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When the rainbow bridge just isn’t enough… 

Brünnhilde has been kidnapped and replaced with Strindberg’s Miss Julie! Katarina Dalayman in, what looks like, a very cool, interesting take on “Die Walküre”…

One reason I started blogging is that I wanted to engage in the diversity of opinions about art. I don’t think that one critic represents the voice of truth. It would be ridiculous of me to pretend that what I say is the only way to think about something, since there’s plenty of evidence that other people think differently (not least in the comments I receive).

In fact, criticism today is all about diversity of opinion. If a new musical opens, I try to read every article about it, because this helps me to form a more complete picture of the range of thought about it. Today, viewing a spectrum of different opinions is the norm.

What I find regrettable, in this endeavor, is the tendency to divide into camps and brand as idiots anyone who has a different opinion. I was not enamored with “Die Walkure” (though I really hoped I would be). goofin, liked it a lot, and she elaborated still more reasons why she liked it. I found goofin’s opinions to be among the most interesting about the piece. (Yes, we disagreed, and yet we Facebooked about the opera, and both managed to avoid thinking the other was an idiot.)

In fact, we observed a few of the same things about the opera, and found that we were in agreement over many of the most crucial aspects of the production (namely: Deborah Voigt and Bryn Terfel’s incredibly moving performances).

It’s for that reason that I encourage all readers to post their own reviews. The point of criticism is to foster discussion, appreciation, thought — not to seize on a couple of points and use them to further one’s own predetermined agenda. Goofin’s posts didn’t make me change my mind about “The Machine,” but it gave me a real understanding of what the piece had done for her and why she liked it. Indeed, some of my most interesting conversations about music have been with people who had a different view than I did. Interestingly enough, We both agreed that “Die Walkure” would work if the whole god element was removed. In the end, we concurred that “Die Walkure” is much closer to Eugen O’Neil than J.R.R. Tolkien.

It would be pretty sad, and limiting, if people shut out other opinions thinking they might challenge someone or make them look bad. Seeing the spectrum of opinion is part of the fun; it makes the piece more interesting for everybody. A new work, in particular, is in the position of the blind men and the elephant: everyone who was there can give his or her own piece of the experience, and readers, seeing them all together, can try to amalgamate them into a larger, and more accurate, picture.

This is what I’ve been SAYING! It’s not hard to connect the dots between “Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark” and the Met’s lumbering “Die Walküre.” Charles Isherwood, I could make love to you right now. You’ve really hit the nail on the head! ”Die Walküre” also had me thinking of Zeffirelli with his emphasis on spectacle over substance.

QUICK question: Which New York stage production from the season just past was notable for its huge expense, its technical problems and its chilly reception?

The obvious answer is “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the Broadway musical that made headlines for itstravails; jettisoned its director, Julie Taymor; and shut down for a serious overhaul last month, with the budget approaching $70 million.

But you might just as easily have come up with another response: Robert Lepage’s new staging of Wagner’s “Ring” for the Metropolitan Opera, the first two installments of which bookended the just-concluded opera season.

In general the Broadway musical and opera inhabit separate, increasingly distant cultural spheres, but these productions represented a notable — and unfortunate — point of contact: two large-scaled, highly anticipated shows helmed by acclaimed theater directors with international reputations, both of whom were handed fat checks to realize their visions. Ms. Taymor’s “Spider-Man” was an outright fiasco, while Mr. Lepage’s “Ring,” with its monolithic machine of a set, qualifies more as a lumbering fizzle, at least at this halfway point.

This kind of drama obviously wasn’t what Peter Gelb had in mind when he took the reins at the Met in 2006 and expressed a desire to raise the company’s theatrical standards by seeking out talented theater directors to join the roster. Mr. Lepage’s “Ring” may prove to be the strategy’s most ambitious production and its most resounding flop. Of the nearly dozen other new productions from theater luminaries that have joined the Met repertory, there have been impressive successes like Nicholas Hytner’s “Don Carlo,” Richard Eyre’s “Carmen” and Bartlett Sher’s “Barbiere di Siviglia.” There have been rewarding productions in traditional style, like Jack O’Brien’s “Trittico,” and more dimly viewed adventures like Mary Zimmerman’s contemporary gloss on “La Sonnambula.” Let’s not forget the much-booed “Tosca” from Luc Bondy, the Swiss theater and opera director.

But one categorical statement I can make: If asked where to go for a reliably stimulating evening of musical theater in New York, I’d be likelier to point a visitor toward the Met than to Broadway. New musicals on Broadway today are mostly audience-pleasing machines manufactured from cultural spare parts: a movie screenplay, a rock songbook, the self-conscious attitudinizing of late-night comedy. Music in the tradition of Broadway greats like Richard Rodgers, Frank Loesser and Stephen Sondheim has practically ceased to be a necessary or even desirable ingredient, with the result that performances of true depth and musical intelligence are increasingly rare.

In the past five years on Broadway, Kelli O’Hara’s Nellie Forbush in “South Pacific,” Alice Ripley’s disturbed wife and mother in “Next to Normal,” Patti LuPone’s Momma Rose in “Gypsy,” Raúl Esparza’s Bobby in “Company” and Michael Cerveris as the razor-wielder in “Sweeney Todd” are among just a handful of transcendent performances that spring to mind. Most came in revivals, tellingly, and it now seems possible, if not probable, that star casting in musical revivals will become the norm on Broadway, making it less likely that gifted singing actors will be given the chance at the great roles in the canon.

At the Met, on the other hand, you are likely to see at least one first-rate interpretation of a musical theater role every week. And it is inconceivable that Nicole Kidman will be crooning her way through “La Traviata” any time soon.

Mr. Gelb’s commitment to promoting gifted singers who are also persuasive actors has sometimes been confused with the practice — deplored mostly in theory by opera lovers — of simply favoring looks over voice. Remember the “little black dress” issue that caused a ruckus a few years ago when Deborah Voigt was fired from a Covent Garden production? But it’s essentially just a matter of bringing the acting standards of opera closer to the kind of nuanced interpretations that can vitalize the material in ways that the old standard — the derided “park and bark” — often failed to do.

Acting in opera and in Broadway musicals obviously requires different skills. Naturalism is the bedrock of American stage acting, even in musicals, but opera is a more purely poetic form, and its music is more complex and challenging than the standard song forms used in most Broadway musicals. It is in some sense physically impossible to sing an aria and act “naturally” at the same time. And opera librettos often reiterate emotional notes relentlessly. The Met’s popular series of high-definition broadcasts to movie theaters has added another, complicating layer to the challenge: how do you give a performance that registers truthfully and powerfully both in the opera house and in cinematic close-ups?

Watching the telecast of Mr. Hytner’s production of “Don Carlo” on DVD, I noticed that the performers were often acting in different keys. Roberto Alagna, in the title role, a creature of the old-school European opera stage, hits the emotional notes squarely and with ample recourse to semaphoric posturing, while Simon Keenlyside, portraying his boon companion Rodrigo, employs a more inside-out acting style. He occasionally seems to be searching for an authentic human connection that Mr. Alagna’s more presentational style made impossible.

In general I’ve found that the acting is at a memorably high standard at the Met these days, with performers like René Pape, Karita Mattila, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Stephanie Blythe, Jonas Kaufmann, Bryn Terfel, Joyce DiDonato, Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay and Mr. Keenlyside giving rich, intelligently conceived performances in operas from a wide range of the repertory. Equally impressive have been the ensemble casts in rarefied works like Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead” and John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” And it’s not necessarily the new productions and the starry casts that deliver the goods: the highlight of my opera-going season was the masterly performance of Jonathan Miller’s production of Debussy’s haunting “Pelléas et Mélisande,” conducted by Simon Rattle with moving, persuasively human performances from the entire cast.

Directing for the opera house is a discipline with its own distinct demands, and the scale of the Metropolitan Opera’s stage adds another troublesome factor to the challenge. In the pre-Gelb era the grandiose literalism of Franco Zeffirelli was the house style at the Met, at least for the core of the repertory. His meticulous re-creations of period décor and his penchant for filling the stage with boisterous crowds and the occasional animal were pleasing to fans who enjoy opera as an escape into an eye-popping fantasyland of the past where even the greatest suffering took place in sumptuous surroundings. But Mr. Zeffirelli’s productions often had a way of diminishing the operas themselves; their emphasis on scale and spectacle could trivialize the musical dramas they were meant to showcase.

No distinct, unifying aesthetic has emerged at the Met since Mr. Gelb took over. That’s hardly surprising given the wide range of directing talent that has been brought in. Certainly the Met has not evolved into a New York outpost of a German opera house, with radically avant-garde productions the norm. (Willy Decker’s “Traviata,” with its whitewashed minimalist set and portentous clock, is about as outré as things have gotten.) Most of the new productions have trimmed fairly traditional approaches in modest stylized touches, and have kept a respectful focus on the letter of the text. Mr. Bondy’s production of “Tosca” has been the most widely reviled new production of Mr. Gelb’s tenure, but even it was fundamentally realistic, incendiary only in a few incidental details. And it is telling that the pans turned to plaudits when the production returned at the end of the season with a galvanizing new cast: Mr. Kaufmann, Patricia Racette and Bryn Terfel.

A pre-eminent truth about opera-going is that the quality of the music-making will always remain the matter of paramount importance. Once the outraged booing of the opening-night claques has faded, a great night at the opera relies infinitely more on the singers and the players in the pit than on any conceptual innovations from the production’s director. Music so predominates at the opera, as it does not in the Broadway musical, that even misguided productions can’t really rise or fall on the merits of a director’s staging.

This is the case even with Wagner’s “Ring,” although it was conceived by Wagner as a gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art) unifying music and the drama. Because it deals in myth, and its characters include gods and monsters — and because its production history has been marked by landmark experimental productions even on home turf at Bayreuth — the “Ring” accommodates and even inspires nontraditional, nonrealistic productions.

Mr. Lepage’s conceptual vision had a natural foundation in Wagner’s own, bringing as it did a single design scheme to a series of operas composed as a unity. But I’m not sure a hefty budget is always a boon to a director. Mr. Lepage’s “Rheingold” and Walkürereminded me of his similarly epic but dramatically wan Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas, titled “Ka.” It too featured elaborate aerial effects and cinematic shifts of perspective, all in mechanically lavish service to an underdeveloped narrative.

The fundamental flaw of Mr. Lepage’s “Ring” boils down to a cart-horse problem: the staging of the drama had to accommodate the design, when the first responsibility of the director should be serving the musical drama. Mr. Lepage’s production seems to be perpetually in competition for our attention with the opera itself. Mr. Lepage’s machine with its undulating movements too often interrupts or compromises our engagement with the drama, whether it is to note the body doubles being used in some sequences or to wonder if all of those Valkyries are going to slide down the slabs during their famous “ride” without tumbling off.

Curiously enough, it was while watching Walküre that I thought of the Zeffirelli aesthetic for the first time during Mr. Gelb’s tenure. In its grandiosity and sheer size Mr. Lepage’s “Ring” harks back to the empty lavishness that the Met has been working to mothball. It’s high-tech, low-concept minimalism, only on a Zeffirellian scale.

Via: The New York Times

Read Die Walküre Part 1…

We’re back with the giant keyboard. Yup…it’s still there. Only this time it’s in the formation of the “wild rocky place” that Wagner calls for. It actually looks very cool. Except the poor singers look a little dismayed at having to climb up and down the thing.

It also appears to have developed “feelings” and “emotions” of it’s own. Perhaps one day it could learn to love? Or kill? In any case, it appears to be experiencing far more complex emotions than any of the characters onstage and it keeps undulating up and down like a wandering attention span. It’s easy to sympathize with the keyboard.

So now we have two gods. A douchebag named Wotan and his wild tomboy of a daughter by the name of Brünhilde...yes that’s right. Wotan looks like a mash-up of Captain Hook, C-3PO, and one of the reject trains from “Starlight Express,” and he acts like a cross between The Six Million Dollar Man and Cloris Leachman in “Young Frankenstein.” Brünhilde looks like a second-hand Raggedy Ann doll, who went shopping at a 99¢ store, in search of a Renaissance Fair costume.

Wotan tells her to go bridle her horse and intervene in the giant cat-fight between Hunding and Signmund…he tells her, “Brünhilde, when those two girls have at it, make sure Sigmund wins. He’s part of the family and, after all, we do for family. It’s nothing against Hunding. Honest! But he is a giant fat sack of crap, and Valhalla has no use for him. He’s a lot like your mother!”

Brünhilde responds to this with a series of shrill “Hojotoho” squawks…and wouldn’t you? This is either a battle cry or a sign that Brünhilde seriously needs to up her Xanax in the morning. She then climbs the mountain to deliver what feels like 54 more Hojotoho’s, and plays grab ass with her father. (Gross.)

As an audience, we are seriously concerned for Brünhilde. Not only because of her name, but because she’s clearly a loony lady singing loony tunes, and she’s climbing an equally mentally unstable set of giant piano keys that might swallow her whole if provoked. One has to question Wotan’s parenting skills. 

All of a sudden Fricka, a giant crap/worm lady with Marge Simpson hair and a space suit, appears from behind the keyboard and then glides forward in her La-Z-Boy recliner chair…she’s clearly not a very active woman. Plus she seems pissed. Really pissed. Alors, Mrs. Fricka decides to engage in a bitch match à la ”Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with Wotan.

FRICKA: “Wotan you dumbass!!! What the HELL is the matter with you? They are BROTHER AND SISTER for Valhalla’s sake! Has that glitter from your eye patch started to seep through?”

WOTAN: “Stop yelling woman! You’ll wake up the other Walküres and they’re so NOISY. I love Sigmund…I dunno there’s something about him. He’s my favorite illegitimate child”

BRÜNHILDE: “Hey! I thought I was your favorite illegitimate child!”

FRICKA: “Enough! Sigmund MUST die. I won’t have incest in addition to adultery in this family!”

WOTAN: “How’d you know about that???”

FRICKA: “Oh I don’t know…maybe it’s the fact that I live up here with Brünhilde and all her Brotha’s from Otha’ Mothas…genius?”

WOTAN: “oh…yeah that.”

FRICKA: “Anyway, Sigmund must DIE! I will not tolerate incest…for god sakes we’re Jewish…not from the Ozarks” 

WOTAN: “We’re Jewish??? How do you figure?”

FRICKA: “We’re greedy despicable characters in a Wagner opera…plus we die at the end.”

WOTAN: “Good point.”

FRICKA: “Now go kill me some Sigmund! RAAAAH!”

Fricka’s recliner recedes backwards on the keyboard. She’s then lowered beneath the stage, presumably to meet with Jabba the Hut’s attorneys over copyright infringement issues concerning stealing Jabba’s likeness.

(Story will continue in Die Walküre - Part 3)

For those of you that missed it…

http://idontgiveafach.com/die_walkurie.html

…yup

As operas go, the Met’s “Die Walküre” belongs right up there with the Empire State Building, Toys “R” Us and the Circle Line boat tours. It is hardly a triumph of art, but it’ll probably be a whale of a tourist attraction. It is Las Vegas without the sex, Mardi Gras without the booze and Madame Tussaud’s without the waxy stares. You don’t watch it, you gape at it, knowing that nothing in Dubuque comes close.

As expected, the singers seem to have been an afterthought to the giant rotating adult toy, aptly titled “The Machine.” It rises, lowers, undulates, causes health risks and even functions as a set from time to time.

We open with a giant piano center stage, storms violently scudding across it’s keys. Then the keys rotate to create a forest; Then middle C breaks apart, and hangs center stage, representing what looks like a tree with a sword wedged in it. We’re apparently in a den of some kind, but it just looks like a giant tree is hanging perpendicular to a giant keyboard. Oh, and it’s snowing in the background.

Suddenly, Germany’s answer to Denzel Washington stumbles into the den looking drunk or weary (or both) and is discovered by Anna Nicole Smith. He looks like a refugee from the Tyra Banks show because he has horrible fake hair extensions and is wearing one of her glittery blouses with an epaulet on his right shoulder. It’s sort of like: if a disco ball wandered into your room wearing a Fabio wig and a tortoise shell.

All hopped up on Oxy-Cotton, Anna Nicole instantly falls for Das Tenzel Vöshington and decides to nurse him back to health.

Suddenly, Anna Nicole’s first husband, Hunding, enters. He looks at her, then back at Tenzel Vöshington, then back at her, then back at Tenzel Vöshington. “Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies unt Gentlemen…vat zah hell ish going on in eere?” Anna Nicole retorts, “I think you’re fucking stupid…”

Baron Grumpy von Hunding Pants asks Tenzel Vöshington “Vaht ish your namen DICKVAD?” Instead of simply answering the question, Tenzel Vöshington (who it turns out is actually named Sigmund) replies, “Vell you kahn’t khol miene shtory heppy becaush miene shtory ish nichts heppy.”

Then Sigmund decides to play shadow puppets (for no reason) to tell the long and sad tale of his gruesome history…even though no one asked. The giant keyboard lowers to display a bunch of shadow cartoons courtesy of Disney. It’s not really clear what has actually happened to Sigmund (Tenzel Vöshington) because, as I said, it’s one f-ing LONG story, and all the shadows look exactly the same, so it’s not really clear who dismembered whom, or who made off with what corpse .

Once this exercise in literal-mindedness is finished, Hunding decides to kill Sigmund but, since it’s been a long day, he decides to kill Sigmund in the morning after he’s had his Shtarbucksen. 

Anna Nicole, then reaches under the stage, and pulls out a giant bong. She then proceeds to stuff it full of PRIMO Mary Jane and gives it to Das Hunding. Hunding then falls into a deep DEEP sleep. It must have been some grade-A weed she gave him, because he manages to sleep through a loud love duet that spans the whole of winter and, I’m guessing, the first two months of spring.

Queue the love duet. It’s long. But the most important thing to note is they’ve both been sitting in front of the giant middle C with the sword sticking out of it for about two hours now. It’s, literally, been hanging over their heads. 

Sigmund: You’re hot. Alzo miene faza said zat I vould pull a schvord from a tree?

Anna Nicole: Really? Well the only sword we have is that one (points to giant middle C.) My father predicted some hunk would pull it out someday. Hey, you look a lot like him.

Sigmund: Ja, you look A LOT like miene faza too. You even have hish woice; And hish hair; And hish eyes; And hish hot tempah. Boy zat schvord looks a lot like za one I’m supposhed to hef one day.

Anna Nicole: You don’t say? Well, I guess we’ll never know. You have my dad’s skin tone…and his DNA. Boy small world huh?

Sigmund: (Pulls the sword out from the giant middle C.)

Anna Nicole: Oh my god! EPIPHANY! You’re my brother! Let’s get married.

Sigmund: Okay…but virsht vee hef zex…lotsh and lotsh of zex.

Anna Nicole: FINE BY ME!

Anna Nicole then launches into a long extended aria about how much she loves her brother…in all the wrong ways. Sigmund fusses with his weave while pretending to listen to her.

Finally Sigmund’s long flowing locks are on full display, the music swells, the keyboard lowers, Anna Nicole faints…

(Scene)

Continue to part 2 of Die Walküre…

Eh….Ain’t Robert Lepage a stinker?

Die Walküre today! I Don’t Give a Fach will be blogging live during the intervals and telling everyone in the theater to SHUT THE F#%K UP!!!

I Don’t Give a Fach, is super excited for tomorrow’s live broadcast of “Die Walküre”. We’ll finally have a decent assessment of all the controversial aspects of this troubled saga. I am, of course, referring to Robert Lepage’s production and not Wagner’s popular masterpiece.

Namely, does “The Machine” really enhance Wagner’s story, or distract us Cirque du Soleil style? Is Bryn Terfel’s Wotan as problematic as everyone has claimed? What’s the current state of Debbie Voigt’s voice? Is she the Brünnhilde people predicted she’d be 5 years ago? Have the singers had any actual direction or are they just bellowing away looking slightly confused?

All these things and more shall be answered come tomorrow’s broadcast! For now I’d like to leave you with a quote that I came across. I feel it pertains to all the hullabaloo surrounding the “Ring” cycle…

“The scenery isn’t the direction. The scenery is a part of the whole production. The most important thing for me in ‘Ariadne’ is the study of these two women in love, and also an investigation into theater. And into the nuances of what’s being said. How it’s directed is incredibly important.” - Elijah Moshinsky on his Ariadne auf Naxos

By Zachary Woolfe April 26, 2011 | 4:57 p.m

Near the end of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections, turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It’s a breathtaking transformation, one that encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Mr. Lepage’s work.

This scenic shift takes place right after the god Wotan has been forced, harrowingly, to disown his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde. She lies on the ground in shock; he has turned away in grief. Our attention should be fixated on the tortured pair as the orchestra swells in solemn sympathy, but instead we watch in awe as the massive set—a series of enormous, seesaw-style beams that together weigh about 45 tons—noisily creaks its way upward. It’s only after 30 seconds or so, when the passage is over, that we remember that there are two people onstage in desperate pain. That Mr. Lepage has chosen to draw us away from them at this crucial interval turns out to be disastrously typical of his costly production.

Many people assume that the Ring is about size and splendor, but as Alex Ross observed in last week’sNew Yorker, the cycle is ultimately not about spectacle but is rather “a deconstruction of power, the dismantling of grandeur.” Tracing an eerily familiar story of the gods who want to hang on to power at any cost, as well as those who can glimpse a new world order, most of the Ring is, in fact, disconcertingly intimate—far closer to Ingmar Bergman than to Cecil B. DeMille. And yet too often in the new production, Mr. Lepage keeps giving us the DeMille—big, often gorgeous stage pictures—because, you suspect, he’s worried that the Bergman material isn’t enough to keep our attention.

In Walküre, the second of the Ring’s four parts, Mr. Lepage does some stunning things. As with his production of the cycle’s prelude, Das Rheingold, the beginning is a high point. He brings the opening storm to vivid life: We are in a sky full of dark, rushing clouds; then we are in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm; then we are inside a hut glowing with firelight. It is sweeping and evocative, showing off the set’s much-touted ability to swiftly morph into the cycle’s dozens of settings.

So Mr. Lepage understands the mixture of stylization and realism that can make us seem to see what we are hearing. But far too often, his interventions undermine his cast’s connection with the audience. There’s that scene change on the mountaintop, which diverts us from one of the opera’s most intense moments. Even worse, once the snowy mountain is in place and Wotan and Brünnhilde confront each other with heartbreaking candor, Mr. Lepage further undercuts the performers by distracting us with projections of avalanches. These have no inspiration in the libretto or score; they’re just punctuation, something to keep us from getting bored. But it’s hard to imagine anyone being bored by one of the most moving, riveting scenes in the opera, as Wotan finally forgives his rebellious daughter before abandoning her forever.

A sure sign that Mr. Lepage doesn’t quite trust the text he’s been given to interpret is that the most effective of Wagner’s radically extended monologues are the ones with which he feels most compelled to interfere. To Siegmund’s Act I description of his troubled childhood, Mr. Lepage adds an unfortunately Disney-ish animated shadow illustration of the story. Later, when Wotan tells Brünnhilde the dark story of the Nieblung’s ring, Mr. Lepage has an eyeball emerge from the floor; onto it he projects, dutiful as CliffsNotes, the narrative’s key images. But when you have, as Siegmund and Wotan, two of the world’s greatest singing actors—the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, respectively—you need to guide them and focus their emotions, not distract from them or compete with them for the audience’s attention.

As in Mr. Lepage’s Rheingold, the performers seem largely to have, if anything, been left to their own devices, a lack of cohesiveness not helped by James Levine’s erratic conducting, including a lethargic first act. Sometimes the absence of directorial attention worked out all right: Mr. Kaufmann, an intensely eloquent, intelligent singer, used his focused, dark tone to project Siegmund’s wounded cautiousness, his sense of isolation. The mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, a resplendent Fricka, seemed more vocally comfortable than she had in Rheingold.

But this is Wotan’s opera, dominated by his agonized monologues about his tragic lust for power, his fears about losing everything. While Mr. Terfel sings richly, he could, with the help of a more acute director, broaden his emotional range and turn a powerful performance into an unforgettable one. The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, making her Met debut as Sieglinde, seemed blandly generalized before withdrawing due to illness after Act I.

Perhaps most egregiously, Mr. Lepage hasn’t helped to guide the soprano Deborah Voigt, singing her first-ever Brünnhilde, past stock expressions of grief—fake crying and awkward contortions—in the final act. We should always respect the risk-taking that separates true artists from merely good singers, but Ms. Voigt was disappointing. As always, she was a warm, tender presence, pointing the text with clarity. But her tone has turned edgy and thin in the past few years. She now lacks the vocal flexibility to capture all the facets of this complex character, a task made more difficult in a production allergic to complexities.

The only complexities are, alas, logistical ones. Act I seems to take place behind a low wall, such that we only see the performers from the knees up. The set was noisy throughout the opera, and the huge planks bounced disturbingly as the singers climbed on them. On Ms. Voigt’s first entrance, she tripped trying to step onto a particularly steep section, and Ms. Blythe at one point seemed terrifyingly close to stumbling off the structure entirely.

These flaws, though, are minor and fixable. The production’s deeper problem is its utter lack of vision and lack of trust in the intelligence and power of the work and the talented cast. Mr. Lepage might justify his emphasis on visual splendor at the expense of a deep reading of this rich text as a post-ideological reaction to the grandly charged Ring stagings of directors like Patrice Chéreau. But it looks more and more like he just doesn’t have any ideas.

Next season brings Mr. Lepage’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Perhaps we should be optimistic: As Wotan says in Act II of Die Walküre, “Things can suddenly happen that have never happened before.” But Mr. Lepage’s Ring has thus far been so opposed to the spirit of the cycle that the prospect of the final two installments is more depressing than exciting.

By Zachary Woolfe April 26, 2011 | 4:57 p.m

Near the end of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections, turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It’s a breathtaking transformation, one that encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Mr. Lepage’s work.

This scenic shift takes place right after the god Wotan has been forced, harrowingly, to disown his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde. She lies on the ground in shock; he has turned away in grief. Our attention should be fixated on the tortured pair as the orchestra swells in solemn sympathy, but instead we watch in awe as the massive set—a series of enormous, seesaw-style beams that together weigh about 45 tons—noisily creaks its way upward. It’s only after 30 seconds or so, when the passage is over, that we remember that there are two people onstage in desperate pain. That Mr. Lepage has chosen to draw us away from them at this crucial interval turns out to be disastrously typical of his costly production.

Many people assume that the Ring is about size and splendor, but as Alex Ross observed in last week’s New Yorker, the cycle is ultimately not about spectacle but is rather “a deconstruction of power, the dismantling of grandeur.” Tracing an eerily familiar story of the gods who want to hang on to power at any cost, as well as those who can glimpse a new world order, most of the Ring is, in fact, disconcertingly intimate—far closer to Ingmar Bergman than to Cecil B. DeMille. And yet too often in the new production, Mr. Lepage keeps giving us the DeMille—big, often gorgeous stage pictures—because, you suspect, he’s worried that the Bergman material isn’t enough to keep our attention.

In Walküre, the second of the Ring’s four parts, Mr. Lepage does some stunning things. As with his production of the cycle’s prelude, Das Rheingold, the beginning is a high point. He brings the opening storm to vivid life: We are in a sky full of dark, rushing clouds; then we are in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm; then we are inside a hut glowing with firelight. It is sweeping and evocative, showing off the set’s much-touted ability to swiftly morph into the cycle’s dozens of settings.

So Mr. Lepage understands the mixture of stylization and realism that can make us seem to see what we are hearing. But far too often, his interventions undermine his cast’s connection with the audience. There’s that scene change on the mountaintop, which diverts us from one of the opera’s most intense moments. Even worse, once the snowy mountain is in place and Wotan and Brünnhilde confront each other with heartbreaking candor, Mr. Lepage further undercuts the performers by distracting us with projections of avalanches. These have no inspiration in the libretto or score; they’re just punctuation, something to keep us from getting bored. But it’s hard to imagine anyone being bored by one of the most moving, riveting scenes in the opera, as Wotan finally forgives his rebellious daughter before abandoning her forever.

A sure sign that Mr. Lepage doesn’t quite trust the text he’s been given to interpret is that the most effective of Wagner’s radically extended monologues are the ones with which he feels most compelled to interfere. To Siegmund’s Act I description of his troubled childhood, Mr. Lepage adds an unfortunately Disney-ish animated shadow illustration of the story. Later, when Wotan tells Brünnhilde the dark story of the Nieblung’s ring, Mr. Lepage has an eyeball emerge from the floor; onto it he projects, dutiful as CliffsNotes, the narrative’s key images. But when you have, as Siegmund and Wotan, two of the world’s greatest singing actors—the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, respectively—you need to guide them and focus their emotions, not distract from them or compete with them for the audience’s attention.

As in Mr. Lepage’s Rheingold, the performers seem largely to have, if anything, been left to their own devices, a lack of cohesiveness not helped by James Levine’s erratic conducting, including a lethargic first act. Sometimes the absence of directorial attention worked out all right: Mr. Kaufmann, an intensely eloquent, intelligent singer, used his focused, dark tone to project Siegmund’s wounded cautiousness, his sense of isolation. The mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, a resplendent Fricka, seemed more vocally comfortable than she had in Rheingold.

But this is Wotan’s opera, dominated by his agonized monologues about his tragic lust for power, his fears about losing everything. While Mr. Terfel sings richly, he could, with the help of a more acute director, broaden his emotional range and turn a powerful performance into an unforgettable one. The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, making her Met debut as Sieglinde, seemed blandly generalized before withdrawing due to illness after Act I.

Perhaps most egregiously, Mr. Lepage hasn’t helped to guide the soprano Deborah Voigt, singing her first-ever Brünnhilde, past stock expressions of grief—fake crying and awkward contortions—in the final act. We should always respect the risk-taking that separates true artists from merely good singers, but Ms. Voigt was disappointing. As always, she was a warm, tender presence, pointing the text with clarity. But her tone has turned edgy and thin in the past few years. She now lacks the vocal flexibility to capture all the facets of this complex character, a task made more difficult in a production allergic to complexities.

The only complexities are, alas, logistical ones. Act I seems to take place behind a low wall, such that we only see the performers from the knees up. The set was noisy throughout the opera, and the huge planks bounced disturbingly as the singers climbed on them. On Ms. Voigt’s first entrance, she tripped trying to step onto a particularly steep section, and Ms. Blythe at one point seemed terrifyingly close to stumbling off the structure entirely.

These flaws, though, are minor and fixable. The production’s deeper problem is its utter lack of vision and lack of trust in the intelligence and power of the work and the talented cast. Mr. Lepage might justify his emphasis on visual splendor at the expense of a deep reading of this rich text as a post-ideological reaction to the grandly charged Ring stagings of directors like Patrice Chéreau. But it looks more and more like he just doesn’t have any ideas.

Next season brings Mr. Lepage’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Perhaps we should be optimistic: As Wotan says in Act II of Die Walküre, “Things can suddenly happen that have never happened before.” But Mr. Lepage’s Ring has thus far been so opposed to the spirit of the cycle that the prospect of the final two installments is more depressing than exciting.

editorial@observer.com