A friend who came to the Wagner Prom earlier this week has made some comments which I’d like to share.
“I had never been very fond of the Ring Cycle until I moved to New York and saw a romantic, traditional production with Hildegard Behrens at the Met; conducted by James Levine , and staging by Otto Schenk. This was back in the late 1980s/early 1990s and ever since then, I have never failed to be moved by the quartet, particularly Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung. I think I saw the same production several times over and bawled my eyes out both at the end of Die Walküre (Wotan saying goodbye to Brunhild) and of course the end of Götterdämmerung. I was equally moist-eyed on Monday.
I have of course seen some newer productions since then, some very bizarre, so perhaps a concert version is the best bet nowadays for us traditionalists, and Monday did not disappoint, but on the contrary was elating.”
Otto Schenk’s Met Ring is the stuff of legend.
“In the United States, Schenk is especially known for his lavish, realist, traditionalist stagings at the Metropolitan Opera, most notably his production of Richard Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen which was hailed by traditionalist Wagnerian opera fans as one of the closest productions to Wagner’s true vision. The production was retired from the Met in 2009.” (Wikipedia)
My friend has certainly burnished his operatic credentials – he needed to. The other two members of our party had both been to Wexford on the same night. It was the night that Bernard Levin was there; the night that the steeply raked stage was mistakenly polished and the singers slid slowly and inexorably down it. Homan was in the audience, Clodagh was one of those singers. We had royalty at the next table on Monday but I had operatic royalty with me. Another member of that happy band is Margaret Tinsley who remembers that glorious evening in My Wexford Years.
Yes, that Met Ring cycle was wonderful. I remember writing a grant proposal to travel from school to New York to see it, and being astonished when the foundation agreed to fund my opera habit. Behrens was uneven, but thrilling, and James Morris hadn’t yet developed that dry, brittle sound as Wotan. I believe it was the only time I saw Christa Ludwig live (as Fricka).
There was a brilliant sequence in Rheingold when they used the full range of the hydraulics to lift everything up several stories and give the sensation of descending below the Rhine. That always got applause, which the scandalized Wagner Religious shushed. (One always couldn’t help but hear in one’s head the voice of Anna Russell: “The scene opens in the River Rhine. IN it!”)
In a later run of that long-lived production, there was unintended drama when Behrens was hit on the head by a bit of Valhalla collapsing out of sequence. She was supposedly fine, but then canceled the Walkure with almost no notice, and the Met had no understudy. After a panicked search, they had to go with a debutante youngster who had never before sung the role. When Jessye Norman found out, she — always the diva — canceled, as well. So the Sieglinde was the understudy (Mechtilde Gessendorf, I think), who actually was quite seasoned and had sung Sieglinde before. The poor Brunehilde was obviously petrified, and almost had to be pushed out onto the stage. She struggled through it, managing to hit most of the notes, and won the sympathy of the audience. At the curtain call, she barely peeped ’round the edge, clearly afraid she’d be booed — and the audience gave her a standing ovation.
That production had all the good (a realistic, amazing mythological world, clever stage effects, usually fantastic casts, and the Met orchestra, which was then the finest opera group in the world) and much of the bad (anti-Semitic caricatures, stand-and-sing valkyries who periodically galumphed about the stage in a vain attempt to convey energy, the thrilling-but-deafening wall of orchestral sound that wrecks so many voices — including Behrens’, seemingly endless stretches without intermission, self-satisfied heldentenors who act as if they were in a silent film, etc.) of Wagner. It was a wonderful introduction to it all.
I remember hearing about the “waxed stage” incident. How amusing to hear not one, but two, first-hand accounts. I know you must vary the blog topics to keep the attention of your diverse readership (and of your own nimble mind, no doubt), but what a treat to have two opera posts this week.
Yes, your lucid and photographic memory has filled in some of the gaps in my memory banks. It was the most exhilarating of productions which as you say proved in my case a lasting introduction to the Ring Cycle.
There was one other apropos to that production (probably amongs many). Am I right that Eva Marton took over from Behrens but when they decided to broadcast the whole cycle on PBS (?), Behrens quickly donned her armour, much to Bartok’s chagrin, and after a contretemps with the Met, Bartok was not seen on the Met stage again ? Pity, as she was a powerful singer and presence.
Yes, indeed, though the Met was a bit more rude to Marton than that: they had asked her to do the Ring, and she had confirmed, and also agreed to learn another role. But then they realized they needed more footage of Behrens than they had gotten in the previous year’s Ring cycle in order to complete Levine’s much-desired video of the whole thing. So they “suggested” to Marton that she reduce the number of her performances so they could get more footage of Behrens. She was annoyed enough about the way they behaved that she withdrew from everything at the Met. Temperament was a forté. She didn’t make it back for almost a decade, I think, but eventually did some rather late-career Toscas and Turandots. Agree it was a pity: she was electrifying and intense, and her huge voice also had a surprising roundness and warmth to it. An old-school diva who at her best was thrillingly committed. What fun to revisit those years.