Wagner’s Siegfried, Opernhaus Zürich, 14.03.2023

After a promising start with Das Rheingold, Zurich’s new Ring took a dubious turn with a lacklustre Walküre, musically and dramatically all over the place. I had misgivings about Siegfried. It it is always the one scheduled for a Thursday in a one-week cycle, and I’ve been through performances of this work in which I was basically very tired. After a day in the office, I braced for a second shift in the opera house. Well, things turned out quite differently. Even at its less exciting, this was an interesting account of the third instalment of the Ring. “Interesting” is a word nobody likes to use but me. If a long opera performance can keep your interest after hours, then this is something that deserves mention. Siegfried is the testosterone-high opera in the tetralogy – the tenor works hard to produce big Spitzentöne and is half-dead by the end of act 2, the whole thing is usually brassy and massive, the acting is heavy-footed, everything is written in capital letters. This is why I was so surprised when the word “Mendelsohnian” occurred to me when I tried to make sense of what I was hearing.

The Zurich Ring can’t help being a fascinating experience: it is not a Wagnerian temple by any definition, it is a small venue, its orchestra is not Germany-level, the Italian conductor is almost asking the audience permission to dare to step into this repertoire and the casting has some surprising names in key roles. In other words, the creative team here cannot fly on autopilot here – you need a concept to make sense of all that. I mean, you could try your luck and see what happens (as it seems to have been the case with Die Walküre), but, well, better not. Here, however, the fact that the world’s official Lohengrin, Klaus Florian Vogt, was debuting in the title role obliged both conductor and stage director to make adjustments. In musical terms, decisions had to be made in terms of volume, tempo and phrasing. Basically, conductor Gianandrea Noseda established an airy orchestral sound, a very regular beat and an approach that meant that everything should be clear and transparent. This all sounds obvious and predictable, but in practical terms it is less simple than it seems at first. And that is why everything was so interesting. The first scenes, for instance, seemed a bit empty without huge and/or penetrating tenor voices and a certain roughness and boldness of sound. When a bass-baritone of heroic proportions (i.e., our Wotan) made his appearance, the proceedings seemed to go into a more classically Wagnerian direction, the orchestra was louder when he was on, for instance. But again the Mime/Wotan scene is one of those really challenging scenes for not truly experienced Wagner conductors – it is looser in structure and the maestro has to work hard to give it coherence. A regular beat seems like a good idea, but it rarely works – the music is Protean by nature and it required a great deal of micromanagement from the maestro if he wants to produce a sense of dramatic effectiveness. Then we reached the scene with the forging song. I cannot truly say that this was the most exciting Wagnerian display in my life, but it was so refreshing to hear it as just like… a song. The tempo was comfortable, the tenor didn’t produce any wow-ish high note, but it all felt cantabile and organic – and maybe truer to the scene. This is no confrontation – it’s just Siegfried confidently forging his song in very good mood, while Mime is happy too that his plan is starting to look like it’s gonna happen. Even if the house orchestra is not competitive if one thinks of what goes on in Berlin, Munich, Dresden or Vienna, the strings were flexible enough and there was a lot of Italianate zipping passagework (which I always like in Wagner).

Siegfried rarely sounds long-winded, there is a lot going on musically and in terms of plot, but this evening it felt almost short. One hardly noticed how long the opera actually is. The second act is the one naturally apter for the lighter approach. All dramatic confrontations actually abound in humor: Wotan makes fun of Alberich, the dragon makes of everybody, the woodbird scenes are pure slapstick, everybody is mid-laugh when Mime is murdered. If that was the best part of this evening, this also means that the third act was the less immediately successful. Yes, the Erda/Wotan scene is the more classically Wagnerian moment in the score and it needed more orchestral weight and Furtwänglerian “profoundness” to reach its ideal effect. The Siegfried/Wanderer encounter too could have done with a little bit more “danger”. I haven’t made my mind about the Brünnhilde/Siegfried “duet”. On one hand, it was refreshing to hear it sung like a love scene, nobody screaming, nobody tired and a Weberian orchestra. On the other hand, this scene needs a deluxe string section to live up to its full potential.

To make complete sense, any report about this evening’s performance needed to talk about the cast in the context of the conducting, so intimate was the relation between these two elements. It is difficult to determine what is cause and what is consequence, but that would have been very difficult to read. So let’s make it the traditional way. It is impossible not to start with Mr. Vogt. His voice is so sui generis in its effortless and almost bodiless spontaneity that some people cal him Heldenchorknabe. I had seen him as Siegmund in Munich some years ago and it felt just weird. The reason is that his low register is hardly supported, and that is a problem for a low-lying role such as the one in Die Walküre. Here, the low register was the permanent snag in his performance – one could hardly hear the end of words and the intonation was not faultless down there. The lack of core in the classically heroic passages – i.e., exposed high notes and singing around the passaggio over the full orchestra – was surprisingly not a problem per se, but it was odd. The first impression was not positive – it felt like someone rehearsing the part and not truly singing it. But then you realized that, probably for the first time, there was a tenor basically not screaming. Tamino-ish as his singing was, there was a positive effect in the sense of its cantabile quality – some passages really sounded like music – and he never, ever felt tired during the whole opera. I don’t know if I would always like to hear the part sung that way, and I can’t imagine it sung this way in a big house, but it was really mesmerizing to hear that. In terms of interpretation, the fact that this Siegfried was Mozartian in sound makes it impossible for the director to make him the boorish fellow we usually see. And there I find that the casting of Mr. Vogt was an asset in theatrical terms. I probably never liked the guy Siegfried as much as I did this evening. Today I could only see someone dealing with an abusive childhood and inexplicably ready to love. If we think of what is going to happen in Götterdämmerung, this approach to Siegfried makes a lot of sense. Here’s a man who always dreamed of loving and being loved – he cannot resist it. He’ll never had enough – he can’t help responding to being liked. It’s his greatest asset and his greatest liability at the same time. It is no wonder that Brünnhilde responds to both sides of this very same thing in such extreme and ambiguous way.

Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke is an experienced Mime who unfortunately was not in his best voice (his high notes remained unfocused during the whole evening) and who either did not find himself in this production or was not directed into something coherent in this production. I’ve seen him sing the part in Munich, and I could recognise part of his routine here, which always veers toward the purely comic and cute-ish. And this staging really, I mean REALLY needed a dangerous Mime. I can’t help thinking of what Wolfgang Schmidt did in Bayreuth – singing like a Charaktertenor when Mime was playing harmless and unleashing a full heroic sound when he was showing his true colours. A heroic Mime this evening against Mr. Vogt’s smooth Siegfried would have been truly groundbreaking in terms of Musikdrama. I would have loved seeing and hearing something like that.

The Siegfried Brünnhilde is the one that always works better for more lyric sopranos. I’m speaking a lot about the Munich Ring here, but I remember well how Catherine Naglestad did some stunning things there. That is why I expected that Camilla Nylund would have a ball with it. Yet I think she was just not in her best voice today, and I would believe if someone tells me “you know, the day I saw she was great”. This evening, she took a long while to warm. Only in the second half of the duet her high register acquired the necessary focus (and she did a hell of a high c in the end of the opera). Before that, she sang with her costumery tonal warmth, musicianship and commitment, but it all basically lacked projection. It is difficult to find a contralto who shines in Siegfried in the same manner she did in Das Rheingold, and one could say Anna Danik was no exception. That said, I don’t think she was in her best voice either. One could hear her fighting with her low register and making everything to focus the sound in her bottom register.

I can’t help thinking that the role of Alberich is too high for Christopher Purves, who clearly knows everything one needs to play this character. However, his upper register fails to pierce through and there is a lot of acting with the voice to make up for it, most of which was covered by the orchestra anyway. He couldn’t help being overshadowed by Tomasz Konieczny, whose voice is simply too big and forceful to go unnoticed and – I’ll say this for the 100th time – who also happened to be the best Alberich I have ever seen. In any case, the Wanderer is his best Wotan in the tetralogy. Here a noble sound is less important, and Mr. Konieczny plays the irony and the bitterness in the text very aptly. David Leigh is one of the few Fafners I have ever seen who sounds as dark and voluminous on stage as offstage (when the amplification always makes the real thing a bit disappointing).

Although Andreas Homoki’s Ring is mostly decorative, I would say I liked the Siegfried better than the two previous instalments. Maybe because the story is more visual, his highly designed fidelity to the libretto (there is a forge, there is even a dragon) are more effective than elsewhere. Moreover, the above-mentioned take on the title role made you look at some scenes from an entirely new angle. I still find that the permanent rotation of the sceneries distracting, the whole idea behind the woodbird guiding dead people into the next life kitsch and the magic fire totally hanging fire, but this time I found there was more to deal with in purely practical terms. It remains quite blank in terms of concept, though.

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