Last year, I described Wagner's Ring Cycle on my political blog, TheCenterline.org, as "a parable of regulatory failure, brought about by irregular financing for a home even the gods cannot afford." In short: the perfect opera for the subprime era.
Thin grounds for talking opera trash on a political site, I know. But it's fair game for macfunke.com. And since I demanded "a Ring for our time" -- and since Times critic Daniel Wakin says Robert Lepage has delivered a new production "for our video-saturated, MP3-playing, computer-dependent, YouTube-watching age" -- here are my thoughts on the Met's new "Rheingold," which Kelly and I caught Monday night.
The orchestra. Impeccable as always. A joy to see Levine, back from surgery, at his nuanced and magisterial best. Only a handful of moments, such as the introduction of the giants, did not quite match the force of some fondly -- perhaps too fondly -- remembered performances.
Costuming. Eh. Freia is pretty; Alberich is not. Few surprises, most of them unfortunate: Fasolt and Fafner look like extras from "Where the Wild Things Are," while Erda comes off like the star of that "other" Ring cycle -- the Japanese-German cult series about an accursed VHS. Some Earth Mother! And the ethereal Rheinmaidens...flippers? Really?
The direction. Also predominantly traditional, with lots of Germanic uber-voguing. Several critics have applauded Eric Owens's "triumphant" Alberich, but to me, his instant transformation from spurned promgoer to supremely confident Lex Luther rinses him too clean of the lovelessness and resentment that drive him. A complete convert to the Hitlerian arts, torn more by his tactical missteps than by his treacherous ambition, teaches us less than an ever-tortured Gollum.
The singers. A cast of strong voices, no question. But the stentorian direction risks homogenizing the main antagonists, Alberich and Wotan. Even Stephanie Blyth's glowing Fricka and the sledge-toned giants -- at opposite ends vocally and theatrically -- seem too nearly aposite as they await, then contest, each turn in Wotan's rulings. Wendy Bryn Harmer, capturing persuasively the vitality and vulnerability of youth as Freia, was a splash of color among a steady march of declaiming that too often felt as carefully regulated as...
...the design concept. Lepage's stage, which chiefly comprises a row of enormous, piano-damper-like levers that can be twisted, elevated and recombined endlessly, is by turns sea, dungeon and sky -- literally Earth, Wind and Fire. There are moments, such as the entry into Valhalla -- which actually functioned on Monday night -- that managed to tap fully both the abstract power of this set's modern light and industrial form, and a more forbidding sense of place for the fortress than even Otto Schenk's distant portraiture delivered.
The design reality. Unfortunately, for long stretches of recitative, too little was made of the (reportedly) $16 million potential of the new mechanized set. It's fine to establish a sort of front porch for the giants as they negotiate for Freia. But why make them park and bark for 20 minutes at time? They have just moved Heaven and lots of Earth to build Valhalla; surely Lepage could have returned the favor by quaking a stage lever or two to match the changing contours of power as the bargaining progresses.
What about the interactive projections? Seeing clouds swirl with Fricka as she moves does support her identity as a goddess, but the fire that constantly backgrounds Loge rather recalls Pigpen's dirt cloud. Worse, for I betcha half the opera, Lepage's team simply brings the planks upright, composing in effect a picket fence. Enduring endless weather patterns under such circumstances is like watching paint refuse to dry.
I want to reward experiment: I was among the few in the audience to applaud Robert Wilson's minimalist production of Lohengrin in the late '90s. But perhaps Lepage's set designer, Carl Fillion, has captured our era too perfectly. Having seen the "Cirque" director make actors climb walls in "Faust," audiences are growing weary of the extenuating interventions from the dreaded 2007-09 period in our history.
There is much to admire -- and be moved by -- in the new "Rheingold," and as with the economy, we can now have confidence that future quarters will not realize the worst of our fears. But it also reminds us of just why we loved the old Schenk approach. Though conservative, it was also a thing of fire, force, mystery and above all, organic balance. In retrospect, we are left to wonder: was all the highly engineered acrobatics of the last few years really worth the staggering price, given what we have lost?
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