(soprano) and DAVID SYRUS (piano) - Wagner Society of England

DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN IN BERLIN
9th to 18th September 2011
Götz Friedrich’s time-honoured staging blazes to life to fight another day
Paul Dawson-Bowling
I recommend the Berlin Deutsche Oper Ring to anyone suffering from Ring hunger. It is
one of the best that I know, with tickets costing so much less than Covent Garden banker’s
league prices as announced for 2012 that there would be money enough left for anyone to
cover the costs of flights to Berlin and hotels. When I last saw Götz Friedrich’s quarter of
a century old “Time Tunnel” production four or five years ago it seemed tired and
outmoded, overdue for retirement, but it has now sprung up to rich new life.
Much of the credit must go to Donald Runnicles, but the shift is partly because Götz
Friedrich’s staging, his damning Marxist critique of capitalism had then seemed a historical
curiosity, whereas it has now acquired an urgent and compelling relevance thanks to the
worldwide catastrophes of capitalism since that time. These catastrophes have shown up
the failures of capitalism not simply as a matter of one or two “whiskers” in the system
which can soon be tweaked right, but as something intrinsic to capitalism itself. Götz
Friedrich’s accent on the Ring’s attack against capitalism resonates quite differently now, as
a renewed vindication of Marx for having in many ways been right all along.
What has dated more is the representation of technology. Alberich the grim
capitalist still sits in his Nibelheim control centre surrounded by screens that spy on his
workers, and he still faces an immense dashboard whence he dominates this operation,
flicking controls, throwing switches and terrorising his slave Nibelungen, but his
communications system looks quaintly old fashioned, such is the pace of technological
change. Even so the other great set pieces of the production: the vast, floor-level braziers
of magic fire in Die Walküre, the fantastical tank-like contraptions of the mechanical
dragon in Siegfried and the huge magnifying mirrors that add to the sinister presences of
Götterdämmerung all remain riveting, and this Ring’s beginning and end, consisting of the
same petrified tableau slowly coming to life at the start of Das Rheingold and sinking back
into silence and stillness again at the end of Götterdämmerung were as impressive as ever.
The slight frustration over this 2011 revival is that it has two rather different revival
directors, Jasmin Solfaghari for Das Rheingold and Siegfried, and Gerlinde Pelkowski for
Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung. Apart from the fact that Wotan and Siegmund now
both sport the almost mandatory pigtails, the biggest change from both directors was the
altered Personen-regie, their deployment of the singing actors (as opposed to the scenic
conception, the Inszenierung), so as to present far closer personal interactions,
particularly in the Pelkowski sections. Even in Solfaghari’s Das Rheingold, at the point
where the problems confronting the gods have evidently been resolved, she has the Wotan
of Das Rheingold and Siegfried, Mark Delavan, warmly embracing his Fricka, the creamy
yet imperious Daniela Sindram. They lean affectionately close so that their foreheads
touch. Again, Siegmund in former times used to sing to his Sieglinde from the opposite
side of the stage, but the expressive Robert Dean Smith now addressed the incandescent
Petra Maria Schnitzer while clasping her in a passionate embrace worthy of Wieland
Wagner at Bayreuth 1958.
By contrast the Siegfried of Torsten Kerl in Siegfried, unfailingly musical but
slightly overextended in a theatre of this size, still addressed himself to the scenery at the
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