WAGNER’S RING • STAATSOPER BERLIN
★★★★☆☆
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
REVIEW WAGNER’S RING: BIG IDEAS MEET BIG MONEY IN BERLIN
With a strong, albeit not entirely watertight conceptual idea and fabulous stage design, Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov surprises the discerning Berlin audience with a striking, innovative interpretation of Wagner’s Ring at the Staatsoper Unter Den Linden.
The production has replaced Valhalla with a gigantic experimental facility that could be worthy of a James Bond setting – a secluded, sinister, neuroscientific research centre where aspects of the human psyche are uncovered through studies of imprisoned test subjects, monitored by white-coated lab technicians and suit-clad managers, with Wotan at the head of the Ring’s gallery of predominantly despicable characters.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
The research centre consists of a three-storey underground building that not only moves up and down, but also shifts sideways so that each floor can slide to the right or left, leading us into one new room after another.
Acid-coloured laboratory interiors with beds prepared for forced restraint, cool designer meeting rooms with marble walls, a beautiful auditorium with beech wood panelling, a gym with a basketball court and a gloomy basement where test subjects appear to be confined in fifty rabbit cages.
This is what it looks like when big ideas meet big money.
It is obvious that such a radical, modernist take as Tcherniakov’s occasionally makes less sense in relation to what is actually being sung – and that, at the same time, one has to do without some of the usual Ring highlights in the expected performance.
Having seen both Romeo Castellucci/Pierre Audi’s initially wild, then confident Ring in Brussels and David McVicar’s rather traditional interpretation at La Scala in Milan, it is refreshing to see that Tcherniakov’s bold interpretation actually manages to modernise the work without completely losing touch with reality. And yet…
The Rhine Gold establishes the unifying idea of Wotan’s research centre as an experimentarium for the human mind and guides us through the visual concept as the plot lines are laid out.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
A truly stellar cast is topped by Michael Wolle in a superior performance as Wotan. I have heard him many times now, but rarely better than in this production, where he appears in all four parts of the Ring.
In Die Walküre, with Eric Cutler as Siegmund and a formidable Vida Miknevičiūtė as Sieglinde, Wotan’s wife Fricka steps into character and insists that the siblings’ inappropriate love story must be stopped and the magic of the sword neutralised. Now, as we know, the trouble really begins.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
However, crucial key scenes disappoint greatly. The Ride of the Valkyries is relegated to the auditorium, where the Valkyrie sisters arrive in dribs and drabs like a bunch of students who just throw themselves here and there in high school clothes and headphones to watch an online lesson where Siegmund meets his end, monitored by ingenious computer systems in flashy video graphics reminiscent of something from Robocop.
It gets worse in the iconic clip-top scene where Wotan punishes his favourite daughter Brünnhilde with eternal sleep in an impenetrable circle of fire. The scene again takes place on the auditorium chairs, which are gathered haphazardly in the middle of the room, with no fire other than the flame-like squiggles Brünnhilde draws with a touch on the chair backs. Come on!
The farewell scene between father and daughter is delivered with superior artistic quality, where I had to surrender to brave tears.
Despite the gaps in the staging, the audience also responds this evening with thunderous applause, which is very much directed at conductor Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Berlin for a musical performance of gripping intensity and soloists of sublime class. Anja Kampe is quite simply a phenomenal Brünnhilde.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
In both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, the staging seems locked into its concept, which slowly takes on the character of repetition. Andreas Schager is a powerful presence in the title role, dressed (of course) in a jaunty light blue Adidas tracksuit. The highlight of the episode, the fight against the dragon, has been modernised to the extent that Siegfried gets into a fight with a more or less crazy test subject at the centre, who goes snake-crazy in a straitjacket. Soon after, a pretty young lab assistant enters the room and waves a bird, which now shows the way to Brünnhilde on the mountain – i.e. through the entire centre and down into the basement.
Original, but so far from the mythological source material that it becomes a little superficial. The director has thrown out (a little too much) of the work’s grand qualities in order to enforce a modern twist.
On the last day, Götterdämmerung impresses with wonderful orchestral playing, while none of the key visual elements we have become accustomed to in Wagner’s original appear in a recognisable form.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Siegfried is stabbed and killed on a basketball court inside the research centre. The final farewell takes place on an ambulance stretcher in a cold meeting room. There is no burning Valhalla/research centre, no funeral pyre, no world collapsing into ruins so that a new one can arise. Just an anticlimactic closing caption that tells us that the end of love is the same as the end of the world.
The production is strongest in its first two episodes, but loses momentum in the last two, where the concept begins to go, excuse me, a little round in circles.
In any case, Tcherniakov’s Ring is refreshingly unconventional. I experienced fascination and thunderous applause in the auditorium, but also both criticism and disapproval in the foyer.
Staatsoper Unter Den Linden once again delivers a captivating opera experience of high artistic class. There are four stars from GOT TO SEE THIS.
