‘Die Walküre’
Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin - 16/10/22
At the end of the second act of this shambles of ‘Die Walküre’ came the best critical response I’ve heard - it was a very loud and very long ‘Boooooo’! Critics are of course not allowed to boo but I did turn to my neighbour, a seasoned old Wagnerian, and said, “I think he has got it right”! Since this is the second week of the Ring Cycle the production team, including Russian director Tcherniakov have not been on hand to take their bows, or rather get the boos which they got every night of the first week’s cycle. So the audience have no alternative but to boo the singers, which is a pity since most of them are very good and it’s not their fault that they have to act in the ridiculous sets that have been designed for them. Indeed I’m seriously thinking of a new organisation, the Society for Protection of Opera Singers, or ‘SOPS’ for short. After all the rabbits and guinea pigs in this production have been lobbied for by the animal welfare lobby and their numbers reduced and their care looked after, and I can report that in the second week of the Ring Cycle they looked quite happy, except when being poked by the ‘lab assistants’. I wish I could say the same for the singers who looked distinctly uncomfortable trying to perform their ridiculous roles, as specified by the director, whilst trying, and on the whole succeeding in singing Wagner’s glorious music.
I had some new neighbours in the audience next to me on the second night, a nice young American couple who told me it was their first ever opera. I gave them the plot outline and tried not to frighten them too much but did tell them this was a “modern” production and might be at times challenging, but if so just to close their eyes and listen! To be fair to the production (difficult I know) the first act wasn’t too challenging. True Hunding’s house didn’t look like a house in the woods but part of an office block with clear glass windows; Hunding didn’t look like a woodsman, but a security guard in uniform; Nothung, the sword, wasn’t in a tree but in the office wall. Nonetheless, the text vaguely related to the action on the stage and it was decently sung, with Robert Watson as Siegmund, Vida Mikneviciute as Sieglinde and Mike Karen as Hunding. At the end of the first act my American friends thought it had been amazing, and I thought maybe it’s getting better.
Sadly, from then on the second act went downhill. Sieglinde as a bag lady crouched in the corner of an office doorway, and to cap it all Siegmund is killed not by Hunding or by Wotan but by a bunch of heavies dressed as security men or bikers. By this time I had lost the will to live, or at least to carry on to the third act, so I left along with quite a few others. Sometimes operas are so bad that critics have the right to protect their mental health! I shall return for ‘Siegfried’ and ‘Götterdämmerung’ and try and stay to the end, but maybe we need a society to protect critics as well!
