“A piano, a piano” is Loriot’s joke, the tone of command for Berlin’s “Ring des Nibelungen”. A full-grown concert grand has boarded Wagner’s symphonic music drama. Director Stefan Herheim is convinced that the greatest opus in opera history urgently needs a solo piano as a “musical-optical gateway to fantasy”. Only for the eyes, not the ears: from time to time Wotan, Siegfried and Co. sit down at the black box, “play” the keys in silence, while the orchestra under chief conductor Donald Runnicles conquers the waves of sound and caresses the lyrical emotions.
The concert grand only has a symbolic existence, for Herheim the unrelated instrument means, he says in the program booklet, “a hinge and a sacred altar of artistic execution at the same time”. Wagner created his work on the piano; a piano remains indispensable for opera rehearsals. Singers climb the winged altar, Brünnhilde lies asleep on it, before Siegfried frees her from the fire, it is all too difficult to climb out of and down from him.
Visually absurd alternating baths, in which it is not just content that hooks and crunches
The Berliner Wagnerian should accept a second basic motive: the vast number of tattered suitcases. Right in the “Rheingold” you will be dragged over the boards by an avalanche of extras – travelers, fugitives. Suitcases, sloppily distributed or massively stacked, dominate the stage decoratively and gloomily (Stefan Herheim and Silke Bauer). Suitcases are not a “worn out” aesthetic theater metaphor? Objection Herheim! In the house discussion, he compares the suspicion with the “demands of some parliamentarians in today’s Bundestag to finally get over a chapter of German history”. But he doesn’t want to understand Wagner’s drama so decidedly politically that all culture is rather a “process of constant refinement” that does not exclude the elements of “resignation, decadence and perversion”.
One piano, one piano! In this “ring” it is in the center because, according to the director, Wagner composed on the piano.
(Photo: Bernd Uhlig)
So Stefan Herheim’s thought, directing and visual arts had to become Wagnerian in 2008 with the “Parsifal” in Bayreuth – in the form of an intoxicating colportage of time and ideology-critical speculation about the “Bühnenweihfestspiel”, always celebrated as pious and sublime, which he spoke radically prose with German politics and short-circuiting society and the Nazi blow on Green Hill. Some felt the clarification as damage, horror.
In fact, the suitcase “ring” now appeared damaged by the corona epidemic drama, which gave the meaningful sequence of the four musical dramas a defect. Autumn 2020: the “Valkyrie”, six months ago only the “Rheingold” original game of the mermaids with the pure gold in water depth, now “Siegfried” premiere, mind you after the end of the world of “Götterdämmerung”. And finally again, Berlin’s Wagner friends, vaccinated or recovered with photo ID, with masks without any distance, were sitting in the fully occupied house.
The problem with the Herheim production is by no means its rejection of the old stage of illusion, the distance between the actors and their role, the Brecht attitude of the “Epic Theater” found in 1926. And by no means the vital enthusiasm for playing and the vocal power of the vocal soloists and choirs. Herheim is completely jeopardizing their eminent presence with them. Wotan and grandson Siegfried, Alberich or Erda thrash the piano, leaf through alleged scores, find senseless conducting gestures. Visually absurd alternating baths, in which it is not just content that hooks and crunches. . . The suitcase migrants of the beginning even intervene in the action. Herheim knows, on GB Shaw’s level from 1898: “The ring a drama of today”. How much more precise, grotesque, humorous, funny did Frank Castorf in Bayreuth push the whole “ring” into the today position!
What the director has mastered: human conflicts
The problem with this interpretation is its conception of images and meaning, including the historically variegated costumes of Uta Heiseke. Mime, the Jewish caricature with a Wagner cap and concentration camp clothing (Ya-Chung Huang), Erda, the demonic-free house (great) mother (Judit Kutasi), Siegfried, the plump, strong child (Clay Hilley), the Gibichungen, philistines from the Fifties (Alle Asszonyi, Thomas Lehmann), Hagen, smart-bad (Albert Pesendorfer). A pound of the forest bird, funny psycho boy from Siegfried’s depths of soul. The bunch of extras appears in everyday clothes or, in the “Siegfried” finale of mad couple love, in underwear for mass sex fuss. Doesn’t Herheim trust the internal force of Wagner’s symphonic erotic earthquake?
The magic of metamorphosis is provided by flowing white fluttering cloths that add space and light to the highest emotions. Or blood-red color orgies as surrogates for Fafner’s dragon death (Tobias Kehrer). Less would often have been more, we think of “Nothingtoseeness” in Berlin’s Academy of the Arts, the show “Empty / White / Stille”, which can be seen until December 12th.
What this director has mastered with ease: Developing human conflicts on stage in a targeted, exciting way. When Waltraude (Okka von der Damerau) and Brünnhilde (Nina Stemme), when Alberich (Jordan Shanahan) and the Wotan Wanderer (Iain Paterson) collide, the musical, the vocal sparks fly. Then again disillusionment: Brünnhilde hurls “Shame! Shame!” out, deepest misfortune, comes from the right, how terrible !, Loriot’s piano drove onto the stage.