Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 12 Number 1, April 2011

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The triumph of individualism in a modern Wagnerian director’s conception to Rhinegold

by

 Rui Coimbra Gonçalves

The University of Coimbra

All imgages © Alfredo Rocha / TNSC

A blogger from the Portuguese speaking community pointed out recently the modern absurdity of some staging options excessively based on subjectivity. He was concerning the recent and controversial scenery assembled by the outstanding British director Graham Vick to the Rhinegold by Richard Wagner at Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, the Lisbon’s opera house, during the 2005/06 season, considering that in the this specific case, the composer was a victim of his own legends and historical mistakes of always, like philo-Germanism and anti-Semitism. To the author of the blog reacted another member, in spite of to doing so in the same way, protesting that he watched a Barber of Seville with a cellular phone in a staging broadcasted by the French classical channel Mezzo…

A discussion like that is moreover a proof of the times of subjectivity and the realm of relativism in which we live today. Rather than the clichés assigned to Wagner, the contemporary staging tend in fact to lend a hand of personal sights and to depict the drama in the Brechtian way, according to which if our actual world doesn’t fit into the drama, the drama in his turn have no place in this world. A dictum like that can find a perfect complement in the Mr Vick’s own notion that we can express by his diction “If opera has a place in the world it must be of the world”.

Among what we are able to remember from our attendance and live broadcasted commentary to RDP, the Portuguese public Radio, of the already far 30^th May 2006, besides all the performances were sold out (who summoned the opera house manager, then the Italian Paolo Pinamonti, to show the sessions to the great public putting a screen outside the theatre, as it happens also in the “Opera for all” seasons, in cities such as Munich, at Max-Joseph Square, in front of the Bavarian State Opera), we could start to point out the stage expanding towards the pit, and the moving out of this to the common stalls (in live performances the result was something like that presented in Picture 1). It could however be set in the same mat in which the Greeks imagined their theatres, inserting the audiences almost around the proscenium, as in Epidaurus), but perhaps also gathering its inspiration from the new experiences with the open air opera fluctuant stage at Lake Constance, in its Switzerland bank, during the homonymous summer festival.

After the unforgettable prelude (imagined, according to the autobiographical writings, in a nap dream at La Spezia, Italy,[1] of water inspiration, as a earth lullaby, and with resonances taken from Friedrich Shelling’ essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom),[2] three Barby dolls dancing singers appear, incarnating the Rhine Daughters, sustain the attention of the Nibelung king Alberich, a role which was here sang and played by the Austrian must acclaimed bass-baritone Johann Werner Prein. He sudden falls in sexual excitement, a detail that was not unnoticed to Mr Vick, who underlined it by the eloquent manner we can see in the picture [Picture 2], jumping promptly to stage from a box. In the place of the gold that tempts in a second time Alberich, was suspended a discothèque glace ball.

The Rhine Daughters warn the Nibelung about the power of the gold for all creature who gets to renounce to love (they would be able to forge the ring that, in his turn, concedes the power over the world, including over the women). Then Alberich steals the sparkling mineral from the bottom of the river and flee with it to his reign of terror located in the underworld. In a Schopenhauerian affected scene,[3] he run down of course all the kinds of love. With these events we reach the final of the first scenery.

In the second scene, it is eloquent the functioning of the improvised machinery under the stage. Wotan and Loge, summoned by the other gods and by the urgency of accomplishment of the pacts engraved in the spear of the first, must descend to the Alberich reign, and capture, through the cleverness of the second, all the treasure of the Nibelung to pay the Valhala fortress to the giants.

It is also significant, already in Third Scene, that in this staging procedure the option consisted to see the oppression as a kind of alienation of the Nibelungs submitted to the Alberich’s tyranny, as, at the same time, employers in a stock exchange and drug maniacs [Picture 3] (the presence of the great world ash-tree, an antecedent in the plot, is clearly an option extra in this staging).

But the level of social criticism (actually one of their pinnacles during those performances), was the carrying to our days of the Wagnerian archetypical ideas. Precisely it could be seen as an improvement in relation with the problems raised by the Wagner’s contemporary behaviour: in fact, even the traditional emphasize of the irrational exploitation of the natural resources belongs much more to our time than of which of Wagner. A situation alike could be appointed to the submission of the individual will to that of social group, cast or restricted interests imposed to the popular majority. We are dealing here with more complex questions of political organization, but it haunts no less the heart of the Wagnerian problematic and, even more, Mr Vick’s lyric theatre conceptions reported to this level of analysis.

The multitude then crying in front of the Nibelung tyrant, had at their disposal certainly a survey of more diversity of means than in which we could see the oppression of XIX^th century industrialization over the man placed together with toothed wheels; or, in the next century, the rise of Nazi Third Reich in Germany between the two world wars. It means now no more (and no necessary) real political oppression, but, e. g., one so simple thing as the daily struggle for to be alive from our days.

The presidential box in the theatre was currently used as a symbol of power showing from the Nibelung, as much as from Alberich during the descent of Wotan and Loge to his realm of hell; and from the gods at the end. (It occurred also with the goddess Fricka during the subsequent staging of The Valkyrie at the same opera house the next season, still directed by Graham Vick).

As we could see in other Wagnerian staging we had the fortune to attend (among those the Robert Wilson’s conception for this last opera at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris, in November 2005), the successes happening with the characters worked as shots between them, and they as pieces of the same game of chance with life and death.

In the same way we could appoint the Peter Sellar’s conception, during the same Parisian season but in Opéra Bastille, of both the roles of Tristan and Isold in the same opera as lovers alienated from the world (an idea that Wagner shapely took once again from Arthur Schopenhauer’s main philosophical work, The world as will and representation), introducing a movie behind stage as a kind of contemporary Greek and Roman proscenium showing us an almost parallel life tale. The removal of the couple was symbolized there by a magnificent water immersion by falling of a couple of fashion models in slow motion picture at the exact instant of the highest point of the huge love duet, in the good tradition of the Wagnerian unendliche Melodie (the “infinite melody”). In these two last cases we are dealing with the practices proceeded in the modern staging of the so-called “producers’ theatre”, a category in which we could easily include Mr Vick own staging conceptions to the Londoner Royal Opera house and Glyndebourne Festival, as well as for São Carlos, and no less his radical recent experiences with an Idomeneo by Mozart staged in a rubber abandoned factory, or even a Wagnerian Tannhäuser given in a former train station (instead of its original localization in the central Germany Wartburg fortress, near Eisenach).

No less curious about this purpose was, in the Second Scene, the express appointment by Fricka (a goddess surrendered to the seductions whose the gold would be able to carry to her with regard to her inconstant husband), of the own rococo interior of the São Carlos Theatre, as the Valhala fortress itself. In spite of not had been the opinion of other critics coming from Spain, our neighbour country, we caught this subtlety in which Mr Vick is clearly a master of interpretation, as we could see later by other details introduced among the main characters in the releasing of The Valkyrie the next year at this same opera house...

By the way of castles and fortresses, it was even more eloquent the resource employed by Graham Vick to depict the both giants in their characters of literal builders of the Valhala as workers and caterpillar managers of its framework construction, as we can see in this suggestive picture taken in full performing of the sceneries two or four of Rhinegold (we are not sure about this, because they appear in both). In a similar and soft way, we could then see a semi-god Loge plenty of perspicacity (incarnated in the Lisbon production by tenor Will Hartmann), with his fetish clothes and his baseball cue, defiant and joking through his laugh about the claims of all the personages, including those of the weighty and slow giants [Picture 4].

But the object and, at the same time, the purpose of the Rhinegold, common to the rest of the entire cycle of the Nibelung to which that opera serves as prologue, is the ring. It is because of this main symbol object of The Ring of the Nibelung that are burst the plot all along this Greek inspired chain of tragedies, in the steps of Aeschylus to whom Wagner voted so many admiration along his life and paid a so evident homage. Here [Picture 5] we can see Rumanian baritone Stefan Ignat as the main god Wotan of the Nordic mythology, proud to show to his public of the remaining gods the ring rapped by force to Alberich, the king of the Nibelungs.

The ring, with its circular shape actually represents the inefficacity of the nature betrayed by the first fault of Wotan against her. (There is the reason to be present the world ash-tree during the scenes with this god, excepting in the scenery which shows the hell down earthly landscape, as revealed in the underworld, a scene that is presented to us along the third part of the four that compose this opera without intermission). In fact, the king of gods had been pull out in his youthfully life a branch from the tree, an action in witch we could see a first offence against nature, rather than a kind of original sin committed in context of German and Nordic mythology.

And it is no less significant that when the same deity gets the ring from the hands of the Nibelung, sudden appears the earthly goddess, Erda, advising him the giving up of the accursed ring in profit of the giants (who built the new house for gods, which in his turn should be paid). The ring is really subject of damnation by the king of Nibelungs, and this crucial happening has consequences over the entire remaining and all the cycle of the tetralogy. And summons, in an even more emphasised level, the final tragedy of the gods, all burned and consumed by the Loge’s flames in final lyric drama, The twilight of the Gods.

When the gods finally appear making use of the presidential box, greeting their imaginary people of new subjects, emerges all around from the mechanical pit a nuclear weapon, which severe implications with the actual moment in terms of international and delicate geopolitical relations we are not able to discuss anymore, the common citizens of a so controversial and irrational matter as it is our world. It would be enough quote in this point the book of Marc A. Weiner, according to what:

This topos juxtaposing impoverished surface appearance and superior and above all privileged depths functions as the fulcrum of Wagner’s aesthetics, providing a motif upon which many of the metaphors of his theoretical writings and music dramas are based. [4]

The own inconsistency and doubtfully characters of some Rhinegold personages lend themselves to this subjectivity of staging, creating an aura to legitimate individualism as such a logical procedure to provide us the trickier Wagnerian enigmas, that we probably will misunderstand for ever.

In fact, as we can read this time in the recent study by Mary A. Cicora of 1998, on purpose of the Rhinemaidens (that, in the shapes we could see above, the director depicted as ingenuous joking and dancing dolls), the earthly goddess Erda, and even talking about Loge (the baseball player god in the related Vick’s conception), the propitious ambiguity to that kind of interpretation infinitude of personalities and their behaviour seems to have necessarily been finally accorded by Wagner itself to each personal point of view generated by each director of the own composer’s posthumous times:

The Rhinemaidens, for instance, can make prophecies, and they see through the falsity of the gods’ grandeur, for instance, as they comment accordingly upon the Entrance of the Gods into Valhala at the end of Rheingold. They are, however, anything but numinous and mythical. In fact, they are silly little creatures who do not know, and ironically perhaps know all too well, not to keep quiet about the magical (but not too magical) properties of the Rhinegold. Ironically, these earth- or water-spirits such as Erda and the Rhinemaidens, and even Loge, the fire-god, while blatantly mythological in appearance or costume, name, and heritage, seem to exist more fore foreshadowing, as some kind of modern omniscient narrator in a work with Romantic irony, or a Brechtian “epic theatre” device. They are apparently mythological, but they fulfill a definitely nonmythological, modern function in the work of art as a whole.[5]

It results obvious the way by witch Mr Vick underlines all of these aspects of myth construction in Wagner, as well as the sense of pragmatism concerning the dramatic intuition of the German musician and poet.

          In some of the Portuguese speaking lands (like Portugal and Brazil), we have a Gospel derived aphorism that we could translate to English (I don’t know if it exists somewhat equivalent in England), by something like «No one can be prophet in his own land».[6] In spite of being a British director who offered to us in Lisbon such a daring sight, which is the subject of our analysis here, perhaps was because of the points of view he displayed while accomplishing his stage management task, he had been so controversial among us there.