Siegfried

Lothar Zagrosek
Orchester der Staatsoper Stuttgart
Date/Location
1 October 2002, 5 January 2003
Staatsoper Stuttgart
Recording Type
  live   studio
  live compilation   live and studio
Cast
Siegfried Jon Frederic West
Mime Heinz Göhring
Wotan Wolfgang Schöne
Alberich Björn Waag
Fafner Attila Jun
Erda Helene Ranada
Brünnhilde Lisa Gasteen
Waldvogel Gabriela Herrera
Stage director Jossi Wieler
Set designer Anna Viebrock
TV director Hans Hulscher
Gallery
Reviews
Musicweb-International.com

Staatsoper Stuttgart’s 2002 ‘Ring’ was based on the ‘innovative’ idea of having different directors and casts for each part of the tetralogy and is now being released on DVD. I assume that the Stuttgart Intendant, Klaus Zehelein thought initially that combining four different views of Wagner’s drama would reveal more aspects of its plot and characters than any single production might do, so that the independent interpretations could coalesce into an original and overarching Konzept of the work as a whole. On the strength of this Siegfried though, the notion seems to have misfired badly for this is a one dimensional interpretation which presents the work as a comic-book with music.

The music is done pretty well however and the singing is of a generally high standard. Lothar Zagrosek may not be an incandescent Wagnerian but he is never less than satisfactory and the music moves along nicely with proper regard for its drama and lyricism. No great risks are taken with the score under Zagrosek’s direction but nothing goes very wrong either. It is middle of the road, but is enjoyable.

In similar vein, most of the singers give very competent performances. John Fredric West as Siegfried manages the forging song very well even though he is not the heldentenor to light the world up exactly. His voice holds up perfectly adequately even when partnered by Lisa Gasteen’s powerful and dramatic Brünnhilde and Heinz Göhrig’s tuneful Mime. These singers, together with Attila Jun’s Fafner, Helene Ranada’s Erda and Gabriela Herrera’s Woodbird offer very pleasurable listening to which no one could take exception. The principals are a strong vocal team, let down only by Björn Waag’s rather lightweight Alberich and Wolfgang Schöne’s vibrato smitten Wanderer.

Music is one thing but production is another, and Gerhard R. Koch’s booklet essay gives an instant flavour of this one. Siegfried is an ‘über-oaf,’ Koch says, given to ‘truly infantile tantrums’ who has the words ‘Sieg’ and ‘Fried’ written separately on his tee-shirt ‘which shows that he comes from: not the forest, not myth, but a comic.’

Koch goes on to say that ‘Jossi Wieler’s direction … exercises an unprecedented power to draw from Siegfried the glummest of all comedies, making laughter die in the throat, and presenting only one negative figure: the Wanderer, Wotan’. Here the god is ‘a schizoid: the CEO of Walhall Inc. who has lost his power base’ and has become ‘an elegant old rocker in jeans, leather jacket and shades, impotent but still enjoying sadistic little games like the quiz in which Mime’s head is the prize.’

Now, in case anyone thinks that I’m an unreconstructed traditionalist when it comes to opera production, I should mention here that I liked Robert Wilson’s Royal Opera Aida (review) when most other reviewers hated it, and that I’ve seen an enjoyable Ring where the Valkyries rode about on mountain bikes carrying the bandaged body parts of dead heroes on their handlebars. So what I’m puzzled about here is not that this production is post-modern; rather it is that the producer / directors think that spelling out everything comic-book fashion somehow illuminates the subtleties of Wagner’s text. Less is quite often no more, unless you happen to be Roy Lichtenstein.

Sets and costumes are certainly glum though. Act I is set in Mime’s dingy all- purpose backyard kitchen/dining-room/ workshop which has peeling plaster and broken windows where Mime beats out the Nibelung anvil rhythm on the side of a bowl in which he peels potatoes. Siegfried enters dressed in a fur hat and coat over his tee-shirt, jeans and trainers (Adidas not Nike, I’d suggest) and threatens Mime with a pair of fur covered paddles on poles. When CEO Wotan arrives on the scene, he points a pistol at Mime while challenging him to the riddles, and good taste forbids me saying what Mime does next. Siegfried fires up the forge with a foot pump, before smashing some more windows and then rhythmically wafts extra draught through the room with its door.

Act II is glummer still. The woodbird is a ‘little blind boy: not a being of pristine nature at all but a tool in a rigged game driven only by erotic urges.’ (Would that be the bird or the rigged game, I wonder.) Fafner sits inside a ‘military exclusion zone’ on a chair with his back to the audience and also has the words ‘Sieg’ and ‘Fried’ on his shirt but in mirror writing so that ‘the killer is already inscribed deterministically on the victim.’ A witty ‘No Horns Allowed’ sign hangs on the wire perimeter. There’s very little ‘Ho, Hi’ here at all: just ‘Ho, Hum’ when Fafner gives up without a fight.

In Act III, Erda, who ‘is not a mythical old woman but rather a socialite with whom Wotan dances the last tango,’ according to Herr Koch, is found in another gloomy room with mandatory peeling wallpaper. The room is almost entirely devoid of furnishing apart from something that looks like a steriliser, a series of trestle cradles over which are draped either some diapers or her smalls, and a cracked wash basin in which she has presumably hand-rinsed the aforesaid items. She wears an unbecoming shiny pink nightie and inexplicably (and it certainly beats me) she has thoughtfully parked a pair of garden shears behind the basin’s pipe-work.

The large dark rectangle above Erda’s wash basin eventually glows white to become a portal to Brünnhilde’s rock. This turns out to be the brightly lit and clinical bedroom from Kubrick’s ‘2001’, where Brünnhilde lies sleeping at her dressing table, despite the enormous double bed nearby. She is dressed in yet another unbecoming nightdress over which she is wearing (guess what) a riding hat and a hacking jacket. Und so weiter, und weiter, und so……….

The comedy really kicks in (not) during Brünnhilde’s awakening though. To illustrate ‘Das ist kein Mann,’ Siegfried puts his hand up Brünnhilde’s skirt and having learned fear at last hides terrified in a wardrobe. Brünnhilde coaxes him out again in a proper wifely fashion by tidying Nothung and the horn away in a bedside drawer and then hanging up her jacket neatly like Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard in Under Milk Wood (….Tell me your tasks, Mr. Ogmore…… I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas…)

With everything to her satisfaction and ganz organiziert, Brünnhilde does a heavy come-on for Siegfried by lying on the bed and patting it seductively. Then she turns all virginal again and runs screaming from him into a corner. After this, she applies a phenomenal amount of make-up and yields womanfully at last (and on the floor too, on account of her overwhelming passion you see) because it is her FATE to do so. Got it now have we, everyone? Oh, do pay attention, George.

The abiding impression left by this production is that the producers’ attempts to make everything obsessively explicit are just symptomatic of present day reductionist thinking, in which ambiguity and uncertainty (and therefore richness in narrative) somehow cannot be tolerated. But Wagner, who clearly anticipated psychoanalysis by half a century, knew far better than that, surely. And since some analysts say that laughter can be a psychological defence against anxiety, we might profitably wonder what Wieler and Morabito are really worried about. Wagner would have done.

In summary then, these discs (which are technically excellent) can be recommended to those who are interested in new Wagner productions for their own sakes but would probably not please everyone.

Bill Kenny | 4 April 2004

Gramophone

Kitchen sink meets the SS – it can only be Stuttgart Opera: this is Wagner for lovers of gimmickry and camp

In Mime’s smithy, a tatty kitchen-diner, he clinks spoons on bowls instead of hammering swords, and reacts to stress by – as the brochure elegantly puts it – ‘frenzied wanking’. A fat fiftysomething Siegfried with Hitler-jugend manners (and a T-shirt reading ‘Sieg Fried’) ‘forges’ the sword on the grubby cooker, for bellows working the kitchen door. The Wanderer slouches around in baseball cap and biker jacket, menacing everyone with a little revolver. Fafner, harmlessly human, sits immobile behind a concentration-camp electric fence, until Siegfried stabs him and hangs his corpse on it, SS-style. The Woodbird, a blind street-boy, somehow leads Siegfried to encounter the Wanderer in Erda’s sordid washroom. Without passing any fire, he finds Brünnhilde asleep in the enigmatic bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead of waking at his kiss, she knocks him flat and dozes off again on his ample paunch…

Welcome once again to Stuttgart Opera’s Ring, which adopts the latest gimmick of abandoning any pretence at dramatic coherence and employing separate producers and casts. This ought at least to create some sense of adventure or spontaneity, but in practice, as with the preceding Rheingold and Walküre instalments (TDK, 4/04), they simply reshuffle the shibboleths of ‘contemporary’ staging.

This cast, though, offers some improvement, notably Jon Frederic West’s Siegfried (due at the Met this season), unhappily Falstaffian but sturdy and not unlyrical despite some choppy phrasing. Cardiff prizewinner Lisa Gasteen is also an ample Brünnhilde.

Mime, Fafner and the Woodbird are adequate, Bjørn Waag’s Alberich and Helene Ranada’s Erda rather more so. Wolfgang Schöne’s Wanderer, sporting a big leathery voice marred by a wavering ‘beat’, is played too thuggishly to convey any tragedy.

Lothar Zagrosek’s conducting is still lively, but here, with what sounds like reduced orchestration, one really misses a sense of detail, for example in the mighty Act 3 Prelude, the contrapuntal web of motifs with which Wagner marked his return to composing the Ring.

Despite excellent recording, therefore, recommendable chiefly to devout neoterics.

mscott rohan | Issue 6/2004

classicstoday.com

There is something so magnificently awful about the physical production and direction of this wonderfully sung and played Siegfried that watching it is a cross between a guilty pleasure and rubber-necking. The Stuttgart Opera decided it would mount a Ring Cycle in which each part was directed and designed by a different team; nor would there be any continuity in casting. In other words, they’re going precisely against both good sense and the composer’s wishes. Why not play the whole thing on kazoos?

Allow me to describe and you may judge for yourselves. Act 1, “A smithy in a rocky cave in the forest”, takes place here in a filthy kitchen/living room in modern dress. The banging-on-an-anvil noises made by Mime are now the sounds of a spoon hitting a mixing bowl. Siegfried wears a dirty T-shirt and jeans and enters wearing a bearskin coat. The Wanderer is dressed like a ’50s biker, in leather jacket, jeans, and a baseball cap; he carries a revolver. When he departs and Mime hallucinates about light, flames, noise, and the dragon, he does so with his hand down his pants, playing with himself furiously. The kitchen door is the bellows during the “Forging Song”.

Act 2, “Deep in the forest”, is no such place: we see a barbed-wire fence, presumably enclosing an internment camp; Fafner is human and sits on a chair, back to the audience. The Forest Bird is a blind Beggar boy. Erda is summoned from a grimy washroom in Act 3; she wears an off-the-shoulder, pink evening gown. There is no rock, there is no fire. Siegfried finds Brünnhilde in a totally white room with a bed on the left, as in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Siegfried awakens her, she wallops him with her fist, knocks him flat, and then falls beck to sleep for a while, head resting on his big tummy. [Editor’s note: See the cover photo; she certainly looks less than thrilled at having been woken up!] Even given the argument that Siegfried is the Ring’s comic interlude (and at least a partial case can be made), this is quite something. Had enough?

This is a pity, since musically all is well–and occasionally brilliant. Lothar Zagrosek’s conducting and the Stuttgart Orchestra are wonderful in every way–big and bold, lyrical and lovely, with just the right tempos and ebb and flow. The strings shimmer, the woodwinds are audible and handsomely played, and the brass is imposing but not afraid to play softly when required. And Jon Frederic West’s Siegfried is remarkably sung, with a bright top, endless energy, and an ease with the part’s more tender moments. He’s very pudgy, and as suggested above, horribly costumed, which makes him look like a dumb redneck–but I guess that’s the point. He leaps around with great agility–and he deserves a better production.

Lisa Gasteen’s Brünnhilde is fine and her transformation from goddess to woman is touching and honest, despite having to do most of it while making the bed comfy for Siegfried and rolling about. Her big, attractive voice is just right. Wolfgang Schöne’s Wanderer overcomes his costume and behavior, and he’s excellent with the text–but there’s constant wobble in his voice, which detracts from his performance. Heinz Göhrig’s Mime is vivid and nasty as sin; it’s to his credit that he does what’s asked of him by the director. The Fafner of the superbly named Attila Jun is commanding; the Alberich and Woodbird just so-so; Helena Ranada’s Erda is terrific. The sound–I preferred the 3D Surround despite the fact that I only use four speakers and they are not really “Surround Sound” oriented–is big and rich. In short, this is a musically very valid and in every other respect grotesque performance, although I must admit that the hideousness is entertaining in a shameful sort of way.

Robert Levine

anaclase.com

« Je n’arrive plus à me concentrer sur Siegfried, et ma sensibilité musicale s’échappe bien au-delà, là où me porte mon humeur, au royaume de la mélancolie. Tout me paraît vraiment creux et superficiel » confie Wagner dans une lettre, dès les prémices de cette composition. Le troisième opéra de la Tétralogie est celui qui lui aura demandé le plus de temps et d’énergie. Pour le spectateur néophyte, c’est aussi celui qui demande le plus de concentration, celui qui ne dénoue pas encore l’intrigue tout en y ajoutant de nouvelles interrogations. Commencé fin 1856 dans l’élan de Die Walküre, le travail sur le second acte est interrompu en juin 1857 et le troisième acte ne sera achevé qu’en février 1871. La création aura lieu dans le cadre du premier Ring de Bayreuth, le 16 août 1876.

Mime a élevé le petit Siegfried dans l’espoir de se procurer, grâce à lui, l’anneau détenu par le géant Fafner devenu reptile (ein Wurm dans le texte, non pas dragon comme on le traduit souvent, mais vers ou serpent). L’héritier des Wälsungs ne cesse de le harceler : d’où vient-il ? Il a vu son visage dans l’eau des ruisseaux et ne ressemble pas au gnome. Qui sont ses parents ? Mime finit par lui révéler l’histoire de sa mère en fuite, morte en lui donnant la vie, et lui laissant les restes d’une épée que Mime n’a jamais réussi à reforger. Qui pourra reforger Nothung, brisée par la lance de Wotan dans les mains de Siegmund ? Comme Wotan déguisé en Voyageur nous l’apprend : seul celui qui ne connaît pas la peur y parviendra, et Mime périra de sa main.

Le premier acte fait donc entrer en scène Mime, occupé par le feu de sa cuisine autant que par celui de sa forge. « Je suis ton père et ta mère à la fois », dit-il à l’enfant adopté. Heinz Göhrig tient son rôle avec beaucoup de vaillance, durant cette première heure. Son jeu expressif sans être caricatural passe même sur film. Il est drôle et émouvant ; le public ne s’y est pas trompé au moment des saluts. Wolfgang Schöne (Wotan) à une voix profonde, mais un peu couverte par l’orchestre au début du dernier acte. En revanche, le nasillard Jon Fredric West (Siegfried) déçoit : il possède la puissance, mais le timbre n’est pas très beau. L’aspect quête identitaire du personnage est accentué dans cette production, ainsi que son narcissisme – le « fier adolescent » étant revêtu d’un tee-shirt marqué à nom. Si l’onanisme de Mime peut se justifier comme rituel de rassurement, le roulage de joint de Siegfried est une aberration, du fait de sa vie sociale nulle et qu’il n’a pas besoin de cela pour s’affirmer ou provoquer le nain.

Au deuxième acte, Björn Waag (Alberich clair et vaillant) veille devant le domaine du reptile, un espace sombre entouré de clôtures grillagées, surmontées de barbelés que dominent des haut-parleurs. Attila Jun – Fafner aujourdhui, Hunding dans Die Walküre [lire notre critique du DVD] – est toujours étonnant vocalement. Venant assister au double carnage, l’Oiseau de Gabriela Herrera fait peur à voir et à entendre : petite chose ébouriffée et pâlotte, aveugle comme Tirésias, anorexique comme une lycéenne en jogging, elle chevrote un chant grêle et souvent faux.

Le troisième acte débute avec Helene Ranada (Erda), assez inaudible du fait qu’elle vient rarement à l’avant-scène de cette nurserie à l’abandon, façon orphelinat de l’Est. Comme si nous passions de l’autre côté du miroir, nous découvrons ensuite un boudoir faussement rococo (velours verts et meubles blancs) qui évoque immanquablement la fin du 2001 de Kubrick. Lisa Gasteen (Brünnhilde) à une belle voix chaleureuse, aux graves très posés. Sa présence ne suffit pas à dissiper l’ennui et le désintérêt qui s’installe. Siegried n’a jamais été aussi pataud et Brünnhilde se brosse les dents après avoir mis son rouge à lèvres… Alors que la mise en scène de Jossi Wieler et Sergio Morabito fonctionnait jusque-là, il est regrettable de finir l’opéra sur cette déception.

En fosse, Lothar Zagrosek continue son parcours sans fautes.

laurent bergnach

Rating
(2/10)
User Rating
(1/5)
Media Type/Label
TDK, EuroArts
EuroArts
Technical Specifications
1920×1080, 9.7 Mbit/s, 17.0 GByte (MPEG-4)
Remarks
Telecast
This recording is part of a complete Ring cycle.