Living at the Opera

In October, 2006, the Kirov Opera and Ballet will come to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa CA. Billed as the “Mariinsky Festival,” the company will play for three weeks, starting with the Kirov’s production of Richard Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” The following observations were recorded about the Valery Gergiev and Georgii Tsypin production on a visit to the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in June 2004.

In June of 2004 the Mariinsky Theater, coming off a successful run of their new production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” just six months before in Baden-Baden, made a hurried decision to include all four operas of the Ring right in the middle of their annual White Nights Festival held at St. Petersburg. From June 8th to June 15th, opera enthusiasts, many from foreign lands, attended this production of the Ring which was vi­sually framed by a primitive Scythian motif designed by Georgii Tsypin who filled the stage with gargantuan mythic figures complete with some beautiful and fascinating costumes by Tatiana Noginova. But in the end, artistic director Valery Gergiev managed to bring to the fore only a handful of bravura performances.

In this mammoth production, both Gergiev and Tsypin, who were also responsible for the production’s concept, appear to have allowed the Mariinsky’s time-honored reverence for great operatic acting to fall by the wayside, causing directors Vladimir Mirzoev in Die Götterdämmerung and Julia Pevzner in Die Walküre to present their work with a decidedly uneven slant. Luckily, some performers were able to uplift the production by creating a number of memorable and vibrant characterizations that are inherent in Wagner’s Ring. The question is, were these dramatic realizations fulfilling enough to overcome those performances that didn’t reach this higher level.

In the last scene of Act One of Die Götterdämmerung, Larissa Gogolevskaya’s Brünnhilde exploded into such a fury that she all but single-handedly put this Mariinsky Ring into high gear. At the begin­ning of the scene, Brünnhilde meets Siegfried who enters wearing the tarnhelm, a magic helmet that transforms him into Gunther, lord of the Gibichungs: he has come to take her as his bride, but she’s been expect­ing Siegfried, her lover and hero. Gogolevskaya seized the moment with a swift jolt of emotions - anger, desolation, total confusion, ending with a desperation that shook her very being. Siegfried’s metamorpho­sis propelled Brünnhilde to valiantly resist Viktor Lutsiuk’s Gunther. Grasping a menacing two-pronged weapon, he draws Gogolevskaya into a fierce struggle, thrusting the exhausted Brünnhilde to the ground. He wrenches the all powerful ring from her hand, the same ring Siegfried wrestled from the dragon Fafner in Siegfried, the third opera of the cycle. Here, Gogolevskaya created a distinctive moment: rising slowly, she walked unsteadily towards her fate, her face chiseled in de­feat. But she wasn’t vanquished yet. This scene served as a prologue for the revenge she will attain in Act Two which finally set this latent production ablaze with a passion worthy of Wagner’s relentless villains.

The nastiest villain in Wagner’s canon is Hagen, half-brother to Gunther and his sister Gutrune, responsible for the cataclysmic events that unfold at the end of the opera. Alone and rejected by his family, Hagen’s abandonment mushrooms into an evil streak that rivals any bel­ligerent mythological figure. He urges Gutrune to give Siegfried a po­tion which changes his mental state from the fun-loving conqueror of Brünnhilde’s heart to a weakened human being with all his foibles. Ma­nipulating Gutrune to marry Siegfried and Gunther to marry Brünnhilde, Hagen uses the double marriage to divide and conquer.

Director Vladimir Mirzoev and costumer Tatiana Noginova es­chew the typical portrayal of Hagen as a clumsy but overpowering brute for a wiry, serpentine character skillfully etched by Mikhail Petrenko. Hiding his androgynous but menacing presence under a colorfully hemmed two-paneled skirt, a tight strapless halter and topped with an elegant skullcap, Petrenko cut a figure that dominated the stage with drops of insinuating venom oozing from every pore. Both he and Gogolevskaya caught fire in this act with an intensity which the rest of the Ring was never able to duplicate. From the moment Brünnhilde re­alizes Siegfried is wearing the magical ring he had given her as a token of his love, she pounces on his treachery, hell-bent on his demise. She plots with Hagen who is ready to obliterate the hero, revealing that the gods never provided protection for Siegfried’s back in battle, a perfect spot for Hagen’s spear. It’s here that Wagner forgoes his principles of musical drama and falls back on the vestiges of grand opera. The ensu­ing vocal and dramatic outburst more than compensates for any com­promise the composer had to make. The fired-up trio — Brünnhilde, Ha­gen and Gunther - vilifies the now victimized Siegfried. Brünnhilde calls out for Siegfried’s death to pay for his sins against her; Hagen lies to Gutrune as to how the deed will be done and seizes the ring for him­self; finally Gunther, summoning up his courage, agrees to the fateful deed. All three climb a ladder to the top of the hall of the Gibichungs, defiantly clasping hands, all the while demanding that the god Wotan come to their aid. This exciting ending received loud approval from the audience.

Act One of Die Walküre the second opera in the Ring, brought an­other fervent ovation following some stalwart singing and the dramatic intensity of Mlada Khudoley’s Sieglinde and Oleg Balashov’s Sieg­mund. Their portrayals essayed a tenderness and steadfast mutual de­votion that led to the birth of their offspring, the unsuspecting hero Siegfried, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Wagner’s lov­ing couple happened to be brother and sister. But Khudoley and Bal­ashov overcame this threat to social convention by their uncanny abili­ty to supplant the characters’ incestuous love with the delightful emotional freshness of newlyweds. From the start, Khudoley sang with a powerful but even thrust, easily delivering the German text, and her comely, natural figure in a white tunic made her all the more appealing to Balashov’s physically imposing but attentive Siegmund who matched Khudoley in vocal ardor and passion as the music of their love duet de­mands. Fleeing from Sieglinde’s husband Hunding, the couple encoun­tered hard times, and here, Khudoley and Balashov transformed the hope implicit in their vows of eternal love to the fear and despair that come from being hunted down.

Ironically, the expressive completeness and dramatic fulfillment encountered in this part of Die Walküre and the riveting scenes of Die Götterdämmerung already mentioned only served to point out the lack of directorial decisiveness in other areas of the Ring. By making pro­duction values predominant in Wagner’s engrossing tale of deception, betrayal and rampant greed rather than highlighting the characters themselves, who are, after all, the primary source of these repulsive traits, the opera’s overall performance left the audience with an impres­sion of dullness and a certain lack of interest. And in the pit Gergiev seemed to be rushing his orchestra through many telling musical mo­ments that the composer had worked diligently to create. This gave all four opera performances an “also ran” feeling instead of the promi­nence and artistic dedication required by such a mammoth undertaking. This is all the more regrettable because Gergiev and Tsypin have mounted an unusual and provocative telling of the Ring.

Tsypin’s mythic stone figures taken from the world of the Scythians who roamed the steppes of southern Russia during the first millennium B.C. showed great imagination in projecting a dynamic and unique the­atrical fantasy which would never even enter the thought processes of many an opera company. But the sheer size of these figures seemed to overfill the stage, leaving little space for the singers to make their mark with confidence and unsettling the clarity of their pronunciation, a must for Wagner’s German crisp and rhythmic prose. For this reason, much of the Mariinsky Ring was structurally loose and emotionally disconnected. One can only imagine what a marvelous feat this production would have been if Tsypin and Gergiev had been able to connect all the dramatic and musical dots in Wagner’s eccentric, mesmerizing saga.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 7:58 pm and is filed under German opera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.