Richard Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ at the Mariinsky – a great opera company forsakes tradition

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 vi sually 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 begin ning 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 expect ing 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 metamorpho sis 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 de feat. 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 bel ligerent mythological figure. He urges Gutrune to give Siegfried a po tion which changes his mental state from the fun-loving conqueror of Brünnhilde’s heart to a weakened human being with all his foibles. Ma nipulating 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 es chew 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 re alizes 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 ensu ing vocal and dramatic outburst more than compensates for any com promise the composer had to make. The fired-up trio — Brünnhilde, Ha gen 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 him self; 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 an other fervent ovation following some stalwart singing and the dramatic intensity of Mlada Khudoley’s Sieglinde and Oleg Balashov’s Sieg mund. Their portrayals essayed a tenderness and steadfast mutual de votion that led to the birth of their offspring, the unsuspecting hero Siegfried, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Wagner’s lov ing couple happened to be brother and sister. But Khudoley and Bal ashov overcame this threat to social convention by their uncanny abili ty 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 de mands. Fleeing from Sieglinde’s husband Hunding, the couple encoun tered 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 pro duction 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 impres sion of dullness and a certain lack of interest. And in the pit Gergiev seemed to be rushing his orchestra through many telling musical mo ments that the composer had worked diligently to create. This gave all four opera performances an “also ran” feeling instead of the promi nence 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 the atrical 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.

The Mariinsky Theater

This article was written in celebration of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, Russia.

In the foreword to John Ardoin’s book, Valery Gergiev and the Kirov, the late actor and writer Peter Ustinov remarks that for most of us in the West, the history of the Mariinsky Theater has been hidden from view. We have been kept especially ignorant of this theater’s daily work ings. Ustinov writes, “I had only learned about the Mariinsky opera house by hearsay, a haze of rumors and opinions unleashed by elderly Russian relatives of whom there was no shortage at the time.”(1) He also discusses the physical outlay of the building which gives the eye so much pleasure when seen for the first time. Along with its sea-green exterior bordered in white trim and a blue interior that seems to come right out of the sea, it is washed with colors, both inside and out, that would make Neptune proud. Ustinov’s comparison of the Mariinsky with the appearance of the Bolshoi Theater brings out the differences between the two theaters. “It (the Mariinsky) is a lovely building of ex quisite proportions which created a scandal at its inception for reasons difficult to comprehend today. It was apparently de rigueur in those days for opera houses to be finished in red, cream and gold. The Mari insky broke into a fastidious world in a mantle of blue, cream and gold, which give it a pleasant aura of lightness.”.(2)

In 2003 St. Petersburg celebrated its 300th anniversary, and a glance at the origins of the Mariinsky clearly indicates how much the theater is a part of the city’s history. The first Mariinsky was founded in 1783 fol lowing a decree by Empress Catherine the Great to stage the first Russ ian comic operas and the best works of foreign composers, largely Ital ian. The theater, designed by the leading theater architect of the day, Alberto Cavos, was later named for the Empress Maria Alexandrovna, wife of tsar Alexander II. The theater’s opening heralded a golden era in the city’s operatic history. Verdi’s opera La Forza del destino pre miered there in 1862 followed by the premieres of many Russian clas sics, two of which were Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila and Modest Mus sorgsky’s Boris Godunov From 1935 to 1992 it bore the name of Kirov, the well-known early communist leader and Leningrad’s party chief, but in 1992 regained its imperial title: the Mariinsky Theater.

In 1988 the name of Valery Gergiev became synonymous with the theater itself. In that year Gergiev became artistic director of the the ater, and since then his name has been attached almost symbiotically to all the artistic successes and, unfortunately, the failures of its opera pro ductions. In no other opera company in the world today is the artistic director so completely identified with the well-being of his company. Not even James Levine’s great success as artistic director of the Metro politan Opera and its orchestra matches the emotional intensity Gergiev brings to the Mariinsky. It is not uncommon for us in the western opera world to think of Gergiev as suddenly appearing on the international opera scene complete with the ability necessary to run an opera compa ny with all its accompanying artistic and financial travails. However, as John Ardoin so aptly tells us, “Gergiev had been a member of the the ater’s conducting staff since 1978, so he is no metaphorical Prince Charming who simply appeared on the scene and by his embrace brought the Kirov back to life. Instead, he structured the theater’s re birth on the foundation of discipline and professionalism laid down by his mentor and predecessor at the theater, the conductor Yuri Temirkanov. But it was Gergiev’s energy and foresight and the breadth of his phenomenal gifts (as well as Russia’s new political climate) that turned the tide.”(3) Although it is true, as Jeremy Eichler says in The Washington Post, that Ardoin’s “book is informative, but [it] leans to ward hagiography”(4) by comparing Gergiev to the visionary thrust of Pe ter the Great, there is no doubt that his great gifts have moved the com pany far beyond what anyone could have expected in so short a period of time. Time will tell if Gergiev’s abundant energy will stretch the company beyond its limits.

Notes
1 John Ardoin, Valery Gergiev and the Kirov (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 2001 ), p.9
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid, p.17
4 Jermy Eichler, “Mother Russia’s Brilliant, Difficult Child,” The Washington Post (17 Feb. 2002), p.GO1

Concert Opera Takes a Stand

In today’s opera world, run over with esoteric opera directors pushing their entangled symbolic productions on to operatic stages, the musical and vocal values, the two most necessary components in presenting opera, often get lost in the shuffle. But not on November 12th and 13th, 2005, when two concert opera performances in New York City took on the frenzy of old- fashioned revival meetings causing their audiences to stand up and give a rousing toast to the musical dramas the Teatro Grattacielo Opera and the Opera Orchestra of New York bestowed on their public. For it was in the performances of Ruggerio Leoncavallo’s Zaza by Gratacielo and Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell by OONY that proved to be the special gifts their devoted fans have been hoping for and were finally delivered to them in bravura style.

The route of the delivery of each performance took different paths. The opera, Zaza, performed in the intimate setting at Alice Tully Hall was no doubt a starring vehicle for soprano Aprile Millo, who portrayed the musical theater singer, Zaza, with a true grasp of the role’s emotional turmoil, and who has on more than one occasion suffered the slings and arrows of music critics and a section of the operatic public. As with any performer who steps into the operatic spotlight, criticism has been both accurate and exaggerated, particularly comments about her emphatic acting style. The bottom line is when Millo is at her best, she displays a warm, lyrical voice capable of filling the house and has a particular vocal quality which is often associated with Italian sopranos of an earlier vintage with whom she identifies. When “on” the soprano cannot only be effective in performance but downright moving and in this performance she was able to give full value, not only to the musical expression so necessary in verismo but also delineate the beautiful Italian text.

There’s a good reason why Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana hold the distinction of being the best of verismo opera. Their stories catch the audience’s attention immediately, have strong dramatic content and are overflowing with abundant melodies that fit their passionate plots as they unfold. Their main strength is that the operagoer doesn’t have to wait very long for the personal conflict or seething jealousies to catch up with their driving fatalism. As with many verismo works like Zaza, one has to wait at least until the middle of the story for the drama to kick in and the pulse to quicken. For verismo lovers-and those who attended Zaza certainly were—the waiting seemed to grow into an emotional anticipation which then erupted into a burst of tormented exhilaration at the opera’s end, evolving into a sort of legal insanity.

One had to wait until the end of the third act of Zaza’s four acts for the pulse to climb. In a touchingly written scene between Zaza and Milio’s daughter, Toto, Leoncavallo developed an unusual mix of vocal expression filled with legato with interjected lines of dialogue. Milio, of course, is Zaza’s lover, and the singer, learning of his infidelity, has come to his home to confront him. Instead, Zaza finds his young daughter there alone. Here, Millo combines vocal security with emotional delineation to bring the opera to its really first notable conflict. The soprano was aided by a young performer, Angelica Asaro, who, appearing to be around ten years old, and apparently a native speaker, declaimed her lines with a natural aplomb reminiscent of those child actors in a Victorio De Sica film, allowing for Millo and the youngster to develop a poignant exchange of each other’s feelings. Underscored by Toto’s tender but cautious approach to her music at the piano, Zaza begins to reflect on how she can no longer hold on to Milio now that she has met his open-hearted and loving daughter. It was at this moment that Millo floated into the “down right moving” aspect of her talent with an introspective, lyrical evocation of the dissolute life she has lead up to her encounter with Toto and thereby creating the verismo character which the audience has been hoping for. And luckily there was more of Millo’s Zaza to come with the duet between Zaza and Milio which ends the opera.

Leoncavallo understood the dynamics of opera as theater and knew how to write a finale which would hit that emotional pitch longed for in a successful conclusion. Here, as Millo expressed Zaza’s hurt and despair as she is about to dismiss her lover for good, the soprano’s voice opened up into round tones filled with intense, heated longings that soared out into Alice Tully Hall. With her final words to Milio, “Ma parti…metti ribrezzo,” “But go, you disgust me,” Millo, standing quite still, and looking out just to her left, all the while imagining that she sees Milio’s last steps as he turns the corner of the street, lets out a sob filled with sorrow, regret and despair, creating a cataclysmic sound that almost shook the house and brought the fervent verismo crowd to its feet.

The next evening, concert opera moved from the intimate setting of Leoncavallo’s story of a forlorn singer to OONY’s presentation of Rossini’s William Tell, an opera on the grandest scale at Carnegie Hall. Music Director, Eve Queler, using the critical edition from the “Fondazione Rossini di Pesaro”–in the original French–gave her artists many opportunities to engage in some valiant singing. An exciting addition to the performance was the New York Choral Society which sang the opera’s diverse ensembles and choruses with such clear attacks and natural aplomb projecting the chorus into the spotlight in Rossini’s last but most monumental work for the lyric stage.

Starting off, Queler proffered a balanced reading of Tell’s well-known overture. As the opening section moved from the pastoral warmth expressed so eloquently in the cellos and double basses and then to the violins, oboes and piccolos, we finally meet the famous galloping section where Queler seemed to hold back the trumpets not wanting them to sound overly bright or aggressive. It was as though she was trying to escape the vestiges of the music familiar to many as the Lone Ranger’s radio and television theme. Her reluctance seemed to rob the overture’s finale of its dynamic and wonderfully hectic quality that Rossini invested so adamantly and which everyone seems to love. But from then on, Queler and her performers dove in and rendered William Tell as the Grand Opera it truly is.

One of the chief musical innovations Rossini used to fill out his concept of Grand Opera was the rich and varied way he involved the chorus in so many of the opera’s scenes. Starting with the opening scene we first hear the chorus as Swiss villagers celebrating the Shepherds’ Festival in their idyllic and picture book landscape typical of many Swiss cantons. But as the story progresses, we find the villagers facing the soldiers of the tyrannical Gesler, the Austrian Governor of Switzerland. Rossini increases the dramatic tension by ending the act with two choruses: one, expressing the dominant hand of Gesler’s forces, and the other, Tell’s patriotic band of freedom fighters. By producing this striking musical conflict, it not only accentuates Tell’s bitter struggle in lifting the heavy yoke of the Austrians, but also fulfills one of the basic tenets of grand opera, dramatic heroics.

In Act Two, Rossini’s inspiration took him to a new level of melodic insight for which he not only composed some of his most beautiful choral music, but deftly placed the ensuing drama in three equal sections, each one representing the three clans who have gathered in the picturesque Swiss countryside to join Tell and his compatriots in their communal desire for freedom. Rossini musically varied each chorus, underscoring their appropriate emotional yearnings. The first clan, the men of Unterwald, anticipate the dangers inherent in overthrowing their Austrian oppressors; the second, the men of Schwyz, reflect on their sorrow and loneliness that oppression has brought to their idyllic life; and, finally, the clan from Uri, arriving by boat, bolder in their determination than the others, stand ready for the challenge that awaits them. Here, Rossini’s particular brand of patriotism comes to full flower as an expression of love of country buoyed by an idyllic way of life in alpine Switzerland. In the finale, all join in a call to arms with music that is both courageous and full of heroic sentiment. Here, the chorus shined in clear, delineated French that matched Queler’s overall prowess in uniting all three: orchestra, soloists and chorus in Rossini’s paean to freedom. The audience, also swept up in this robust affirmation, brought forth the first of three thrilling ovations that made up one glorious evening of live opera.

In Act Four, the aural parameters of live opera almost set off a volcanic eruption within the space now known as Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium. Marcello Giordano as Arnold, a Swiss patriot, arrives at his family’s home to express his sorrow over his father’s murder at the hands of the Austrians. In the aria, “Asile hereditaire,” a piece of tenor splendor and touching musical refinement, he recalls his deep love for his father. Then in a rousing allegro section, Arnold calls on his compatriots to assist him in his plan for revenge. The scene, known throughout the opera world as possibly the severest test of a tenor’s vocal prowess, is written in a flowing line that is not only demanding in regards to its repeated phrases but is interspersed with 6 high C’s, two of which are sustained for a full measure that can easily tax the breath in the worst way or float on the breath in the most joyous .

On this night, Giordano and joyful singing became synonymous.

The tenor, pacing back and forth as if to gather strength in order to propel those clarion notes out into the house, discovered to his delight that the Choral Society’s clear and full-bodied responses to his “Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance,” in his great opera scene was ecstatically emerging as a duet. And heaping pleasure upon pleasure, he repeated the cabaletta with the same dynamic force and pitch-perfect high C’s as before, driving the audience to a
heart-pounding, thunderous ovation. It all came together as grand opera, the moment Giordano turned to his chorus and applauded their stalwart singing, turning this glorious moment into a clear demonstration of how great singing never fails to produce such a singular, highly-charged reaction from an appreciative audience.

Of course, we can never know for sure whether Rossini knew that this would be his last opera, but what we do know is that he concluded his opera with one of the most beautiful and musically sonorous endings that the opera world has ever been privileged to hear. The composer brought his unblemished hero, William Tell, his loyal soldiers and fellow citizens, his family and Tell’s beloved Mathilde, the Austrian princess, now a Swiss patriot, together for the last scene, to sing Rossini’s vibrant, densely harmonic ode to liberty — one that began with heavy rain clouds that hovered over the sweeping purge of their Austrian oppressors, soon revealing a bright, azure sky highlighting the dioramic snow-covered mountains and lush green valleys. This finale, certainly a tribute to Rossini’s musical genius, also became a tribute to Queler, her orchestra, soloists and chorus from the audience who in its final ovation, stood and cheered showing that this concert opera had fulfilled everyone’s desire for a great night at the opera.