A magnificent 17 hours of ‘Ring’
timers and experienced Ring heads alike fell under the hypnotic spell of the Wagnerian sound world. The swell and fall of the composer’s richly imagined orchestral currents, the pinpoint dramaturgy of these stark moral and psychological portraits, and the cornucopia of vivid stage imagery — all of it combined to create an immersive theatrical experience unlike any other.
And it always bears repeating that the massive scale of the “Ring” Cycle is very much part of the work’s essence. To sit (not without physical discomfort or creakiness) through the entire 17-plus hours of this tale is to plunge into its uttermost regions and come out renewed on the other side.
“I will never forget this for as long as I live,” I overheard one patron say as the curtain descended on Act 2. “It’s exhilarating, it’s maddening, it’s overwhelming.”
With the Opera’s production, which has two complete cycles still to run, nearly everything snaps into place with complete assurance. The work of conductor Donald Runnicles and the Opera Orchestra has been nothing short of extraordinary — a week’s worth of tireless, sumptuous instrumental textures and meticulously charted dramatic rhythms.
The casting, too, has made this the most consistently well-sung “Ring” the company has mounted in 30 years. There are dozens of roles to be filled in this cycle, none of them free of challenges, and anyone with some history of opera attendance in San Francisco can easily remember the weak links in smaller roles — or even the demonstrable second-raters given principal assignments — during some of the revivals of the past.
The current “Ring” has nothing of the sort. The masterful performances in all the main roles — Greer Grimsley’s exquisitely nuanced Wotan, Falk Struckmann’s magisterial company debut as Alberich or the vivid and indefatigable partnership of Iréne Theorin and Daniel Brenna as Brünnhilde and Siegfried — are matched without fail by every member of each cast.
And although I have some reservations about the overall conception of director Francesca Zambello’s American themed production, which we’ll come back to, there’s no denying the theatrical vibrancy and psychological detail she brings to individual scenes and sequences. At every juncture, the human dimension of drama registers with concerted force — even when the characters in question aren’t actually human.
“Götterdämmerung” is actually the most consistently human of the “Ring” operas, one in which the contours of large-scale social living come entirely to the fore (it’s no coincidence that this is the only one in which a chorus appears). There are various dwarves and immortals lurking around the periphery of the action, but the twilight of the gods, to cite the opera’s English title, is already well under way.
That’s one of the things that make the opera’s central story of love and betrayal at once so poignantly intimate and so mythic. Brünnhilde has completed the transition from immortal to human woman — a transition beautifully caught in Theorin’s luminous, finegrained singing — and Brenna’s depiction of Siegfried conjured up memories of his youthful beginnings in “Siegfried” while adding a new layer of robust maturity.
There are new additions to the roster of characters here as well — most notably the malevolent Hagen, whose machinations to reclaim the ring forged by his father Alberich drive the opera’s plot. Bass Andrea Silvestrelli gave a capacious performance, by turns glowering and winningly ironic, and all of it cloaked in dark, weighty vocal colors. Hagen’s half-siblings, the pusillanimous Gunther and his inconsequential sister Gutrune, are never pleasant company, but they were rendered with unusual dramatic presence by baritone Brian Mulligan and soprano Melissa Citro.
The two female trios that frame “Götterdämmerung” with ostentatious symmetry were both splendidly delivered — first the all-seeing Norns (Ronnita Miller, Jamie Barton and Sarah Cambidge) and then the return of Stacey Tappan, Lauren McNeese and Renée Tatum as the playful but rightfully aggrieved Rhinemaidens. Barton, who had made a formidable Fricka in the cycle’s first two operas, did double duty as Brünnhilde’s sister Waltraute in Act 1.
The scenes with these two trios also elicited characteristically inventive stage imagery from Zambello and set designer Michael Yeargan. As the chronology of this production proceeds across a century and a half of American history, each opera is dotted with telling parallelisms — from the California Gold Rush at the outset of “Das Rheingold” to the rural poverty, corporate skyscraper and wartime paratroopers of “Die Walküre” to the increasing ecological devastation of “Siegfried.”
“Götterdämmerung” is no exception. In this version, the Norns are technicians in a digital panopticon, laying the fiber-optic cable that records and conveys the doings of the world. The Rhinemaidens now cavort amid grimy plastic refuse that they struggle constantly to clean up. The Gibichungs’ hall is a high-rise condo infused with metal, vinyl and bad taste.
Yet these conceits, and more like them, tend to make a quick point and then vanish, only to be replaced by traditional sword-and-cape motifs. For most of the production, the American theme — which is designed to communicate relevant parallelisms to our own political and moral dilemmas — is nowhere in sight.
This is perhaps less a fault than a missed opportunity, although it’s also true that thematic consistency can become an interpretive straitjacket if you let it. And in any case, the general air of anxiety and decline, reinforced by the turbulent, angsty video projections of S. Katy Tucker, is unmistakable.
What lingers most in the memory after the entire cycle has run its course is the fecundity and brilliance of Wagner’s score, as rendered by Runnicles, the orchestra and this remarkable cast. Wagner conceived of what he called a “Gesamtkunstwerk” — a “total art work” in which all the various art forms were intertwined — but there’s never been much doubt that in this formulation, music stands as first among equals.