Much has already been written about the now infamous Achim Freyer production of Wagner’s Ring at Los Angeles Opera.  The past year has seen the trial runs of individual performances of the four operas, each unfailingly generating opposing cries of rapturous commendation and vitriolic opprobrium.  A year after Freyer’s exuberantly non-naturalistic Rheingold opened in solitude, it finds itself revived as part of the first complete cycle of Wagner’s masterwork ever performed in the city of Los Angeles.  Taken by itself, it bodes exceedingly well for the operas to come, as well as for the artistic judgment of LA Opera in choosing Freyer to be the director of this cultural milestone for the city.

It is difficult to know where to begin in describing Freyer’s production.  Latent with symbolism and otherworldly imagery, it draws from Brechtian alienation theory to create a timeless world radically unlike our own.  Everything bears Freyer’s imprint, from the striking set design, abstract lighting, and extraordinary costumes—works of art in themselves, hand-painted with the help of Freyer’s daughter Amanda.   Unlike other renditions of the Ring that owe obvious debt to the now standard paradigms—beautiful pageantries of inoffensive romanticism such as Otto Schenk’s, political-socialist allegories in the vein of Chereau, echoes of Wieland Wagner’s allusive minimalism—Freyer’s feast of colour and impressionistic imagery is, quite simply, sui generis.  This is a risk.  Many will not find its abstract, painterly strangeness to their taste—and yet, taken on its own terms as all things sui generis must be, it is thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining, even evocative of genius.

The opera opens with the familiar E flat chord evoking the dawn of time.  Yet rather than being played out amidst primordial darkness, the undulating Rhine, a vast sheet of fabric rising up against the raked platform that comprises the heart of the stage, is visible behind a transparent scrim.  On the far left side of the stage, a towering figure appears; clad in his trademark long coat and slanted hat, one recognises Wotan.  Surrounded by prehistoric darkness, a light flashes and an eye appears in the corner of the stage, symbolic of the sacrifice the god incurs when he commits the cardinal sacrilege against nature, wrenching his spear from the world ash tree; he then sheds his wanderer’s guise, coat and hat flying off as he rises above the Rhine in apotheosis, violently snatching aloft the spear he has won.  It is awe-inspiring stagecraft, and more than that, it bears out the parallelism between Wotan’s crime against nature, predating the events of Rheingold and only narrated in Gotterdammerung, and Alberich’s.  There is a reason Wotan refers to himself as ‘light-Alberich’ in Die Walkure, and Freyer’s bears this out better than any other production I have seen.

Once lost, Wotan’s eye remains in the corner of the stage, watching over the proceedings of the opera ubiquitously.  The god’s black ravens also flank the stage—this is a Ring for Ring aficionados, rich in textual allusiveness and visual symbolism, recurring patterns of images reinforcing the complicated transmutations of Wagner’s score.  One might not care for the frequently tangible directorial hand, but there is no question that it falls fully in line with Wagner’s text and intended meaning.  

The designs for the characters—also Freyer’s—are anything but naturalistic.  All are viewed through the lens of myth; Alberich, for instance, is impishly realised with a cartoonish dwarf head, platform shoes, pinstripe trousers, and a red tailcoat.  In the first scene, he ambles along the base of the Rhine, stooping to pick up and smell a rose he then offers to the Rhinemaidens, drifting easily above him.  When Wotan and Loge meet him in Nibelheim, he has traded his red coat for white coattails; surrounded by his nibelung slaves toiling with hammers, he strides around gleefully, a cigar in one hand and the ring in the other.  The tarnhelm is—naturally—a gold top hat; here is Shaw’s political allegory of the Ring granted delicious expression.  Freyer’s genius is that he does not allow this, or anything else, to become the singular meaning of his production.  He evokes Shaw’s allegory but does no more, maintaining a timeless mythology that eschews the narrowness of politics or any facile, directorially contrived interpretation.  Simply put, for all its iconoclastic individuality, it shows—perhaps illustrates would be a better word for it—rather than tells.

And what a universe it shows…!  The imagination of it all boggles the mind.  At the centre of everything is a raked, circular stage, the bottom half of which opens ingeniously to reveal Nibelheim beneath when Wotan and Loge descend from the heavens.  The gods preside around the raised upper portion of the disc, radiantly white and luminous in Freyer’s precise lighting.  They wither when Freia is stolen and their immortality is threatened, their brilliantly pure costumes turning black.  Unlike most productions, they actually achieve a sense of mythological stature in that they are so obviously not human; their fantastical appearance will doubtless be vexing to some, but then, who is to say what a god looks like anyway?   Loge is Mephistophelean in red, his hair branching up to emulate horns; he is a showman, clad in a black bow tie with an assortment of hands to complement his wily character.  The other gods similarly reflect their natures visibly—Fricka, goddess of marriage, constantly trying to rein in Wotan, has overlong arms she repeatedly stretches out toward her husband; Wotan’s long robe sports the icon of a single eye for adornment, and he periodically wears a helmet concealing his face behind the shape of a single eye.  It is made of wire, encasing his face beneath and bearing out visually the way in which he has imprisoned himself existentially.  If this sounds contrived, in the impressionistic universe Freyer paints, it works.  And ultimately, it works because one does not have it rammed home tendentiously; one need never pause to consider the allusive ramifications of the staging in order to appreciate it or its astonishingly striking theatrical scenery.

Not content with merely a stylized setting and alien costumes, Freyer employs a surreal theatrical language in the movements of his characters.  Though the gods initially remain largely fixed behind icons of their characters on the side of the stage—emblematic, perhaps, of the cold, static world inhabited by Rheingold, predating the introduction of human love that comes only in Walkure—avatars periodically appear and move across its centre, acting out what is suggested psychologically and metaphysically.  Though the semantic language of the choreography as much as the imagery is distinctive, the meaning ever serves to underscore Wagner’s libretto and score.  The scrim is never removed from the front of the stage, recurrently employed to showcase visual projections and complex lighting.  Scenes of startling beauty are created this way; here is Wagner painted through the wide, vivid brush strokes of a conceptual artist.

The music itself tended to be strong if not always as consistently brilliant as the staging.  However, there were exceptions to this; Richard Paul Fink made a delightfully malevolent Alberich, his singing as strong as any I have heard in the role.  He should be particularly commended for pulling off such a wonderful characterization while forced to sing under a nibelung mask.  Arnold Bezuyen’s Loge also stood out, doing full justice to his character’s ironic, mercurial devilishness, and Michelle DeYoung was superb as Fricka.  As Freia, Ellie Dehn excelled in a part that can be nondesript, her upper register consistently clear and beautifully voiced.  Graham Clark succeeded in evoking all Mime’s oppressed misery, leaving much to look forward to when he returns in Siegfried.  Other roles were strong, if not always exceptional; as the Rhinemaidens, Stacey Tappan, Lauren McNeese, and Ronnita Nicole Miller were competent, if perhaps underpowered.  Jill Grove was a capable Erda, rising up out of the earth to warn Wotan of impending destruction, and Morris Robinson and Eric Halvarson were fine as the giants Fasolt and Fafner, respectively.  Beau Gibson’s Froh was decent if lacking vocal heft; as Donner, Wayne Tigges ushered in the rainbow bridge with lustrous clarity and panache.

I have not yet made up my mind about Vitalij Kowaljow’s Wotan.  He sang well enough, his deep bass rich and commanding.  There is no doubt that he is an able singer, more than capable of mustering the requisite vocal power for the role.  Yet I was not always convinced he was quite able to attain the stature evidenced in the best exponents of the part—his voice occasionally seemed to lack colour, and had a tendency to veer toward force over beauty.  However, he bore out Freyer’s complicated characterization well, investing his Wotan with an aloof mythical eminence that was a world apart from most modern interpretations.  Here was an amoral god, neither the gangsterish thug of many new productions, nor a character one felt one really knew, let alone loved.  It was a strong showing, and it will be interesting to see in Walkure whether he is ultimately capable of investing Wotan with the power and humanity of a truly great interpretation.

The orchestra played marvellously, if reservedly, under conductor James Conlon.  If the prelude was carried off a little loosely and without the tight rein ideal for Wagner, the brass a little weak and occasionally prone to intonation problems, all came together exquisitely by the end.  The strings were a force of beauty and tenderness throughout; gentler parts such as Freia’s theme were a joy to behold, and it was truly chilling when Alberich seized the gold from the Rhine and laid his curse on the ring.  The final scene, the illusory parade of untrammeled splendor that accompanies the gods to Valhalla, was resounding, less overwhelming than it can be but played with nobility.  The orchestra pit is covered for this Ring in the tradition of Bayreuth, a nice touch but one that may have muted the acoustic slightly—however, it was a strong performance under the guidance of a seasoned Wagnerian.  If it grows even just a little tighter and more majestic in the coming performances, Conlon and his orchestra should be capable of transitioning from the very good to the great.

Finally, however, it was Freyer’s vision that carried the evening.  I find it hard to understand those who found the production so damningly controversial, who would experience it and make such paltry attempt to appreciate the intent even if not caring for the aesthetic.  Modern productions of opera go awry when a directorial conceit contradicts the composer’s music.  This happens routinely enough, especially in Europe; in recent memory, Christof Loy’s Tristan at Covent Garden failed to succeed not because it was minimalist or avant garde or too edgy for unimaginative traditionalists, but because too much was imposed on Wagner’s music that ultimately detracted from what it was trying to say.  Freyer’s Rheingold is such a triumph because it succeeds in being utterly unique, the intransigently distinctive product of Freyer’s seemingly boundless artistic imagination, while never once working against Wagner’s text or score.  To the contrary; what makes it so interesting is its tireless allusiveness to the text, to all the intricacies of the story and its characters, its unending parade of visual Leitmotivs that bear out the drama in concordance with the music.  It is a vision like no other inhabiting a world never before conceived, yet fully in accord with Wagner’s universe for all that.  One can argue ad infinitum about what it means to produce an opera as the composer would have intended—whatever that means when the composer was writing in a completely different period and with radically different staging techniques to hand.  It goes without saying that of course Wagner would not have conceived Freyer’s Rheingold.  This is for the simple reason that its vision is so unmistakably Freyer’s own; yet this does not mean that it detracts in any way from Wagner’s design.  For my part, I rather think Wagner would have admired Freyer’s sheer ingenuity and uncompromising individuality.  In a letter to Liszt, Wagner famously exhorted, ‘Kinder, mach neues!  Neues!  Und abermals neues!’ (‘Children, make new!  New!  And always new!’), and in his Rheingold, Freyer does precisely this—and with more overarching flair and originality than I have ever before witnessed in a production of the work.

If the rest of the cycle proves able to match the standard set by this Rheingold, Freyer and LA Opera will have achieved something momentous with their $32 million investment.  This is but the start of the first of three cycles running through the end of June; if at all possible, get a ticket—this is a cycle that deserves to be experienced.




John E. De Wald
Opera Britannia

Photographs by Monika Rittershaus