Each June
for the last seven years, Ádám Fischer has run a week-long Wagner festival at the
new Palace of Arts with a mix of International and Hungarian performers – high
profile enough to be dubbed “the Hungarian Bayreuth”. Despite my great
affection for Wagner, I have to confess to not paying too much attention until
this year, either being on or saving for a holiday or feeling I was getting
enough opera already from the regular schedule, and preferring my Wagner
(except Parsifal) in the mindset of bleaker months anyway.
But this
year, along with a dramatic increase in my overall opera attendance, I’ve
sought to learn a bit more about the wider opera world, and after taking a
closer look at the names on the playbill for the Ring production this week –
performing the Ring as four one-offs inside of a week, even as a semi-staged
production, is an immense project and probably financially unviable nearly
everywhere else – quickly realized how much I had been missing.
In this
production we had German tenor Christian Franz in the extremely demanding role
of Siegfried in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (and as Loge and Siegmund in Rheingold and Walküre, which I now regret not shelling out from my summer holiday
fund to see – who needs money in the USA anyway when there’s so many family and
friends to freeload off?) Franz, who has worked regularly with Fischer in
Budapest, now seems to be one of the world’s top Siegfrieds, standing in at the Met a few years ago to great acclaim.
For Brünnhilde we had Swedish soprano Iréne Theorin, whom sang Venus for me in Tannhäuser in Vienna last November, and who also is in there in the top
handful for Wagnerian ladies. To exalt these foreign singers is not to detract
from our local talent in the least: singing Wagnerian leads at such a high
level requires special attributes, stamina, training, and coaching that the
Hungarian opera world hasn’t necessarily been equipped to adequately foster
over the last few decades, although I have hopes that Szilvia Rálik (who will
be taking on Dutchman, a first Wagnerian role – the Waldvogel early in her career doesn’t count) and maybe a few others
of the lasses might be able to handle Brünnhilde or Isölde in a few years
without destroying their voices). I’m not sure I see a real Heldentenor on the
horizon though, despite being mightily impressed with István Kovácsházi.
The likes
of Christian Franz and Iréne Theorin, however, culled from a global pool of
opera singers with the right stuff, fly all over the world enacting these
special roles over and over again, not just a 7-8 performance run once a year.
How can we afford to bring them here? Especially for a week long festival? From
the interviews, apparently their admiration for Ádám Fischer trumps financial
considerations. And they love the 21st century acoustic technology
of the intimate Bártok Béla Auditorium in the MüPa, which one of them described
as a “shoebox”. And it’s true too—at only a little over 1000 available seats
per performance, since parts of the auditorium behind the stage were closed off,
this was about half the size of an average opera house. So the clever people
who hustled the cheapest seats (around 10 USD) early on still had very good
seats in cosmic terms. I had to pay more (45 USD for front row balcony) but
still a fraction of the price compared to seeing the same performers in the
same roles in New York or Vienna, or anywhere else for that matter, since opera
companies putting on the Ring are out to hear the cash registers clinking. I
did manage to score a cheap spot for Lohengrin
in 2013 though.
The intro
to Siegfried starts. I love the slithering evilness of the introduction,
especially in the Solti Ring, which Fischer seems to track somewhat – probably an
unavoidable comparison for all the obvious reasons. Mime’s (Gerhard Siegel)
opening lines “Zwangwolle Plage… Müh Ohne Zweck” … one of the few sustained
operatic lyrical bits that I can bray out at will when sufficiently primed and
provoked. It makes for a great party trick, especially if there are unsuspecting
German people present.
In comes
Siegfried. The production by Hartmut Schörghofer is semi-staged: the singers
aren’t really acting out killing each other, dragging in bears, blowing
their horns, forging swords, etc. There is a huge LED screen backdrop (huge by
my standards at least) that displays such things in a series of stylized
montages, in some cases with non-singing actors/dancers pantomiming the action alongside. This technique actually worked fairly well.
The open Müpa concert hall stage isn’t built for hauling heavy scenery around
anyway, but while some operas cry out for over-the-top modern or traditional
staging, in my opinion, when it comes to the Ring the former is likely to be
distracting and the latter dowdy. This solution offered background visual
stimulation without unduly sapping the focus of the audience or the singers.
Although it
could get confusing at times, like in the video excerpt below above from the
2008 festival (same production, same Christian Franz, but otherwise a different
cast) where we can see a childishly-drawn dragon getting disemboweled by an
equally prepubescent sword, which is cool, followed by somebody’s underwear
flying off into outer space, which I don’t get, unless that was the Tarnhelm or
even the ring itself, which come to think of it I didn’t see represented
anywhere else. Serves me right for missing the first two, which would have set
me straight.
This
production introduced a couple of other interesting visual motifs I hadn’t seen done
elsewhere. Loge shows up more often than called for in the text, looking for
all the world like the pyromaniac Dauphin in Quills dressed as Eric Idle singing the Galaxy Song. A pair of
skinny, dour guys with big noses and black feather boas are Wotan’s ravens,
which is particularly effective in Götterdämmerung,
when perched up on various balconies they remind us that Wotan, though no
longer present, is still watching the action unfold together with the audience. There are bits of
humor added in careful measure too. Siegfried interacts comically with an
onstage oboist and horn player while devising his signature call. The audience chuckling at a performance of
the Ring? Two-faced Mime ventriloquizes his sweet falsetto blandishments by
way of a monkey hand puppet – presumably a long-standing device of Siegfried’s
adopted boyhood. Clever! But not overboard.
Franz was
amazingly fluid, skipping deftly from register to register in Siegfried, a role that often gets key
bits shouted rather than sung (which I didn’t detect) or transposed (which my
untrained ear probably wouldn’t pick up anyway). His voice was showing signs of
strains on a few notes toward the end of Götterdämmerung
(whose wouldn’t?), but he put in back together and soldiered on, no doubt
relieved to be finally stabbed by Hagen.
Iréne
Theorin is a true goddess, or demigoddess, or whatever – the total package of a
dramatic soprano and looked fabulous in a glittering long dress. The third act
of Siegfried was brilliant, with
perfectly modulated power coming through at each pitch. The first act of Götterdämmerung, with the O heilige Götter bit, even if the singing was technically there, didn’t
gel quite as much as it could, as if Siegfried and Brünnhilde were talking the
talk but starting to harbor secret doubts about their eternal passion, although
this kind of slow start often happens in first acts. Or maybe it was me in
Sunday afternoon mood getting worked up trying to figure out how to diplomatically
shush a nearby one-legged elderly lady in a wheelchair who had trouble
unwrapping a steady succession of those little peppermint candies from the
dispenser that the Müpa leaves outside the concert hall so that all and sundry may
fill up the finest acoustical space in Central Europe with crinkling noises. Why don’t they just dispense cherry bombs?
(She stopped later though.) Anyway, Theorin was back to form for the remainder,
losing a bit of color on a few notes but then delivering an utterly chilling
and convincing Immolation scene to send us all home to bed with.
Bass-baritone
Juho Uusitalo made a fine Wotan: I liked the idea of a Finnish Wotan, played mostly
with a sense of wry Scandinavian detachment in his reedy baritone range as the
Wanderer, compelled as his power ebbs to achieve his ends by trickery rather
than his own authority, but then he manages to summon up the old mojo again,
and he’s the King of the Gods once more, for a few minutes at least, reveling in
the full glory of that which has given him his power, so many children, and
that fine bass voice. This Wotan seems
to be the semi-retired founder of a once-flourishing enterprise that has since
gone bankrupt, partly through his own misdoings, and he’s using what art he has
left to him to manage the liquidation as best he can: a much more complicated Wotan
than the thwarted and misguided paternal figure we usually see.
An even
more famous Finn, Matti Salminen was a super Hagen (and Dragon) – playing the
character with a sense of winking slyness and self-deprecation, rather than the
charmless mass of lugubrious bitterness we usually see, revealing how he could
come to be a charismatic leader of men and also the true extent of his
treachery.
The
Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra did a fine job, even though they don’t
regular work with operatic singers, as far as I know. The horns wobbled in
places, but I’m going to stop complaining about brass playing Wagner and
Strauss until I’ve heard an orchestra that supposedly knows how it’s done (I
believe this means Chicago or Berlin). Hearing the funeral march, and later the
immolation music performed live is always an awesome thing, but in this
chamber, under Fischer’s baton, it was truly transcendental.
