Wagner, for Good and ill
NORDLINGER, JAY
Wagner, for. Good and III The Met's All-Star "Ring" By Jay Nordlinger Of all the world's opera companies, only New York's Met has the stature to summon to its stage the finest, most appropriate...
...Strange, then, that Levine has decided to spend his career in the opera pit...
...ner nights of his career...
...At 53, he has already spent 25 years with the Met and seems bound to spend 25 more...
...When she is healthy, Behrens is a classic Wagnerian soprano, which is to say that the chief merit of her voice is its ability to withstand Wagner's rigors...
...Here, then, is a proposed rule, tradition-defying though it may be: Singers who have to be apologized for in advance should not go on, and if they are ill and choose to perform anyway, they should skip the sympathy pitch from the general manager...
...And like Domingo, she sang intelligently, fashioning lovely phrasing in long arcs of sound...
...It is no trade-off for her, as it must be for most of her peers...
...When he reached Siegmund's pivotal moments of Act I—the "Spring" aria, the hurled oaths as he pulls the sword of Wotan, king of the gods, from the tree—you felt something that you seldom feel in the opera house or the concert hall: that you were witnessing something indeed historic, that future generations would envy you for having been there...
...With her first cry of the legendary "Hojotoho," however, it was clear that Behrens had done a disservice by going on—or that the Met brass had done the disservice by pressing her to do so...
...The second act was preceded by the appearance onstage of the Met's general manager, Joseph Volpe...
...The Ring comprises four separate, full-length operas about the decline and fall of the Norse gods that demand not only exhausting performances but imaginative stage effects...
...Morris's mediocrity was both surprising and decisively damaging, as the last two thirds of Die Walkure fall principally on Wotan's and Brunnhilde's shoulders...
...Though Behrens, by performing under such conditions, was asking for the audience's understanding, she might have had its resentment, too, because she marred the opera by failing to give way to a soprano who at least could have executed the part, unlike the world's most sought-after Brunnhilde on a night when she should have rested her voice...
...And Morris owns this role on the world's stages to an even greater extent than Behrens owns hers...
...It is startling to hear, in the first sung notes of Die Walkure, those Italianate sounds coming out of Siegmund's mouth—lush and liquid, instead of stentorian and forced...
...Wagner obviously, in his long and often despicable life, listened to devils, but, equally obviously, he listened to angels, too— which is why Theodor Herzl began his Zionist conferences with the playing of Wagner by a hired orchestra...
...it was, by turns, extraordinary and deeply flawed...
...Famous as a lyric-dramatic tenor, suited to Puccini and Verdi, Domingo has, in his mid-50s, become the leading Wagnerian tenor of his time...
...Her lower register was practically inaudible, and her upper register—in this notoriously punishing and risky role— was a crapshoot...
...He sang with deep understanding and acted convincingly, too...
...In the Met gift shop, Ring-heads may purchase Valkyrie hats, Rhine-maiden towels, and Siegfried's-sword letter-openers...
...But she has agreed to go on and asks for your understanding...
...A company that can do it even passably is remarkable...
...So reliable is James Levine that he has come to be taken for granted...
...Domingo's and Voigt's bodies might not have matched—the virile Spaniard and the pasty Chicagoan played twins—but their voices did, and one could not have imagined a more superbly sung Act I. When the curtain fell, the orchestra members, ordinarily a jaded, unionized lot, did not file out for a smoke...
...No one ever looked more like Wotan, with his ash-tree spear, Moshe Dayan patch, and god-like stride, than James Morris...
...Audiences always dread the sight of such officials, because it usually means a cancellation and a substitution, and indeed Volpe had an announcement about that evening's Brunnhilde...
...Hildegard Behrens is suffering from a bout of allergies...
...No Wagner opera has a chance without a masterly hand over the entire, sprawling enterprise, and there is no better conductor of Wagner than Levine—and no better conductor, period...
...When these well-laid plans succeed, the results are not only glorious but historic...
...Like Domingo, she is an unusual Wagnerian in that she produces a huge yet creamy sound...
...This was Golden Age stuff—a reminder that not all greatness lies in the past, that not all the best performances are contained on crackly old recordings adorned with sepia photographs...
...Reviewers of operatic performances habitually, and inexplicably, forget the indispensable man—the one on the podium...
...The time-honored pattern of conductors is to begin with opera but then to graduate to a symphonic podium...
...The performance suggested both the strength and the weakness of the Met's all-star strategy...
...Groans and curses...
...On April 7, the Met delivered a performance of the second opera in the cycle, Die Walkure, the best loved of the four and the apotheosis of everything that Wagner sought to achieve...
...Wild cheers and sighs of relief...
...Domingo was partnered in this act by Deborah Voigt, who is increasingly the soprano in demand for the more lyrical Wagner roles...
...But he was ragged and unmusical throughout and gave a horrendous account of the opera's most sublime moment—the "Farewell," in which Wotan puts his daughter to sleep and calls for a circle of fire to protect her...
...Levine will surely be recognized as the giant he is as soon as he is safely dead, or elderly, and his recordings are deemed definitive...
...Good and III The Met's All-Star "Ring" By Jay Nordlinger Of all the world's opera companies, only New York's Met has the stature to summon to its stage the finest, most appropriate singers for any work in the repertory and present them in a kind of all-star performance...
...Domingo is a frustratingly uneven singer, but for a couple of hours he was firing on all cylinders, blazing through the role rather than doggedly assaying it...
...Domingo's intonation was spot-on, as he traveled repeatedly to the center of the notes, rather than fishing around for them, as he is wont to do on his lazier, or less comfortable, nights...
...The worthiness of this Walkure was assured—regardless of the fates of the throats—by his leadership of it...
...Maybe it is his ties to opera, or maybe—and this is something you do not hear in public every day—it is that he is a fat, perspiring, bushy-haired Jew from Cincinnati who does not cut the figure that many, particularly in Europe, seem to seek in a conductor...
...The Metropolitan Opera is currently staging Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung—always a wildly ambitious undertaking because of the arduousness of its roles, the paucity of conductors who are equipped for it, and the sheer size of the thing...
...And you never know—no matter how glittering the cast—what you are in for until the curtain and the baton both rise...
...This was genuine acting, not "opera acting," which is so much hammy pantomime...
...This music, like the events of the Ring, is beyond time, beyond place, beyond everything but the capacity to stir sluggish souls...
...Instead, they applauded in astonishment like everyone else...
...Still, Behrens is a true singing actress, and even at 60 she makes a believable Briinnhilde, part of why she is the marquee attraction of the Met's Ring...
...She has no need to sacrifice power for beauty, or to skimp on beauty for power...
...The hype and kitsch that surround every production of the Ring cannot obscure the shocking wonder of it when it is seen and heard...
...In the end, one can say only what Sieglinde says as Brunn-hilde sends her into the woods, to play out her destiny: "O miracle past understanding...
...Placido Domingo, the production's Siegmund, had one of the banAssociate editor Jay Nordlinger is the music critic of The Weekly Standard...
...But, beset by her ailment, Behrens was weak and quavering, croaking like an infirm old lady instead of soaring like Wotan's favorite daughter...
...Levine has never received the credit he is due, and he is outright contemned by some...
...When they do not (as they often do not), the results are all the more disappointing for the opportunity that has been squandered...
...The mythic Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior had nothing on this pair, and any listener unsentimental about the past knew it...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 32
