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    Ukrainian Conductor Oksana Lyniv Arrives at the Met Opera

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    Oksana Lyniv, who is leading “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera, has used her platform to criticize Russia and promote Ukrainian culture.The Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv was preparing for a performance of Puccini’s “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera this month when she saw the news: A Russian drone had hit a building in Odesa, not far from the home of her parents-in-law.She called her family to ensure they were safe. But images of the attack, whose victims included a young mother and children, lingered in her mind. When she conducted that night, she felt the pain of war more acutely, she said, praying to herself when Liù, a selfless servant, dies in the opera’s final act and the chorus turns hushed.“In that moment, I saw all the suffering of the war,” she said. “How do you explain such sadness? How do you explain who gets to be alive and who has to die?”Since the invasion, Lyniv, 46, the first Ukrainian conductor to perform at the Met, has used her platform to denounce Russia’s government. She has also set out to promote Ukrainian culture, championing works by Ukrainian composers and touring Europe with the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, an ensemble that she founded in 2016.The war has raised difficult questions for artists and cultural institutions. Russian performers have come under pressure to speak out against President Vladimir V. Putin. Ukrainians have faced questions too, including whether to perform Russian works or appear alongside Russian artists.Lyniv, who now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany, has sometimes felt caught in the middle. She protested last month when a festival in Vienna announced plans to pair her appearance with a concert led by the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has come under scrutiny over his connections to Russia. (The festival canceled his appearance.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stephen Gould, Tenor Best Known for Tackling Wagner, Dies at 61

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      He was especially acclaimed for his performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. As his voice developed, he once said, so did his view of how and why to deploy it. Stephen Gould, a tenor who after a detour into musical theater established himself as a leading interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner in performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and elsewhere, died on Tuesday in Chesapeake, Va. He was 61.His death was confirmed by his longtime agent, Stephanie Ammann. Early this month Mr. Gould announced on his website that he had bile duct cancer, that the disease was terminal and that he was retiring from singing.The Bayreuth Festival paid tribute to him on its website after that announcement.“Stephen Gould was, with interruptions, one of the mainstays of the Bayreuth Festival from 2004 to 2022,” the festival’s post said. “Highly esteemed by audiences, the press and within the festival family, he was rightly dubbed the ‘Wagner Marathon Man’ and thrilled audiences with his distinctive voice and condition in countless performances.”Mr. Gould established himself as a reliable heldentenor, a singer who takes on heroic roles, mostly in the German repertory, requiring a particularly powerful voice. Such roles are among the most demanding in opera.Mr. Gould in the title role of “Tannhäuser” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2004, with Roman Trekel as Wolfram. “This was his Bayreuth debut,” one critic wrote, “and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”Jochen Quast/European Pressphoto AgencyHe first appeared at Bayreuth in 2004, performing the title role in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a production that dazzled Olin Chism of The Dallas Morning News.“One of the heroes was American tenor Stephen Gould, who sang the title character,” Mr. Chism wrote. “This was his Bayreuth debut, and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”He remained so over the next 18 years, performing in 20 Bayreuth productions; he regularly sang the title role in “Siegfried” and Tristan in “Tristan und Isolde.” He also performed in leading opera houses around the world, including with the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in 2010 as Erik, the hunter, in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”Mr. Gould knew that the major roles he undertook required a certain maturity.“Everyone wants their heroes to be young and vibrant and look like Brad Pitt in his early days,” he said in a 2019 interview with the German news outlet Deutsche Welle. “But you have to give the voice time to develop.”As his voice developed, he noted in the same interview, so did his view of how and why he was deploying it.Mr. Gould as Tristan and Nina Stemme as Isolde in a production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Royal Opera House in London in 2014.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“I don’t try to sing for the public anymore,” he said. “I did when I was younger, of course. You want to be popular, you want the critics to love you, you want your career to go high and all of that. Now when I’m onstage, what I enjoy most is discovering something for myself.”Stephen Grady Gould was born on Jan. 24, 1962, in Roanoke, Va. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston before joining Lyric Opera of Chicago’s developmental program for young artists, the Center for American Artists. He originally imagined himself as a baritone before switching to tenor.He was put to the test at age 27 when he had to substitute for Chris Merritt in the demanding role of Argirio in Gioachino Rossini’s “Tancredi” when Mr. Merritt became ill during a run in Los Angeles, where the opera was being staged jointly by Lyric Opera and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.Mr. Gould in the Royal Opera’s production of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” in 2009.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“He gamely tackled the patriarchal ardors of Argirio with a light, often pinched voice and reasonable dramatic presence within the static staging context,” John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times. “The stratospheric climaxes were forced out as high-pressure bleats, and initially much of the passage work was smeared. But he seemed to gain strength and composure, and more than held his own in the big Act II duet with Marilyn Horne in the title role.”Soon after, on what he said was a whim, he auditioned for the national touring company of “The Phantom of the Opera” and was cast. He spent several years with that troupe, performing various roles, though not either of the male leads.“When I finished with musicals, I just was going to quit,” he said in 2019, “but I wanted to give it one more chance and met a teacher from the Metropolitan Opera who told me that I’d been singing incorrectly from the very beginning.”He rededicated himself to opera, working on his technique and growing into the Wagnerian roles for which he became best known.“By then,” he said, “I was at the right age to actually sing Wagner. Too many singers today are pushed into their big Wagnerian roles in their 20s.”Information about Mr. Gould’s survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Taking in Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Braxton at Darmstadt

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      In between the four operas of the “Ring,” a critic traveled to take in world premieres by Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Braxton.It’s not a typical week in Germany when a staging of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” on the composer’s own turf at the Bayreuth Festival finds itself outdone for world-consuming sadness, rage and the possibility of redemption.But that’s what I experienced recently when I traveled between the four operas of the “Ring” at the festival and the Darmstadt Summer Course, a hotbed of avant-garde works since 1946.On Wednesday in Darmstadt — during a day off between “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth — Ensemble Nikel backed the Irish experimental singer and composer Jennifer Walshe in the world premiere of the complete song cycle “Minor Characters,” which she co-wrote with Matthew Shlomowitz.The morning after “Minor Characters,” I traveled back to Bayreuth for “Götterdämmerung” as staged (to much polarization) by Valentin Schwarz. Experiencing both back-to-back, I had the feeling that the song cycle had managed to steal the fire of the “Ring” cycle.I had expected “Minor Characters” to have a keyed-up, smash-cut musical aesthetic. Shlomowitz’s “Popular Contexts” series, for piano and “sampler keyboard,” after all, uses snatches of vocal growls, drooping water sources and Ping-Pong volleys, plus piano and beat-work, to create a disorientating, groovy effect; then nervier piano marches, alarming synths and distorted guitar samples.

      Popular Contexts / Performed by Mark Knoop by Matthew Shlomowitz / Peter AblingerWalshe’s compositional practice often revolves around her wide range of vocal inflections. Her approach incorporates extended technique experimentalism and free improvisation in addition to composed elements.But also many, many accents. In a 2020 profile, the New Yorker critic Alex Ross celebrated her ability to channel “Irish bard” and “California surfer girl” alike — a style which reaches a high state of refinement on solo Walshe efforts like “All the Many Peopls.”

      ALL THE MANY PEOPLS by Jennifer Walshe“Minor Characters” hits a new level of development for Walshe and Shlomowitz. He seems to pull her a bit closer toward more typical song forms; she puts some critical distance between his synths and the way they can seem to self-consciously emulate Muzak. And they put to use, through the piece’s dramatic interrogation of the pleasures and ills of our too-online present, the ferocious chops of Ensemble Nikel — a group made up of a percussionist, guitarist, saxophonist and keyboardist.Walshe’s text moves fast, and the music moves at the speed of thought. One moment, her vocals may seem to be celebrating internet memes — or the “minor characters” who become “main characters” for a day on social media. But before long, she’s chiding the world, or herself, for ignoring weightier matters. The music rockets back and forth between amiable, unhurried rhythms and black-metal blast beasts; between ad-jingle saxophone riffs and free-jazz skronk; between even-keeled, Eddie Van Halen-style finger-tapped motifs on electric guitar and less orderly plumes of distorted noise.She toys with audience expectations, too. Early on, she begins in a confessional mode, relating a #MeToo-style narrative involving a professor luring one of his students down to his basement. But before long, Walshe leaves the audience there, narratively, with no resolution and the professor screaming to no one in particular, in perpetuity.Instead, “Minor Characters” pivots to new fascinations and horrors — an exorcism in a rural country field, reports on a burning planet — as online life tends to do. When Walshe gave wild voice to lines like “they knew, we all knew, and we did nothing about it,” her self-implicating understanding of the climate crisis had a Brünnhilde-like edge — with traces of grace and good humor leavening her grave understanding, similar to Wotan in the “Ring,” of a world order’s undoing by its own designs.Walshe has a wide range of literary inspiration, Wagner included; her contributions to the liner notes for “Peopls” refer to “certain sections from ‘Watt’ by Samuel Beckett,” the rapper KRS-One and “the cast of ‘Lohengrin.’” That Wagnerian citation is no joke. “I don’t do anything ironically,” Walshe said in a brief interview after the performance of “Minor Characters.” “I don’t like any music ironically. But it has to mean something. There has to be something at stake.”“Minor Characters” seems to ask: If everyone is distracted online, following their own taste, how do we solve problems together? Even though the show feels complete, there is no true resolution.It felt more satisfying, even, than the “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth. Schwarz’s risky staging seems to run aground in the final opera. He has interesting ideas in the lead-up: making Wotan an even bigger cheater than usual; depicting Fafner’s dragon form as a hospice patient at home, sitting on the hoard of gold as a member of the gerontocracy.And Schwarz offers bleak humor, such as in Mime trying to teach Siegfried fear by introducing him to sex through pornography. But by “Götterdämmerung” none of that seems to have mattered as the opera’s telling sputters in its final moments.Still, there was much fine singing and orchestral playing. The bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny’s Wotan had some of Walshe’s gloriously unhinged energy. In both “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried,” during moments of self-pity, he would crumple to the ground, offering aspirated whimpers; the next moment he would be raging, spurred on by a just as quickly extinguished explosion from the orchestra, led with fire by Pietari Inkinen.And Inkinen’s way with quieter textures provided a ravishing experience of Bayreuth’s fabled acoustics: He and the orchestra produced soft-grained marvel after marvel in the second, contemplative act of “Walküre,” then, as if with whip in hand, he blazed through the final act of that opera and the first act of “Siegfried” with what seemed like one complete surge of momentum.Anthony Braxton, whose new “Thunder Music” system debuted in Darmstadt.Kristof LempIn between those two shows, I traveled to Darmstadt for another world premiere: the debut of American saxophonist-composer Anthony Braxton’s new “Thunder Music” system, which came courtesy of a performance, led by him, of his Composition No. 443.While not strictly dramatic in nature, “Thunder Music” suggested a stagelike feel. In this new category of his compositional practice, individual musicians are responsible for making choices about how to merge their own sound with prerecorded sounds of thunder and nature.At Darmstadt, the musicians in this chamber ensemble — including singers, woodwinds, brasses, an accordion and two double basses — prerecorded a take on No. 443 the day before the concert. Then, at the show, the performers could control the extent to which their own prerecorded material was mixed with thunderstorms or swarms of birds (controlled through an app designed for their phones). Simultaneously, they played Composition No. 443 again — live, this time with the ability to network with other musicians in improvisations, or interpolations of past Braxton pieces.At one point, when the saxophonist James Fei and the trombonist Roland Dahinden collaborated on the theme of Braxton’s Composition No. 131 — in which frenetic riffs are capped with a sashaying figure that seems to wink at listeners — they put a jolt of Braxton’s bebop-tinged catalog into what had been an airy stretch of No. 443.Braxton has in the past declared himself “a complete fool for the music of Richard Wagner” — something that you can sense in operas like “Trillium X,” which I reviewed earlier this month from Prague. But you can also sense Braxton’s affection in the way he encourages musicians to layer his various compositions during the same moment in performance. That bit of No. 131 that cropped up during No. 443? Call it a Braxtonian leitmotif for Charlie Parker. More

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      At Bayreuth, the Work on Wagner’s Operas Is Never Done

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      At the festival that Wagner founded, a new “Parsifal” looks different depending on how you see it, and a workshop model refreshes revivals.After the enormous risk of its beginning, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany was for a long time a place where the stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas were encased in amber.When his four-opera “Ring,” which inaugurated the festival in 1876, was brought back for the first time 20 years later, Wagner’s widow, Cosima, stuck with a vision essentially identical to the one her husband had overseen. “Parsifal” was even more static: After premiering at Bayreuth in 1882, it returned there as an unchanging ritual until 1934.But in Bayreuth’s modern era, perpetual workshopping prevails. New productions usually play for five summers before cycling out, and the expectation is that directors will keep futzing through that time. Sets change; sequences are adjusted and eliminated; details are added and subtracted.Now, it’s Valentin Schwarz’s turn to tinker.His “Ring” opened last summer. It was a caustic, contemporary-dress interpretation that compressed the work’s sprawling settings to a single estate and eliminated the mythological magic, the dragons, potions and instant transformations. The “Ride of the Valkyries” was a waiting room of wealthy women strutting in cosmetic surgery bandages. The world-ending conflagration Wagner intended for the ending was a fire-free anticlimax at the bottom of an empty pool.On Monday, though, as the sweeping music of that ending played, a backdrop lowered to reveal the theatrical lighting behind, and the body of Wotan, the king of the gods, was seen hanging from the grid, dripping wet — the death of divinity, “Sunset Boulevard”-style. It was a fresh addition to the staging, if still something of a letdown, a mild finale after 15 keyed-up hours.There were more tweaks to this “Ring.” The kidnapping and hoarding of children — an obsession with youthfulness; a sense of violence passed through generations — is one of Schwarz’s themes. So it makes sense for girls we saw drawing in “Das Rheingold” to now return to pay their respects at a coffin in “Die Walküre.” The hard-partying decadence of the characters in “Götterdämmerung” is even harsher this year, and the suicide of a goddess earlier in the “Ring” is more strongly telegraphed in the final moments of “Rheingold.” The child of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, not in Wagner’s libretto, died in last year’s version but now escapes the apocalyptic finale.You can tell Schwarz intended these revisions to heighten certain aspects of his interpretation. But their impact is generally minor. And the most important change from last summer isn’t onstage — it’s in the pit.Last year, Cornelius Meister conducted the premiere because Pietari Inkinen had to drop out with a case of Covid late in the rehearsal process. Meister’s work ended up being blandly neutral, not quite compatible with Schwarz’s vivid, provocative staging.Newly volatile and fierce under Inkinen, the orchestra now matches, and feeds, the curdled, unsettled mood of this “Ring”; the sound is often forceful, but it’s stubbornly anti-grandeur. Sometimes that means brash playing that even verges on unbeautiful. The winds were almost wild in a grinding, grim account of the introduction to “Siegfried” on Saturday, and gawkily reedy — at once sinister and whimsical — as Hagen and Gutrune plotted in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday.The pacing is tauter this year, and more tense. Inkinen propelled scenes forward, giving and receiving from the singers during long narratives. The “Todesverkündigung,” the dreamlike scene in “Die Walküre” in which Brünnhilde appears to Siegmund in a vision, was steadily, hauntingly built. All in all, the orchestra was, as Wagner intended, a character in its own right, one as anxious, unstable and fascinating as Schwarz’s conception at its best.As Hagen, the production’s linchpin, the bass Mika Kares, a newcomer to the cast, was most memorable: aggressive and doleful, stony and agonized, shambling around the set like the overgrown child he is.Another newcomer, the soprano Catherine Foster, an alert actress and proud presence, sang with clean tone and slicing high notes as Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung.” Sounding gruff as Wotan — a role he shared last year with another singer — and acting with overkill, even by this staging’s standards, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny settled in as a meditative, wry Wanderer in “Siegfried.”Tobias Kratzer’s 2019 staging of “Tannhäuser,” revived this year, features a performance within a performance of the opera.Enrico NawrathOver a week at the festival, the quality of the singing was consistently high. And pre-opening cancellations provided the opportunity for some heroics.The uncannily pure-toned tenor Klaus Florian Vogt and the sensitive, easily vulnerable soprano Elisabeth Teige sang in “Die Walküre” one day, and “Tannhäuser” the next. Even more remarkable, the tenor Andreas Schager sang the title roles in “Siegfried” on Saturday and “Parsifal” on Sunday, and then Siegfried in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday — all with clarion enthusiasm. This is the kind of Wagnerian Everest-climbing you get only at Bayreuth.In Tobias Kratzer’s crowd-pleasing 2019 production of “Tannhäuser,” the title character abandons the bohemian high life of Venus and her road-tripping pals for a sober, rule-based order: a performance at Bayreuth of, yes, “Tannhäuser.” (Referencing Bayreuth and its past productions in new stagings is almost de rigueur at the festival.)Metatheatrical collisions ensue — Ekaterina Gubanova is laugh-out-loud funny as Venus infiltrates the “Tannhäuser” within the “Tannhäuser” — before a tragic final act strains to tie up a lot of thematic loose ends.But the production is an endearing party, one that extends outside during the first intermission to a pond near the festival theater, for a gleefully messy, proudly queer, highly eclectic performance ranging among the likes of “I Am What I Am,” “Part of Your World” and “Ol’ Man River.” Back inside, Nathalie Stutzmann conducted a warmly effusive performance, with just a slightly chaotic ending to Act II.It was a superb vehicle for the festival’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich — but quite possibly outdone by the group’s powerful, elegant work in “Parsifal,” from ethereal to mighty to ferocious and back again.Georg Zeppenfeld, left, and Andreas Schager in Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which is designed to be seen in augmented reality but which can also be viewed as a more straightforward staging without the technology.Enrico NawrathPablo Heras-Casado led that opera with a calm confidence that never felt rigid. The selling point of this “Parsifal” — new this year and directed by Jay Scheib — is the incorporation of augmented reality, or AR. But because of internal conflicts over funding, less than a fifth of the audience is provided with the glasses that superimpose over the live action a panoply of floating, moving digital images.On opening night, I and other critics saw the staging with the AR glasses. But then I returned to see the show as the vast majority of visitors will: without them.Some things about the inoffensive, unilluminating, unmoving live staging are clearer without the busy AR imagery. I now caught that desert mining seems to be going on in Act III, and that, at the end, Gurnemanz and a female lover, who embraced guiltily at the opera’s start, are happily reunited.But the use of live video onstage — highly effective in an unsparing perspective on Amfortas’s bloody wound being probed and dressed — elsewhere just shows us close-ups of what we can already see, as at a stadium concert. The fallen sorcerer Klingsor wears high heels, a nod toward gender blurring that goes otherwise unexplored.As a traditional production, this “Parsifal” was nothing special; it felt palpable that most of the staging’s resources were going into developing the AR. But even if the results of that venture weren’t satisfying artistically or emotionally, the technology worked. And its ambition was true to the spirit of experimentation — and, these days, revision — that has coexisted with reverent tradition at Bayreuth for almost 150 years. More

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      Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at the Bayreuth Festival Experiments With AR

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      Cutting-edge technology has again come to the Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner premiered his final opera with the latest stagecraft in 1882.For Richard Wagner, the latest technology was crucial to staging his operas.In Bayreuth, Germany, where he opened a hilltop theater in 1876 to realize his vision for his works, he promised that “the most up-to-date artistic resources will be used to offer you scenic and theatrical perfection.”That year, the Rhinemaidens at the start of his “Ring” were supported behind the scenes by wheeled machines that made them seem to swim. A projector with prisms tried to create the effect of gods walking across a rainbow. The auditorium was dimmed — unusual at the time — to focus the audience’s attention and enhance the illusions.Nearly 150 years later, cutting-edge technology has come again to Bayreuth: augmented reality, which adds a dense, often impenetrable layer of surreal imagery to Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which opened on Tuesday.Among the many AR images visible through special glasses are motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze.Joshua HiggasonThis medium could hardly be further from the creaky machinery and gas lighting of the 19th century. But the goal is the same as Wagner’s: to create “scenes such as you might imagine had come from an ideal world of dreams.”But there’s a catch.After a squabble within the notoriously squabbling Bayreuth Festival about funding the expensive augmented reality, or AR, glasses, money was allotted for 330 sets in a theater of 1,925 seats.So 83 percent of the audience just experiences the old-fashioned article: Wagner’s operatic mystery play about a young man who ends up redeeming the ailing rituals of a corps of Holy Grail knights, straightforwardly staged and superbly sung, and conducted with muscular solidity by Pablo Heras-Casado. A much smaller group, including critics, gets the glasses, which superimpose on that live staging a crowded AR environment that is constantly in motion.Are the 83 percent missing much?They miss the space between them and the stage seeming to fill with twinkling stars as the soft prelude begins. The bare trees rotating in the ether. The motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze. The asteroids. The fly that seems to land on the outside of the AR lenses.Later, the flocks of birds, blood-red globules and spiky strawberries. The slithering snakes and spinning, silently cackling skulls. The blossoming flowers. The arrows, spears, machetes, axes, grenades and severed arms. The forlornly quivering plastic bags and the bounding fox. The rocky ledge that appears to fill the area beneath the seats in the third act.In AR style, the 3-D images don’t move with you as you move your head. Rather, you seem to be able to pan across an environment that surrounds you: not a realistic landscape but a galaxy of disembodied elements floating in the darkness, a free-association, stream-of-consciousness panoply linked, to varying degrees, to the plot.Some of the images’ textures are photorealistic, but most emphasize their computer-generated unreality, their unnatural angles and fake finishes, their eerie weightlessness. The aesthetic — with its collagelike excess of uncanny juxtapositions and its flat affect — evokes the digital art that has sometimes been winkingly called post-internet.Georg Zeppenfeld on the spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi set for Act I, designed by Mimi Lien.Enrico NawrathBut for those wearing the glasses, the union of the production’s AR and live aspects isn’t generally happy. The lenses are tinted, so the live performance looks considerably dimmed, and the staging’s frequent video projections are almost invisibly faint.The AR elements (designed, along with the video, by Joshua Higgason) often block the onstage action, even as those elements are fragmented enough to suggest they are offering a complement to that action, rather than a self-sufficient alternative.However dreamlike, the resulting visual confusion doesn’t convey the hypermaximalist, proudly absurdist overload of Bayreuth productions like Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 “Parsifal” or Frank Castorf’s 2013 “Ring.” This is because Scheib’s sensibility — in both the virtual and live spheres — is basically plain and direct.When I peeked below the glasses to watch bits of the performance without AR, there was nothing particularly imaginative or illuminating about this “Parsifal.” The first act takes place in a spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi landscape — the sets were designed by Mimi Lien — with a halo of flashing lights that brings to mind the spaceships of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”These Grail knights wear stylish, contemporary clothes — long tunics, yellow skirts, boldly patterned hoodies — designed by Meentje Nielsen. The sorcerer Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors. After Parsifal destroys the garden, the third act is set in a lonely desert encampment, alongside a machine on the blurry line between war and industry: maybe an earthmover, maybe a tank.The tenor Andreas Schager is tirelessly passionate and convincingly boyish as the guileless Parsifal, and the bass-baritone Derek Welton is mournful yet reserved as Amfortas, the wounded king of the Grail. The bass Georg Zeppenfeld is an elegiac Gurnemanz, who oversees the knights; the baritone Jordan Shanahan, a brooding Klingsor.Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is depicted as a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors.Enrico NawrathThe mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca sounds luxurious — lean yet velvety — as the ambiguous, ambivalent Kundry, cursed to shuttle forever between the realms of Klingsor and the Grail and a role too often screamed. Bayreuth’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich, is, as ever, poised and powerful. On Tuesday, the orchestra didn’t quite bring out the exquisite transparency and delicacy of some important passages, but Heras-Casado’s conducting was vibrant, even-keeled and well-paced.There were a few memorable AR moments. At the end of Act I, a boy in jeans seems to walk through the space, slowly flapping wings attached to his arms — perhaps a melancholy nod to the winged children in Stefan Herheim’s celebrated 2008 “Parsifal” here, just as the dam we seem to be at the bottom of at the start of Act II may be a reference to the hydroelectric plant that opened Patrice Chéreau’s centennial “Ring” at Bayreuth in 1976.Yet there is something bland and empty at the production’s core. It’s not clear what Scheib thinks the nature of the sickness is at the root of this Grail cult, so it’s not clear what Parsifal’s climactic redemption offers. If the final AR image of plastic bags, echoed by one onstage, gestures toward a critique of environmental despoliation, it’s a wan gesture.This means the augmented reality has little profound substance to support, just a jittery desire to stimulate — to ornament and impress — which is just what Wagner didn’t want from stage technology. Scheib’s AR decorations rarely inspire emotion or a sustained sense of wonder: the impression, as Gurnemanz says to Parsifal, of time becoming space.The inadvertent result of all the lavish resources is to prove the superiority of the live over the digital — to keep us sneaking back under our glasses from the augmented real to the really real. The closest parallel in the opera to contemporary technical wizardry is Klingsor’s false garden; it feels rather perverse to extend those artificial seductions to the rest of a piece that’s condemning them.We have come a long way from this opera’s premiere at Bayreuth in 1882, when Gurnemanz and Parsifal stepped in place as a painted backdrop scrolled by, turned by hand on rollers, to create the illusion they were walking. “The simplest of means,” one observer wrote, “had brought about an overwhelming effect.”For all its ambitions and expense, Scheib’s “Parsifal” never overwhelms.ParsifalThrough Aug. 27 at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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      At Wagner’s Festival, New Technology Reveals a Leadership Rift

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      The Bayreuth Festival’s production of “Parsifal” will feature augmented reality. Securing the equipment set off a financial and philosophical dispute.The American director Jay Scheib was looking at a bank of monitors inside the Bayreuth Festival Theater on a recent afternoon.He was rehearsing his new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” which opens the storied Bayreuth Festival on Tuesday, and as performers circled a large metallic monolith onstage, the screens showed three-dimensional flowers floating through blank space — psychedelic animations that will come to life for audience members who see them with augmented-reality glasses.Through those glasses, Scheib said, the flowers, and other items during the performance, will appear to float through the auditorium. In keeping with the opera’s themes, he added, these moments are meant to provide the audience with “sacred visions” of “a world where wonder still exists.”Scheib’s production is one of the most ambitious, and high-profile, attempts to incorporate augmented reality into opera performance. But it also caps months of tumult at Bayreuth, after plans to outfit nearly 2,000 audience members with the glasses for each performance were downscaled because of an apparent money dispute between the festival’s artistic and financial leadership. The compromise, in which only 330 attendees will be provided with the glasses to experience the production’s signature flourishes, has left many fuming, and concerned that internal conflicts at one of the most important events in opera were undermining its relevance.Founded by Wagner in 1876 as a showcase for his work, the Bayreuth Festival draws opera fans from around the world for one month every summer to hear a handful of the composer’s works in repertory — including a new production at the start of each edition. A major event on the German cultural calendar, the opening is usually attended by prominent political figures including Angela Merkel, the country’s former chancellor.Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, with her husband, Joachim Sauer, at the opening of last year’s Bayreuth festival, which remains a major event on the German cultural calendar.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe festival remains treasured worldwide for the pristine acoustics of its theater, a hilltop opera house that Wagner had a hand in designing, and for its connection to the composer: It has been led by a family member since his death in 1883. His great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner took over creative leadership with her half sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, in 2008, before becoming the sole artistic director in 2015.In recent years, though, a new leadership structure has added a layer to the festival’s decision-making. In 2008, the budget came under the control of four members of an independent board representing outside shareholders that collectively provide about 40 percent of the budget: the city of Bayreuth, the state of Bavaria, the German federal government and a group of private donors called the Society of Friends of Bayreuth, who currently chair the board.Although the funders are meant to refrain from interfering with choices made by Bayreuth’s artistic leadership, some in the media have argued that the decision to withhold the money for the purchase of 2,000 glasses represented an attempt by the shareholders to rein in Wagner’s approach to the festival and her great-grandfather’s work.Since World War II, Bayreuth directors — including Richard Wagner’s descendants — have brought a modern or experimental sensibility to the composer’s works. In 2013, Katharina Wagner invited Frank Castorf to reimagine the “Ring” as an anticapitalist epic about oil; the next “Ring,” Valentin Schwarz’s production, which opened last year, recast the cycle as, in part, an allegory about the anxieties of aging.Toni Schmid, a former high-ranking Bavarian civil servant who led the festival’s board of shareholders until 2020, said the decision not to fund the glasses was emblematic of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth’s “more conservative idea of how a Wagner opera should look today,” which is at odds with Katharina Wagner’s vision.A scene from Frank Castorf’s reimagined “Ring,” in 2013. Since World War II, Bayreuth directors have brought a modern and sometimes experimental sensibility to their Wagner stagings.AlamyThe largely older members of the donor group, Schmid said, “would like to have the productions they saw 50 years ago back, when they were young — but that’s not art, it’s a museum.” He added that he wished the shareholder’s board was occupied by representatives “who know what they’re talking about” and described the decision to not finance the full number of glasses as “a joke.”Manuel Brug, a German journalist and critic for Die Welt, said in a phone interview that the current festival structure allowed too much power to Friends of Bayreuth. “The group is too old, with many people who joined because it makes it easier to get tickets,” he said, arguing that the donors should be excluded from the governing body in the future. The Bavarian arts minister Markus Blume said in article in the Nordbayerischer Kurier on Thursday that the state of Bavaria might take over some of the donor group’s shares in the future.Georg von Waldenfels, the chairman of the shareholders board and head of Friends of Bayreuth, disputed that he had interfered in Wagner’s decision-making and said in a phone interview that the decision to downscale the number of glasses was “purely a decision of the artistic leadership.” He added that the shareholders had merely “stuck to the business plan.” Wagner, however, said that the original plan failed “because of the financing and divergent views about the glasses” and that the outcome was “unfortunate.”This disagreement reflects a broader debate about Wagner’s legacy, and adds another chapter to the festival’s history of public arguments and reckonings. Winifred Wagner — the English-born wife of Richard’s son, Siegfried — who oversaw the festival from 1930 to 1944, was an avowed fan of Adolf Hitler until her death in 1980. Following World War II, the composer’s grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang, opened the festival anew as something more apolitical.More recently, the festival has been a subject of chatter, including longstanding rumors of a feud between Katharina Wagner and her former musical director, Christian Thielemann, who left his post in 2020. Last year, he publicly criticized her decision to replace the word “Führer” (“leader”) with the word “Schützer” (“protector”) in a production of “Lohengrin,” a change that had been made out of sensitivity to Bayreuth’s past associations with Nazism.Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of the composer, took over creative leadership of the festival with her half sister in 2008, before becoming the sole artistic director in 2015.Enrico NawrathJay Scheib, the American director who is staging “Parsifal” for the festival this year.Helen DurasIn a phone interview, Thielemann denied any feud with Wagner, and said that Bayreuth has long been plagued by gossip. “There is something about Wagner that poisons people,” he added. “He is both an intoxicant and a perfume.”Wagner’s contract will be up for renewal this fall, pending a vote by the festival’s board of directors. She said that if the offer were made, her acceptance would be contingent on changes to the festival’s organization. “You need to make this place ready for the future, and if some structural things don’t change, then it’s impossible to do the work,” she said, though declined to provide specifics.If she were to depart the festival, it would likely mean the end of the Wagner family’s creative leadership: No other relative has publicly expressed an interest in taking over.Wagner said that her push to find innovative ways of staging her great-grandfather’s work was necessary, given the “limited repertoire” of the festival — Richard Wagner’s 10 mature works — and global competition among high-profile theaters staging his operas. If Bayreuth just continued to mount old-fashioned productions, she added, “people can just watch a DVD.”The idea of incorporating augmented reality into “Parsifal” emerged in early 2019. Among the challenges was adapting the technology, which is conceived for looking at nearby objects in brightly lit spaces, for a large, darkened theater. Ultimately, Scheib’s team solved the problem by creating a laser scan of the entire auditorium, down to the millimeter.Scheib said that augmented reality would emerge during crucial scenes, and would include a gigantic floating tree and a flaming horse. When Parsifal naïvely kills a swan, a pair of enormous ones will appear to fly near the auditorium’s ceiling, spouting blood.An example of the augmented-reality that viewers with glasses will see in “Parsifal.” Scheib said the uncertainty about the glasses had been a “distraction.”Bayreuth FestivalThis “Parsifal,” however, can still be experienced without the glasses, with sets, lighting and costume design depicting what Scheib described as a “post-human landscape in which the last group of people are hanging on, trying to make sense of faith, forgiveness and belonging.” But, he noted, the uncertainty about the glasses has been a “distraction.”The use of the technology, Scheib said, was in keeping with Wagner’s own way of approaching opera. “He carried out so many innovations, with lighting and architecture,” he added. “Ultimately, he wanted the theater to completely disappear.” More

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      Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ Uses the Word ‘Führer.’ Keep It There.

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      In some cases, the inflammatory, Nazi-associated term has been changed out of sensitivity. What do we lose when that happens?There are some 10,000 words in the libretto of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” which the Metropolitan Opera is presenting in a new production starting on Feb. 26. But the most inflammatory one comes at the end.The title character, a mystical knight who arrived in the first act to defend the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, points to a handsome youth in shining silver armor who has magically appeared out of the water. He is the lost brother.“Here is the Duke of Brabant,” Lohengrin declares. “He shall be your leader.” In German, Wagner’s text is: “Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt.”Piotr Beczala will sing that line at the Met, as will tenors at the vast majority of other opera houses in the world when they put on “Lohengrin,” a repertory staple for over 170 years.But at a smattering of companies, particularly in Germany, and most prominently at the Bayreuth Festival — founded by Wagner and still run by one of his descendants — the text has quietly been changed because of the association of “Führer” with Hitler, who was a treasured guest at the festival.“Especially we in Bayreuth should be particularly sensitive there,” Katharina Wagner, the festival’s director and the composer’s great-granddaughter, said in a statement, “because we have a special political background and therefore also a special responsibility.”Wagner, who is also a stage director, added that she preferred to make the change — from “Führer” (“leader” or “commander”) to “Schützer” (“protector”) — in her productions of the opera.“Führer” is certainly arresting today. But when Wagner was writing the opera, in the 1840s, it was an unassuming, somewhat vague military title that referred, depending on the word to which it was connected in a compound, to varying degrees of operational command.The word got a new charge toward the end of the 19th century, when Georg Ritter von Schönerer, an Austrian antisemite who agitated for pan-Germanic nationalism and harbored fantasies of ancient Roman revival, took it on as the name his followers would address him by. (They also embraced “heil” and the rigidly outstretched, so-called Roman salute as a greeting.)Von Schönerer’s ideas and his gift for propaganda were inspirations for Hitler, who in the early 1920s began to use “Führer” as his title, along the lines of the success of Mussolini’s self-styling as “Il Duce.”As with Mussolini, the word became central to what was soon the fully cultlike worship of a charismatic would-be national savior, and “Führer” was the foundation of Hitler’s official title starting after the death of Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, in 1934. One of the Nazis’ omnipresent slogans was “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”: “One Nation, One Realm, One Leader.”Anja Harteros, front, and Piotr Beczala in Yuval Sharon’s staging of “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleSomewhat surprisingly for non-German speakers, the word is still found all over that language as part of compounds. A train conductor is a “Zugführer”; a driver’s license is a “Führerschein.” At Bayreuth, Katharina Wagner herself carries the title of “Geschäftsführer,” or managing director.But for the term to stand alone, especially as a military or political title, is basically verboten.And it’s not exactly neutral in the context of Wagner. Even if he wrote long before the rise of the Nazis, his works were tainted by his notorious antisemitism and, decades after his death, by Hitler’s enormous affection for his music and the dictator’s friendship with the Wagner family.Hence the “special political background” that Katharina Wagner referred to, the source of the sensitivities that she has worked to address. Some years ago, the festival unveiled a large display on its grounds about artists killed, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise affected by the Nazis. Several stagings — including Stefan Herheim’s “Parsifal” and Barrie Kosky’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” — have dealt explicitly with Wagner’s and the festival’s political legacy.The change of a single word seems like it could hardly be a subtler interpolation. At Bayreuth, which lacks supertitles, it is likely that almost no one would have noticed had there not been a small flurry of coverage of the issue last summer. And deference toward sensitivity might make sense, given the festival’s history.Yet the erasure of “Führer” is a missed opportunity. It also doesn’t quite make sense, with the unintended consequence of seeming not to take Wagner’s text and his careful word choices seriously. “Schützer” is used elsewhere in the libretto to describe Lohengrin’s role within the plot as a kind of transitional figure after Gottfried, the lost brother, has disappeared. The energizing question of the story is, in a leadership vacuum, what comes next? It’s therefore misleading, after Gottfried’s deus ex machina reappearance, to refer to him as “Schützer,” since he, unlike Lohengrin, is entitled to actually take political and military command.And if we’re rooting out Nazi associations in “Lohengrin,” why stop at “Führer”? Early in the opera, ominous reference is made to armed action against the German “Reich,” and stentorian choral “heils” proliferate, like something out of the propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” In “Meistersinger,” why then preserve the ending, when the kindly cobbler Hans Sachs suddenly, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art,” a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd?Any of these changes might be made out of respect, but they also let us in the audience off the hook. Wagner’s works are as ambiguous and ambivalent as we are, pulled between the desire for freedom and the desire to be led and commanded. This should not be something to erase, but rather something to explore — for us watching and for the stage directors who shape Wagner’s vision for us.Yuval Sharon, who directed the latest Bayreuth “Lohengrin” but had no part in the decision to change the text, said in an interview: “I feel like it’s part of your responsibility every time you restage this opera, the same responsibility you have with any opera that has fraught language or fraught ideas. The visual aspect gives you an opportunity to offer a counterpoint to that original.”In other words, how should a staging represent Gottfried if we are to take in the nuances of what might be meant by him returning as Führer? Presumably, in 2023, it’s not as an unironically perfect Aryan boy in gleaming armor, an unquestioned savior. Sharon depicted him symbolically, as a verdant flowering of nature; Hans Neuenfels, whose “Lohengrin” preceded Sharon’s at Bayreuth, had an adult-size bloody newborn emerge imperiously from an egg.There are as many options as there are productions. But simply taking out “Führer,” with all its connotations, softens the complexity of the society depicted in the opera — a restive, angry one willing to submit to a leader who will quickly and easily solve its problems. The libretto’s medieval Antwerp is not so different from the Germany that blindly followed its own Führer.It is often said that we shouldn’t anachronistically import into Wagner’s works the ways in which they were heard and used long after his death. In the case of “Lohengrin,” later history actually illuminates this unsettling opera; changing a word out of an excess of sensitivity distorts it.“I think editing it feels a little bit like a whitewash,” Sharon said. “It can dull the edge of what makes the piece so potentially dangerous and disturbing. The opera carries in it the DNA of so many utopian visions, and simultaneously the very beginning of totalitarian thinking. Both coexist in his works, and you can’t have one without the other. Part of what’s amazing about Wagner is engaging with those impulses, in both directions.” More

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      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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      Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic

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      Valentin Schwarz’s production of the four-opera epic presents human characters with relations even more tangled than usual.BAYREUTH, Germany — About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.Schwarz’s acidic, passionately performed, contemporary-dress version is a “Ring” without magic or nature, in which all the characters are human, their relations even more tangled than usual, and all the events take place on a single estate.While in the libretto, the dwarf Alberich briefly turns himself into a lowly toad, that is here just a metaphor; it’s mentioned in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyries don’t fly through the sky, but bray around a waiting room in spike heels, flame-colored nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried, the flawed hero, is given a sword — or at least a shard that resembles one — but it does nothing supernatural. (The weapons here are mostly handguns.)In Valentin Schwarz’s staging of “Die Walküre,” the mythic Valkyries are instead women in spike heels, nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages.Enrico NawrathThis is all of a piece with the demythologizing trend in Wagner stagings over the past 50 years, especially in Europe. The most influential ones over that period have been made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the “Ring” as an allegory of anticapitalism, with the action set more or less in the present and the gods depicted as members of the modern upper classes, the characters’ nobility and valor as mostly sham.That was also the case with the last Bayreuth “Ring,” by Frank Castorf, which ran from 2013 to 2017. But compared with Castorf’s gleefully baffling staging, which often abandoned coherent storytelling altogether, Schwarz’s is fairly straightforward in its account of the codependence and acrimony running through a family. There are whiffs of daytime soaps in the harsh vividness of the visuals and acting, and a bit of “Succession,” too.If the “Ring” is an allegory — a reach for some conservative operagoers, but a given for many directors — the conceptual anchor of a production is the nature of the gold, the theft of which from the Rhine, in the opening minutes, is the sin that sets the epic plot in motion.The gold — and the powerful, toxic ring it’s molded into — symbolizes the commodity that the onstage world values most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated through the globalized economy. For Schwarz, picking up on the magic apples the libretto says the gods require to retain their freshness, it is youth, innocence, children.His “Ring” is full of adults obsessed with appearing younger — through exercise, plastic surgery, absurd attempts at hip clothing — even as, more than in most stagings, they visibly age over the cycle.In Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the stolen gold is a young boy (Erik Scheele) whose abduction by Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.Enrico NawrathThis obsession tips over into ominous hints of child trafficking and abuse; the slaves of Nibelheim are here a roomful of identically dressed blonde girls drawing at tables. (The girls aren’t overtly hurt, but they’re clearly being hoarded.) The dwarf Mime’s workshop is a creepy tea party and puppet theater for raggedy homemade dolls. And in Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the gold is not a bit of metal, but an actual young boy whose abduction embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.The life cycle is the focus from the beginning. The libretto sets the start of the “Ring” beneath the flowing waters of the Rhine, but Schwarz instead shows us an animated projection of a womb, in which twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and combat.That image of a family’s foundational claustrophobia is a key to all that follows, as the action plays out in and around the gods’ home, Valhalla. (The forbiddingly sleek, spare sets are by Andrea Cozzi, the evocatively changing light by Reinhard Traub, and the fiercely trashy costumes by Andy Besuch.) The giants who, in the libretto, have been conned into constructing the lair are here chic architects of a glassy expansion. Alberich now isn’t of a different race than Wotan, the king of the gods, but is his less successful brother.Michael Kupfer-Radecky, left, and Stephen Gould (who was replaced last week by Clay Hilley) in “Götterdämmerung,” in which the family property is now inhabited by even more depraved people.Enrico NawrathThe all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are part of the estate’s omnipresent, watchful servant underclass, which shines the silver as the main characters suffer. Later, Mime and the dissipated Gibichungs, Gutrune and Gunther, are ever more depraved inhabitants of parts of the property, long after the gods have passed on.The role of Wotan, his hands ever pawing at women at their most vulnerable, is shared by the sturdy Egils Silins (in “Das Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Die Walküre” and “Siegfried”). In the second act of “Walküre” last week, Konieczny had an appropriately bourgeois accident — the back of his Eames lounge chair broke off, and he tumbled to the floor — so he sat out the third act, giving Michael Kupfer-Radecky the opportunity to jump in, superbly, a few nights before his manic turn as Gunther.In “Siegfried,” the title character was sung by the tirelessly secure Andreas Schager, subtly unfolding the lovable side of a drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilley was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and he would have been impressive even under less dramatic circumstances.“Die Walküre” was notable for Klaus Florian Vogt’s pure, rapt Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s tender, surging Sieglinde, by far the most vocally resplendent performance of the week. Daniela Köhler sang brightly in the short but daunting Brünnhilde part in “Siegfried”; in the much longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” Iréne Theorin acted with intense commitment to the staging, but her sizable voice wobbled under pressure.Lise Davidsen, left, gave the most vocally resplendent performance of the week alongside Klaus Florian Vogt in “Die Walküre.”Enrico NawrathStepping into the production just a few weeks ago to replace a sick colleague, the conductor Cornelius Meister led a solid, sensibly paced, somewhat faceless reading of the sprawling score.For all that is clear, even blatant, about Schwarz’s staging, there is much that is memorably, lyrically ambiguous. Appearing periodically throughout his “Ring” is a small, glowing white pyramid in a glass cube. Characters occasionally carry it, and it sometimes sits next to furniture or in the corner, but it’s never explained or dwelled on. It is whatever you think it is: a model of the pyramidal addition to Valhalla; a stylized sword or spear tip; purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and beyond the complications of reality. It is, in essence, a line of poetry, enigmatic and evocative.Similarly, drawings of stereotypically Wagnerian faces with winged helmets keep popping up — they’re what the girls are making in Nibelheim — before taking form as the red masks carried by the sinister crowd of vassals in “Götterdämmerung.” Do they represent the stultifying weight of tradition in presenting the “Ring”? The dark side of German nationalism?Thankfully, it’s not specified — nor is the meaning of the omnipresent horse figurines and toys. The most important horse in the cycle, Brünnhilde’s Grane, is, like the gold, here a real person: a tall, dependable, silent aide with an equine mane and beard.Enigmatic images abound in the staging, including red masks with stereotypically Wagnerian faces.Enrico NawrathThere were indelible images throughout the week: the giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) moldering at home on his deathbed; Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and Hagen (Albert Dohmen) confronting each other on a palely lit stage, empty but for a punching bag that Hagen attacks, then forlornly embraces; Hagen’s slow, mournful dance as he leaves, waving Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.And at the end of “Die Walküre,” we don’t see Brünnhilde asleep in a ring of fire, but rather the final attempt of Fricka (Christa Mayer) to reconcile with Wotan, her husband. He walks away, leaving a single candle burning as the curtain closes, a nod toward the libretto’s fire that captures the emotions of the music and the moment in a fresh light.But while the abandonment of enchantment is often illuminating, occasionally it ties Schwarz in knots. Since there is no potion to cause Siegfried to forget — and cruelly betray — his love for Brünnhilde, their ecstatic duet earlier in “Götterdämmerung” needs to be staged, unconvincingly, as a fight to give motivation for his bitterness. And both Theorin and the staging run a bit out of steam in the closing, apocalyptic Immolation Scene, with Brünnhilde wandering aimlessly, then cradling Grane’s decapitated head as she lies down next to the murdered Siegfried at the bottom of the estate’s drained, dirty pool.Instead, the real coup of “Götterdämmerung” is the realization, earlier on, that the kidnapped Rheingold-boy has grown up to become the embittered, ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, in Schwarz’s staging, we see him treat Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the libretto) as callously as he was — the wheel of fear and abuse continuing to turn.And the production’s final image is a reprise of its first: again, twin fetuses, but this time in seemingly peaceful embrace. Is that peace lasting? Or will birth inevitably bring about a renewal of resentment, betrayal and violence? With admirable restraint, Schwarz doesn’t define whether he thinks a sick world is capable of change.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Aug. 30 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More