A Minority View
A member's views of the 1998 Ring cycle
in Adelaide
I have to concede immediately that in liking the production
I am in a minority among the members of the Adelaide Ring Cycle audience
to whom I talked and the critics who have reviewed the performances.
Along with many others at the momentous occasion of
Australia's first complete locally produced Ring Cycle, I marvelled
at the sound coming out of the Festival Centre pit, much of the singing
and some of the stage effects. However, I will leave comments on the
singing, playing and conducting to others since I suspect there is
more of a positive consensus, including me, on these aspects of the
production.
Many people took Pierre Strosser, the producer, and
scenic designer, to task for imposing a "minimalist production"
on the Cycle. In this context, people were really criticising the
set for not being spectacular and/or naturalistic in the sense of
following Wagner's stage directions closely - as does the current
Metropolitan Opera production. A particularly sore point was the absence
of a graphic representation of the end of the world in Götterdämmerung.
But what about the lack of a Rhine, a dragon, a ring of fire (oh all
right, some conceded, the flowing red fabric was a nice touch), or
a real funeral cortege? It seemed Strosser's intention to strip the
operas of all but the most essential action to which reference is
made in the text (not the stage directions - and even this approach
doesn't include, for example, Brünnhilde's and the other Valkyries'
references to their horses).
Even more fundamental an objection was raised to the
"perverse" refusal to allow the characters to look at each
other or, worse still, to touch. Where were those climactic moments
of ecstatic passion some of us believe to be the core of Wagner's
operas? These seem to be unanswerable, fatal shortcomings in the production.
But is there a way of seeing the production which makes sense of what
we saw on stage? We are certainly not helped in solving this question
by any revelations from Strosser, who kept his intentions very close
to his chest in those few interviews he gave while in Adelaide or
which I read at least.
I must admit I was floundering for a grasp on the production
for about half of Das Rheingold. My first reaction was to try
and place the period of the production using the gods' clothes as
the starting point. They seemed to suggest the late 19C, but they
had a regional, even parochial look to them - not the quality clothes
one might associate with Paris or London or Berlin.
Then, when the impact of the "minimalist"
staging reinforced the feeling of "something late 19C" about
the production, I began to feel more sure that we were being shown
an interpretation of the Ring Cycle as if it were a late 19C play,
especially one by Ibsen. By the middle of Act 1 of Die Walküre,
I had become confident that this approach would make the production
very relevant to me - whatever Strosser may have intended!
I have to confess that my academic background is the
study of American drama and its relationship to what were at one time
highly radical and, to some, offensive modern plays such as Ibsen's
The Pillars of Society (1877), The Doll's House. (1879),
An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck
(1884), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builders
(1892). One could also point to Peer Gynt (1867) with its young
heroic figure, trolls and other exotic components as showing a generic
relationship to the Ring Cycle.
It may be stretching credibility too far to suggest
that there are deliberate structural parallels between these plays
and aspects of Strosser's production. Although, Mr Antony Ernst
in one of his lectures to the NSW Wagner Society before the Adelaide
Ring Cycle remarked that Ibsen admired Wagner.
Regardless of any links between the two artists, I am
sure that Strosser had in mind the very bourgeois, drawing room nature
of many of the Ring Cycle's scenes, notwithstanding the stage directions'
references to rocky mountaintops and riverbanks. In taking this approach,
Strosser may well be extending the scenic and demythologising approach
taken so successfully, in my view, by Patrice Chereau in the centennial
Ring Cycle.
But then that is what art is about - making unlikely
links and showing us how to see/hear a work or life in a new way.
The Master Builder is in part about deceit and broken agreements.
An Enemy of the People is in part about a character who refuses
to let people get away with their illusions and upsets people's greedy
plans. Fricka fits this part quite well. Nora, in The Doll's House,
could be seen as a Brünnhildean character in the way she develops
her own values and rebels against the constricting mores of her society.
Unfortunately, Nora is not able to reach a state of transcendence
as Brünnhilde appears to achieve at the end of Götterdämmerung.
This point about transcendence is of course another
area in which Strosser, to my mind, has redirected the Ring Cycle
towards the late 19C - this time focussing on the world view being
developed in the anti-Romantic, anti-transcendent literature that
was being written from the middle of the 19C onwards (and which Strosser
admits to reading voraciously).
In this literature, and the philosophy of people like
Nietzsche, there is no place for the miraculous, the metaphysically
transcendent. Strosser drives this point home, it seems to me, at
the end of Götterdämmerung. This world is now utterly human.
In this production, Siegfried's dying lyrical recounting of his adventures
comes across as something truly from another world. His death is the
assertion of the human - the evilly human - over the other-worldly,
which Siegfried's innocence (whether captured by the performer or
not) is intended to represent.
This also accounts for the stripping from Götterdämmerung
of evidence of the magical, such as the Tarnhelm. Siegfried's use
of it to appear as Gunther to trick Brünnhilde is just that - a clumsy
trick which fails to convince us as it later worries Brünnhilde. Similarly,
there are no gods or Valhallas really left after Brünnhilde's transformation
into a mere mortal: so the destruction of the gods and Valhalla can
only occur in her imagination. All the audience is left with then
is Brünnhilde staring into a vista (or void), waiting for death. This
can appear to be a relatively bleak view and it is, of course, the
basis of much Western literature since Nietzsche announced "the
death of God". On the other hand, it can be seen as retrospective
- Brunnhilde looking back into the world of happiness she hopes to
rejoin after death. Wagner's music, however, reminds us that it is
what is happening in a character's heart or soul or mind which is
important - the attitude one takes to existence or the end of it.
Even more disturbingly, this world is the world of Victorian
values - it is improper and uncivilised to give way to public demonstrations
of emotion, let alone touch, or for men and women to look directly
at each other outside the bedroom. Ibsen's plays are full of passion
and a desire for commitment which is constantly frustrated by the
social conventions of propriety and decency - probably even more so
in the provincial capital in which Ibsen was writing.
A friend commented in response to my views that the
characters in Ibsen's plays are usually physically close, even if
only because of the confines of the drawing room, even if emotionally
distanced from each other. Maybe in Strosser's staging, the physical
distance between characters serves a number of purposes. It can be
seen as the Ibsen approach writ large to match the cosmic scope of
the drama. In the case of the gods the physical distance may represent
the hierarchy which exists between them, as well as their different
spheres of responsibility. In the case of the demigods and humans,
maybe Strosser is deliberately denying the audience the sight of Sieglinde
and Siegmund embracing, or Brünnhilde and Siegfried, to underline
the point that in this world, our everyday world, such joy is hard
won and we shouldn't expect to experience it vicariously.
To give both Ibsen and Strosser their due, this holding
back of emotion, this refusal to break with convention, this constant
avoidance of touching or demonstrating passion, can, with the right
actors and producer, lead to amazingly powerful reactions in the audience.
This is still the appeal of Ibsen's dramas. We have to deal with
both the obvious levels of frustration on stage and the powerful emotions
being raised in us by the observation of these highly charged situations.
In the case of the Ring Cycle, we have the added advantage
of Wagner's music to leave us in no doubt as to what is happening
in the characters' minds and hearts. In the ABC documentary on the
Adelaide Ring Cycle, Strosser says that "the music is the flesh
on the characters". What he does with the characters, the settings
and the action, is to let the music be the primary means to communicate
- simply, directly - and powerfully (under Mr Tate) . The "minimalist"
stage setting assists this by not distracting the viewer with either
superbly or inadequately wrought stage effects - they are all
mostly secondary to the drama. After all, Wagner used much ink in
asserting the primacy of the drama and the supporting role of the
music in his works.
TERENCE WATSON March 1999
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10-Mar-2004
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