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Contemporary directors who are still fairly young, as Warner is, have seen hardly any productions of the Ring to react against, because ever since Patrice Chéreau’s devastatingly successful Bayreuth Ring of 1976, his kind of eclectic post-modern idiom has become the only acceptable one for a self-respecting avant-gardist to follow. Yet the Ring is an inherently rebellious work, both portraying and embodying some principle of freshness and renewal, so that we are always bound to grow restless with an orthodoxy of interpretation. So the gestures of defiance of tradition that Chéreau brilliantly enacted, including updating scenery and costumes, making the gods a degenerate crew of late capitalists, systematically undermining any possibility of nobility or grandeur, have now themselves become moribund, and Warner’s production may perhaps be viewed most kindly as an encyclopaedic farewell to them. It’s hard to think of any cliché of contemporary Ring-production which can’t be found in this production, which already has the feel of a museum piece. Most of Wagner’s stage directions are naturally ignored, some with disastrous results: no Nibelungs rush on with the hoard at the captured Alberich’s command, so the drama’s most terrifying climax, though also underplayed by Pappano, just didn’t exist. The hoard is money, contained in a few dispatch boxes, emptied into a hole as ransom for Freia; nothing to do with material possessions literally blocking her from sight, one of the Ring’s most potent and moving symbols. To the grandiose music at the end, the gods undignifiedly begin climbing up step-ladders to Valhalla, though Wotan soon thinks better of it and as the curtain comes down he is having it away with Erda in an armchair. There is plenty of that kind of thing, which some people may be happy to call deconstructive.
The sets of Stefanos Lazaridis are elaborate, and at times really striking. The Rhine is impressively represented at the start, only to be abolished after a few minutes; the Rhinegold is a dazzling sphere into which Alberich plunges, one of the telling moments — less effective is his arrival at the depths of the river paddling a boat on a monorail. The gods inhabit black marble halls, with a perilously sloping floor, so that their vast dining table constantly threatens to let gods and silverware slide off it — some nimble acting was required to forestall audience anxiety or mirth. That is rank amateurism. Nibelheim is a morgue-cum-psychiatric ward, with Alberich performing lobotomising experiments on its twitching inhabitants, quite the wrong kind of bondage or repression. In general, there is too much clutter, and I hope that by the first revival there’s been a spring clean.
The musical side of things fares much better, though I had no feeling of inevitability. Pappano, in Wagner as elsewhere, has his fancy taken by odd unobtrusive moments, often overlooks the obvious, and fails to sustain tension in transitions. The orchestra was once more on top form, and gave a wonderfully cogent account of the prelude, all the more so in the face of the incredible level of noise — coughing, dropped glasses and programmes — kept up by the audience. Chief interest was in Bryn Terfel’s first Wotan, and here the results were encouraging. He produced a stream of rich tone, with slight strain at the top. His characterisation is still rudimentary, and the Wotan of Die Walk
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