Pack fights, Pack gets along – just not. When director Valentin Schwarz creates the new “Ring des Nibelungen” in Bayreuth, which has been postponed twice because of Corona, as a family saga, weapons are drawn on the eve of “Rheingold”. And even before the super-low E-flat of the double bass sounds from the depths of the orchestra pit in the Festspielhaus, this primal abyss of all the “Ring” motifs and all the divine light albums and dwarfish black albums in Wagner’s doomsday myth, the curtain already rises and one sees – yes What? A DNA double helix? Corals on the bottom of the Rhine, right next to the soon to be cursed ring?
No, an umbilical cord can be seen on the stage-high video, or more precisely: two. Twins in the womb appear, while the Wagnerian waves, contoured too soberly by Cornelius Meister on the podium, gradually rise. First they slide gently around each other, then they kick and punch. Fratricidal war, fratricide, that’s right, it starts in “Rheingold” when Alberich enslaves Mime and the giant Fafner kills his brother Fasolt.
The highlight of the new Bayreuth “Ring” so eagerly awaited after two years of Corona is that the 33-year-old Austrian Schwarz takes Wagner’s free handling of Nordic and medieval myths as license to create something new. Alberich doesn’t rob him of the ring, nor of the despicable capital of the gods, when the Rhinemaidens teasingly disempower him, but youth, the future.
Help, the dwarf has kidnapped the children: the boy with the baseball cap can only be little Siegfried, the blond-haired girl could possibly be the later Valkyries. Or whatever, in any case Black raises the generation question. He will certainly work out how family trauma is passed from generation to generation.
And Siegfried as a child in Nibelheim, that would have been logical insofar as the radiant hope of Wagner’s mammoth work in part 3 of the tetralogy was actually raised by Alberich’s brother Mime and taught how to forge. Large parts of the family constellation, however, have less to do with the onomatopoeic music that is so evident in the “Rheingold”.
Showing the Wotan clan with a children’s paddling pool instead of the Rhine and in the second act with a bungalow living area including a salon with servants and a house bar (stage: Andrea Cozzi) also tends to downplay the prelude to the world-spanning, incommensurable 16-hour work rather than into it to radicalize today’s into it.
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The father of the gods appears in golf clothes, instead of a hammer Donner swings a golf club (which is punished with immediate lumbago – laughter from the audience). Freia is kidnapped in the SUV, Fricka sips a cup of espresso until the great mother Erda speaks her famous word of power.
Meanwhile, Cornelius Meister and the Festival Orchestra uncover the action potential of Wagner’s score down in the ditch. One misses the fantastic, the disturbing, the Wagnerian mixed sound. Even the licking flames in Nibelheim look striking.
The most convincing of the “Rheingold” singers: Olafur Sigurdarson as Alberich
Among the singers, Olafur Sigurdarson as Alberich received the loudest applause. His powerful voice, his intensity of expression and his fury, which never denies his own fallibility, are the most convincing, followed by Christa Mayer’s energetic and emotionally nuanced goddess Fricka and the natural authority of Okka von der Dameraus Erda. The other, also dynamically weaker voices, Egils Silins as somewhat statuesque Wotan, Daniel Kirch as the occasional lackluster and capricious Loge, Arnold Bezuyen as a whining, gasping mime or Jens-Erik Aasbö and Wilhelm Schwinghammer as the giant brothers embody rather one-dimensional types, albeit with a passion for caricature.
What will it be like when the kids grow up? The children kidnapped, pawned, cheated of their childhood? Valentin Schwarz’ Wagner and Bayreuth directorial debut has been known as the “Netflix” ring since an interview last winter. Well, Dallas predates Netflix.
By the way, little Siegfried is not an angel in “Rheingold”, and as I said, gods and dwarves are constantly waving pistols around. When is the first shot fired? This year’s festival continues on Monday with the new Bayreuth “Ring”; in the “Valkyrie” even more kinship comes into play.
