Opera of distant research – Newspaper Kommersant No. 187 (7388) dated 10/10/2022

The Berlin State Opera continues the premiere of Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen directed by Dmitry Chernyakov under the musical direction of Christian Thielemann. About the third part of the cycle – the opera “Siegfried” – tells Gular Sadykh-zade.

The central episode of “Siegfried” – the epic battle with the dragon – ends with the victory of the hero. But in the introduction to the opera, the leitmotif of the dragon sounds even more frightening: in the deepest, gloomy, like a cave, bass register, the serpentine motifs of the contrabassoons are secretly tossing and turning – just like a reptile unhurriedly unfolds its rings. Christian Thielemann conveys this impending horror with such suggestion, with such an undercurrent of gloomy drive that goosebumps run through the skin even before the curtain rises. However, when it rises, we again see the endless auditoriums, offices and laboratories of the ESCHE (Ash) research center invented by Dmitry Chernyakov, which slowly, like the same dragon, crawl on a turning circle.

Three elderly librarians are busy in the file cabinet, in their appearance the former mermaids, the Daughters of the Rhine, are hardly guessed. And it is already clear that they are destined to turn in the last part, “The Death of the Gods”, into prophetic Norns, spinning the yarn of the fate of gods and heroes. In the meeting room, under the golden bas-relief portraits of Wagner, Beethoven, Goethe and Tolstoy, assistants sit relaxed; they disrespectfully ignore Wotan who burst into the hall; the aged director no longer causes the former thrill, and his power has significantly diminished over the years.

Chernyakov builds his “Ring” as a saga about different generations – and in this he is by no means original. Beginning with The Ring of the Century by Patrice Chereau and Pierre Boulez in Bayreuth, many directors have resorted to a similar interpretation of the events of the Ring. Chernyakov, in addition, is already being reproached for having emasculated the flourishing, complex, branching mythology of the Ring, preferring a rather dryly rational explanation of what is happening: a long scientific experiment is underway to establish whether it is possible to control human nature, his mental and sensory processes. The purpose of the experiment is to try to develop a new type of person who has free will and is not subject to manipulation. However (and, knowing Chernyakov, we can assume that he compromised on this issue), the main magical objects of the Wagner epic are present in this director’s version. A ring of power flashes on Wotan’s finger in Rhine Gold; the sword Notung, although pulled out of the mezzanine, and not at all from the trunk of the World Tree, is in the Valkyrie; and even the spear of Wotan, the source of divine power, appears momentarily in his hands.

The experiment has already gone through three stages and dragged on for years, so in the third part the heroes of the tetralogy became noticeably decrepit. Wotan (the most magnificent Michael Folle, demonstrating miracles of endurance and artistry) over the years has lost his dignity and impressiveness, becoming a disappointed, degraded old man. Dwarf Mime (the beautiful tenor Stefan Ruegamer) from a slender young man with developed muscles and undoubted intellectual inclinations turned into a bald, untidy homebody; his brother Alberich (Johannes Martin Krenzle) generally moves with the help of a walker – which does not prevent him from habitually commanding Mime and swinging at him. And only the young and wild Siegfried, a sunny hero, a child of nature and forest (inimitable, quick as mercury, Andreas Schager), brings life, movement and humor to the dull life of the old people, laughing, gesticulating vigorously, questioning – and in the end achieving what you want.

And he wants to find love. Realizing that Mime is not his father, he happily dreams of finding a mate for himself, sad that he did not see his parents, listens to the bewitching rustle of the forest … And he is unaware that while he was crushing his nursery with a hammer, performing a symbolic act of renunciation from childhood, Wotan watches with interest from his childhood, his outrages and a cheerful fire made of toys, on the other side of the mirror window – just like he watched his twin children in the previous “series”. Yes, and the apartment is the same, only now Mime and his pupil Siegfried live in it, whom Mime tries in vain to teach fear.

The scene with the Forest bird is also placed in an exploratory context: a graceful young laboratory assistant appears in front of Siegfried with a bird in her hands (and Victoria Randem’s sonorous, sparkling, gently iridescent coloratura soprano embellished this scene very much). Like the meeting with the notorious dragon, which the giant Fafner turned into in the Wagnerian libretto.

During the next phase of the experiment, Siegfried finds himself in a room where two frightening-looking nurses bring a chained, disheveled Fafner: he is muzzled, in a straitjacket, which suggests that the former leader of the organized crime group is kept in a madhouse. Fafner is freed from his fetters and left alone with a chuckling, mockingly relaxed – hands in trousers – Siegfried, who does not seem to understand the danger posed by a madman.

Andreas Schager on his Facebook (the activities of Meta (social networks Facebook and Instagram) are banned in Russia as extremist.— “b”) boasted that he became a real hero in the eyes of his four-year-old son after he defeated the “dragon”. Indeed, the battle scene is built breathtakingly dynamically, like a real duel: strangulation techniques, throws, and ground fuss are used, in the end, Siegfried manages, snatching Notung’s broken blade from his backpack, to plunge it into Fafner’s side.

Wagner wrote Siegfried for a long time, interrupted for years, and this circumstance could not but affect the tempo and style of the opera; Siegfried, with all its musical beauties and important content – it is here that Wagner reveals his main character to the world – is a static and rather resonant composition. Therefore, it is especially difficult to put on Siegfried. Chernyakov, nevertheless, tries to comment on stage in detail the endless dialogues, huge monologues and lengthy duets, games of riddles and riddles between Mime and Wotan (from which we learn the “summary of the previous episodes”), Mime’s evasive answers to the pupil’s questions about his origin and birth .

In the third act, the director’s desire to “delimit”, to level out the excessive pathos of the first words of Brunnhilde (Anya Campe) waking up from a long sleep – “Hello, sun! Hello world! Hello world! – makes him come up with an unexpected move. The heroes, as if performing the prescribed roles for someone else watching, wink between phrases and silently laugh. In my opinion, the unspeakably beautiful responses in the orchestra, painted with delicate dawn colors, and the harp chords rising like waves of warm air at this moment categorically contradict what is happening on the stage. (By the way, Campe, who at one time sang Sieglinde in Bayreuth’s “Ring” by Frank Castorff and Isolde in Chernyakov’s “Tristan”, did not quite satisfactorily cope with the part of Brünnhilde; the singer each time took high notes with great tension, on a cry and on a separate breathing.)

And there was no sleep on a rock surrounded by a raging flame – all for fun. Brunnhilde, disobeying the expressed order of the father-director, was expelled from the research institute in the finale of “Valkyrie”, but now she has returned and took part in the final phase of the experiment. Wotan leads her by the hand to the same laboratory where Alberich was once tortured with electrodes. And she, as if nothing had happened, lays down on a medical gurney, depicting a deep sleep. Instead of Granet’s horse, a plush conic is placed on the windowsill; instead of fire, the girl draws conditional flames with a pink felt-tip pen on the glass; instead of armor, the maiden is covered with a shiny cloth. In its own way, a variant of the “Formula of Love”: is it possible to artificially create conditions under which a spark will run between the participants in the experiment and love will break out? But the feeling that Siegfried and Brünnhilde experience in the end turns out to be genuine, not invented. The experiment was a success. And the final burst of the orchestra is an absolutely real apotheosis of love, light and happiness.