An Unforgettable Tristan Run

There is not a soul among opera fans who has not heard of or been present for the many changes with the Met’s Tristans and Isoldes; their press office and the media worked overtime. Of course, this is one of the reasons that people attend many performances of an opera they have seen and heard dozens of times: every one is different. But this run was more different than most: four Tristans in six performances, with Ben Heppner able to perform only in the last two. The first cover, John MacMaster, sang only on opening night. The second cover, on March 14 and 18, was Gary Lehman, who had never done the role on stage but covered it in Los Angeles recently. He was known to us, as he was our first Ursula Springer Endowed Fund awardee in 2006 and performed at our Special Contributors program in March 2006. The March 22 matinee was sung by Robert Dean Smith who had performed the role in Bayreuth. The only Met happening that could top this was the December 28, 1959 performance for which three Tristans, all ill, were persuaded by the general manager Rudolf Bing to sing one act each; the indefatigable and incomparable Birgit Nilsson was their Isolde. Board member German Bravo-Casas has provided the following background:

For more than a decade, Gary Lehman has been a fine singer with good presence and convincing acting abilities. He sang many leading baritone roles at the New York City Opera, as well as with regional companies. He also was one of the 1993 awardees of the Richard Tucker Gala, broadcast on PBS. As with Plácido Domingo, Lehman’s voice has developed and acquired the rare combination of a lyric tenor and the heroic distinctive character of a heldentenor. His last minute replacement for Domingo as Parsifal in Los Angeles in 2005 was a great success.

Musicologists talk about the “Tristan chord” and others talk about the “Tristan curse” in referring to the impossible role that Wagner gave to the heldentenor; the first victim was Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who died at age 29 one week after the world premiere. On March 18, we witnessed another episode to be added to the list of proofs that the “curse is working.”

Mr. Lehman had an unscheduled encounter with the prompter’s box due to a malfunctioning prop in Act III: a runaway rug. In fact, this bizarre production element, in a silly stage set and an odd production, had not worked properly since the dress rehearsal (why did it take so long to fix it?). Every article had a different version, but the fact is that his shoulder, not his head, hit the prompter’s box, and he certainly did not slide into the box. He had a bruised shoulder but if his head had hit it... His wife Susan Foster rushed backstage expecting that he would be taken to the hospital, but he returned in 10 minutes to finish the opera to great acclaim. Note that Ms. Foster covered Isolde and sang one performance in the Los Angeles Opera run in February, and the two will cover Tristan and Isolde in the November-December 2008 run at the Met.

Nathalie D. Wagner

President

Hamburg Rheingold

Das Rheingold. R. Wagner. Principals: F. Struckmann, J. Buchwald, L. Elgr, P. Gaillard, W. Koch, J. Sacher, T. Martirossian, A. Tsymbalyuk, K. Pieweck, H. Kwon, D. Humble, H. Y. Lee, G. Rossmanith, A.-Beth Solvang. Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg: S. Young, cond.; C. Guth, dir., C. Schmidt, scenery and costumes; W. Göbbel, lighting. Performance of March 16, 2008 (premiere).

Ever since Australian-born Simone Young took charge of the Hamburgische Staatsoper—she was appointed to the post of both music director and general manager in 2005—this venerable and thriving institution is once again attracting the attention of the discerning opera tourist. Proud of its distinguished history, the Hamburg Opera seems poised to rejoin the ranks of Europe’s leading opera houses—a position it long held under the leadership of Rolf Liebermann. Young has lost no time in launching the formidable project of presenting new productions of all the Wagner and Richard Strauss operas and, what is even more remarkable, of mounting them almost exclusively with the forces of her Hamburg ensemble.

Judging by the recent premiere of Das Rheingold—the first round of a new Ring that will be completed in October of 2010—Hamburg is now a place to watch. This Ring will be forged by Claus Guth, one of Germany’s busiest new directors, whose Wagnerian credits include Das Liebesverbot (Munich 2002) and Der fliegende Holländer (Bayreuth 2003). Guth is less of an iconoclast than Peter Konwitschny, the darling of the German music critics, who not long ago did Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger for Hamburg (see my review in Wagner Notes, April 2003). However, what Guth may lack in stylistic flair and sheer directorial chutzpah is amply compensated for by his keen sense of drama, his stringent approach, and his good taste (no Eurotrash here!). Still, his is a radical, revisionist interpretation of Das Rheingold, conceived for an audience that is Wagner-satiated rather than innocently hopeful of peering into the densely swirling waters of the Rhine or to be awed by a “rainbow bridge of blinding radiance.” Probably the only Ring production in the world that still relies on such charming naiveties is the current Met production.

As a matter of course, Guth updates the Ring and even goes beyond Patrice Chéreau in his landmark Bayreuth production of 1976. While Chéreau placed the action in the period of the work’s composition, Guth moves it squarely into the present time, when a trickster like Loge might be reasonably expected to work with a video camera. And while Chéreau translated Wotan, the chief of the gods, into a captain of 19^th-century industry, Guth further reduces him to the head of a modern middle class family that huddles in the attic of their modest home, contemplating the mock-up of a poor man’s Walhalla in pursuit of their absurdly megalomaniacal dreams of ruling the world. Here and elsewhere, myth and nature have been virtually eliminated. No spear for this Wotan; no “open space on a Mountain Height”; and certainly no Rhine.

Guth’s revisionist and ironic reading of Das Rheingold achieves its most thought-provoking and persuasive effects at the opening and at the end. Taking literally Wagner’s reference to a river’s bed, he gives us a real, larger-than-life bed—large enough for three Lolita-like teen-maidens who sleep with their stuffed animals under a billowing blanket, whence they emerge to play their games and to tease and torment poor old Alberich. The Nibelung himself is cast in the role of an exterminator, with back-mounted container and other paraphernalia suggestive of a lowly boarding-school custodian.

The final tableau is dominated by a large window in Wotan’s attic through which the evening is literally spread out against the sky. While Wotan and his clan, champagne glasses in hand and silhouetted against a magnificent cloudscape, dance deliriously to the pompous strains of the Walhalla, rainbow, and Rheingold motifs, Loge occupies the foreground. Having turned over the body of the just murdered Fasolt, he contemplates his bloodied hand and holds it up to the audience, thus foreshadowing the bloodshed of the ensuing action and signaling the efficacy of Alberich’s curse.

Throughout the evening, thanks to Claus Guth’s thoughtful “Personenregie,” the many dramatic moments of Das Rheingold become truly gripping. The giants—looking as though they have come directly from Hamburg’s fabled red light district—actually threaten Wotan with physical violence when his trickery becomes apparent. The antagonism between Wotan and Alberich is articulated in two fierce physical fights. It does seem, however, that in this sort of advanced Regietheater some sheer directorial goofiness is unavoidable. Here, the silliest moment occurred when, at the beginning of the sublime Erda scene, we see the earth mother engaged in a perfectly banal activity of tending, watering can in hand, to a dwarfish, bonsai tree, presumably representing the world ash. One shudders to think what the future holds, in this production, for this miserable shrub. At the musically arresting moment in which Wotan conceives his survival strategy, as the portentous sword motif is sounded for the very first time, we see him snatch and pocket the switchblade with which, in a truly terrifying enactment of Alberich’s curse, Fafner had stabbed Fasolt to death. We are made to realize that Wotan’s miracle weapon—Nothung das Schwert—will perpetuate the violence and save no one at all.

It is a pleasure to report that the vocal talents of the entire cast are uncommonly satisfying, which is all the more remarkable in that the singers, other than Struckmann and Sacher, were making their debuts in these roles. Falk Struckmann, who has sung Amfortas at the Met, was a vocally secure Wotan. He was outsung, however, by the Alberich, Wolfgang Koch—a name to remember! Strong performances also came from Katja Pieweck (Fricka), Jan Buchwald (Donner), Ladislav Elgr (Froh), and Jürgen Sacher (Mime). Simone Young’s conducting of this fabulous score is idiomatic and distinguished by subtle variations of tempo. In keeping with the directorial emphasis on action and drama, the musical proceedings were never ponderous, always fleet.

Hans Rudolf Vaget

Hans Rudolf Vaget, Professor Emeritus of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Smith College, is the lecturer for the Society’s 2008 Bayreuth English-language lecture series.