Stream: Siegfried
As part of the ongoing actions to see us through the Coronavirus emergency, The Metropolitan Opera in New York has made available free on its streaming link many recent productions from their archives. Today I am reviewing Siegfried, recorded on November 5th 2011, the day after my 56th birthday. The reason I mention this is because I was in New York, working at the Met at the time. In fact, I was able to watch the Dress Rehearsal of The Valkyrie actually in the theatre just before this transmission. It was the first time I had heard Jonas Kaufmann live and it was fabulous. Bryn Terfel wasn’t bad either! The Met auditorium is a vast cavern accommodating 3,800 people. It has the largest capacity of any repertory theatre in the world, and small voices don’t fare terribly well, especially competing with a full Wagner orchestra. So, from the broadcast, one cannot really tell whether the voices come over well in the auditorium. This review will be based then on the recorded sound, with the caveat that I have no idea how each voice was matched onstage.
I can attest to the voices of two of the main protagonists in Siegfried, as I have sung with them both. I sang with Bryn two years ago at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where I had a small part in Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg, when he was singing the great role of Hans Sachs. This is a phenomenal voice, as we all know, but sometimes he sings roles that are not perfect for him. Wotan in Wagner’s Ring Cycle might be seen as slightly too heavy for him, especially back in 2011, as he was really a Baritone then, not a Bass-Baritone which the role calls for. His voice has darkened over the years into the magnificent sound we hear today. Fortunately the Siegfried Wotan, known in this opera as The Wanderer, is the highest of the three Wotan parts, and was and is better suited to Bryn.
The other connection I have with this broadcast is that, amazingly, I have sung both Siegfried and Gotterdammerung with Jay Hunter Morris, the Met’s Siegfried. In 2009, I was engaged by the Seattle Opera to understudy the roles of Fafner and Hagen in their Ring Cycle. I spent a wonderful summer in that beautiful city on the Pacific (home of Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing and Grunge) and spent many jolly hours with the cast and the understudy cast. Jay was the Siegfried understudy, a 45 year old Texan who had sung around America but had recently discovered that he could sing the big Wagner Heldentenor (heroic tenor) roles. With his blond, all-American good looks, he was much nearer the ideal casting that Wagner imagined than I had ever seen before. We worked together on the staging and took part in cover runs of Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. It was clear that this was one to watch, and he was cast 2 years later as the Siegfried understudy at the Met. Just before the Dress Rehearsal in October 2011, the Siegfried withdrew and Jay was catapulted into the show for the first night and the subsequent performances and the broadcast. A star was born, and I had sung with him!!!
Meanwhile, back to the review!
Robert Lepage’s production received mixed reviews at the time, as the set was enormous and rather unwieldy, and cost millions! I found it not bad, although I had been spoiled by the really beautiful production in Seattle, based on the forests and mountains of Washington State, but it looked quite dangerous for the singers, as apart from often being in motion, it seemed treacherous underfoot, which singers hate. The conductor was Fabio Luisi who had taken over from James Levine, after unsavoury stories began to appear about him. He kept the music flowing very well and allowed Wagner’s astonishing textures to emerge freshly. The singers seemed at home with his conducting, which is a great compliment to him.
The first act starts with a flashback to Mime the dwarf’s discovery of the pregnant Sieglinde, the subsequent birth of Siegfried resulting in his mother’s death, and the boy’s upbringing in the forest. The set shifts into a forest glade by a realistic looking stream where Mime has his forge and where Siegfried lives with the crabbit old man, here portrayed as a hunchback, whose only plan is to nurture the boy until he can slay the giant Fafner, who has transformed himself into a Dragon. If you are lost already, look the plot up on Google. It is filled with every factor found in ancient sagas – an orphan, a broken sword which must be remade, a dragon, a series of riddles, Gods interfering with humanity etc. Tolkien knew his stuff a century after Wagner!
Gerhard Siegel, the German tenor who sang Mime was excellent. A big, well-controlled voice and many years experience in the role combined to form a very convincing portrayal of this scheming dwarf. He seemed to have no trouble singing this very difficult role, especially after he had suffered a heart attack singing it on that very stage two years before!
Jay Hunter Norris made his entrance dragging a sadly comical bear with him, as specified by Wagner. Usually these days the bear is imagined on stage, as a bloke dressed up as Bruin fails to frighten and only makes us laugh. Anyway, Mime was suitably frightened and the story of Siegfried’s parentage was revealed through a series of threats and counter arguments. Wagner’s Siegfried has to be innocent and fearless but also comes over as brainless and frankly brutal and charmless, so the sight of two unpleasant characters insulting each other becomes a little tedious.
Siegfried storms off after the revelation that Mime is not his father, allowing the entrance of Wotan, chief of the Gods, disguised as a Wanderer, complete with hat and Gandalf staff. Wagner stipulates that Wotan must hide behind a floppy hat as part of his disguise, but singers hate hats, as they muffle the sound to us as we sing. Consequently, Mr Terfel removed his hat as soon as possible, revealing a truly awful wig of straggly grey hair. However, he sang like a god and his scene with the weaselly Mime was excellent, as Mime asks the wrong questions and cannot answer the final question - “who will forge the sword anew?” Wotan leaves, saying only that he who knows no fear, will remake the sword.
The final scene of the act shows Mime trying and failing spectacularly to teach Siegfried fear, and Siegfried’s triumphant forging of Nothung, the sword, in a wonderful feat of singing, which I have never heard done better, other than Lauritz Melchior’s definitive recording from the 1930s. My mate Jay nailed it!
The second act opens even deeper in the forest, near where Fafner, the giant turned dragon, guards his hoard of gold, including the Ring and the magic helmet which acts as an invisibility cloak and can change one’s appearance into whatever is desired. The set looked fabulous, a primeval wood at night. Various figures move around, a suggestion of a dragon and a yellow bird, as the wonderfully creepy music rings out its various musical motifs. Wagner’s technique of building motif upon motif becomes fully mature during Siegfried. The composer broke into the creation of the Tetralogy halfway through this act, and the interlude between 1857 and 1869 when he wrote Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg, represents a huge leap forward in his creative technique.
From the darkness emerges a figure with a lantern. This is Alberich, sung here by the fine American Bass-Baritone, Eric Owens. He has spent aeons lurking here in the hope of winning back the all-powerful ring that he forged from the stolen Rhinegold, the ring that Wotan stole from him, that the giants claimed as their reward for building Valhalla and that Fafner killed his brother to win for himself. Gaining the ring has brought him no peace, as he lies in the forest guarding it, transformed by the magic helmet into a dragon. He knows that Siegfried has been urged by Alberich’s equally evil brother, Mime, to forge the sword and kill Fafner. He awaits their coming, but is interrupted by Wotan, still disguised as the Wanderer. He thinks the god has come to claim the ring for himself, but his plan is to see Siegfried gain the ring, free Brunhilde on her rock and save the world. (Go back to Google for the plot, if lost).
The great scene between Wotan and Alberich is wonderfully played by these two fine artists, and the contrast between their voices is splendid. I sang Wotan in the first Ring Cycle at Longborough Opera in the Cotswolds in the late 90s, and always loved this scene.
Wotan withdraws with dire warnings to beware of Mime, as the dwarf and his blond bombshell protege arrive. Mime continues to try to teach Siegfried to be afraid, but our hero is having none of it. There follows the sublime passage when Siegfried rests by the, again rather good, virtual stream full of birdsong and forest noises. He tries to talk to one particular bird, the little yellow animated bird which has been flitting about. He tries to make a pipe out of a reed, with his huge sword. It doesn’t work – cue some rather silly comic stuff (Wagner’s fault) and then decides to communicate using his hunting horn. It transpires that his small horn plays like a French horn, and that he is a virtuoso!
The playing awakes the huge sleeping dragon whose ghastly eyes stare out of a monstrous serpent’s head. Cue a bit of running about by Siegfried and a lot of roaring from Fafner (another of my favourite roles, more suited, to be honest, to my voice than Wotan) and the inevitable happens. Fafner is killed but not before appearing as the giant. Jay Hunter Norris does his best with this scene, but it’s really difficult to play, especially as he had little rehearsal, and his playing is only sketched in. However, he continued to sing splendidly. Tasting the dragon’s blood from his sword, he learns how to understand the birdsong, and what has been a woodwind tune is now sung by a light soprano offstage. Her voice is OK, not what I would call Met quality, but on her appearance at the curtain call, she was revealed to be a ravishing blonde, so perhaps that explained it? Siegfried learns, by the magic blood, that Mime is indeed out to kill him and eventually loses patience with the evil dwarf and kills him with Nothung.
A short aside to reveal that, when in Seattle, I bought an opera T Shirt which had on it “Much Ado About Nothung”, which I have to say was rather clever!
The bird tells Siegfried that he must awaken a wonderful bride locked in sleep on a mountain top, guarded by fire, such that only he who does not know fear can rescue. Even brainless Siegfried can work out that this means him, and off he charges after the bird.
End of Act 2.
Wagner made a speciality of writing wonderful preludes to his Third Acts. I think of Lohengrin and especially, Meistersinger, that wonderful evocation of melancholia after the mayhem of the end of Act 2.
In Siegfried, he doesn’t disappoint, as the music surges and roars, reflecting all the thoughts in Wotan’s head as he approaches the mountain top where he has left Brunnhilde asleep surrounded by fire years before. I remember singing this scene at Longborough with enormous satisfaction, as his dialogue with Erda is one of the great scenes of all opera. Here the Irish contralto Patricia Bardon sang the Earth Goddess in a fabulous costume. Perhaps not at her best on this night, yet she managed to convey her confusion as she herself was awakened from eternal sleep to find that all her preconceptions had been changed. Wotan goes to her for advice, but now knows more than the all-seeing goddess herself and learns more from her non answers than he might have hoped for. He acquires self knowledge and sees the end coming. Bryn Terfel was magnificent in this scene and now, as he prepared to meet Siegfried for the first and only time, you felt he was reconciled to his fate. Still the antagonistic spoilt brat that is Siegfried riles him into a final magnificent challenge, doomed to failure as surely as Siegfried is himself doomed. Jay Hunter Morris is back on a good acting track in Act 3 and convincingly and easily knocks his grandfather (back to Google!) out of his way, breaking the Great Spear of Wotan as he does it. Terfel’s acknowledgement of the loss of his powers in his final utterance “Zieh hin, ich kann dich nicht halten” brought back memories of my mentor, the greatest Wotan of them all, Hans Hotter.
The set revolves again and we find ourselves on a rocky mountain height. Siegfried goes through fire to reach his goal, and discovers a “man” in armour lying on a rock with a sleeping horse nearby. The music soars to unbelievable heights of beauty as he finds out, in the sadly comic line “Das ist kein Mann” on cutting Brunnhilde’s breast armour away, that this creature is the first woman he has ever seen. The inevitable question arises – how to wake her? Some epic fairy tale intuition persuades him to kiss her, and there follows the wondrous awakening music, which we will wait several more hours to hear again when Siegfried is killed at the end of the next opera.
Deborah Voight has waited several hours already in her dressing room, and many minutes lying flat on her rock, but doesn’t disappoint when she unleashes her voice for the first time in the opera. Her joy at seeing that it is indeed Siegfried who has awakened her, just as Wotan had finally promised at the end of the Valkyrie, is clear. The final scene has sometimes been criticised for going on too long, but serves two purposes. It describes the psychological journey Brunnhilde has to make from awakened goddess to mortal sexualised woman, and also, more prosaically, gives the singer a chance to let rip.
More often than not, this great duet is unbalanced by pitting an exhausted tenor against a fresh soprano, but here Morris has kept enough vocal strength in reserve to hold his own. Only in the final music do we hear that he is absolutely knackered, but even then he still belts out his top As like a good ol’ boy! A joyous conclusion to a brilliant performance, enhanced by the fact that we witness the arrival of a new star in the operatic firmament, my chum Jay Hunter Norris!
Unbelievably, it’s The Twilight of the Gods next up. What will that be like? Watch this space…
