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| The Metropolitan Opera House. |
As I mentioned in the last post, the production has been criticized for its reliance on a large, mechanical set. It has been deprecated by most critics who found it an unnecessary distraction that resulted in a shallow interpretation.
Yes his machine creaks, but it's no louder than other props or the audience members' coughs. Mostly it just sits there, and after warming up, the creakiness seemed to diminish.
Yes, images that sometimes move are projected onto the machine which sometimes moves. The critics call this distracting, but how is it different from allowing anything else on the stage to move? "For shame, they lowered a backdrop in the middle of the act, which caused me to completely lose track of the music," said no one after any opera. Never mind that Wagner explicitly calls for some drastic scene changes as one blogger notes. If moving images are so distracting, how are these critics able to comment on movie scores? My take: there are images on the set that move with the set and in response to the singers on the set! Awesome!
And if we're going to call the imagery in this production shallow, then we'd better start addressing the upholstery choices of other operas. A bland or traditional design is a missed opportunity for the director to force his personal, narrow, anachronistic wrapper around the production. Wagner was actually quite specific in his stage directions. Do the critics demand that every new production include a deep layer of obfuscation unintended by the composer? Do they want high-concept settings in every scene that somehow don't also usurp your attention away from the music?
Some images were admittedly a little strange. The palantir-esque eye during Wotan's monologue in Die Walküre was probably not a Wagner invention. The transitional purple-pink, amorphous patterns in the final opera defied any explanation. But these were neither distasteful nor jarring. A few slightly odd visuals do not deem the entire production "catastrophic" or "disastrous" as many critics have proudly hyperbolized.
One example of a particularly effective use of the set was the opening to Act III of Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries. Here, the eight Valkyrie sisters ride through the sky selecting the bravest of fallen warriors to bring back to Valhalla. They enter with a (tremendously difficult, especially as an opener) battle cry of "Hojotoho!" In other productions, the curtain rises, the music starts, the goddesses enter onto the stage, they sing, they call to their implied horses offstage, and it is a rousing show. In the Lepage production the music starts with the sisters spaced between the 24 moving planks. 16 of these are stationary and show the mountains and clouds passing below while the eight that they sit atop are fashioned as the heads of their horses. These horse heads tilt up and down suggesting their riding motion. Rather than entering the stage one-by-one, there they are riding fast, high in the sky. When it's one Valkyrie's time to enter, she slides down her plank onto the front of the stage, effectively dismounting. This is possibly the first presentation of this scene that fully expresses the dynamism and vivacity of these warrior goddesses. It was thrilling and the audience definitely responded.
Another was Donner's clearing of the sky which opens the way to Valhalla. For this short scene, Donner stands alone on the set which serves as a misty, tilted surface representing the sky. As the music rises and he prepares for his strike, he strides in circles about the center of the set which pushes the mist into a sort of whirlpool (as I mentioned, the images are responsive). Finally, at the music's climax, he strikes the ground (which is the sky, remember) with his huge hammer, bolts of lightning flash from the point of contact, and the mist clears. (I was going to link a video from the original season's performance, but it was different enough to lack the vitality of the version I saw.)
The problems I detected with the production were three-fold. First, there were a few curious decisions in the direction. But being ignorant of Wagner's stage directions, I'll leave those alone. Second, while there were definitely more than a few fantastic voices (Stefan Margita, Stephanie Blythe, Eric Owens, Hans-Peter König, Jay Hunter Morris), a few important characters received weaker talent. Wotan, in particular. Mark Delavan is a clumsy actor with a voice too thin to conjure the full authority of the character. But these roles are all so incredibly demanding, the fact they had voices left at all by the end deserves great respect. (Bryn Terfel plays Wotan in the recordings that are available for purchase on DVD or Blu-ray, and his portrayal ranges from tender to terrifying. Sometimes tired, though.)
Finally, the conductor, Fabio Luisi, managed to let me down too often. There were times in Das Rheingold where the Met orchestra stated bold themes less than boldly, and others when they rose too loud and completely drowned out the singers. In Götterdämmerung, the orchestra was frustratingly inconsistent. Especially in the brass. I don't know if it was just one or several horn players having a bad night, but it was highly uncharacteristic of this normally superior ensemble.
Still, these are mere quibbles. Ring productions are always big, expensive, exhausting, enormously challenging projects. To accept and surmount the considerable technical and technological challenges that Lepage's production entails honors Wagner's ambitions. Do the myriad leitmotifs not derive from a few fundamental bases? Then isn't it fitting to have the sets derive from variations on a common foundation, i.e. the machine? The public seems more appreciative than the critics. There were people outside with signs begging for tickets each night. The always generous applause at the end of acts usually came well before the last note sounded. And walking around listening to conversations, the only negative comment I heard was from some poor young man complaining over his phone about how he couldn't understand the plot or the singing and couldn't leave and shouldn't have eaten Chipotle earlier in the day.
If Ring experts find the production too vanilla for their tastes, fine. If you've seen a dozen Ring cycles and are well familiar with Wagner's intent, I understand that you want a new perspective. But most people have not, and the machine together with the cast and orchestra make for a brilliant introduction. In the end, I accuse the critics of deciding the production a failure first, then inventing reasons to justify this later. Perhaps blogger David Kim sums it up best: "The most virulent criticism I’ve seen of Lepage’s work comes from music critics of many years standing who have particular interests in twentieth and twenty-first century music. The most effusive praise comes from websites dedicated to Wagner. That probably tells you most of what you need to know."
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