Actually, it was a good plan. Since the theaters in Bavaria are exploding with creativity and everyone is performing everywhere – there is enough stockpiling – you can also watch a dress rehearsal if the schedule doesn’t turn out differently. In music theater this is possible in exceptional cases because a dress rehearsal corresponds to a normal performance. And: The Regenburg Theater has already issued tickets internally for the dress rehearsal of Wagner’s “Rheingold” in the port on the Danube. This crowd then experiences one of the most unusual opera performances in recent history. Because Corona came. But that’s not all.
Corona has been around for a while, but now it has become very acute: on the afternoon of the rehearsal day, a member of the orchestra tested positive. On that day there were around 600 corona cases across Germany, but of all things one of them in the orchestra. As a result, artistic director Jens Neundorff von Enzberg sent the orchestra home and asked Jooa Jang, the solo coach at the house, to play the piano. In the white tent on the edge of the harbor basin there are now only two people, Mrs. Jang, who tirelessly plays the piano, and conductor Tom Woods, who coordinates the music with the singers. This is a bit more slimmed down than the reduced orchestral version by Eberhard Kloke, which would actually have been played, but has the great advantage that you can understand every word.
Rhine daughters loll on a yacht
The theater discovered Regensburg’s western harbor a few years ago as a venue, showing the “Flying Dutchman” and a “Tosca”, always overwhelming. Because the port is a stage. An elongated pool, on one side the theoretically possible 2400 spectators sit, on the other there is an old warehouse, an industrial cathedral, in front of which the singers play – which in this case director Andreas Baesler asked them to do – and on the facade of which you can see imposing videos and videos Can project animations (by Clemens Rudolph). The push barge Susi, who is now called Wotan and carries a red sofa the size of a bouncy castle, on which the gods frolic, has moored at the quay of art. In the pool itself, the Rhine daughters drive up on a fancy motor yacht, lolling silvery glittering on the foredeck, before entering the clinch with Alberich, who Oliver Weidinger subsequently turns into an impressive underworld king. The piano and vocals are transmitted through boxes, everything sounds close, present and good, Anna Pisareva, Vera Semieniuk and Tamta Tarielashvili seduce you with giggles.
In fact, you get used to the piano very quickly, Baesler tells the story compactly and well, videos enlarge the actors larger than life. Fafner (Selcuk Hakan Tıraşoğlu) and Fasolt (Seymur Karimov) make their appearance with two huge cranes that are already in the harbor, Fricka (Vera Egorova-Schönhöfer) profoundly scolds their husband; If Wotan (Adam Krużel) and Loge (Brent L. Damkier) then head to Nibelheim – here evoked by the animation of a huge smelting plant – they seem like two wonderful idiots who want to pull off the big deal.
The push boat is called Wotan and carries a red sofa the size of a bouncy castle on which the gods frolic.
(Photo: Jochen Quast)
Everything works, but that would be too easy. The performance has to end at 11 p.m., so the “Rheingold” has been shortened, for example the two useless gods Donner and Glad removed. But now it takes longer, which means that shortly before 11 p.m. – Wotan is currently struggling with the fact that the giants also want the ring – the performance stops and a magnificent fireworks display breaks out. That would actually come when the gods came to Valhalla, but there shouldn’t be any fireworks after 11 p.m. and you just have to try it out once. Then the performance continues, but now a very large excavator begins to rearrange the containers that are standing around in such a port. Meanwhile Erda (Tamta Tarielashvili) warns Wotan about the ring, but the busy excavator demands a lot of attention; one wonders what kind of goods are moved there in the middle of the night.
The interesting thing about all the unusual things: You pay attention in a completely different way, rethink this opera and have enough vocal comfort for real Wagnerian experiences. At the premiere on the following day, we can hear that everything was back to normal. After the positive rapid tests, the musician’s PCR test turned out to be negative and the orchestra was allowed to play. But the brittle and exciting experience was reserved for the visitors of the dress rehearsal.