At Last, a Singer's

By Michael Walsh

Ever since the grandiose failure of Sir Peter Hall's staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth two summers ago, Wagnerites have been anticipating the San Francisco Opera's new production of the epic four-evening cycle. For although it is common knowledge in the opera world that there are not enough voices of heroic Wagnerian caliber around these days, just put on a Ring and watch the paying customers line up.

The San Francisco production proved well worth waiting for. Indeed, blessed with a first-rate cast, a skilled if not always inspired conductor, and a director with strong dramatic ideas about the piece, it must rank as one of the best stagings in recent memory. Objections may be raised about some of Director Nikolaus Lehnhoff's departures from Wagnerian canon in an otherwise traditionalist view of the work. But there can be no disputing the high quality of the vocalism. Since 1976, there has been a director's Ring (Patrice Chereau's Wagner-as-social-revolution) and a conductor's Ring (Sir Georg Solti's at Bayreuth in 1983). Here, at last, a singer's Ring.

As the brash, confident Wotan of Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, the splendid American bass James Morris served notice that he will be a Teutonic god of vocal power and majesty for years to come. Proud, haughty and resolutely amoral, Morris dominated the drama as he must to give depth to the tragedy that is, ultimately, Wotan's doing. Equally impressive was the Hungarian-born soprano Eva Marton, a legitimate contender for the mantle of Birgit Nilsson with impassioned performances of Brunnhilde in Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. Awakened by Siegfried on the Valkyrie rock, Marton sang Brunnhilde's Heil dir, Sonne greeting to life in gleaming, radiant tones, and her blazing immolation scene ignited a final musical conflagration that cleansed the spirit.

Vocal quality was high throughout: Tenor Rene Kollo's sturdy Siegfried, Bass- Baritone Walter Berry's crafty Alberich, the ripe Fricka of Mezzo-Soprano Hanna Schwarz in Das Rheingold. A delightful bonus was the Walkure Fricka and Gotterdammerung Waltraute of Vienna-born Mezzo Helga Dernesch, who some years ago was an important Isolde and Brunnhilde. Combining her still considerable power with a riveting dramatic presence, Dernesch gave a lesson in Wagnerian artistry. Conductor Edo de Waart was too often cautious when he should have been impetuous, but he roused himself in Gotterdammerung to deliver a reading of surge and sweep.

Drawing their inspiration from the work of the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, the production team of Lehnhoff and Designer John Conklin created an emotionally resonant mythic landscape. The poetic ruin near which Siegfried encounters the Rhinemaidens in Gotterdammerung, for example, was suggested by Friedrich's Winter, and the staging uses other Friedrich images prominently. It was a back-to-nature approach, a middle ground between the conservative 1975 Seattle Ring, which was strongly influenced by Arthur Rackham's 1910-1911 book illustrations, and the experiments at Bayreuth, which included both Chereau's radical vision and Hall's muddled attempt at neoromanticism.

Lehnhoff's direction emphasized the personal relationships in the Ring, and he achieved moments of real poignancy. In Die Walkure, Siegmund dies, not abandoned on the battlefield, but in the arms of his father Wotan, who had in fact ordered his death. It was a moving tableau suffused with love, reproach and disbelief. And Lehnhoff injected a welcome light touch into Die Walkure when he has Brunnhilde, Wotan's favorite daughter, playfully jab her spear at Dad before rushing off with a high-spirited "Ho-yo-to-ho."

Several willful departures from the traditionalist scheme, therefore, seemed gratuitous. The Gibichungs hall, festooned with Third Reich eagles, needlessly politicized the scene. While there was a distinct frisson produced by the director's view of Gunther and his sister Gutrune as a degenerate version of the earlier incestuous lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde, the music does not support such an interpretation at all. Even worse was Lehnhoff's idea that Nothung, the sword, was forged from Alberich's gold. Granted, it is a problem for all directors that the sword's musical motif is initially heard at the end of the first drama, Das Rheingold, whereas the weapon itself is not physically present until the next opera, Die Walkure, when Siegmund pulls it from a tree trunk. But by introducing it earlier, Lehnhoff loaded it down with more associations than it could support. Nothung was everywhere in the cycle: Fafner the giant killed his brother with it in Das Rheingold, and Hagen ran the hapless Gunther through with it near the end of Gotterdammerung. None of this conforms to Wagner, and the sword as symbol of Wotan's moral dilemma thus became nonsense.

This may seem like quibbling. But symbols, both pictorial and musical, are at the very heart of the cycle, in fact of most Wagner. Despite pressures on directors to produce something original these days, Lehnhoff could have intruded less upon the Ring. Doing it Wagner's way would have been good enough. After all, that's what the singers did.