9 October 2010: Wagner, Das Rheingold
Metropolitan Opera, broadcasting live in HD. James Levine, conductor; James Lepage, production; Freia, Wendy Bryn Harmer; Fricka, Stephanie Blythe; Loge, Richard Croft; Mime, Gerhardt Siegel; Wotan, Bryn Terfel; Alberich, Eric Owens; et al. In collaboration with Ex Machina. Seen at West Springfield multiplex
We are back for another season of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts live in HD at hundreds of local cinemas coast-to-coast and more abroad. Again this year, more than ever before: twelve broadcasts from the Met between 9 October and 14 May, representing, I believe, some five new productions and the rest revivals. The Met is off to a marvellous start. This production of Das Rheingold is the first of four operas by Wagner to be mounted at the Met this season, together comprising a new production of the Ring cycle, designed by Robert Lepage.
A brief word from the General Manager of the Met at the beginning explained that the Lepage production has strained the resources of the Metropolitan Opera to the limit, exploiting the vast capabilities of the Met stage and making new demands. In the course of this production of Rheingold one could see how this could well be. The Rhine maidens guarding the gold at the bottom of the river are wearing underneath their mermaid-like, dark chain-mail-like costumes stiff harnesses connected to cables that fix them to a steeply raked series of planks (one might call them) which have the capacity to rotate forward and back individually on a central axis and so, by turns, make for a vertical wall or a stage floor, or anything in between. These harnesses are fastened in between the “planks” in such a way that the maidens can seem to swim up and down as they sing. Lighting as much as anything else gives shape and color, light and shadow, to this seemingly infinitely flexible wall. And so, at the end, when it is time for most of the assembled cast of gods to retreat upwards to Valhalla, the planks retreat back, seem to rise up and to form a rainbow bridge carrying them over the chasm of the nether world into the godly chambers where all is light, love, and peace.
This mechanical concept, invented by Lepage, is a very powerful and comprehensive one, so flexible and adaptable that any setting can be established by it and then characterized for location and atmosphere through its manipulation and wonderfully inventive lighting (the credit for the lighting design is to Etienne Boucher).
(As I reflected on this amazing contraption, it suddenly struck me that Lepage has been looking at that mastermind of the scenic art Adolphe Appia, who almost single-handedly effected a revolution in nineteenth-century scenic art. In Appia’s high blank walls and straight, unmitigated ascending staircases one can see the ancestry of Lepage’s planks; it is almost as if Lepage has anatomized Appia’s concepts, split them up into parallel boards, and then made them individually manipulable. And of course Lepage h