Berlin — Lately, Germany’s capital has started to look like the southern city of Bayreuth.
in at least one respect. The Berlin State Opera adopted the Bayreuth approach (initiated by the composer himself) in staging Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. present everything within a weekWhile most houses are built slowly, sometimes over years, towards that marathon, Berlin unveiled the entire production at once, until the first cycle wrapped up on Sunday night.
Fifteen hours of musical performances and rehearsals with hundreds of performers is a daunting task, especially for a busy repertory house like the State Opera. But this myth-busting, subtly provocative new production by Dmitri Cherniakov was designed for a special occasion, with Daniel Barenboim, the company’s longtime music director and giant of Berlin culture.
However, Barenboim’s health deteriorated in recent months and he declined the premiere. In his place came Christian Thielemann, one of the few conductors to conduct all ten of Wagner’s mature operas at Bayreuth. He doesn’t have much experience with the Staatskapelle Berlin State Opera Orchestra, but after his first “ring” with them, when Barenboim finally resigned, he suddenly seemed like a strong contender for the podium. It looked like
Staatskapelle executed with sensitivity and skill Thielemann’s vision for The Ring, a long crescendo spanning four operas. His slower-than-usual tempo tested the singer’s endurance, but he also had a keen sense of balance and adjusted his sound to match theirs on stage. Famous (and always acclaimed) studio recordings of Georg Solti He has performed with the Vienna Philharmonic since the mid-20th century. But it rewarded the patient listener, and Thielemann simultaneously shaped the level of the scene and the gigantic overall score.
He also had a talent for explaining the signature moments of Wagner’s scores. Be it the raindrops at the beginning of ‘Die Walküre’ or the idyllic forest babbling in the heart of ‘Siegfried’. As it happens, they are the only glimpses of nature in Cherniakov’s The Ring, and not only demythologizing the work, like the family drama in modern costumes staged in Bayreuth last summer, but also the characters. Isolation in a very human world. It was built by their hands and cut off from the outside world.
If you speak to someone who has seen this ‘ring’, you are unlikely to hear the same reaction twice. The boos and cheers that filled the auditorium of the State Opera for Cherniakov at Sunday’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ curtain call are gratifying. There seemed to be no passive listeners in the house.
Wagner’s sprawling and dramaturgically incomplete work—a transgenerational power struggle between gods, creatures, and humans—has been prey to interpretation for nearly 150 years. In his book The Perfect Wagnerite, George Bernard Shaw claimed that “The Ring” was a Marxist epic. So did director Patrice Chéreau in his centenary stage benchmark at Bayreuth.
Chernyakov offers an original reading of “Ring” that deviates greatly from Wagner, but with an equally rich narrative. The plot doesn’t fit into the script, but like the text, it’s written a lot at once. A commentary on the dangers of playing God. The limits of knowledge and science. the evolution of sexual politics; conflicts between generations; and renovations can even ruin historic buildings. Funny and poignant, ironic and terrifying, yet irreverent, it remains true to The Ring as a work of novel complexity.
Here, four operas unfold within the walls of a Cold War-era research center called ESCHE (Esche is German for ash tree, cut down in the name of power, cut down in the name of power, withers in parallel with the collapse of war). Gods. ) is a vast facility. Curtain is the blueprint for the 185 rooms he has on the third floor alone. The program of works refers to Wagner’s life as a golden age of experimentation. Sometimes the world changes, sometimes it twists. So did the post-World War II arms race and scientific fantasies when this “Rheingold” story began.
The types of experiments being conducted at ESCHE are revealed in the opening minutes. There, people gather in an auditorium to watch a video (by Alexey Poluboyarinov) of fluid being injected into the brain to disrupt neural pathways. Been formed. It is the least unnatural act.
Wotan, Lord of the Gods — Michael Voll is the production’s culmination as conducting baritone, and an astonishing range of actors — directs a realm of exploration into the human heart. Subjects are stress tested or manipulated into love and violence for observation. In a world where everything is an experiment, nothing is guaranteed to turn out to be real.
The ring is not a physical object, but the concept of knowledge as a force. Scenes that would normally be the highlight of his magic on stage (the rainbow crossing his bridge, the flames surrounding the sleeping Brünnhilde, the flooding of the Rhine), except for the needless blinking substitutes, are not included in Chernyakov’s staging. Waited for my daughter to fall asleep. And there aren’t that many individuals. Most characters make it to the end of this “ring” alive.
Cherniakov, as usual, manages detail at a level rarely seen in opera. Most striking is that his characters are playing each other rather than the audience. Even without sound, the action was able to convey its essence.The soprano Vida Miknevichute is as powerful and fragile as Freya in “Rheingold” or Sieglinde in “Walküre”, but it has been through the years. Emotional and physical abuse is clothed in facial expressions and grimace reflexes. Lauri Vasar’s Günther, the boss who was cuckolded in front of his colleagues in “Götterdämmerung,” looks back at one of his colleagues with a displeased and sympathetic smile. Fricka, played by Claudia Mahnke, is her desperate wife, who cruelly forces her to give up her bitter relationship with Wotan and keep the pen she lent her to sign Sigmund’s fate. do.
Elsewhere, the cast laughs and performs physical comedy. This “Ring” would be an office sitcom if the subtext wasn’t so terrifying. Cherniakov traces her ESCHE presence over half a century, beginning in the 1970s and reflected in her costume in Elena Zaitseva’s Grounding. This place has been rotten from the start, built with dirty money by Fasolt (Mika Calles returning as the evil Hagen in ‘Götterdämmerung’) and Fafner (Peter Rohse returning not as the dragon in ‘Siegfried’). as a psychiatric patient in a straight jacket).
The original sin is less conducive to conspiracy than usual. More important is the theft of Alberich’s “gold”. A later scene suggests that he is an employee of the Center, but undergoes a stress test and breaks down under pressure, violently removing the sensor from his head and running out of the lab with as much data as he can carry. He — Johannes Martin Kränzle is Volle’s signature foil for Wotan, forming his own research area in the basement.
However, Wotan turns out to be a consummate schemer, but not on par with his rivals as written, his ‘Light Alberich’ and the dwarven ‘Black Alberich’. In “Götterdämmerung”, Alberich — aging through the entire cycle like everyone else — appears dead and exists only in Hagen’s mind, while Wotan’s normal first three but appears in all four operas. His cameo at the end of Brünnhilde’s self-immolation scene is where Chernyakov’s work is focused. Many of her monologues convey anguish and revelation equally by the soprano Anja Campe, and are Wotan’s accusations sung directly to him, contrary to the final scene of “Valkyrie”.
Like Wagner, Cherniakov seems to have started with Siegfried’s death and worked backwards. If you follow that thread, you’ll find that his “ring” is a series of failures and misplaced priorities. The first two of his operas exist to set up Wotan’s ultimate experimental subject, Siegfried. Siegfried was born in the center and raised under constant surveillance. And throughout, Elda (Anna Kiss Judit, as assertive as Vol) appears at key moments with her three norns, soberly witnessing Wotan’s stupidity.
Not all add up. As is often the case with Cherniakov, I feel like he ran out of time. He introduces the actual ring in “Götterdämmerung”, but it serves its traditional purpose as a symbol of fidelity, so it makes no sense as an object of everyone’s obsession. Notung’s sword and Wotan’s spear are also made literally, and in a world without magic their powers are mysterious and irrelevant.
But when successful, Tcherniakov’s approach is thoughtful and torn. He shows how women have risen from casual brutality in the workplace to precarious power from the 1970s to the present day. But the abusive relationship was always shaped in such a way that Brünnhilde was ignored by Siegfried (the tireless, crowd-pleasing Andreas Schaeger), which drove her to depressive behavior and possibly alcoholism. And Cherniakov, through his own landscape design and lighting by Gleb Firszczynski, shows how easily history, whether Wotan’s legacy or Eche’s architecture, can be taken for granted or erased. It shows what you can do.
Few characters die, so they have to live with their mistakes, and as long as the center is open, they’ll probably perpetuate them. is required and here acknowledged by Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde sings, albeit heroically in campe, in a lower note than the other sopranos in the role. Instead of greeting the flames of Siegfried’s cremation, she left the facility with her bag in hand. , which he never set up. Brünnhilde describes escaping from a delusional world and seeing “the end of the world” with her enlightenment.
She is seduced by Elda, a fluttering toy bird she holds in her hand. But Brünnhilde is not deceived. She leaves everything behind and pulls the curtain back — perhaps unaware that her colleagues carelessly pursue, but she has wisdom.
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Until November 6th and again at the Berlin State Opera in April. staatsoper-berlin.de.