Love Among the Ruins

By Michael Walsh

They booed Harry Kupfer in Bayreuth last week. To be sure, they also booed Set Designer Hans Schavernoch and Conductor Daniel Barenboim. But the real invective -- a great, throaty vassals' chorus of opprobrium -- was reserved for Kupfer, the tousle-headed East German director who had committed the unpardonable sin: staging a brilliantly theatrical production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen that had little to do with musty tradition and everything to do with revivifying art.

The Salzburg Festival may be more glamorous and expensive than Bayreuth, but a new Ring -- this is the first in five years and only the tenth ever -- in ! the sleepy West German city is a memorable event in the world of music. It was here that Richard Wagner, music's great megalomaniac, built an acoustically perfect theater to house his revolutionary music dramas; here that he produced the first Ring cycle in 1876; here that Wagner, his wife Cosima and his father-in-law Franz Liszt are buried; here that Wagner's grandson Wolfgang keeps alive the sacred flame. To Wagner lovers, Bayreuth is a holy place, the Ring a sacred ritual and the Festspielhaus a shrine.

Yet here, too, sacrilege has become the order of the day. "Children, create something new!" ordered Wagner near the end of his life, and in the postwar period, directors have taken his exhortation literally. Wieland Wagner, Wolfgang's late brother, gave tradition a kick in the lederhosen with his spare, psychologically penetrating productions of the 1950s and '60s. In 1976 French Enfant Terrible Patrice Chereau booted it out the door entirely with a conception that updated the story to the Industrial Revolution and nascent Marxism. Now comes Kupfer, with a daring viewpoint that is as Teutonic as Wolfgang's thick Franconian accent.

As Wieland and Chereau proved, a radical Ring will ultimately be accepted if it is presented with dramatic force and intellectual coherence. Each new Ring director has the obligation to seek the spirit, not necessarily the letter, of Wagner's four-opera cycle, and Kupfer, director of East Berlin's Komische Oper, is no exception. He presents a cinematic rethinking of the myth that projects the action far into a grim, post-nuclear-war future, in which gods, dwarfs, giants and humans stumble through the detritus of a lost civilization in a futile search for salvation. As stern as a Lutheran sermon yet as exciting as an action-adventure film, Kupfer's Ring is thrilling.

Perfect Wagnerites know that the operas are built from short musical phrases, called leitmotivs, that symbolize characters and ideas. There are themes for Siegfried's sword and Wotan's spear, for renunciation of love and for its redemption. Artfully intertwined, they underpin Wagner's own libretto, based on the sagas of Norse and Germanic legend. In presenting what the composer called a "stage-festival play," Kupfer found physical leitmotivs to complement the musical ones and give his production a visual as well as a musical unity. Characters do not just stand and sing; they stand and deliver, fighting with fury or embracing with abandon, falling down faint in ecstasy. < As Wotan (Bass John Tomlinson) bids a sorrowing farewell to Brunnhilde (Soprano Deborah Polaski) at the end of Die Walkure, they both collapse facedown on the ground, overcome with emotion.

Schavernoch's imaginative sets contribute greatly to the production's success. Like something out of George Miller's Mad Max movies, they depict an exhausted world where love can be found only among the ruins and the survivors get by as best they can. Hunding's hut is an underground shelter; Brunnhilde's rock, a barren stretch of moonscape, glowing radioactively. The Rhinemaidens disport themselves among the twisted remnants of what appears to be a power plant (shades of Chereau). It is a gloomy, godforsaken land that well suits the Schopenhauerian concept of pessimism with which Wagner suffused his text.

In Ring productions, concept is everything these days, at least until a new generation of heroic singers -- Flagstads or Melchiors -- comes along. Vocally, this cycle offers only two major performances. Tenor Siegfried Jerusalem, in the title role in Siegfried, may lack the ideal resonance at the top, but his voice is fresh and warm, and he cuts a handsome, lithe figure as the hero. As Waltraute in Gotterdammerung, Waltraud Meier got the week's biggest ovation for a blazing performance.

Leading his first Ring, Conductor Barenboim leaves a mixed impression. His predilection for slow tempos is very much in evidence, yet occasionally he bolts precipitately, as in the final scene of Siegfried, when it is all that Polaski and Jerusalem can do to keep up. There is some piquant orchestral detail at times, but at others the texture is crude. Barenboim's challenge is to find a convincing, unified point of view.

No such charge can be leveled against Kupfer. In a striking final tableau, after the old order has been destroyed, he populates the stage with a crowd dressed in formal clothes -- like the Bayreuth audience -- mindlessly watching television as the conflagration subsides. The drowned Hagen lies unnoticed, a beached whale in black leather. Despite the music's glowing promise of redemption by love, no one seems to have learned a thing: only two innocent children make their way, hand in hand, out of the carnage. A forgetful human race ensures that, in Kupfer's moral universe, history repeats itself exclusively as tragedy. No wonder the audience booed. But never mind. In a couple of years, when they are accustomed to it, they will be cheering.