Stefan Herheim is a director whose work I have learned to appreciate, and I don’t mean that this was an acquired taste, but mostly as the acknowledgment of a clear development in his style. Regardless of what he professes in his interviews, my first impression of his productions was of someone who didn’t like opera at all. His stagings were drained of emotional content, the plot was ridiculed, everything replaced by a joyless, restless sense of comedy as some sort of statement of nonconformity. As I believe that the entertainment industry is intrinsically dependent of comedy, staging tragedy these days is actually what requires some guts. Therefore, I couldn’t help finding the whole approach ultimately superficial. But then I saw his Bayreuth Parsifal, his Amsterdam Onegin and could finally see what he was truly capable of. That is why I was eager to see his Ring for the Deutsche Oper.
I have tried to keep an open mind, but this Siegfried made it difficult to me. In the performance booklet, the Dramaturg speaks of the importance of laughing in the Ring, but it seems that this translates into this staging exclusively in its laughableness. At moments, I looked around and saw members of the audience tsking in sheer Fremdscham. When you have the migrant agenda (whose relevance to the plot is still open to debate) reduced to refugees partaking in an orgy in the Brünnhilde/Siegfried duet, one is made to believe that the laugh is in one’s own expense. And I don’t mean this because I was shocked – this is the world of free porn! – but because it was just embarrassing. Even the extras looked disconcerted for being part of something so utterly lame. And there’s the omnipresent lapse of taste. We are made to see too many things that shouldn’t be there in the first place – angel-like winged Sieglinde and Siegmund in the forest scene, for instance. Especially when it seemed that the purpose of their presence was the need to disentangle the huge white fabric that is the single solution for every scenic instruction in the libretto. And the piano, of course. I don’t know, but people pretending to play a piano looks just ludicrous to me. And every character does that in this production. For instance, Siegfried crossing the magic fire here is nothing but a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonation.
The way I write makes it probably seem worse than it actually was – and maybe this is true. There was the occasional successful moment, of course: the basic scenic idea for the dragon is efficient (it ends poorly – with dancers!), the slightly psycho boy woodbird cheering over Mime’s death could be even scarier without the gags. As everything was overwrought and constructed, it was difficult for the audience to endorse it for more than 5 minutes without cringing.
Musically speaking, this performance is also so far the nadir in this Ring. This might be a matter of taste, but I believe that the score and the plot of Siegfried require a crisper performance, with a stronger sense of forward movement, firm accents, an impression of raw energy. Yet Donald Runnicles seemed to be stuck in Walküre mode here. Everything sounded basically comfortable and polite. When it was impossible to take refuge in Gemütlichkeit – as in the scene with Erda, the sensation was rather of awkwardness, the brass section a bit below its usual standards.
I don’t think I had ever seen Nina Stemme as the Siegfried Brünnhilde, and now I regret it, for even past her prime, she sang it very well. With the help of mezza voce, she acquitted herself commendably in some difficult high-lying passages, phrased with beautiful legato and generated warmth and affection. She pushed all her acuti and the final high c was something of a screech with a nondescript pitch, but still a classy performance.
This is the first time I hear Clay Hilley, without any doubt a Heldentenor: the voice is firm, the stamina ia admirable (he got tired only in the last 10 minutes), he is not afraid of the high tessitura, his German is clear and credible. Once you hear someone like Andreas Schager as Siegfried, you might get used to more ringing acuti, but Mr. Hilley’s tonal quality is maybe more spontaneous and he is very likable in the role in spite of an unheroic physique. In this sense, he was well contrasted with Ya-Chung Huang’s petit frame as Mime. The Taiwanese tenor displayed admirable command of the German language and the style, yet his voice is a bit soft-centered for the part. The lyrical quality of has its advantages, though: his singing as Mime was unusually smooth too.
Iain Paterson was clearly in stronger voice than in Die Walküre, and yet he still had to work hard in the competition with the orchestra and sounded fatigued in the scene with Siegfried. The evening’s Alberich, Jordan Shanahan too had a voice a bit velvety for the part, but could produce a cutting edge for his exposed high notes and came across as an unusually congenial. Tobias Kehrer too was rather smooth as Fafner, but Marina Prudenskaya, who stood in for the originally cast Erda, was not in her best form and had her ungainly moments.
I HEAR VOICES 
Your ongoing comments on the Herheim/Berlin/Runnicles Ring is a lifeline to those like me who have given up on live opera performances many years ago.
The productions are (with rare exception) sophomoric, self-absorbed, feckless wastes of time, money and talent.
Once, Herheim seemed a possible exception, but no. He is just another rich armchair socialist who fancies himself a Wunderkind whose notions of high-faluttin’ superiority render his ‘genius’ irrelevant. He’s just another political hack who has transformed our once grand opera houses into tawdry Punch and Judy venues.
I admire your fortitude and dedication.
The last truly great and brilliant Ring production I saw, and own, albeit on film, was the cycle from Amsterdam with Pierre Audi and Hartmut Haenchen in 1999. The cast was a mixed bag but fully in tune to Audi’s vision. Of course, the journalistic critics dissed it, because, I suspect, the cast wasn’t star-studded enough to hold their attention.
If Graham Clark’s Mime as The Fly didn’t grab them then they are beyond hope,
I digress. I look forward to your comments on Herheim’s Götterdämmerung. I expect Siegfried will be standing in the piano with a canoe paddling down the Rhine (in south Texas) smuggling members of the murderous MS13 thugs into El Paso.
Hello, Jeffrey!! What makes me sad is the “self-absorption”, you know, when an artist starts to have dialogues with his own imaginary audience instead of the people seating just right in front of him.
I haven’t seen the Audi Ring, but I’ve heard the audio and remember finding Nadine Secunde quite touching – in spite of some small shortcomings- as the Walküre Brünnhilde.