Wagner’s Die Walküre, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 05.01.2022

Das Rheingold is the installment of the Ring in which directors use all their understanding of Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Politics to dazzle the audience with their ideas. Then there is Die Walküre with characters and their lives and passions and needs – and this is where we see if the Dramaturgie is just for show or not.

Stefan Herheim seems to be determined to prove that his concept is solid – even if he has to underline everything for us to see that. Sieglinde lives in a house made of suitcases – I’m ok with that, it is an unobtrusive idea. It is not a place where she wants to stay. Instead of the tree, there is the piano with the sword stuck in its keyboard. So, yes, she cannot play her own music, she doesn’t have a voice, that’s a powerful image. In act 2, the migrants are everywhere, watching and occasionally interacting with the gods. They are the audience – and this is a play. I don’t find this adds anything in terms of dramatic tension, but rather diffuses it – but, hey, maybe that’s just old silly bourgeois me wanting to entertain myself with make-believe human suffering… So, yes, Wotan is telling the story of why the world is going awry and why he is so alone just for the benefit of Brünnhilde’s eyes… surrounded by twenty people. In the Fricka/Wotan scene, they observe everything with a sympathetic look, for, yes, it’s not as if they had bigger personal problems to think about…  The third act begins with the actors in this mythical play (the Valkyries) surprised by the fact that the audience is there and the show had already begun. It was cool, we laughed, that’s something you can do when you don’t have money for flying horses. And then there’s the Valkyries being sexually assaulted by the extras – but that one I’ll leave for the director’s shrink to explain. So, yes, it’s all there, but so what? It all seemed like patina over these people’s predicaments. 

And yet the director proved to have some interest in the petite histoire within this big story – here Sieglinde has a son with Hunding, a Malatestino-like pre-teen with a sick smile and a fondness for playing with knives. He is so poorly treated by everybody that he develops an immediate affection for Siegmund: he might be a stranger overtly flirting with his mother in his father’s house, but he is nice. So, put yourself in Sieglinde’s place: you’re stuck in a gloomy old house with a brutal husband and a psychopathic son until one day a nice guy comes along and he was big and strong and he even liked the weirdo kid. What would you do? Cut your own child’s throat just for the fun of it?! Well, my friends, that’s what Sieglinde does here. When she gets to the Walhalla, she obviously finds her own hell loop in the ghost of her murdered child. There’s a TV series about that, and if you watched it, you’ll know it’s all about guilt. And so Mr Herheim explains – in act 2, the passion is gone, Sieglinde worships an idealized version of Siegmund and is embarrassed for soiling his reputation with her own shame. And is there a better way to show all that than inventing a filicide? Of course not…!

The big question is :  ok, but does this work scenically? Occasionally, generally when no new idea was being staged and it just looked like any performance of Die Walküre. There’s a problem of kitsch here too – like the tree growing from the piano with video projections worthy of a videoclip of a song by Lionel Richie. And, man, it was cold, the gags making it even less relatable. It made me think of Guy Cassiers’ production for the Lindenoper with nostalgia. I wasn’t a fan of it – but in the end there were no dry eyes in the audience (me being bourgeois again, I know). And Daniel Barenboim had a great share of responsibility. He probably threatened to fire everyone if there was one dry eye in the audience, I guess. I don’t know – it just worked. 

Here Donald Runnicles has a strong asset in a world-class Wagnerian phalanx in the pit, but a problematic cast on stage. I have never understood the idea behind Brandon Jovanovich as a Wagnerian tenor. For me the sound lacks core and seems to spin backwards rather than forward around a high f and above. This evening the inaudibility and difficulty in holding a phrase was such that even a nay-sayer like me was expecting someone to announce him as indisposed. That happened in the first intermission. This alone involved the conductor reining in his orchestra in an almost baroque-ensemble level of volume. The strings coped famously with lustrous passagework and velvetiness of tone. But you could hear the frustration in the sound of that Wagnerian brass section. In other words, this compromised the sound picture in an almost irreversible way. The fact that we had a small-scale Wotan in Iain Paterson did not help it either. As in the scenes with Sieglinde and Siegmund, one could clearly notice the orchestra being dimmed for his every utterance. And he got tired in spite of that midway his big act 2 monologue. All that said, Mr. Paterson’s bass baritone has an appealing sound, he sings in the right style and delivers the wordy text with sense of line. Only in act 3, the conductor finally found an ideal balance by letting the orchestral sound overshadow his Wotan whenever the music really demanded it while cutting him some slack in the more lyrical moments. 

Among the male singers, only Tobias Kehrer displayed a truly Wagnerian voice as a dark-toned Hunding, almost congenial in tonal warmth. In any case, cherchez la femme. Elisabeth Teig was a lyric, creamy-toned Sieglinde who phrased with affection and Inningkeit. She had to work a bit hard to keep up with the more outspoken moments, but could do that without loss of color and focus. Although Annika Schlicht operates on a restricted tonal palette (especially in the upper half of her voice), she offered a classy account of the part of Fricka, with ideal word pointing, sharp sense of rhythm, good projection and charisma.

And there was Nina Stemme as Brünnhilde. This Swedish soprano has been singing dramatic roles for more than a while and one can feel that the trigger point for pushing top notes seats a bit lower than it used to in her prime. But still, her voice retains her hallmark fullness and the volume is all one wants in a big auditorium. I have to say that, in a way, I believe she is more satisfying than in the days her means were even more generous and she would now and then lack focus in her middle register. Hers was not the most exciting or touching account of the role (Barenboim could extract more from her in this department when I saw them at La Scala some years ago), but it was richly and sensitively sung – what proved to be essential to lift this performance above the prevailing okness.