A ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth, as Beauty Shines Through Newness

A ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth, as Beauty Shines Through Newness A rehearsal for “Das Rheingold” at the Bayreuth Festival, with Andrew Shore as Alberich, front, at left, and Ulrike Helzel, Fionnuala McCarthy and Marina Prudenskaja at center. More Photos > ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: August 2, 2006 BAYREUTH, Germany, Aug. 1 — During the curtain calls for any new production here at the Bayreuth Festival, it is practically a tradition for the audience to greet the creative team with a lusty chorus of competing boos and bravos. On Monday night the audience in the Festspielhaus honored that tradition at the end of “Götterdämmerung,” which concluded the festival’s new staging of Wagner’s four-part epic, “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”
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Before agreeing to take on the “Ring,” Tankred Dorst, the eminent 80-year-old German playwright, director, filmmaker, storyteller and actor, had done just about everything one could do in theater with one exception: direct an opera.
“My advantage is that I don’t have to continue a career as an opera director,” he said when his appointment was announced. Judging from the audience response and the initial buzz in the opera world, his debut will be heatedly debated for months. I found his work fresh, provocative and mostly effective. But more on that later.
The real hero of the Bayreuth “Ring” is not Siegfried or Brünnhilde, but the conductor Christian Thielemann. Whether the Bayreuth Festival can still claim to be the world’s premier Wagner house has long been an open question. But whatever one’s take on the production, Mr. Thielemann drew a probing, radiant and exhilarating musical performance from this orchestra of dedicated instrumentalists (drawn from top-tier German orchestras), as well as from the robust festival chorus and an involving, if vocally uneven, cast.

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Mr. Thielemann, who is not the most articulate talker, has a way of getting into trouble when he speaks of national tradition in German culture. What he means, though, it seems from reading some of his most recent comments, is that German orchestras in the first half of the 20th century brought a natural pathos and a traditional connection to their playing of Wagner. In striving to recapture this quality today, musicians are in a bind. The struggle comes through, and the pathos seems strained. Moreover, Mr. Thielemann, 47, is a conductor with a contemporary sensibility who also wants playing to be incisive and up to date.
This is a difficult balancing act. But he pulled it off in the “Ring.” His tempo for the stormy opening music of Act 1 in “Die Walküre” was on the slow side. The tension came from the clarity he brought to the strangely overlapping lines and riffs. By revealing the complexity of this driving, frightful episode, he made the music seem interesting as well as hypnotic.
As always, he showed keen insight into what could be called musical rhetoric: that is, the ways the phrases begin, end and overlap. The music of the three Norns at the beginning of “Götterdämmerung” was murky and languid, yet never lugubrious, because Mr. Thielemann laid out the intertwining contrapuntal lines with such lucidity. And I will not soon forget the spacious, rich colorings and tragic nobility of the final scene in “Walküre,” when the god Wotan casts a sleeping spell over his rebellious daughter, Brünnhilde, perhaps the most sublimely sad music ever written. Here Mr. Thielemann achieved that elusive mix of pathos and clarity.

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Returning to the production, Mr. Dorst was tapped for this assignment only after the festival’s first choice, the acclaimed film director Lars von Trier, withdrew. This could not have been an easy spot for Mr. Dorst. But he is an immensely interesting artist. His production concept was driven by a question that has long dogged “Ring” buffs: What happens at the end with the twilight of the gods? My interpretation has always been that through corruption and overreaching the gods bring about their own destruction. At the end, the Immolation Scene, the gods are gone. For better or worse, mankind will have to get along without them.
Mr. Dorst disagrees, and he is not alone. To him the gods are always with us, continually reliving their stories. But we mortals do not see them. In this production the gods appear in some woefully makeshift contemporary sites as they try to re-enact their sagas. The consistently striking sets were designed by Frank Philipp Schlössmann. In many scenes everyday people are going about their business, oblivious to the invisible gods. The exception is a young man with long blond hair, an Adidas T-shir

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