Opera North Announce 2016 Ring Cycle Dates & Locations Written By The Wagnerian on Thursday, 22 January 2015 6:20:00 pm After four years of individual performances of each part of Der Ring des Nibelungen in concert - although semi-staged - ON have now announced the dates and locations of the full cycle, to be performed in 2016. Washington National Opera's BravO is DC's premier young professional arts-lover program for those between the ages of 18 and 40! The program is free to join and offers discounted tickets, social events, backstage tours, pre-performance talks, and more.
Fans of Richard Wagner's The Ring are devoted at the best of times. But when they've come to watch the final performance of a 20-year-old production about as close to Wagner's original stage conception as possible, then devotion becomes near-fanaticism.
So it was at New York's Metropolitan opera last Saturday night. The Lincoln Centre Plaza was full of serious opera followers wearing ridiculous outfits, in the Wagner equivalent of an annual Star Wars convention. In their day jobs, they probably work (or used to) as chief executives of major international banks; on Saturday night they were dressed as 12th-century warriors.
The occasion was the last rendition of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final instalment of the Ring, under the uber-traditional production of the Viennese director Otto Schenk. When it was first introduced to the Met, opening with Die Walküre in 1987, the production must have been astonishing, with epic set changes to match the scale of the music, its romantic mountain and forest settings, and its technological wizardry. In the digital age such tricks no longer astound, and the set itself is said to be ready to actually implode – as opposed to theatrically implode, as it does at the end of Götterdämmerung. Which is why the Met decided to kiss goodbye to this old, much-loved friend.
Much-loved is actually a gross understatement, because Met regulars have come to adore the production almost as much as the opera. They see in it everything that is good about literal translations of the score – and by implication everything that is bad about newfangled modern interpretations full of clever-clever directorial antics never intended by the composer. Meet Leonard Levine, for instance, who was at the Met on Saturday having seen the complete Schenk Ring no less than eight times. That's about 120 hours of opera viewing. 'It's the Ring as Wagner really intended,' Levine told me, standing on the Plaza wearing one of those horned Valkyrie helmets. (He confessed to having found it discarded in a dustbin one Halloween.) 'It's magical, and it fits the libretto. It's literal,' he added.
When Levine says the production is literal, he means that literally. When Wagner notes in his stage directions that the sky glimmers, then there is a glimmer across the Met's proscenium-arched sky. When he orders lightning, lightning is duly provided.
Or take the ending of the opera, and of the entire 15-hour Ring cycle. The empire of the gods, Valhalla, is destroyed as a result of the curse of the Ring, a gold trinket made out of treasure stolen from the Rhine. Wagner stipulates: 'The flames immediately flare up so that the fire fills the whole space in front of the hall and appears to seize on the building itself. When the whole stage seems filled with fire, the glow suddenly dies down. At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks.' Not an easy theatrical effect to pull off, but Schenk and his set designer Gunther Schneider-Siemssen certainly try their hardest, replete with blood-red lighting, tumbling faux-granite boulders and, naturally, masses of dry ice.
Over the years, the production has built up a following that has helped to bankroll the Met through difficult times. Saturday's final performance was sold out – a huge achievement for a 3,000-seat theatre – helping to raise sales of Met paid seats to 88% for this 33-week season. But as time passed, its literalness started to become an impediment to younger audiences. Some have found its dark swirling skies, rainbows and Gothic flourishes more comic than majestic, the overall effect dating like one of those 3D postcards from the 1970s. The audience aged along with the production. Though the Met was full on Saturday, the average age must have been well over 60, which is not a sustainable economic model.
Next year, the Met will introduce a new Ring by the Canadian director Robert Lepage. Given his previous work, audiences can expect very little literalness, plenty of video projections and, yes, digital manipulation of moving images. Will my horned friend Levine come back again to see the Lepage? 'Yes, of course, I want to see the contrast. But I'm not looking forward to it.'
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What hasn't aged is the power of the music, and the extraordinary communication of it by the musicians. John Tomlinson as Hagen was outstanding, his translation of the character rich, dark and deeply evil. Linda Watson as Brünnhilde began tentatively but was forceful by the end. Jon Fredric West as Siegfried was a bit too much of a puppydog for my taste, though he sang competently. The star of the night was the Met's music director, James Levine. He has grown into a stately older age with the production, having been present at its birth and now at its demise. In my 1990 DVD of the Schenk Ring, Levine appears with a mass of black, mad professor hair. On Saturday night, the mad professor look was still there – come to think of it, he even resembles Alberich, the dwarfish Nibelung who fashions the Ring and issues its curse – but he is now snow-white.
Levine's command of the Met orchestra has only grown. It was crystal clear, from rib-rattling double bass to twinkling chimes, and overwhelming in its power. At the tumultuous climax – as nihilistic yet hope-laden as any ending in any artform in history – Levine raised his hands and held them aloft like a man transfixed at prayer. After 20 years of this, is it any wonder?
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