After a superlative showing for the first two evenings of Wagner’s Ring, one could be forgiven for waiting with unwonted expectancy to see what LA Opera would conjure for the third installment of their cycle.  Yet success was by no means guaranteed; Siegfried is always one of the more challenging operas to stage well, all too easily encumbered by lengthy plot recapitulations and a hero it can be difficult to like, let alone regard as potential savior of a corrupt world.  Factor in a dragon that as often comes across as ludicrous as threatening and the sheer fact that the opera stretches to over four hours for all that, and one can understand the rarity of truly exciting performances.  Though perhaps not perfect, I am happy to report that Achim Freyer’s production manages not only to stave off the aforementioned pitfalls, it succeeds in maintaining an unchecked level of momentum from brooding prelude to ecstatic finish.

As with the rest of his cycle, Freyer’s take on Siegfried is marked by keen ingenuity and his ever distinctive visual style.  The opera begins with the stage depicting some sort of cosmic race track, flowing horizontal lines cutting across an initially frozen tableau of all those pursuing Alberich’s ring.  Alberich himself, Wotan, Mime, and Siegfried are all represented as the prelude ominously sounds, the first three placed on platforms identified by numerical places.  As Freyer himself terms it, the stage serves as ‘a spatial model of human time made of horizontal lines with time-measuring, flowing verticals, portraying mortality.’  The message is simple—the end is nearing, the stakes are mounting, and only one can emerge victorious.  Siegfried, however, is qualitatively different from the others, the new man purportedly free from the sins of the past; he is not given a numerical ranking, but stands alone with a different nomenclature altogether, marked rather by the letter ‘A’.  Yet he, too, is caught in the fray.  Shortly into the act, Alberich and Wotan slowly wander off the stage to leave Mime and Siegfried continuing with the plot, but the point has been made.  Time is running out.

It is a fascinating idea, intellectually and visually stimulating; there is no doubt that Freyer takes Wagner’s work seriously and continuously manages to keep his presentation of it interesting.  In this case, it achieves mixed results in practice.  Though Siegfried does mark a pivotal point in the cycle, and though motion, time, and circularity are at the heart of the work, one could dispute the dramatic effectiveness of so artificial a construct on stage.  Intriguing at first, it eventually wears thin, particularly when the stylised directions leave the conversation between Siegfried and Mime at times seeming overtly unnatural—as when, for example, Siegfried moves distractingly off the stage as Mime is speaking to him, ambling casually back on from the opposite end and responding as though he had never left.

Still, as with nearly everything in this cycle, it is certainly a spectacle to behold.  The act is one that can seem belabored—the majority of it featuring Mime and Siegfried alone, much of it rehashing a narrative already known to the audience—yet in Freyer’s hands, it felt swift and dynamic.  The use of recurrent yet evolving iconography on stage to complement these narrative passages renders such moments of exposition some of the most remarkable in the cycle; in its way, Freyer’s recurring imagery and its transmogrifications bring out the shifting melodies of Wagner’s score all the more eloquently.  The uneven battle of wits between Vitalij Kowaljow’s booming Wanderer and Graham Clark’s wily Mime was utterly captivating, the revolving stage shifting their positions to the foreground or background as each assumed centrality in testing the other’s knowledge.  Visual Leitmotivs—the usual fantastical parade of characters and symbols, appearing as their stories or the ideas they represent are evoked—colour the top of the platform between Wotan and Mime.  Taken with the flowing lines of light streaking across the stage in evocation of movement and mortality—both so crucial to the history they relate—it was a remarkably dynamic rendering of the scene.  Though not every concept of the production works so immaculately, it is fair to say that when Freyer’s production succeeds, it does so to the detriment of pretty much everything else one has seen in the past.

Of course, this potency had its ample share of foundation in the superb playing of the LA Opera Orchestra.  Under the direction of James Conlon, their sound has grown progressively richer and more accomplished throughout the cycle; by the superbly realised opening bars of Siegfried, it was clear they have become entirely at home in the complex idiom of Wagner’s music.  Though the strings have breathed life into the epic sweep of Wagner’s score from the first, the brass had in Siegfried tightened up markedly—the horns producing the hero’s call with consistent beauty—and the orchestra achieved a more cohesive whole.  The evening was meticulously shaped under Mr. Conlon’s conducting, reigned in and granted the architectonic structure necessary to convey both the overwhelming grandeur and classical intimacy of Wagner’s drama.  It was an intelligent reading of the score, powerful but never bombastic; the more I hear of this orchestra and their conductor, the more impressed I become.

This holds true for much of the cast as well.  Mr. Kowaljow’s Wotan continued to dominate the stage, his bass resonating with a warm, dignified timbre.  As noted above, his scene with Mr. Clark’s conniving Mime was a highlight; it would be difficult to imagine a better exponent of either role at the moment.  Mr. Clark’s acting captured impeccably the admixture of groveling and cunning that comprise Mime’s character, and his singing rang out loud and triumphantly.  Dressed in a green apron with yellow work gloves and sporting an oversized dwarf head—occasionally removed for comic and theatrical effect when the audience sees beyond his surface artifice—he looks the part to perfection, too.  Freyer’s costume design may be whimsical and sometimes strange, but it works.

These were matched in stature by the Alberich of Richard Paul Fink, his avarice practically tangible in his scene with Wotan at the start of Act II.  Like Mr. Kowljow and Mr. Clark, he is fully capable of stealing any scene he is in, his strong baritone dark and agile.  Clad again in his perfectly rendered pinstripe trousers and tailcoat, he rapaciously gripped a cigar at the opposite corner of the stage from his nemesis, precise lighting cutting across the scrim and creating an ethereal division between the two.  It was spectacular to look at, and alongside their superb characterizations, made for thrilling theatre.

Ultimately, however, neither representative of the old order can win out, and it is Siegfried who must recover the ring.  The Siegfried in this production, with his fake muscle-man body, furry bearskin pants, ingenuous white face, and curly blond locks of hair, is a sort of combination between cartoon superhero and wide-eyed clown.  If this sounds perverse, it isn’t—in fact, it is a surprisingly effective way of rendering a character notoriously difficult to portray convincingly.  For though Siegfried was in Wagner’s first intention a Shavian superman destined to uproot the old moral order and usher in a new age, he is also all brute force, impulsive, unthinking.  His raw physical power lacks the wisdom and understanding that only Brunnhilde will eventually possess, and which alone can redeem the world.  Freyer’s iconography might not be subtle, but it strikes at the heart of the character.  In fact, this was perhaps the first time I have really liked Siegfried.  Where some productions render Siegfried as callous and cruel, this one underscores his naivety and youthful exuberance.  If he acts in a clownish way at times and finds himself all too easily deluded, we sympathise with his inexperience and incomplete personality, lacking in insight as he so obviously is.

The role of Siegfried is an infamously Herculean undertaking even without the clownish makeup and sharply inclined stage of this production, and though it unquestionably stretched John Treleaven’s abilities more than would have been ideal, he did make it to the end with his voice mostly intact.  If this sounds like damning praise, it is not intended as such—for a role as fiendishly demanding as this, that in itself is rather an accomplishment.  It is true that Mr. Treleaven’s voice can come across as weak in its upper register, high notes belabored and volume less than ideal; in their scenes together, Mr. Clark’s magnificent Mime tended to overshadow.  Yet Mr. Treleaven owns a tenor voice that is capable of real lyricism; this was manifest in his forging song in the first act, the first time he really commanded the stage, projecting his lines boldly and with joyful vitality.  If he is not one’s dream heldentenor, he at least managed to get through the role primarily unscathed.

Helping him on his path to Brunnhilde was the woodbird of Stacey Tappan, in lovely voice as she perched on Wotan’s spear.  The forest murmurs passage was especially moving here, played with real feeling by the orchestra, its woodwind instruments deserving particular mention.  The scene painting was glorious too, gold wisps playing about the scrim; with Ms. Tappan’s sweetly intoned voice, a real sense of fairytale was created.  This was heightened by Eric Halvarson’s spectacular, deep-voiced Fafner, authoritatively thundering out from behind the stage.  As with Act I, the sense of drama, spirited playing from the orchestra, and overall scenic artistry made the act pass by in a flash, never languorous as it so often is.  

This was mostly true as well of the third act, which found Linda Watson again in strong voice as the newly awakened Brunnhilde.  Her soprano, fresh and unworn, rang out over the orchestra, a nice contrast to her obviously exhausted Siegfried.  Still, Mr. Treleaven mostly succeeded in keeping up with her, only really flagging in the final moments, when all lyricism was effectively lost.  Ms. Watson’s intonation went a little wide once or twice, and subtlety is not her strong suit; however, the sound produced was more often ravishing than not, and her love duet with Mr. Treleaven was genuinely glorious.  The production faltered a little here, the now familiar doppleganger technique employed as doubles appeared on stage in the mist of this most tender (and isolated) of moments.  Though this effect has typically been used effectively, I found it distracting in this case, making the end cluttered and too sylised where the music demands emotional purity.  Furthermore, the tautness heretofore achieved in the orchestra slackened in the act’s final moments, and the obviously worn out Mr. Treleavan and Ms. Watson, suddenly given to bellowing more than nuance, lacked a proper sense of cohesion during their final notes.  Nevertheless, much beauty was engendered despite the odd bit of sloppiness, and taken as a whole, there was significantly more to applaud than to lament.

And other moments in the act touched greatness.  During the frenetic assault of its awesome prelude—written after a twelve year gap from the second act during which Wagner composed Tristan and Die Meistersinger—the orchestra was overwhelming, Wagner’s newfound insistence on the primacy of music over text in ready abundance.  Jill Grove’s Erda was magnificent, her confrontation with Wotan spellbinding.  They appeared in a world of intertwining darkness and light, a place that seemed to stand outside time itself.  It was emblematic of the essence of Freyer’s production, its perpetual insistence on standing firmly outside the naturalistic world in theatre built upon archetypal myth and evocations of Greek tragedy.  Perhaps above all else, Freyer’s production relishes these moments of timeless, mythological stature; in its constant visual allusiveness, it frequently displaces notions of time and memory, creating something of an eternal present bound together by recurring leitmotivs of music and iconography that hearken to the past as much as the future.  One can only imagine that, as idiosyncratic as it appears at first glance, the overall effect is precisely what Wagner himself would have intended.  He certainly would have appreciated the consummate theatricality of it all.  As Ms. Grove sang of the Norns, rendered here as beautiful, primordial creatures bound together by the taut red line they weave, they descended slowly from above in anticipation of their role in Gotterdammerung.  Mr. Kowaljow’s towering Wotan will be sorely missed during that final evening—nevertheless, one cannot help looking forward to discovering how LA Opera’s Ring, so frequently brilliant, will present its concluding chapter as the end of all things foretold by the Norns finally comes to pass.




John E De Wald
Opera Britannia

Photographs by Monika Rittershaus