The announcement of a new production of the Ring cycle at Opéra National de Paris was greeted with much excitement in early 2019. Tickets went on sale shortly afterwards, and Wagnerians worldwide rushed to secure their seats at the Bastille for one of the two cycles planned for November/December 2020. Some were apprehensive of the director Calixto Bieito, but most chose to focus on the occasion as their music director Philippe Jordan’s last major assignment before he assumes the same position at Vienna State Opera. (He conducted the Met’s 2019 Ring cycles.) The cast featured many of today’s reigning Wagner singers, including veterans from Bayreuth and elsewhere. What better excuse to spend a week in Paris?

Then the pandemic hit the world in 2020. Rumors of cancellations began to circulate, but a surprising announcement was made in July: a concert performance of the Ring would take place as scheduled. Apparently the idea of cancellation was contested by Jordan himself, who insisted that the Ring be performed. In the meantime, the corona crisis showed little sign of abatement as many Europeans took their annual summer holidays. An email came in early October stating that, while the concert performance of the Ring would still take place as scheduled, given the limited number of audience members who could be admitted, it was necessary to refund the existing tickets before one could repurchase (a smaller number of) tickets. Many of us from outside France had abandoned the trip to Paris by that time, but it was bittersweet to receive a refund. This alternative arrangement also came to naught, as Paris Opéra announced at the end of October that due to the government’s decision to close down theaters and other public establishments to combat the pandemic, even concert performances were not possible. But soon after, a new decision was made: to record the Ring without audience, and broadcast it a month later via internet radio. There were a couple of last minute cast cancellations in November, namely the Wälsung twins, but worthy replacements were soon found, and the recording of the Ring proceeded under the most challenging of circumstances.

As the world hunkered down to a solitary holiday season, the broadcast of the Paris Ring took place in four installments: December 26, 28, 30, 2020, and January 2, 2021. I do not believe I was the only one whose heart was warmed by what it was yearning for during all these months of isolation without live music. Jordan’s conducting was fresh, lithe, and transparent. He was keen to bring out fine textures and colors in the score, with each instrument weaving leitmotifs in a continuous stream of music. Jordan’s tempi seemed very fast, especially early on: he finished Das Rheingold in less than two and a half hours, and the first act of Die Walküre took just about sixty minutes. However, he knew when to take a long pause and where to caress long lines of music. The orchestral endings of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung were splendid. As Martina Serafin, who sang Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, said eloquently in an excellent companion documentary, “Une odeseé du Ring,” the ending of Götterdämmerung was “full of hope.” Instead of the usual heavy brass proclaiming the demise of the gods and their Valhalla, we heard the glorious flowing of the river Rhein, the theme earlier heard in the splendid singing of Lise Davidsen’s Sieglinde in Die Walküre, Act III, played with delicate beauty.

The documentary (in French) followed the recording process with excerpts of music interspersed with interviews with musicians and singers. It was clear that, despite the fear of COVID infections, everyone involved was there because he/she wanted to make music together. Jordan showed consideration for everyone involved, including the backstage crew who moved equipment. He thanked the musicians for their hard work and dedication and was presented with a bouquet of flowers by the concertmaster as a farewell gift.  There was also an informative interview of Jordan by the new director of Opéra de Paris, Alexander Neef, in which Jordan explained his apprenticeship with many Wagner conductors, and his professional coming of age in Zurich. He explained his fast tempi, stating that he feels that the Ring should be performed as a series of “dialogues.”  One may agree or disagree with this interpretation, but the attempt to reach out to the audience, through this interview as well as the documentary, was commendable.  The Opéra house and its staff went out of their way to embrace the audience worldwide.

It is not easy to comment on individual singers, as the balance and mix of sound were not always optimal.  Suffice it to say that all of the singers, including the chorus (who sang facing the stage during Hagen’s call scene in Götterdämmerung as they were scattered in the auditorium for social distancing), did a superb job of making Wagner’s music come alive, with clear German diction as well as vocal color and nuance.  Iain Paterson as Wotan/Wanderer exceeded expectations with his committed and heroic singing.  Ekaterina Gubanova’s Fricka was well schooled and sung, but I would have preferred more variety of color and phrasing to express Fricka’s frustration and manipulation. Stuart Skelton, a late replacement for Jonas Kaufmann as Siegmund, showed his vast experience with the tragic hero and with memorable highlights including “Wälse, Wälse!” and the high note concluding Die Walküre, Act I.

Other notable male singers included Jochen Schmeckenbecher, who sang Alberich as a noble soul led astray by greed for power, Norbert Ernst as a veteran Loge, and the two giants: Wilhelm Schwinghammer’s yearning Fasolt and Dimitry Ivashchenko, a versatile singer luxury cast as Fafner. Günther Groissböck’s Hunding was another star turn, his deep and velvety voice making us regret that the role was so short. It is a shame that the world must wait for his Wotan/Wanderer for several more months, as his role debut in Bayreuth in 2020 had to be postponed. Gerhard Siegel’s splendid tenor makes every hearing of his Mime a special and pleasurable occasion. Ain Anger as Hagen showed off his marvelous bass (perhaps another possible Wotan/Wanderer) as he dominated his scenes with malevolent snarls. Johannes Martin Kränzle as Gunther added gravitas to this often overlooked but sympathetic character with his nuanced singing.

Andreas Schafer, one of a handful of tenors who can assay the role of Siegfried today (another such tenor, Stephen Gould, said Siegfried is far more challenging than Tristan), excelled in tender moments: in Siegfried, Act II and in Siegfried’s farewell to Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung, Act III when his tendency to sing forte was held in check. Two sopranos split the role of Brünnhilde. Martina Serafin in Die Walküre brought warmth and sympathy to the role with her rich middle register, although she sometimes sounded stressed in her high notes. Ricarda Merbeth as Brünnhilde in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung sounded shrill at times, but she sang on pitch with power and understanding of the character. Her immolation scene was deeply moving.

Two female singers were absolute revelations, adding excitement to the already strong cast of singers. Wiebke Lehmkuhl as Erda in Das Rheingold has a dark yet clear and profound voice:  everything you would ever want for this mysterious earth goddess. The Wanderer/Erda scene in Siegfried, Act III was a masterpiece. The young Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen replaced Eva-Maria Westbroek as Sieglinde. While Davidsen had made a role debut as Sieglinde at Deutsche Oper Berlin in the fall, only a few lucky German audience members could experience her Sieglinde live, under restricted conditions. Already hailed as the next great Wagnerian soprano, her luxurious voice poured forth with ease and power, and with the overwhelming immediacy of a young woman’s perplexity and sincerity. Sieglinde’s most important phrase, “O hehrstes Wunder!” rang out with “hope” that is to come at the end of the cycle.  And we salute and join all the musicians and singers who dare to hope for a brighter future, as Richard Wagner promised almost 150 years ago.

Ako Imamura
A Society member, is a frequent traveler (under normal circumstances) and reviewer for Bachtrack.

Photo: Philippe Jordan at the Paris Opéra Bastille, January 2019, taken by Ako Imamura.

© Wagner Notes, January 2021, a publication of the Wagner Society of New York. All rights reserved.
 

Stephen Gould, Tenor: Special Contributors Reception and Interview, November 16, 2019

Stephen Gould, one of the great heldentenors of our era and an annual Bayreuth Festival performer, was guest of honor at a November16, 2019 reception. He discussed the new Bayreuth production of Tannhäuser, and also noted the value of supporting young artists in the early stages of their careers. The Society presented him with an engraved silver tray as a memento of the occasion. 

Gould graciously made time to meet with our special contributors while performing Tristan, Act II with the National Symphony Orchestra. Hosted by Frank and Claudia Deutschmann, he was interviewed by F. Peter Phillips, Society Secretary. The Society annually plans an appreciation for the generous contributions of many members, enabling our awards, grants, recitals, and other assistance to promising dramatic singers: a very challenging career path.

Tristan (Stephen Gould) and Isolde (Christine Goerke) with  National  Symphony Orchestra.  
(photo taken  at  NY  performance.) Photo : Scott Suchmam/NSO.

New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, x + 769 p. List price: $40.00; WSNY Price: $29.99 (click here to order)

This is a remarkable book. Alex Ross has written what is arguably the most wide-ranging, intellectually comprehensive, entertaining, and thoroughly useful volumes ever produced on Wagner. Let us dispense at once, then, with its main problem: the title. This is not a history of “Wagnerism,” if that word means, as it does perhaps to most of us, a distinct body (or bodies) of thought that propagates the ideas of Wagner, drawn both from his writings and his music dramas. What it is is a panoramic survey, with multiple critical analyses, of the impact, for good or ill, that Wagner has had on European and North American culture over the last 150 years. The subtitle is also questionable. “Shadow” suggests that Wagner’s music has served in part as a penumbra that restrains or even limits artistic freedom or political action, whereas Ross offers ample evidence that Wagner has served as an empowering agency for artists from all walks of life. Indeed, in the balance, he has been more a vital impulse than an affliction on modern culture.

There are multiple dangers when dealing with the reception of a universal artist such as Wagner. He can mean all things to all people, and, because he can, writers can all too easily lose themselves in admiration of the boundless scope of the work so that any possibility of a palpable grasp of the subject dissolves. Ross, however, brilliantly avoids this problem. Narrative is one of his great strengths; he is a born story-teller who narrates his tales succinctly and compellingly. Chapters are centered around topics, but arranged in roughly chronological order, with considerable temporal overlap. The advantage of this approach is that discussion of major figures in the reception history of Wagner is often spread over several chapters. For example, Thomas Mann’s lifelong critique of Wagner surfaces throughout the book, covering not only the early ‘Wagnerian’ short stories, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and the ‘Sorrows and Grandeur’ lecture, but even Doctor Faustus. It would be difficult to imagine a more unWagnerian character than Adrian Leverkühn, the fictional composer in this work. He embodies a total rejection of Wagnerian romanticism, which Mann, by the 1940s, had come to sense as a demonic aspect of German society. And yet, by the end of the novel, Leverkühn’s modernism has not been offered as a solution to Germany’s problems; on the contrary, Ross even hints that the fate of Leverkühn indicates that Mann might have been moving back to an acceptance of Wagner as a humanistic force in society. It is this sort of extended argument that gives contour to Wagner’s reputation as well as a complexity and continuity to the whole volume. It also allows readers to draw their own conclusions as to the limitations and individuality, as well as universality, of Wagner’s work. Throughout, we see his impact on the modern world through both individual responses to his work and through public events. This leads to neither a hagio­graphy nor a denunciation of Wagner. Rather, it is a balanced and precise history.

Hardly a single major artistic figure from the fin-de siècle to the mid-20th century seems to have been able to avoid Wagner, either as a benign influence, a hostile antagonist, or both. It is perhaps ‘both’ that defines his unique power and becomes the dominant theme in the volume. The world has consistently felt exceptional ambivalence toward Wagner, arising from conflict between intense admiration for the seductive power of his music dramas and frequently acute discomfort at how overwhelming their impact can be. Many of Wagner’s more trenchant critics note the way in which his music leads one toward philosophies and ecstatic or utopian visions that are profoundly suspect, as the political and military conflicts of the early 20th century suggest. In this regard, it is appropriate that the opening chapter of the volume should be devoted to Nietzsche’s tormented and unresolved conflict with Wagner and his work, as it anticipates the wracking ambivalence that artists and writers, political theorists and revolutionary activists, individuals and collectives, have experienced with Wagner. Their struggles may have had triumphant outcomes, often in the realm of creative art — artists as various as Baudelaire, Shaw, Yeats, Willa Cather, Joyce, Woolf, Eisenstein, and Terence Malick, not to mention modern stage directors, have found Wagner to be primarily a liberating, if sometimes dangerous, influence — but when the struggles are collective and incorporate Wagner more as propagandist than artist, disaster can result. Ross focuses especially on the dilemma of racial minorities, especially Black and Jewish, many of whom have found liberation and self-fulfillment in the music dramas, but are cruelly disappointed by social responses, based on Wagner, that exclude, even erase them. The discussion of Wagnerite W.E.B. Dubois’ experience of racial intolerance, told in his story ‘On the Coming of John,’ is notably powerful in its anticipation of the destruction of minority culture, partly in Wagner’s name, that was to follow later in the century.

The dark side of Wagner, his appeal to nationalist and, above all, Nazi propagandists, is prominent in Ross’s book. Hitler’s sojourns in Bayreuth are described with discomforting detail, and yet Ross does not omit to notice that the bulk of the Nazi party had very little interest in Wagner and were not above resisting Hitler’s demands that they attend the Festspielhaus. When one balances this against abundant evidence offered elsewhere in the book that Wagner appealed to a wide range of political biases, especially left-wing revolutionaries, who, from George Bernard Shaw via Vsevolod Meyerhold to Frank Castorf, have stoked the flames of revolutionary impulse embedded in the works, one recognizes how truly universal Wagner’s appeal has been. Ross’ achievement has been not to beat the drum for a particular way of interpreting Wagner, but to show how many drums have been beaten.

Wagner has survived, Ross demonstrates, not only due to the power of his work, but by its constant ability to adapt to a changing world. It was threatened by the anti-heroic leanings of modernism, but survived as the modernists, in stripping the works of their Victorian trappings, found in them an elemental understanding of humanity as asocial, even mystical beings that had so far eluded readings of Wagner. It was threatened too by the cultural reaction to the two World Wars, and in our own time by our growing awareness of the Holocaust and Wagner’s problematic association with it. However, this cannot hide either Wagner’s intensely intelligent political understanding or the overwhelming sense of humanity that lies within his work. Often he can serve as a bulwark against forces that threaten our society. Indeed, it is notable that as the narrative moves into our own pitiless times, Parsifal frequently appears in discussion, not only from an antisemitic point of view, but as a work of extraordinary compassion.

Perhaps the most exhilarating parts of the book are those where the positive, life-giving attributes of Wagner’s influence come to the fore. Ross provides a succinct account of his influence on French symbolism and contributes an especially valuable summary of the Revue wagnérienne, which is followed a chapter or two later by a section outlining the maturing influence of Wagner’s ideas on Yeats and the Celtic twilight. The keystone chapter to the entire book is on Willa Cather, whose life was divided between the wild landscapes of the American West and the city; she never felt the countryside as a culturally deprived wasteland, as her experience of Wagner’s works had instilled the landscapes of her Nebraska home with an enormous beauty and consequent sense of meaning. There are some unexpected but very welcome sallies into distinctly unWagnerian territory, with telling passages on Theodore Fontane’s stories of the disastrous impact of Wagnerian ideals on lovers, and Frank Wedekind, who found the operas both ‘irritating and engrossing’, violently attacked the influence of Wagner on contemporary culture. Even Brecht, an anti-Wagnerian if there ever was one, is measured against Wagner in a comparison that could do with further development.
Ignore the inaccurate title. This is a noteworthy book, with breathtaking range and scope, by an author who is as good a literary critic as he is a musicologist. Ross does not lard his prose with jargon or, for that matter, with Wagnerian grandeur. He writes, first and foremost, because he loves to tell stories and there can be no grander reason for writing than that. Above all else, this book is a true pleasure to read.

Simon Williams
Simon Williams is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theater and Dance, University of California at Santa Barbara.He lectures and publishes widely on theater and opera. He was the Society's Bayreuth lecturer from 1998 to 2000.

© Wagner Notes, October 2020, a publication of the Wagner Society of New York. All rights reserved.