Die Walküre: der Gottheit nichtigen Glanz

I am becoming a Walküre completist. With my mother, I attended Saturday's matinee at the Met, but will make this a brief report. Let me pass over the Lepage production in comparative silence (for once!) It is so very dull, so lacking in any apparent imagination except the visual. The only fresh insight it has inspired in me is: I really need to go to Germany. Saturday's orchestral performance seemed slightly cool, with a lyric melancholy that served the latter two acts better than the first. Coordination issues, however, were noticeably improved from the previous cycle's Walküre. Luisi and the orchestra were notably supportive of Frank van Aken, making his Met debut as Siegmund. I regret to note that the Machine's Walkürenritt configuration drew applause from the audience, but the Valkyries themselves contributed excellent work, with strong and exciting singing. (My mother opined moreover that Eve Gigliotti deserved awards for bravery, "getting back up on the horse" with a vengeance after the Machine bucked her in last year's run.)

Hans-Peter König made an impressively stentorian Hunding, coarsely possessive of Sieglinde, coarsely threatening towards Siegmund, and singing with diction that dripped with contempt. Stephanie Blythe was impressively rich-voiced as ever as Fricak; the constraints of staging her in her chariot are increasingly irksome to me. Eva-Maria Westbroek made a very touching Sieglinde. Her ardent singing was notable for beautiful tone and phrasing, especially in the first act. She sounded slightly fatigued by the end but still very expressive (I admit to tearing up at "O deckte mich Tod, dass ich's denke.") Frank Van Aken's Siegmund was indisputably valiant, and admirably engaged, but vocally underpowered. He has a bright voice which I might gladly hear in a smaller house, but here he sounded rough at the top of his range. Lack of rehearsal or nerves might account for his errors of omission and commission with the text; I found these distracting. Bryn Terfel's Wotan continues to be incredibly exciting. At Saturday's performance, his god was visibly and wildly despairing. Terfel did growl in places for effect, but sang expressively and responsively. His treatment of text--intellectually and emotionally nuanced--continues to delight me. ("Götternot!" gave me chills.) The Abschied was sung with beauty and power, and acted with profound tenderness and profound sorrow. Even as Brünnhilde begs for a softening of her sentence, Wotan reaches out as if to take her hand. Throughout the fraught dialog, Wotan himself seemed on the brink of weeping... and I sobbed. Katrina Dalayman gave a vocally solid performance as Brünnhilde, if not (to me) a terribly involving one. She sang the second act with accuracy, but without much ardor. Dalayman did bring warmth and sweetness of tone to the final scene. I was an emotional mess as the fire rose around Brünnhilde's cliff, which may be no bad way to leave a Walküre.


Curtain call photos:

Die Walküre: Wunder und wilde Märe

I know it's irresponsible to play favorites with the Ring operas, and of course nearly impossible to really choose, but I love Die Walküre a lot. Wearing flat shoes and armed with chocolate, the Beloved Flatmate and I stood for Friday's performance at the Met. Very fine singing made it an emotionally intense experience. Robert Lepage's production contributes little except a dramatically useful forest for pursuer and pursued in the staged overture and second act. There was a malfunction with the projections in the final act which I mention only to say that although it shouldn't have happened, I didn't feel it was a disastrous distraction; I was prepared for Terfel and Voigt to carry the confrontation in front of a fence instead of an avalanche. More worrisome to me were the lapses in the Met orchestra's customary precision. One brass quaver may be regarded as a misfortune; two looks like carelessness. In Act I the orchestra seemed occasionally ahead of the singers, a problem which was swiftly rectified. Fabio Luisi is currently doing the work of several, and I'm not sure how much time there was for the orchestra to rehearse with him. Overall, however, it was a fine and sensitive performance. This was Wagner on a human scale, with the singers' emotions leading the expression of the orchestra throughout. The coming of spring was beautifully handled; the lovers' embrace was interrupted with a crash, but thereafter the textures of the orchestra were delicate as moonlight. Similar dynamic contrasts were used effectively in the confrontations of Act II. The overture seemed to be played from Siegmund's perspective, the fury of the storm and the threat of echoing horns taking second place to the rhythms of racing blood and hard-won breath. The orchestra found melancholy tenderness for the Wälsungs, an almost breezy tone for Brünnhilde's entrance, and gave a fiercely exuberant Ride. The Valkyries, in this most (in)famously excerpted moment, contributed exceptionally good work. This wild music was sung with beauty of tone, vivid characterization, and good handling of text, making the formal phrases sound like sisters' chatting.

Stuttgart Ring: Die Walküre

After watching Christof Nel's version of Walküre, I have concluded that I am musically spoiled by the Met.  I even had a moment of weakness in which I wondered whether being faintly bored by a production was better than being deeply frustrated by one. This was a Walküre which lost mythic romance without substituting gritty bite. The program notes inform me that the director saw his role as that of a psychoanalyst, who wanted to reveal the internal conflicts and ambivalences of the characters, using "today's materials." I'm sorry, but putting Sieglinde in a print dress rather than a medieval kirtle does not automatically make her plight more moving. Brace yourselves, Gentle Readers; I'm going to rant!  Act I of the staging specializes in emphasizing the obvious. In introducing gestures mimicking those of lust into Siegmund and Sieglinde's first exchange, I would accuse it of reducing the profound to the profane. Awkwardly stylized movements sat oddly with a set and properties which are insistently mundane.  Robert Gambill's voice is leaner than what I usually expect from a Siegmund, but he had some beautiful phrasing, and I liked his tone.  I found him sympathetic, as well, though it would be hard not to feel sorry for a man wearing a Lycra tank top, knit shorts, and an iridescent blue windbreaker.  He also contributed moving moments in Act II, though he seemed a shade underpowered (the Stuttgart audience loved him, so maybe he was fine in-house.)  Angela Denoke was, similarly, a slightly small-voiced Sieglinde, and I thought she had some intonation problems, but I'm not sure whether that might be the fault of the recording. The sword bore an unfortunate resemblance to a butter knife, but what the staging did with it was rather interesting: first visible as a sword of light on Sieglinde's body, the weapon itself is revealed when the walls open out during "Du bist der Lenz."

Being Turned On By The Opera: Die Walküre, my mother, and Jonas Kaufmann

My mother, lord love her, has long regarded--and listened to--my opera obsession in more or less suffering bewilderment, or more or less bewildered suffering.  More than one broadcast was curtailed by a long-suffering maternal: "Darling, can you turn the screaming off?"  In a brave spirit of zeal for wider experience, though (and for understanding her crazy daughter,) she has come to the opera with me before: to Cenerentola, known as "the pretty one," to Turandot, "the elaborate one," and, now, to Walküre.  After Turandot, I had promised that we could go to a show on her next New York visit, and I wouldn't make her try opera again.  How I got from there to loaning her my handkerchief during Wagner is a story which I offer not only for your entertainment and edification, Gentle Readers, but also for your consideration as a case study in opera audience development. Because I am, now, allowed and even encouraged to get her to try this opera thing again, as long as it's a "nice, dramatic one" like Walküre.

Die Walküre: Wes Herd dies auch sei

Final scene: Voigt, Terfel; (c) Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

In brief, I thought the best thing about the Met's Walküre was its phenomenal orchestra, and the worst its Picket Fence of Symbolism, as I am calling the set.  Update: the Met has posted pictures; tellingly, most of them focus on the singers. The singing was thoroughly committed, and held many pleasant surprises.  In the program was printed a "conversation with the director."  Lepage was asked how he planned to engage the new dimensions of Walküre, after Rheingold.  "Suddenly," said Lepage, "we deal with love and nature. Walküre is a piece where there are snowstorms, where there is lightning..." I had a sinking feeling. Lepage has often spoken of his fascination with the landscapes of Iceland, whence, of course, much of Wagner's source material hails.  And so we got a Walküre obsessed with landscapes, rather than ideas.  I grant, the forest for pursuer and pursued to weave through was effective, and yes, having the gods' conversations of Act II on top of a volcano can be an (unsubtle) metaphor for potentially explosive undercurrents.  But I was not seeing a Walküre with landscape-as-metaphor.  Lepage belabors the point of desired fidelity to the work. Failing to explore its layers and its ambiguities is, I would argue, a serious failing in this respect.

Sieglinde bin ich

Wagner's ideas about Eternal Womanhood irk me deeply. However, I have to give him credit for creating some female characters I love. Sieglinde is one of them: her Act I journey from cowed misery "wo Unheil im Hause wohnt" to the delirious ecstasy of "Sieglinde bin ich!" makes me want to stand up and cheer. Of course, she hardly has an easy time of it in the rest of the opera. But I love her ferocity, even in despair; she may be close to insanity, but she's still powerful. Even her "Fern von Siegmund! Siegmund ferne!" seems to me to have far more of the wounded tigress than the damsel in distress (or, to use more contemporary terminology, the codependent female.) And she's had some great interpreters, wild-eyed Altmeyer and the regal Jessye Norman being among my (strikingly unoriginal) favorites. Having heard and seen my adored Waltraud Meier in the Met's '08-'09 Ring, I was a little depressed thinking about the fact that whoever the Sieglinde for next season's Walkuere would be, it wouldn't be her. Here she is at La Scala in 1994:

And here she is in Act III from the same production. How could anyone else fail to be a disappointment? (I do realize that I'm biased, here... but I love her, and the Sieglinde she gave last season remains in my personal shortlist of the best and most moving performances I've seen.) And how in the world could any Sieglinde who was not Waltraud Meier fail to be overshadowed by her highly-anticipated Siegmund? I was encouraged to find that Eva-Maria Westbroek, a name unfamiliar to me (which probably should count as a Really Shameful Confession), had sung a widely popular Sieglinde. An interview (which I inexplicably can't find again; sorry) left me with the impression that she was smart and feisty. So I took the YouTube plunge.



All right, I'm excited. That is a fierce Sieglinde (the ecstasy escalates here.) And that (even on YouTube, through my laptop speakers) is an amazing sound. And she's beautiful. Dear God, please let her and Herr Kaufmann be in good voice when I go to hear them; please have the production leave these talented actors scope; and please let them both keep their own hair. Amen.

Dich grüsste mein Herz mit heiligem Grau'n

If opera tends to be a love-it-or-hate-it art form, surely it has no more polarizing practitioner than that prickly, erratic, quite possibly insane man, Richard Wagner. A musical critic and priest once delivered a lecture series on Wagner tellingly subtitled "The Terrible Man and his Truthful Art." (Available for purchase here.) The man himself was famously inspired by Nietzsche, and the movements of anarchism and nihilism. In turn, Wagner's music inspired Ludwig II of Bavaria to build what is arguably Europe's most recognizable castle (complete with Wagnerian murals and an awesome grotto). It inspired George Eliot, and Marcel Proust, not to mention countless writers of movie and TV music. And yes, it also was embraced by the man whom the inimitable Charlie Chaplin is spoofing here, accompanied by the Lohengrin overture.