Everyday experience – Newspaper Kommersant No. 189 (7390) of 10/12/2022

Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen directed by Dmitry Chernyakov and musically directed by Christian Thielemann at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin was an event to remember for a long time. For the first time in forty years, since the famous “Ring” by Goetz Friedrich at the Deutsche Oper, a tetralogy was staged in Berlin, which is perceived as a large-scale statement about modern man, time and the most important problem of all time, free will. About the last part of the opera cycle – “The Death of the Gods” – tells Gular Sadykh-zade.

In the last part of the Wagnerian tetralogy, the death of the hero entails a universal catastrophe: from the sparks of the funeral pyre, soaring up to the sky, Valhalla lights up, lined with bundles of firewood (all that remains of the World Tree – the sacred ash). In the global fire, everything that exists burns down – and a new cycle of creation of the universe begins. Here Wagner quite consciously brings the mythology of the “Ring” closer to the teachings of the Upanishads about the cyclical nature of the creation and destruction of the worlds.

There is no fire in Dmitry Chernyakov’s play, just as there is no Siegfried’s funeral pyre, on which the loving Brunhilde (Anya Campe) ascends, longing to be reunited with her lover. Instead of a bonfire in the finale, we see a black space of the stage, devoid of signs of time and place, and finally we understand that in the coordinate system of Chernyakov’s “Ring” appearancelessness, emptiness and timelessness are a metaphor for freedom.

Brunnhilde is finally free: free from the enfilades and halls of the hermetic research center “Ash”, which for years has replaced the real world for its inhabitants; from an endless experiment on human nature; from the dictates and guardianship of Father Wotan; from the whims of men, whose toy she became at the behest of the same Wotan, the director of the institute. She walks across an empty stage with a travel bag in her hands, which she once handed over to her beloved Siegfried, cheerfully equipping him for a trip along the Rhine. Her mother, Erda, silently watches her daughter in the distance, holding a figurine of the Forest bird in her hands. And in the back of the stage, lines that Wagner never used in the final version of the libretto float slowly: “I am leaving the dream house; I’m running from madness forever. I close behind me the open gates of eternal becoming.

The purpose of the experiment was not achieved: after experiments on the dwarf Alberich and two generations of his own descendants, Sigmund and Siegfried, Wotan did not manage to bring out a stable type of “free man”. His entire life and scientific strategy suffers a crushing defeat. And he, completely decrepit, sadly looks at his grandson prostrate on a medical gurney, who was truly free only for a short time, while his sincere love for Brunnhilde lasted.

In the last part of The Ring, Chernyakov brings the main characters of the tetralogy onto the stage, even those whose appearance in the finale was not foreseen by Wagner: in The Death of the Gods, according to the libretto, the gods are present invisibly, only as doomed observers who have finally renounced active participation in life. of people.

The appearance of Wotan in the key scenes of the finale – during the mournful Funeral March, led by Christian Thielemann with such pathos and rhetoric that the throat seized with a spasm – imparted an unexpectedly pitiful meaning to the scene of mourning the hero. Because his own grandfather mourned him, frozen at the head like a mute embodiment of grief; the great Erda, the great goddess and mother of Brunnhilde, also appeared from the bowels of the earth, waking up from her eternal sleep to honor the hero.

Siegfried was killed by the half-dwarf Hagen (powerful and stately Mika Kares) – an evil power manipulator, the actual head of the Yasen Research Institute; killed not on the hunt, but in the gym, where the employees rested after the basketball match. A treacherous blow to the back was inflicted by the tip of a flagpole that hung on the wall – it was immediately clear that this flagpole was hanging here for a reason. The whole scene leading up to the murder is solved psychologically precisely, with a huge increase in tension: Siegfried, talking about how he killed the dragon and got the ring, recalls what the Forest Bird sang to him, and successively, step by step, moves in his memories to that the moment when she chirped to him about a beautiful warrior maiden sleeping on a magical rock surrounded by flames. The blow overtakes Siegfried at the moment when the memory of Brunnhilde and his true love returns to him. Andreas Schager played and sang this moment absolutely amazingly: his death cry, his horror and repentance, the way he opens one door with the last of his strength, then another, in order to find Brunnhilde and explain to her – one of the most important moments not only of the role , but the whole tetralogy. But his strength dries up, and Siegfried collapses in the same stress lab where Alberich was once tortured. And where he himself was recently examined by three laboratory assistants (mermaids, Daughters of the Rhine), with cute jokes, jokes, begging him for the same ring.

At this moment, Thielemann’s Funeral March sounds so majestic and doomed that you understand: that’s it now. This music, with inevitable crashing triads in C minor, timpani strikes and booming basses, is a mournful requiem not only for the hero, but for the whole world, which is destined to no longer exist.

Both famous symphonic episodes – “Siegfried’s Journey along the Rhine”, when the hero sets off by boat from the “Brunhilde Rock” down the river and reaches the possessions of the Gibihungs, and the same Funeral March – were played almost like a standard, with fantastic clarity, rhythmic and timbre clarity, when you hear everything down to the last note. To be honest, without Christian Thielemann and the Staatsoper orchestra, Chernyakov’s Ring would have lost at least half of its credibility. Because the musical events taking place in the orchestra pit turned out to be no less, and perhaps more important, than what was happening on stage.