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A Precise Drama with Music

Das Rheingold opens Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in Salzburg

The date for Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic to embark on their four-year Wagner adventure in Salzburg has not been chosen by chance. At the Easter Festival 2007, when the curtain goes up in the Grosses Festspielhaus for the premiere of Das Rheingold, it will be exactly 40 years since Herbert von Karajan began to realise his vision of founding a new festival which would make its mark on the Mozart city and enhance its attractiveness, as well as making a decidedly different interpretation of Wagner’s operas in contrast to the “holy” Green Hill of Bayreuth.

Whereas Karajan had all possible means at his disposal to position this idea of Wagner – with the Ring cycle at the centre – as a singular, original event, his successors have to come to terms with certain financial constraints. The new Salzburg Ring cycle is taking place in cooperation with the festival in Aix-en-Provence, where each separate opera is performed in the summer previous to the Easter Festival. That means that Das Rheingold was already heard in July 2006 in the Théâtre de l’Archevêché (the archiepiscopal theatre). The impressions gained by the writer of these lines indicate a clear narrative production, not burdened by mythological interpretations.

Production design (with Lilli Paasikivi and Sir Willard White). Photograph: Elisabeth Carrechio.

Sir Willard White. Photograph: Elisabeth Carrechio.

The French stage director Stéphane Braunschweig, director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, a man with experience of directing plays and opera, has also designed his own stage sets for Wagner’s Ring. It is a neutral, grey box. High up is a source of light, a window (on the world perhaps?). The only pieces of furniture are three small red velvet chairs where Wotan, the father of the gods is dreaming. A projection of water dominates the stage as the Rhine maidens, wearing white dresses, appear on hydraulically raised platforms and bridges and Alberich in a dust-coat. Then the family of the gods arrives and a story begins that goes wrong from the very beginning. Father has had a castle built but cannot pay the building contractors, the giants Fasolt and Fafner. These take mother’s sister as security until the money is raised.

Braunschweig is therefore not aiming at myths or fairy tales, or at models for explaining the world or philosophical considerations but at a stringently told psychological and comprehensible story close to our time. To what extent this concept works and to what extent it appears as a principle permeating the entire cycle, remains to be seen in the subsequent operas, as is true of all performances of the Ring. For Die Walküre, in summer 2007, a new festival hall is available for Wagner’s Ring in Aix-en-Provence. Das Rheingold was performed in the open air under the Mediterranean sky of the south of France and now has to be adapted for the Grosses Festspielhaus. In that respect we can certainly regard it as a second “premiere” when it is performed in Salzburg.

Four decades ago Herbert von Karajan aimed to achieve the greatest symphonic clarity and transparency in his interpretation of Wagner. The Berlin Philharmonic, world famous as a concert orchestra, had never before played opera. In 1967 and from then onwards they did so at a standard entirely focused on the specific sound of the orchestra. Karajan’s unmistakable sense of balance newly defined the cohesion between the pit and the stage, and he gave the orchestra a major role in conveying the drama of the music and of the story. He also demanded the highest degree of precise articulation from his singers.

Robert Gambill. Photograph: Elisabeth Carrechio.

Thanks to the CD edition which keeps the special sound of that time vividly in the ears of today’s observer we may now notice a surprising continuity in the new Rheingold. As we know from previous seasons in Salzburg, in elaborating the dramatic concept of the operas he conducts, Sir Simon Rattle aims to achieve a “speaking” balance between vocal and orchestral voices. Rattle began his first attempt at Wagner, Das Rheingold, one year before embarking on his Berlin – Aix-en-Provence – Salzburg expedition by rehearsing and giving a concert performance with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. It was breathtaking to experience the music drama as a “singing drama”. The acoustics of the Grosses Festspielhaus and the highly differentiated sound of the Berlin Philharmonic will probably create the right basis in the new interpretation in Salzburg. At any rate in casting the individual singing roles Rattle has not chosen powerful, heroic voices but singers who are clearly aware of the meaning of the words and can thus fully interpret their dramatic impact. Clarity is of the utmost importance in elaborating the work; this already became evident in Aix-en-Provence.

It is for that reason that the director puts particular stress on the dialogues. Movements in the stage area are reduced to a minimum. The scenic imagination remains transparent. A magical stage area of light as created by Günther Schneider-Siemssen and which became the hallmark of the Karajan productions will probably not be created in the new reading. Nevertheless, if things have not changed fundamentally since the performance in Aix-en-Provence nine months ago, audiences will be able to experience a slender, clearly articulated, precise drama with music, a compact and comprehensive story.

Karl Harb
Translation: Elizabeth Mortimer

Related information

• Richard Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen”: Programme 2007–2010
• Berliner Philharmoniker
• Sir Simon Rattle