The Ring at the Met # 4: The Joyful Victory of "Siegfried"

Okay, before we get down to business, let's see if anyone remembers this line:  "He's very young, and he's very handsome, and he's very strong, and he's very brave, and he's very stupid."  I'm sure my friends, who know my lifelong love for the wickedly on-target musical satires of Anna Russell, were probably wondering when her (in)famous take on Wagner's Ring would make an appearance.

This is definitely the time, because -- notwithstanding Russell's heavy dose of sarcasm -- the hero of the third opera in the tetralogy, Siegfried, really is all of those things (although in fairness, "naïve" is a better descriptor than "stupid").  And it's these precise qualities that do so much to lighten the atmosphere and the mood of Siegfried, especially when viewed in opposition to the doom and gloom surrounding so much of the total story of the Ring.

It's ironic that Siegfried is, in many places, absolutely a comic opera (chuckles were erupting all over the house at regular intervals), and yet it's dominated until the last scene by low voices and features some of the darkest orchestral textures Wagner ever composed -- heavy reliance on the lower instruments of the orchestra, with especially dark sonorities for the famous forging scene, and most of all for Fafner's cavern.

It's even more ironic that, perhaps because of the comic elements, Wagner felt sure that Siegfried would be the most popular of the four Ring operas.  Ummm -- not.  Thanks to the handy little tally that the Met always displays in the house programme, I now know that I witnessed the 541st performance of Die Walküre in Metropolitan Opera history, versus the 273rd performance of Siegfried.  

Buoyancy and optimism are as essential to the singer as they are to the character, because the role of Siegfried is -- beyond question -- the heftiest challenge any composer has ever handed to a dramatic tenor.  Indeed, the common use of the German term heldentenor ("heroic tenor") to describe this type of voice can be traced back to Siegfried more than any other opera.  A complete performance of the title role in Siegfried is like a pentathlon for the vocal cords and diaphragm muscles.  A singer who approaches this challenge unprepared, or in a worried or otherwise pessimistic mood, will get eaten alive by the music.

On the dramatic side, the biggest challenge of the lead role is age.  That's because it takes years for a singer's voice to grow and settle to the point where tackling this role even becomes an option -- and not a few singers' careers have come to a crashing halt in part because they took on Siegfried and other heldentenor roles before their voices were actually ready.  So, with the ideal heldentenor approaching age forty, you then have the problem of making him appear and act on stage as not just a much younger man, but actually a teenager!  It doesn't help any that so many singers of the heldentenor type run to weight (including both Siegfrieds that I've seen in previous live performances).

For the producing opera house, there's the necessity (and it is absolutely that) of booking one of the few available heldentenors several years in advance, and then crossing your fingers and hoping like mad that nothing goes wrong.  Accidents, illnesses, career-ending injuries -- even a common cold can threaten a long-planned staging of this opera.  The first time this Metropolitan Opera production was mounted, the scheduled tenor did become ill and the Met had to find a replacement Siegfried on very short notice of less than a week.  They did find him, in the person of Jay Hunter Morris -- and saving the Metropolitan Opera's bacon like that is a definite launching-pad experience for any singer's later career!

So let's start on the actual performance right there.  I've seen the 2011 staging of the same production in the Cineplex and on video, and there's far more stage business in the show now than there was in that previous take.  I'd be willing to bet that much of it went by the board in 2011 simply because Morris had so little time to settle into the role, adjust to his colleagues, and get the feel of the stage before having to get out there and give it a go.

No such problems this year, and Andreas Schager convincingly turned the clock back to present a firebrand of teenaged temperament, running the gamut in seconds from mercurial high spirits to brooding introspection.  At times, his vocal explosions became a shade too explosive for my liking, although well within acceptable limits.  At several points in his arguments with Mime, the tone became harsh under pressure as he let his anger at the dwarf rip.  On the other hand, his voice became positively silky in his quieter singing, creating beautiful tone apparently without effort when wondering about his mother or during the forest murmurs scene.  His powerhouse performance soared to great heights in the final love duet, and he hit the finish line of the marathon without any apparent sense of strain to be heard.  Dramatically, too, Schager projected all the aspects of the character with both conviction and a strong sense of having fun -- which let us enjoy the fun in the work as well.

The entire first act stands or falls by the partnership between Siegfried and Mime.  The role of Mime presents its own challenges, demanding a nimble, flexible voice, rapid-fire articulation, and the ability to project multiple aspects of a sweetly manipulative yet unimaginative schemer.  No getting around it, Mime is not nice -- but the audience still has to care a bit about him if the whole of Act 1 isn't going to land with the dull thud of a flop.

In this performance, Gerhard Siegel absolutely hit the sweet spot on all of those requirements.  His voice definitely fit the bill, and his shambling physicality, endless hand-wringing, and vividly expressive face telegraphed every inch of his schemes -- and his corresponding doubts and fears.  For me, the key point was that he actually convinced me to buy into his stupidity in the riddle scene with the Wanderer (Wotan).

All the qualities that distinguished Michael Volle's performance as Wotan in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre continued into Siegfried.  Volle clearly showed us the paradoxical nature of the god's thoughts at this point.  At one moment he accepts with resignation and even with relief the impending end of his rule, and at the next rails against his fate and struggles to avert it.  While this paradox appears openly in the first two scenes of Act 3, it was both implied and -- even more -- heard in Volle's acting and singing at many points in the first two acts.

Also present was a cruel streak in the character (an aspect I don't recall encountering before) in the concluding moments of the riddle scene.  This sense of cruelty added another dimension to the Wanderer's personality, and made him seem more human as he struggled in an all-too-human way with his dilemma.  Notable, too, was the depth of his dejection after the moment when Siegfried shatters the divine spear.  In face and voice, Volle showed us that in truth the sword broke him too, and thus he created a heart-rending sensation of loss.

Tomasz Konieczny sang as clearly and as flexibly as before in the role of Alberich.  Both musically and dramatically he deployed the mixture of fear and excitement with which he greeted the rousing of Fafner.

One of the intriguing directorial decisions in this production is the concept of having the dragon turn back into Fafner-as-giant after Siegfried stabs him through the heart.  This was handled convincingly and gave Dmitry Belosselskiy another chance to appear physically as well as singing -- since the voice of Fafner-as-dragon is done from offstage with amplification.  In every way, he achieved his finest moment of the cycle in this death scene, infusing his singing with an underlying sense of regret as if he himself now understood the enormity of how and where his life had gone off the rails.

Soprano Erin Morley did lovely work in the Woodbird's melismatic carolling.  Also important in this forest scene was the virtuoso playing of Erik Ralske in the critical onstage horn solos.

For me, the acid test of orchestra and conductor in the entire cycle is the performance of the prelude to Act 3 of Siegfried.  This complex interweaving of motifs accurately depicts in music the storm and stress in Wotan's heart as he confronts his fate, and it's important to keep the interwoven textures clear.  With a tempo slower than one commonly encounters, Philippe Jordan and the orchestra totally hit the target zone with as clear a performance as I've ever heard, one that lacked nothing in force and fury yet still kept all the strands of the musical argument distinct.  It rose to the most thunderous of all thunder rolls -- I could feel the air quivering around me.

The ensuing mountain scene with Erda crackled with dramatic tension of another sort.  Where she remains partially imprisoned in the earth in Das Rheingold, Erda here ascends out of her fastness and moves about the stage.  This allows her more freedom to explore and express her own fear and bewilderment as the world spins out of control around her.  The Wanderer in this scene actually seizes her a couple of times, a move that's dramatically effective to say the least.

I'm less certain about her costume.  A plain black robe in the first opera here becomes a robe covered with faceted black mirrors, which sets the reflected rays of stage light darting restlessly all over the auditorium.  This is a rare miscalculation in the costume department, appearing at once garish and just plain tacky -- not to mention becoming a scene-stealing nuisance.  It reminded me of Liberace's suits covered with sequins -- no lie.

Karen Cargill gave an impressive performance as the Primeval Mother Goddess here, the voice both powerful and assured with little sign of the broad vibrato that I heard on the first night.

And so, finally, we come in the very last scene to the wakening of Brünnhilde.  Needless to say, everyone is waiting for the last and greatest laugh of the entire show -- the moment when Siegfried removes her helmet, then starts backwards and exclaims, "Das ist kein Mann!" ("That is no man!").  Or, as Anna Russell so succinctly put it, "He's never seen a woman before -- so he doesn't know what she is -- but he soon finds out."

Christine Goerke gave another rich, assured performance as Brünnhilde in this final scene, right from her opening invocation to the sun.  As with her father at the beginning of the act, Brünnhilde also has to struggle with the loss of her divine power and inviolability.  Goerke gave a magnificent account of the fears that trouble the character as she confronts her inevitable diminution.  But she allied that fear with the new nobility that human Brünnhilde will bring to the task of setting the world right, a task already foretold for her in the Erda scene.  Vocally, she became the equal of Andreas Schager in the final ecstatic moments of their love duet, ending with a rock-steady final high note.

With this team, Siegfried received an impressive performance, building on the strengths we already discovered in the first two operas and adding new strengths in several key areas.  Another magnificent evening of music drama at the highest level of quality.