Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

It’s been done in so many places by so many people that even the New York Times has had to dig a little to find someone on staff who’ll say much good about it at this point. It feel like shooting fish in a barrel. But reality is hard to escape, and I admit after seeing the entire cycle over the last ten days at The Metropolitan Opera with Götterdämmerung wrapping things up last night, that this week has felt pretty hollow and dispiriting as far as opera goes. It’s difficult even to be snarky or witty about the production given how uninspiring this whole show is, defying even the possibility of camp. Lepage offers no insight into the events of Wagner’s lengthy work. He doesn’t even rehash somebody else's. It makes Francesca Zambello’s recent production in San Francisco feel like it came straight out of Berlin with all of its “ideas” and “thought.” Instead, Lepage treats his audiences to days of characters just entering and exiting from the wings directly onto the front skirt of the stage where they stand for hours and sing. Meanwhile opera's noisiest and most expensive backdrop clacks and hisses along during the scene changes before coming to rest in yet another high tech pose it will hold until politely invited to move again. Occasionally the tedium is broken up by the distant shouts of stagehands (as it was Thursday briefly) trying to keep the whole contraption on course, like deckmates on some latter-day Titanic.

The wreck here is only artistic, though. Götterdämmerung is perhaps the worst staging of the four operas in the cycle. The special effects are rarely special and almost always cliché from the crumbling statues of the gods in the finale to the blood washed from Gunther’s hands after Siegfried’s murder which soon stains all of the video-projected Rhine. The biggest and most dramatic moments in the score are largely ignored and instead accompanied by lengthy exits and entrances of various characters as if nobody knew what to do with all that pesky music. Characters pace back and forth on the stage as if waiting for the orchestra to get to their entrance. Sadly, some of this may have rubbed off on conductor Fabio Luisi who gave a polished but oddly unengaged interpretation of the score for most all of the performances. It was the kind of Ring where nobody is pushing anyone towards anything, which may well be the worst kind. Even the drab, quasi-mythological costumes seemed mostly to work to stay out of the way of something bigger that never arrived.

Most of the vocal performances over the four days were not so instantly forgettable. Cancellations for illness abounded as I noted previously, and on Thursday, Eric Owens too, was announced sick and unable to perform Alberich for his brief scene in Act II. Richard Paul Fink, who will sing the role throughout the final cycle this year, covered the part and seemed like a breath of fresh air wandering in wearing a contemporary dark suit. There were heroes. Jay Hunter Morris continued to use his good will and lovely voice to great effect right through the end. Hans-Peter König who had done lots of duty in this show as Fafner, Hunding, and finally Hagen was easily the most assured and beautiful singing of the Ring’s final installment. Even Katarina Dalayman, who sang Brünnhilde, powered down for the cycle’s final opera and was steely and powerful without so much outright shouting as in Siegfried. Owens has becomes a first rate opera star out of these performances as Alberich as he should be. Bryn Terfel seemed best when Wotan became more sentimental and nostalgic as the cycle went on. His performances in Act II of Die Walküre and all of Siegfried were touchingly, beautifully sung. But his characterization of Wotan isn't comprehensively as great given that the god's more stentorian moments come off as blasé.

What the future hold’s for this turkey of a production is anybody’s guess. It certainly will live on next season and for some after that I imagine. It will certainly live on in video and everyone around the world will get another chance to see the entire previously screened four operas as part of the The Met Opera's Live in HD series over the course of the next two weeks. Don't believe all the Chicken Little harping you may have read about the drawbacks of the movie theater presentations. Having seen both versions, the theater presentations are notably preferable not only for their cost, but also because the most stupefyingly dull excesses of Lepage's non-production are improved upon by video editing and the qualities of a multi-camera video production. Any loss in image quality from seeing it live is a small price to pay to liven things up.

It’s been popular to take this Ring’s artistic failure as some sort of bigger indication of the company’s leadership under Peter Gelb, but I’m less inclined towards this sort of overly dramatic interpolation. Everyone is allowed their failures, even the Met under Gelb and I would still argue there have been plenty of success under his tenure so far as well. But I would wager that selling tickets for next year’s planned cycles at the Met aren’t going to go as easily as they did this year, much less compared to how they’ve gone in the past. Much was made over the availability of individual tickets for individual operas during these cycles, a situation not typical of seasons past, and I can tell you that from where I sat in the heart of center orchestra, a zone you’d suspect would have been pretty popular the first time around, the changing faces from night to night far outnumbered those who sat through all four operas. There weren’t tons of empty seats, but certainly lots of people had made relatively last minute plans for the shows I would guess. With less starry casts and cycles that continue to be spread out over 8 to 10 days, I know I for one don’t have a lot of incentive to sit through this one again any time soon. There is one cycle left that starts Saturday night, and there are tickets still available for all the shows, or you can see for yourself what's going on in a local theater starting next week.

Labels: Met opera reviews 11/12