2024-10-29 13:12:00
A promising combination: Vladimir Jurowski conducts, Tobias Scratch conducts Richard Wagner’s “Rheingold” at the Bavarian State Opera. Ultimately, the Germanic gods take the place of the dead Christian god. But that’s not the main problem with this performance.
“God is dead” someone wrote on the grate of a dark and rather dilapidated church. And in front is a suicidal boy in a black sweatshirt with camouflage shorts: Alberich. The famous E-flat major opening of “Rheingold” responds to Wagner’s friend/enemy Nietzsche’s dictum, although it is far too tidy. Did Wagner die here?
No, absolutely not, because a new tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung” is currently starting at the Bavarian State Opera. “Rheingold”, the first part of the cycle, was performed for the first time in this house in September 1869. . Against Wagner’s wishes, his financier Ludwig II also followed the “Walküre” before moving to Bayreuth.
This is not the only reason why a “ring” always has something particularly edifying. The last one was forged in 2012 by Andreas Kriegenburg and Kent Nagano. Now at work are the current general musical director Vladimir Jurowski and the highly anticipated Tobias Rache, who is still riding the wave of the success of his Bayreuth “Tannhäuser”.
In a church with scaffolding, such as in the “Bottom of the Rhine”, the playing area is very far from the ramp and usually remains there. The Rhinemaidens (finely tuned voice: Sarah Brady, Verity Wingate, Yaji Zhang) are playful girls in oversized dresses with cell phones (equipment: Rainer Sellmaier), who can sometimes shrink or teleport completely. A black billy goat (reference to the devil?) darts past, gold only shimmers yellow from a hole in the ground, a rocket or two of fireworks goes up. And suddenly the gods arrive too, real, Germanic ones, in nineteenth-century theatrical costumes, with spears, winged helmets and blindfolds.
So far so banal and also so vague in its manageable meaning. Should this be an ambitious “Rheingold” start?
The dragon eats half a dog
Even from the pit the Bavarian State Orchestra sounds fresh, colourful, but not very exciting. Vladimir Jurowski relaxes, turns on the light where it usually remains dark on stage. However, he also goes to great lengths to reach dangerous levels before things get more drastic, darker, and dramatically expanding in Nibelheim.
There, with the dwarves, everything is very common again. In a curtain-wall video film, Wotan has put on a suit and arrived on a commercial flight (a blonde Katharina Wagner clone sleeps at his side) in an America where churches are burning and Alberich (the terribly evil and suffering Markus Brück) ) holed up in a suburban garage among weapons and computers: a Trump fan on the dark web. His repressed brother Mime (strong tenor character: Matthias Klink) is just an assistant. He is allowed to build him a Darth Vader invisibility helmet, but his brother in dragon form eats half of his dog behind the garage door.
At one point, even the fire god Loge (more clearly and balanced than in his London debut: Sean Panikkar) strolls around the church smoking and wearing a black existentialist turtleneck. Now he pushes the hesitant Wotan in front of him, puts Alberich, reduced to a toad, in a food box and the flight returns.
Where it gets really brutal: Wotan tortures the helmet and ring of the naked dwarf, who is in the Man of Sorrows pose, and drastically cuts off his finger, just like what happened to Barrie Kosky in London. Because the two giants (in subtle contrast: Matthew Rose as Fanfner and Timo Riihonen as Fasolt), with whom he has construction debts and who are apparently Jehovah’s Witnesses, want the entire treasure consisting of automatic weapons and full suitcases of money. Until they get it, the goddess Freia (Mirjam Mesak) is strangled with a rope.
The warning Erda (underlined: Wiebke Lehmkuhl) also appears from the darkness of the church as a praying old woman who puts on the ring as evidence and then leaves it to Wotan for his end-of-the-world spectacle. In the end what we have been waiting for for a long time happens: in the church, which in the meantime has gone up in flames, it is not the Grail that is revealed, but the altar, wrapped in a plastic sheet. And as the light shines through a glass window the color of a rainbow bridge, before a crowd of believers in today’s disorder, the Germanic gods occupy the empty holy places like their Valhalla among gold-studded neo-Gothic carvings. God is dead. The gods live. But even in the finale the music doesn’t really want to overwhelm.
Wagner’s murder in the cathedral. Did it have to be like this? Somehow we expect more from zero/Jurowski. This “Rheingold” appears harmless to helpless with rather vague causalities and unconvincing images that take refuge in penal humor and hardly show any way out; especially since the “Walküre” will not follow until summer 2026.
After all, until then, the strongest impression remains, alongside his irreverent Fricka (Ekaterina Gubanova), of the great Wotan between hesitation and exhibition: Nicholas Brownlee sings it with confidence, filling the space and always understanding the text, like a god rather perplexed. , as Richard Wagner had long described it.
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