F Richard Wagner
The Royal Opera
Covent Garden
THIS is what it has all been leading up to. Bryn Terfel, the great bass-baritone of our generation, stepping onto the stage to sing Wotan.
Here singing in Rheingold, the opening production of the Royal Opera’s new Ring Cycle, Bryn fulfils that promise and expectation - as if it was ever in any doubt.
Rich, clear and sure of voice, commanding and darkly intense, Bryn seemingly effortlessly lives the role. This is a powerful, majestic Wotan, portrayed in this Keith Warner production as a Victorian man of science and learning. But he is also a pitiless and ambitious tyrant, a rich and arrogant industrial giant presiding over his estate.
Both aspects of this Wotan are instilled in this performance, preparing you for what is to come over the course of the epic cycle.
Warner’s production, with designs by Stefanos Lazaridis, is a multi-layered affair with platforms that rise and fall, revealing the different worlds of gods, men, the naughtily naked Rhinemaidens and the Nibelungs.
Linking each of these levels are ladders that characters climb and descend and umbilical cord like red rope that twists its way between these worlds.
That combination of increasing scientific knowledge and the world of the great Victorian capitalist with towering engineering projects dominated the approach to the show.
Alberich’s underworld is that of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Mime, sung by Gerhard Siegel, carrying body parts around a macabre laboratory. The Nibelungs are zombies with electrodes in their exposed brains.
Not only does Wotan take the magical Tarnhelm but a model aeroplane he finds in Albereich’s laboratory for his own cabinet of scientific instruments.
Gunter von Kannen sings a splendidly wretched and sympathetic Alberich while Philip Langridge is a sharp as glass, a cigarette-lighter flicking Loge.
The giants who have built Valhalla for the gods are cleverly presented as that greatest of Victorian engineers, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and a skilled craftsman.
Rosalind Plowright sings Fricka as an equally ambitious partner to Wotan with Emily Magee is Freia who is both appalled and attracted by the attentions of the giants. Her brothers Froh and Donner are sung as a pair of fops by Will Hatmann and James Rutherford.
Collectively the gods are presented as vampires, with Wotan their Dracula, desperate for their next bite of Freia’s golden apples to keep them alive.
Jane Herschel’s Erda is present throughout the drama and in the closing moments copulates with Wotan to produce new offspring for the next installment of the cycle – Walkure.
While some of the great moments of the opera, such as the entrance to the gods into Valhalla and the curse of the ring, could have enjoyed more panache, musical director Antonio Pappano’s first Wagner is rich with promise for the musical challenges to come.
Further performances December 21, January 4, 7, 10. The production will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday, January 17 at 7pm.
