Richard Wagner, Die Walküre:  Soloists and orchestra of L'Opéra de Marseille (new production) Marseille, France.  23.5.2007 (MM)

 

 

Wagner's nine Valkyries landed noisily on the stage in Marseille (5/16/07) just six weeks before this second instalment of Wagner's tetralogy hit another stage thirty kilometers up the road at the Aix Festival.  This unpretentious Marseille event has set the bar fairly high for an inevitable Marseille/Aix Walküre competition.

The Marseille Walküre is apparently the only survivor of a complete Marseille Ring which back in the 1990's got as far as a Siegfried before community poverty precluded such excess.   Further intermission intelligence suggested that the thwarted Ring was a mise- en-éspace (staged with costumes and lights, no scenery), and that the current version was a resurrection of its original 1996 staging, though an infusion of money  allowed the addition of scenery. Happily it is not the resumption of another larger Ring project that would serve only to usurp too much of Marseille's  small season.

In this production the obvious detail in the staging was striking. Perhaps originally lacking the scenographic means to display a concept, led stage director Charles Roubaud to illustrate Wagner's text with literal actions, abstracted only inasmuch as they were acted without  props, i.e. sword, swords, spears or staves and with the pivotal Hunding /Siegmund duel taking place off stage.  The resulting intimacy of this approach rendered Wagner's characters human rather than godlike, prosaic rather than legendary.

The Marseille stage provides an intimacy with which is quite unusual for a proscenium theater, and also an even rarer acoustic that permits every word and nuance of voice to sail over its bright and present pit.  It is a fine theater and   Marseille's excellent cast took advantage of these attributes to play Wagner's drama to the hilt, vocally and histrionically.   Albert Dohmen, Wotan, used his black low notes and bright upper register fully, sometimes falling into a sort of sprechtstimme to effectively color the extended Wotan monologues, making them vivid enactments of the conflicted state of this vulnerable god.  Simply cloaked without hat and eye patch, Dohmen's presence was huge, his ample physique underlining Wotan's human vulnerability rather than his heroic lineage.

Janice Baird's  Brünnhilde was vocally and physically heroic, her voice rising easily  above her eight sisters.  Her  palpable warrior energy gave way to a quite visible vulnerability when subjected to Wotan's wrath, acted certainly, but intensified by a discernable sense of her perhaps early middle age.  This Brünnhilde was a woman  not a girl, making the human stakes in this scene keenly felt.

The nine, mature voiced Valkyrie sisters, unarmed and shieldless, were very effectively costumed by Katia Duflot in filmy skirts and constructed tops suggesting armor while exposing ample décolletage.  This ensemble tore the stage up  vocally in its justifiably famous scene, here sung by real, big voices, not young-artist program apprentices.

The Siegmund of Torsten Kerland was beautifully sung, his ample physique revealing both his character' naiveté and  his wolf-man origins.  The Sieglinde of Gabriele Fontana was equally impressive, her somewhat excessive ardor making her a believable victim. These were both appropriately sized, healthy younger voices that gave vibrant life to Walküre's stand alone first act music.  Convincing presences both vocally and histrionically were Artur Korn's  Hunding of and the Fricka of Sally Burgess, whose costume, an abstraction of mythical forms, perhaps would have been just right in the original mise-en-éspace.

Richard Wagner fancied himself a philosopher, and perhaps in the Ring,  some sort of theologian.  The simplicity of his ideas, their grandness, and their basic appeal (the power of love, the evil of money) are integral to the Wagnerian poetic.  This opera's story of incest and adultery, of marital and family squabbles taken literally, without Wagner's philosophical frame, is hard to fit to the idealized Wagner musical continuum.  It was Richard Strauss who knew how to deal with such subject matter.

The setting of the Marseille Walküre could have provided the needed conceptual framework for the production but did not.  Credited in the program to Michel Hamon as "dispositif scénique" or scenic plan rather then as "decors",  the stage picture was a neutral dark space, sometimes fully covered with a transparent screen (scrim). At other times,  smaller oblong screens descended, and other very narrow oblong shapes with an angular cut at the bottom (get it?) were also present.  Images, abstract shapes generally, were projected onto these various screen forms to suggest both places (Hunding's hut) and physical objects (cups, swords, spears) whose uses were mimed by the singers.

The best moments of this  Walküre occurred when the "dispositif scénique" was forgotten for a few minutes, the stage cleared of apparatus and image, and the original mise-en-éspace merged into the musical continuum through the use of lights. Lighting designer Marc Delamézière did indeed provide some fine, musically motivated stage pictures effected by  sculptural side lighting, and his use of bright light, white light, shadow and darkness.

Video segments, realized by Gilles Papain, were projected onto these various screens at the obvious moments in the story (the ride of the Valkyries, the ring of fire) but also at inopportune moments (a center stage, ten meters tall, blinking Brunnhilde eavesdropping on Siegmund and Sieglinde huddled in a corner).  Certainly not inexpensive to realize, the flatly projected elements of this production looked like expedient cheap solutions.  Worse, they deprived the stage of dimensionality, belying the Wagnerian poetic, the over-riding attribute of which is its sense of philosophic and emotional depth.  At once the scenic elements were simultaneously not enough, too much, inappropriate, unmusical, and rarely but sometimes effective.

All this contributed to a musicality that was finely detailed though sometimes tedious.  How much of the tedium should be attributed to the conductor Friedrich Pleyer is hard to know as the staging  was so out of balance with Wagner and the pit.  While the big orchestral moments were sufficiently grand, maestro Pleyer's Walküre finally never did catch fire though he gave, like all the stage players and the orchestra, a fine and committed performance.  On then, to Aix.

 

Michael Milenski

Pictures © Christian Dresse