Seattle Opera has long had a love affair with Wagner’s operas: I was present at their second iteration of the Ring Cycle back in 1987 and my husband that of 1979; it's good to know that Wagner is always worth a revisiting. As my husband said, “I know every word, every note, every scene in Das Rheingold.” He added that he was prepared to be bored but was very pleasantly surprised that he was not.
With a fabulous production like this one from the Minnesota Opera, how could one be anything but excited and glad to be present? The production team created a steampunk influenced world that highlighted the tensions between the gods who live in the heavens and sometimes lose sight of their own morality; the giants, the builders of Vahalla who simply want their pay; and those in the lower depths, the Nibelungs ruled over by an entirely corrupt Alberich.
But how to fit this all into the stage of McCaw Hall?
Easy. Clear out the orchestra pit. Make that the Rhine, the home of the sensuous and playful (and sometimes cruel) Rhine Maidens, giving Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde (Jacqueline Piccolino, Shelly Traverse and Sarah Larsen) room to sing to their gold and cavort with Michael Mayes’s Alberich. They drive him to the edge of madness by denying him the possibility of love—except that denying love (along with family, one of the great forces of this opera) opens the way to Alberich’s theft of the gold, and the production of the titular Ring.
That in turn makes the Nibelungs slaves to Alberich, who works them like an overlord. The rest of the opera follows the transfer of the gold from owner to owner and the breaking of vows, another great theme of Rheingold. Nibulheim is located under the Rhine, a journey made through David Murakami’s projections that invade a front scrim, a back screen and the house itself; similarly, the ascent to Valhalla is made with other projections that give the illusion of rising up in the air and crossing a neon-bright animated Rainbow Bridge.
But if the Rhine is now located in the orchestra pit, where are the players, the ones who make instrumental music? On stage, in full view of the audience: that not only makes the Wagnerian orchestra central to the action, it highlights the fact that an orchestra is both a human response to music but also a technology. Unless miked, singers build their instruments out of their bodies and carry their voices with them, but an orchestra utilises music-making machinery, very ably played by the musicians of the Seattle Opera and its conductor, Ludovic Morlot.
We see the tensions between art and craft and architecture, as well as very human emotions in Brian Staufenbiel’s direction. The gods loom over the rest of Wagner’s universe, walking along a vast catwalk and peering down at those they see as so othered that those others barely count, while the gods, and especially Greer Grimsley’s Wotan, often make plain stupid decisions, as his wife Fricka (Melody Wilson) is glad to rub in Wotan’s face. It’s a theocracy but one that is quite flawed, as both the giants Fasolt and Fafner (Peixin Chen and Kenneth Kellogg), and Alberich point out.
All of this was well served by the production and the conflicts baked into Wagner’s libretto, but there were some real surprises here. Michael Mayes’s Alberich used the space of the orchestra pit to plow through and under the Rhine including pratfalls caused by attempting to grab the Rhine Maidens, who Jonathan Dean’s English captions described as “slippery and slimy.” As the director noted, this replicates Wagner’s own use of alliteration in his text but Mayes also made us feel Alberich’s pain, with his singing and acting alike.
And Frederick Ballantine’s Loge (the trickster figure here) is not only beautifully sung with a lovely sense of line, but also manages to appear both amazingly thoughtless and deeply sympathetic: he cheats, he lies, but he also saves the gods by buying back Freia (Katie Van Hooten), goddess of youth, with Alberich’s stolen gold. And finally, Mime (Martin Bakari) was far removed from the “barking Mimes” of the 1980s. He found the music in the lines of Wagner’s music, and clearly cared much about the fate of the Nibelungs under Alberich’s oppression and greed; it was a truly great performance of what can be a very troublesome role.