Last Updated: May 31, 2000
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One of five winning entries by Justin Davidson of Newsday, Melville,
N.Y. that won the criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE Distinguished
Writing Awards.
Monday. April 21, 1997
THE METROPOLITAN OPERA reached the third part and the 13th hour of "Der
Ring des Nibelungen" on Saturday, and Wagner's operatic juggernaut slouched
that much closer to doomsday. The sibling-lovers, Siegmund and Siegelinde
are both dead, and their inbred son Siegfried has come of age: The sword
has been passed to a new generation of Aryans. Just three more acts (plus
a prelude) and Valhalla will fall.
Wagner's genius was to have created a universe in which singing is not
merely a convention, but an aspect of natural law: Walkyries ride flying
horses, adulterous gods sire superheroes who swig dragon's blood and take
advice from birds, dwarves have the gills both to court and cheat river
sprites at the bottom of the Rhine - and every one of those creatures sings.
The orchestra provides atmosphere in the literal sense - music is the air
they breathe. That is why these operas have to be so long: One cannot make
a quick tour of an alternate universe.
I am not generally fond of fantasy or situations that drip with symbolism,
but having let myself into Wagner's world on Saturday night, I had no desire
to re-emerge. Director Otto Schenk, set designer Gunther Schneider-Siemssen,
and lighting designer Gil Wechsler have been as thorough in recreating
Wagner's cosmology as the composer was in imagining it. Their hobbit habitats
and fiberglass forests are as vivid as they are familiar, the dragon has
a slimy crustacean charm, and the weather atop Wotan's mountain changes
spectacularly with the characters’ states of mind. The gods brood, and
the sky goes black. Brunnhilde is kissed out of her 30-year slumber by
Siegfried, and multihued light seems to come from several different suns.
If there was rarely a dull moment on this mythic planet, the credit
goes to James Levine, who presided over a performance of such kinetic musicality
that the hours barreled by. Levine supported the singers with an orchestral
undergirding as solid and incandescent as Brunnhilde's flaming rock, and
he had a valorous cast.
Wolfgang Schmidt was the titular hero, and he sang the role magnificently,
matching his magic sword Nothung for well-honed, tempered heft and playing
him as a good Germanic brawler: swaggering, fearless, and not terribly
bright. On occasion, Schmidt played his character's thickheadedness for
laughs. In that fleeting homoerotic moment when he finds the warrior-goddess
Brunnhilde asleep on her rock and lovingly removes her shield, helmet,
and breastplate before discovering that she is not a man, Schmidt made
much of the way Siegfried's momentary horror is sublimated into instantaneous
love.
Hildegard Behrens, who sang Brunnhilde (oddly, wearing a nightgown under
her armor), has recovered most of her voice but not all of her focus since
being afflicted by a cold in "Die Walkure," and she was the only cast member
who allowed her hour onstage to drag.
James Morris could not have been more magisterial as the Wanderer, the
god Wotan in human mufti. The expert tenor Graham Clark made a real character,
and not just a cartoon hunchback, out of the blacksmith-dwarf Mime, expertly
regulating the dosages of kicked-dog skittishness, venality, and sympathy.
