In Act II of Die Walkure, faced with the death of the son he has chosen as instrument of his redemption, the god Wotan longs bitterly for the end.  With Gotterdammerung, that moment has finally arrived—not only the end of Valhalla and the ascendancy of the immortal gods, but the end of LA Opera’s inaugural cycle of Wagner’s Ring.  By any standard of judgment, the cost of this production to the company has been high; and yet, watching it all come together and culminate in this evening, one can only admire the breadth of its accomplishment.

The opera opens on the Norns, prefigured in this production in the third act of Siegfried.  There, they merely appeared in illustration of Erda’s words; now they assume centre stage, inhabiting a timeless world of light and dark, phantom shapes illumined on the scrim and stage evoking the linear as well as the cyclical.  The thread of fate they weave is vivid and tautly stretched, at times radiantly bearing the mixed hues of the elements—green, red, blue, and yellow—a recurring motif throughout the operas.  It is exactly the type of scene Achim Freyer’s production does best, intimate, powerful, intensely creative and impressionistic, equally resonant and bespeaking the universal underpinnings of Greek theatre so important to Wagner’s dramaturgy.  The aesthetic stylization and iconography, so alien in Das Rheingold, has over the course of the cycle become familiar and increasingly comprehensible as part of a grander scheme.  One of the great pleasures of this Gotterdammerung is witnessing the way Freyer’s leitmotivs have, like Wagner’s, recurred and transformed over time to reach fulfillment in the final part of the drama.  Unique and stylised they might be, but taken together, the four operas of this staging add up to a whole that is both cohesive and glorious.

In this, the music once again followed the high standard of the drama.  The Norns were sung in wonderful voice by Jill Grove, Michelle DeYoung, and Melissa Citro, presaging the end of the gods with superlative beauty and feeling.  As ever, visual allusiveness abounded; in one corner, Wotan’s eye still loomed, now blinded in recognition of the god’s turning away from the world; in another, high above the stage, an effigy of Loge leered down mischievously beneath Wotan’s shattered spear.  It is a clear intimation not only that Valhalla is soon to fall, engulfed in Loge’s conflagration, but that LA Opera’s cosmic play is itself at an end—one thought all too readily of those purported dying words of Caesar Augustus, ‘acta est fabula.’

Wagner’s prelude to Gotterdammerung is extremely complicated, interweaving an astonishing admixture of Leitmotivs in narration of the past and foreshadowing of the future.  Freyer’s production drives this home with poignancy and the usual aesthetic wonder; as the thread of the Norns breaks and they depart, the age of gods and fate finally sundered, one feels the portentousness of the scene in all its gravity.  The shift to the passionate music of Siegfried and Brunnhilde provided welcome relief, Linda Watson and John Treleaven giving beautiful expression to their glorious love duet.  Mr. Treleaven’s voice was exceedingly strained by the close of Siegfried, and it was good to hear him now rested and at his best.  Though Ms. Watson unquestionably owns the stronger voice of the two, he succeeded in keeping up with her, his upper register again bright and well-projected.  The orchestration elicited by James Conlon was lush and grandiose; the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra carried Ms. Watson and Mr. Treleaven well, resounding magnificently, especially in the brass, while never overwhelming the singers.  The jubilance of Siegfried’s Rhine Journey was conveyed with abandon, the strings flowing and majestic, the horns perfectly in tune and sounding as triumphant as ever.  I have already noted my progressively greater admiration for Mr. Conlon and his orchestra, and they were perhaps on the best form in Gotterdammerung of the entire cycle, breathing vivid life into Wagner’s complex score.  

And yet, for all the achievement of the orchestra, it is always the uniqueness of Freyer’s staging to which one returns.  Gunther and Gutrune, sung with pronounced skill by Alan Held and Jennifer Wilson, wore expressionless masks, depriving them of all individuality.  They are ciphers more than people, indicative of the faceless, soulless multitude they represent; the Gibichung chorus is similarly veiled.  As with so many of Freyer’s devices, if this sounds overly contrived on paper, it works astonishingly well as theatre.  It also lends credibility for once to the scene where Siegfriend dons the tarnhelm to disguise himself as Gunther—in this case, he simply put on an anonymous Gibichung mask of his own, his heroic identity subsumed by the static world of which he is now a part.

Hagen is conceived as Alberich’s puppet, the Nibelung often a silent presence on stage hungrily watching his son carry out his plan.  Wearing a shiny gold suit and equipped with a remote control with which he controlled events on the stage, Hagen was superbly realised by Eric Halvarson, previously seen as Hunding and Fafner.  Mr. Halvarson has been a consistent boon to the production, and his Hagen was perhaps the best of his roles, menacingly sung with a threateningly dark timbre and every measure of bitterness seeping into his words.  His scene with Alberich at the start of Act II was a highlight, Richard Paul Fink in strong voice and as dramatically captivating as ever.  This is the first production of the Ring I have encountered in which Alberich’s scenes consistently rank amongst the very best; between Freyer’s insightful direction and Fink’s accomplishment in characterisation and rich, robust baritone, one began almost to like him by the end.  Certainly he cut a more sympathetic figure than tends to be the case.

Another recurring blessing to the cycle has been Michelle DeYoung, returning after her opening scene as a Norn to sing Brunnhilde’s sister Valkyrie Waltraute.  After a strong showing in the soprano role of Sieglinde in Die Walkure, it was remarkable to see the ease with which she returned to her customary mezzo voice.  As before, she commanded the stage during her time on it, conveying Waltraute’s entreaties with urgency and feeling.  Stacey Tappan, Lauren McNeese, and Ronnita Nicole Miller returned as the Rhine Maidens, on better form overall than in Rheingold and making an impressive showing as they taunted Siegfried in the third act.

For his part, John Treleaven’s Siegfried, if still flawed, was also much more consistent than it had been the previous evening.  His repartee with the Rhine Maidens in the third act was charming, his voice effulgent and resounding; this time his tenor, though perhaps still occasionally uneven in tone and intonation, made it to the end in far better shape.  His kidnapping of Brunnhilde in the guise of Gunther was startling, and he executed his final scene with all the dramatic and vocal power it demands.  His narration of his past adventures during the hunt was genuinely lyrical and poignant, the abrupt reawakening of the memories of his life with Brunnhilde conveyed with heartbreaking clarity and conviction. His death—Hagen’s spear symbolically cutting through Nothung above the stage, the sign of the cross formed between them as he fell crumpled to his knees—was especially striking.  He also managed to depict a suitable ingenuousness in the second act, which featured a particularly strong Gibichung chorus.  They sang gloriously, their swords flailing about brightly at Hagen’s call; as ever, the painterly lighting of Freyer and Brian Gale reinforced the sense that one was watching a living work of art on stage.  

As usual, Linda Watson produced a consistently powerful, thrilling sound that sometimes landed a little shrill, but which more often than not struck high notes with both golden accuracy and ample projection.  Though I can find her tone sometimes wayward, it was radiant in her scene with Waltraute in Act I, and she came off especially powerfully at the end of Act II, her blazing soprano riddled with anguish and the thirst for vengeance.  It was an especially well executed scene generally, Mr. Halvarson and Mr. Held in similarly undaunted voices carrying easily over the sweeping flow of the orchestra.  Their pact for revenge was as darkly chilling as it ought to be.  And where it mattered most, Ms. Watson summoned boundless heroism and beauty in her final moments, breathing incandescent, heartfelt life into her sorrow and her triumph as she bid farewell to the husband she had lost and lit the way to redemption for the world through her own immolation.

The conclusion, an awe-inspiring scene in which the Gibichung chorus is annihilated and the stage itself collapses to reveal the theatrical mechanics underneath, marked a powerfully dramatic way to end a Ring cycle distinguished by its consummate theatricality.  One initially couldn’t help looking with skepticism at the idea of applying Brechtian dramatic techniques to Wagner, an artist who stressed the importance of feeling in art over what he termed the synthesizing intellect.  Yet Freyer succeeds in utilizing a theatre of alienation primarily to raise his production beyond the quotidian and restore the full stature of myth to the work, a quality sorely lacking in so many contemporary approaches.  Despite all its intellectual depth, what makes it succeed is how convincingly this works as stagecraft, and just how resonant it manages to be on an intuitive level.

Some of the old Brechtian tricks are there, to be sure.  As the stage collapses, for example, one is blinded by the stage lighting revealed behind; as Wotan’s ravens, flanking the stage as the god’s eyes in anticipation of the end, finally fly away to tell of its arrival, prompters are revealed underneath.  One has a sense of the blurred boundary between the fantastical world on stage and our own, the fact that the two all too readily intertwine and that the end of a work like the Ring is, to some extent, a blank canvas ripe for our own interpretation.  Yet taken in the midst of the sheer magic Freyer has created from the first moments of Rheingold to now, some fifteen hours later, when it all comes crashing down, it is not any theatrical artificiality that is underscored.  In fact, it barely even registers.  What one is struck by, as one has been for the entirety of the enterprise, is the unbridled power of theatre and art to create new worlds, to stretch the bounds of the imagination and move us profoundly.  In Freyer’s production, one has the distinct sense that, as so rarely occurs, the work of an artistic genius is being presented through the vision an artistic genius in his own right; and ultimately, as Wagner intended, the visceral power of the theatre and the music overshadows any more Brechtian intellectual impulse to an extent that renders any suggestion of its preeminence risible.  The majestic sweep of Conlon’s orchestra, cascading through the theatre as the Rhine surpassed its banks, positively overwhelmed; with the strings coruscating alongside the final scenic image, a seemingly underwater stage lit by the soft golden hue of the gold restored to nature at last, one could be forgiven for being left with a sense of the transcendent sublime.

What more could one ask of art?  Certainly one could ask no more of a company’s first production of Wagner’s Ring.  For all its ingenuity, uncompromising individuality, and musical achievement, LA Opera, James Conlon and his orchestra, Achim Freyer, their exceptional cast, and all those involved have created a truly historic moment, not only for LA Opera, but for productions of the Ring worldwide.  For those who have witnessed this production, it will be difficult not to view most others as somewhat antediluvian by comparison.  Which isn’t to say it should be taken as marking any sort of trend in new Wagnerian direction.  To the contrary; Freyer’s Ring stands alone, a thing unique in itself and its at times almost startling beauty.  It is a vibrant indictment against the vapid directorial approaches of all too many modern takes on opera—and what is more, a heartening reminder that once every so often, greatness can be achieved in art and in life.

John E De Wald
Opera Britannia

Photographs by Monika Rittershaus