Houston Grand Opera: Die Walküre

This past Thursday we saw Die Walküre, the second part of Wagner's Ring Cycle. This time last year, when I saw Das Rheingold for the first time, I didn't know what to expect, but this year I had the advantage going in of knowing that I love the look and direction of this production. And I was initially intimidated by Wagner, but I'm finding the music far more accessible than I expected. (I also note that the audience made its appreciation of the orchestra's performance very apparent.)

Not having seen the Ring Cycle before, I can't compare this with other productions, but I find it difficult to imagine that I would find another interpretation more exciting than this one, which is modern and sophisticated. An article in the Opera Cues program written by conductor and Artistic/Music Director Patrick Summers notes that "all of the imagery of the Fura Ring production comes from ancient literature ... if the production resembles science fiction it is only because science fiction shares some of the same sources as the Ring mythology." He continues: "The technological conveyances are modern, like video or Lege's Segway, but their symbolism is not: Wagner's visual imagination was generations ahead of what was physically possible in his era...."

I'm glad to have read that, because it gives me context, yet I still feel free to experience this Ring Cycle as science fiction. I'm new enough to opera that I'm not confident about my opinions, but I can and do talk about science fiction all day long, and I'm becoming more interested in and comfortable with fantasy literature as well. For me, then, this is the best of many worlds.

At some point I really should talk about the opera itself, though! In Das Rheingold, the dwarf Alberich steals gold from the Rhinemaidens (I will never forget the singers in those water tanks!) and forges it into a ring to make himself invincible, which works ... for a while. Wotan, chief of the gods, steals the ring from Alberich but then has to use it to pay the giants Fafner and Fasolt for building Valhalla, the fortress of the gods. In Die Walküre, Wotan has since fathered nine daughters, the Valkyries, with the earth goddess, Erda. With a she-wolf, he has also fathered the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, but separates them because he hopes that will enable them to one day recover the gold ring for him.

The opera begins when Siegmund and Sieglinde, now adults, meet and fall in love, not knowing at first that they are siblings. Sieglinde's husband, Hunding, demands that Siegmund fight him the following day, and Sieglinde shows him a sword embedded in a tree that no man has been able to pull out. In retrieving the sword, Siegmund realizes Sieglinde is his sister, but still claims her as his bride.

In Act II, Wotan tells his daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, to protect Siegmund in the coming fight. Wotan's wife Fricka, however, demands that Wotan champion Hunding instead, so Wotan tells Brünnhilde he has changed his mind. She plans to obey, but when Siegmund tells Brünnhilde he will not follow her to Valhalla if Sieglinde cannot go with him, Brünnhilde sides with the lovers. Wotan appears and intervenes by shattering Siegmund's sword, allowing Hunding to kill his opponent. Wotan then kills Hunding and gives chase to Brünnhilde.

The third act opens with the Valkyries gathering slain heroes, represented by a swinging "wrecking ball" draped with live but motionless acrobats (pictured at top of post). The audience literally gasped when the curtain went up on this impressive scene. The Valkyries are afraid to help their sister, and Sieglinde herself wishes she had died with Siegmund, but Brünnhilde tells Sieglinde that she is now carrying Siegmund's child and must survive. Sieglinde escapes, and Brünnhilde stays behind to face Wotan, who punishes her by making her mortal and placing her in a sleep that will last until a man awakens and claims her. At her request, he has her surrounded by fire so that only a brave man will attempt to rescue her.

I know that described like this, the story sounds silly; it's hard to convey how majestic and moving it is when combined with the music, words, and sets. The music and words are probably among the most studied works in opera history, and I don't have the knowledge to analyze them properly, but I will say once again that this opera really was more accessible and moving that I would have expected. I can't wait to see Siegfried next year and Götterdämmerung the year after that, and have I mentioned that I love the way Houston Grand Opera is performing one of these pieces each year? We've been going to HGO for about five years, but this makes it seem more like an ongoing relationship rather than just something we do six or seven times a year. Some of the artists are reprising their roles in more than one of the productions, so we get to know them better, and these performances, at the end of the season, somehow each seem like the event of the year.

As with Das Rheingold, Die Walküre makes extensive use of video screens, showing such things as stylized wolves running through a forest (think of those motion-capture rides, just further away on the stage). The screens also showed the massive tree in which the sword was embedded; at one point the letters of Siegmund's name are drawn up repeatedly through the roots to the ends of even the smallest branches. In this particular story, there is also a fair bit of lightning on screen.

And I don't know what to call them, but another effect repeated from last time was the use of conveyances for the gods and Valkyries to move them around the stage as though they were swooping at will. Even though each of these had two visible stagehands openly manipulating them, I had no trouble getting lost in the effect. (And when we see one of the giants from Dad Rheingold return next year, I hope to see his Aliens power-loader again -- it was awesome!) All of this comes courtesy of La Fura dels Baus, the Barcelona-based theater group that created this production. I note that the set designer, Roland Olbeter, is working on a "full-scale automatic puppet opera with music by Russian composer Elena Kats Chernin to be played by instruments he created" -- that sounds like something I would love.

There was only one effect that wasn't quite all I would have hoped for, and that was the slow speed at which the fire-bearers surrounding the sleeping Brünnhilde lit their torches from one another. I had expected the circle of fire to swoosh up into full flames all at once, but perhaps the passing of torch to torch is meant to go with a particular length of music. Once lit, however, the circle was an impressive visual with which to end the opera, and it will certainly stay in my memory.

[Images are property of Houston Grand Opera.]
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The Wagner Files

Samuel Finzi and Pegah Ferydoni as Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima in "Wagnerwahn" ("The Wagner Files") (2013).
Last night, Paul and I attended a private screening by Houston Grand Opera of "Wagnerwahn", which has been translated as "The Wagner Files". This was an episode in the Die Kulturakte series, and was a 90-minute biographical documentary of Richard Wagner. The reason for this screening, of course, was that HGO will soon be premiering the second of the four Ring Cycle operas, and in opera, although context is not quite everything, it certainly is important.

What I loved most about this documentary was the creativity of its presentation. It mixed interview footage of Wagner historians and even one of Wagner's descendents, Katharina Wagner, with dramatized portions in which actors Samuel Finzi and Pegah Ferydoni portrayed Richard and Cosima Wagner, respectively. It further mixed that with artwork from Wagner: Die Graphic Novel, written by Andreas Voellinger Gebundene Ausgabe and illustrated by Flavia Scuderi. This art has been partially animated, so that the faces and mouths sometimes move, or fire or floods are shown as dynamic instead of static. [Author corrected -- thanks to Lukas for the info!]

To further add to the mix, the enacted scenes made no attempt at historical accuracy in terms of dress and scenic background, so that modern-sounding telephones were utilized often (no cells, thankfully) and modern-day cars zipped by -- that is, unless sleek Audis really did exist in Wagner's time. The characters were dressed dramatically, in a style that I couldn't attribute to a particular time period, and the camera angles were even more dramatic, with long angles and shots up and down through spiral staircases. Wagner and Cosima often spend minutes at a time staring at each other intensely, and there are long moments when Wagner dresses himself in the pink silk fabric for which he had something of a fetish, gazing at himself in the mirror while smelling the roses he also loved.

So what happens when you add all this up? In my mind, you get something like the Frank Miller version (remember Sin City?) of Wagner's life -- or at least the portions of his life most impacted by his second marriage with Cosima. I thought it was fascinating.

And that relationship was indeed the focus of the documentary. Wagner carried on a long affair with Cosima, during which time she, her husband, and their children lived in Wagner's house and she took over the management of his career. Cosimi, who was herself the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, even bore Wagner a child whom she passed off as her husband's for a while. Eventually, though, the affair was outed and Wagner was forced to leave Munich, where he had been quite spoiled by the patronage of King Ludwig II. He moved to Switzerland (again), Cosima joined him there after a time, and they eventually married (by this time they had two additional children together). As the documentary portrayed it, the course of their love was never smooth, in spite of or perhaps because of their passion for one another.

Before seeing this documentary, I knew very little about Wagner's life; I essentially knew that he is regarded as a genius and an anti-Semite. This documentary made abundantly clear that he was both of these things, and that he was also quite a bit more vile than I had imagined. It seems that perhaps with the partial exception of Cosima, he treated the people around him according to how useful he thought they could be to him. The worst case, in my mind, was his blatent exploitation of Ludwig, who clearly was in love with him. Although Wagner was not gay, he didn't shy away from intimacy with other men, so in that regard he was not completely dishonest, but his letters to Ludwig play up that aspect of their relationship shamelessly -- he obviously wanted to give the impression that he felt more than he did, in order to keep the moneybags close by. I don't believe the documentary stated this, and I would want to confirm it elsewhere before believing it entirely, but Wikipedia hints that Ludwig actually considering abdicating his throne to join Wagner in Switzerland, and Wagner dissuaded him. And that makes sense, because the money might well have dried up if Ludwig had given up his throne. I certainly felt sorry for Ludwig, who was completely duped as far as I'm concerned.

The documentary also dealt with the anti-Semitism head-on; in fact, one of the historians said that Cosima's detailed diaries should be required reading for Wagner apologists, because they make it perfectly clear that the couple's shared anti-Semitic views were extreme. There was a long scene in which Wagner sat in a bathtub ranting to Cosima about the Jews while she wrote down everything he said. My impression was that phrases Wagner used were paraphrased from the diaries. Wagner basically said that the Jews couldn't speak or sing properly and were essentially vermin who were stealing "our" art forms. He said that no negotiation was possible, and extermination was the only solution.

I have to say, I felt incredibly uncomfortable during this scene, but I think that was the filmmakers' intention. Wagner's descendant, Katharina Wagner, said that she has to deal with the fact that his hateful bigotry existed and was well documented. If I felt uncomfortable, imagine what it's like to have that legacy permanently recorded in your family's history. For the documentary to shy away from this aspect of his personality would have been a mistake. I noticed that very little mention was made of Wagner's children, and I cringed at the idea of them growing up in that atmosphere. Then I wondered whether Wagner himself developed those views as an adult, or if he grew up hearing such hateful rants in his own family.

Oh, and there was also some information about his music and operas! In fact, the documentary included some footage from the same production of the Ring Cycle that HGO is putting on here in Houston. I greatly enjoyed Das Rheingold when we saw it last year; it was a very modern, science fictional production, and it looks like the rest of it will be along the same lines. In the meantime, for anyone interested in Wagner, I highly recommend the documentary if you can find it.

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