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Of Gods And Monsters
The Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle by Robert Lepage has been an uneasy mix of cuttingedge technology and old-fashioned representational staging. With “Siegfried,” the third opera, which opened on Thursday, Mr. Lepage and his team have finally married those elements, thanks in part to new techniques in 3-D imagery. Fire, waterfalls, a rocky mountaintop, a dense forest, even an underground view with slithering worms and skittering bugs, came vividly to life through Pedro Pires’s video images projected against the 24 moving planks of set designer Carl Fillion’s “machine.” There are still some showy transformations (four changes of position and video during the opera’s prelude, for example), but the set is more integrated into the action than it was in “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre.” With François St-Aubin’s medieval-looking costumes and longhaired wigs on everyone, Mr. Lepage seems to be trying to give us the kind of realism that Wagner would have put on stage if he had had the technology a century and a half ago.
After the gray, industrial look of Robert Lepage’s first two ‘Ring’ installments, it was nice to get some color and texture into the action.
With the aid of Fabio Luisi’s detailed, balance-sensitive and brisk conducting, and a stellar cast of singers, this “Siegfried” moved away from the static awkwardness of Mr. Lepage’s “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre” and presented a lively, propulsive, even comic account of the young Siegfried’s coming of age. Jay Hunter Morris, who took over the punishing title role just a week before the premiere, has a bright, pliant tenor—not large, but ringing and energetic. He brought an appealing goofiness, youthful impulsivity and bumptious self-confidence to Siegfried. His clashes with Gerhard Siegel’s penetrating Mime, grotesquely hunchbacked and absurd in the extremity of his fawning and malevolence, took on a broad, cartoonish humor that worked. So did his quick conquest of Fafner the dragon, who emerged from his cave as a yellow eyed, snaggletoothed serpent, a caricature of a monster. In this opera, Siegfried’s opponents are easily bested by a young superhero with a magic sword.
Siegfried is on his way up; his grandfather Wotan is on his way down, and the superb, powerful Bryn Terfel gave the Wanderer mercurial flashes of humor and danger as well as moments of grand existential despair. In one of the production’s finest moments, the Wanderer walked to the very edge of a plank, which jutted out over the void like a rocky promontory, and called for the goddess Erda with the desperate, last-ditch ferocity of Lear howling on the heath. His subsequent exchange with Erda, the voluptuous-voiced Patricia Bardon, in a costume of black mirrors and a long white wig, had a potent, intimate chemistry (Wotan and Erda have a history), unusual in a scene that often plays as yet another boring recounting of “Ring” backstory by two bellowing singers. And his encounter with Siegfried, who breaks his staff and knocks him down, felt shocking despite its inevitability.
The theatricality of this “Siegfried” faded somewhat in the final scene, when Siegfried, having passed through the magic fire and several hours of serious singing, awakens Brünnhilde. Deborah Voigt sang with a steely intensity, and not surprisingly, she sounded fresher than Mr. Morris, but her wide-eyed Bride-of-Frankenstein look and a lack of warmth in her sound made this underdirected love scene, which should be climactic, fall flat. Also, Etienne Boucher’s mostly sensitive lighting set their encounter against a dark sky, an odd choice considering that the brilliance of the sun is mentioned more than once.
Eric Owens, looking like a demented Rastafarian in overalls and a long wig, was a growling, frustrated Alberich; Mojca Erdmann was a luminous Forest Bird, more substantial and resonant than the flickering green video image that represented her on stage, and Hans-Peter König was suitably lugubrious as Fafner.
After the rather gray, industrial look of the first two “Ring” operas, it was nice to get some color and texture into the action. I liked the worms, the waterfall that ran red after the killing of Fafner, the shadows of birds that swept across the bleak mountaintop. The video gave nature an organic part in the opera, and nature is certainly present in the music, from the groaning horns of the prelude to the transparent Forest Murmurs. Yet, unlike Francesca Zambello’s “Ring” in San Francisco, in which the degradation of nature is the production’s central theme, Mr. Lepage uses nature as illustration. The theme of his production, if there is one, still seems to be those moving planks, which creak audibly as they turn. But at least they had more to offer the storytelling in this installment of the tetralogy.
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