience of the Ring as much as you might expect it to. What Wotan taught himself to comprehend — what he gave up his immortality to experience — was precisely this, the felt passage of time. If it all flew by in the twinkling of a conductor’s baton, as thrillingly and delightfully as it often does in Die Walküre, the Ring would not give us this, and it is meant to give us this. We may start out as gods, but we all end as mortals, trudging toward the grave.
Wendy Lesser, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of eight books, most recently Room for Doubt.
