Film looks at Lepage’s Ring in the Machine age
“N obody has got it perfectly right,” William Berger, an author of popular books about opera, is heard to say in Wagner’s Dream, a documentary about the Robert Lepage production of the Ring now reaching its full-cycle apotheosis at the Metropolitan Opera and coming next week to a theatre near you.
This is not an especially perceptive remark: Nobody in the realm of opera presentation can be expected to get it perfectly right. But the pitfalls are more considerable in Wagner’s Ring than in most works created for the stage. To read the critics, Lepage has succumbed to many of them.
The cyclic presentation of the four operas in cinemas around North America, starting Wednesday with Das Rheingold, might constitute the director’s last chance to restore a measure of dignity to the grandest enterprise of his illustrious career. Or it might widen the chorus of boos heard quite clearly in footage of the opening night on Sept. 28, 2010.
Of course, the documentary by Susan Froemke, which you can see Monday evening in the same cinemas carrying the Ring, is fundamentally sympathetic, although the camera does not pan away from the many difficulties caused by 24 rotating aluminum planks known to stagehands and singers alike as the Machine.
This made-in-quebec unit became notorious l ong before it started to creak in rehearsals. Arriving in New York grossly overweight – 90,000 pounds instead of the expected 50,000 – it could not be accommodated without structural reinforcements to the Met stage.
Much of the documentary revolves around the Machine, its complexities, its vicissitudes, the large squad of technicians required to manage it, the difficulties singers experienced in traipsing from plank to plank. The famous first-night tumble of Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre is fully documented, along with the soprano’s backstage vow (later recanted) not to try that entry again.
Despite its initial billing as a 21stcentury marvel, the Machine looks very much like an industrial artifact of the 1920s, something built by machinists and steamfitters. Sure, there are some computer screens on which brake-mechanism failures are duly monitored, and the lighting effects surely have some software genesis. But often the unit is pushed by stagehands from behind, as might a huge set on casters a century ago or more. and the suspended Rhinemaidens are braced more or less as were their ancestors for the first Ring in Bayreuth in 1876.
All this points to a conclusion some writers have found hard to reach in view of Lepage’s avantgarde reputation: This is a conservative Ring. There are no sociopolitical concepts, no hydroelectric plants, no gods in Brooks Brothers suits. Costuming is conservative, down to a breastplate for Wotan.
One new insight is the information that Lepage was inspired by the volcanism of Iceland to create an active and living platform for his drama. The Eddas of Iceland are the source of many of the mythic characters and episodes that Wagner expanded on in the Ring. Again, the director’s impulse was not to revolutionize the cycle, but bring it back to its almost-forgotten roots.
Froemke had remarkably open access to Lepage, both at his Ex Machina production company in Quebec City and at the Met. Much of the conversation is in French (and subtitled).
Inevitably, one wonders whether the presence of the camera influences the interactions being filmed. Would Met general manager Peter Gelb, cool cucumber that he is, have reacted so philosophically to the failure of Valhalla to materialize on opening night had the red light not been on? Was Met artistic director James Levine (who was later sidelined by a back injury) really as peripheral to the production as the documentary makes him seem?
Another qualm concerns whether prior access by viewers to all the nitty-gritty of production will attenuate the magic of the broadcasts themselves. Wagner insisted on a “mystic gulf ” between the audience and the stage. Froemke fills that gulf to the brim. The human-interest subplot concerning the last-minute substitution of Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried is also apt to lead the spectator to see that heroic, bellowing figure on the screen as … Jay Hunter Morris.
But those with a curiosity about all matters operatic will find the lengthy documentary (five minutes short of two hours) worthwhile. As for the screenings starting Wednesday, take note that they are the original Live in HD broadcasts from 2010 (Das Rheingold), 2011 (Die Walküre and Siegfried) and last February (Götterdämmerung). They will not incorporate the improvements in staging Lepage decreed for the complete presentations now under way in New York.
Still, for thousands of opera fans, this will be their only practical opportunity to experience the Ring in its entirety in something like a theatrical setting. Go to metfamily. org for a list of cinemas and start times.