Siegfried and a Bamberg link

shezan, who was in Bamberg last year at this time and saw Tristan with me at Bayreuth, posted a lovely picspam to commemorate this. Check out pictures of my beautiful hometown, here! (kathyh, if you could make me a Bamberg icon from one of the pictures, I'd be eternally in your debt (again).)

Now, about Episode III, A New Hope, err, Siegfried.


"The plot is a bit..." said my friend during the second break, and I finished "...a boy's own adventure". She laughed and said that was it exactly. Which is, of course, why Siegfried is my least favourite of the Ring cycle. This being said, I was surprised to rediscover how many tender and introspective moments are among the boys' adventure bits, notably Siegfried in the forest pre- dragon fighting, trying to figure out what his mother might have been like, listening to the birds and in vain trying to sound like them. He comes across as very young, vulnerable and lonely and it saves him from being an insufferable clockwork hero. Stephen Gould, who is this cycle's Siegfried, did really well with what is a murderous part (he's got lots to sing for two acts and then meets a completely fresh soprano for the final Siegried-Brünnhild duet with about 25 minutes of non-stop singing), and wasn't a bad actor, either - in addition to the above mentioned monologue, he was great in Siegfried killing Mime and the shock after reaction, getting really across that although Siegfried couldn't stand Mime and had just heard Mime plotting his death, this is his foster father whom he has just killed, the only person he ever knew.

Speaking of Mime, Gerhard Siegel did an Andy Serkis. He was really fabulous as Mime, getting across both the pitiable side and the cloyingness which could drive you insane (with the result that Siegfried didn't come across as a complete brat early on for wanting to get the hell out of there), and the ongoing desire for at last some power and respect of his own, i.e. the ring. A very physical peformance, too. Beate, who as mentioned earlier never saw the Ring performed before, had already said in Rheingold "oh my god, he's Gollum", and repeated that last night, which had me pointing out that Wagner went there first. As chance would have it, when we did our sightseeing tour through Franconian Switzerland on Friday we made a stop in Bayreuth so Beate could see the Villa Wahnfried (where Wagner lived and where there's the Wagner museum), and who should be there but Mr. Siegel, chatting with the director, Sven Friedrich, while doing the tour around the house and asking him whether he could have a look at the original orchestration because of a dispute with the conductor. Which Mr. Friedrich granted.

Back to Siegfried: Falk Struckman gave another terrific performance as Wotan, and the scene between him and Erda, taking place with the stage completely dark (a clever solution to the problem that the Valkyrie cliff was directly behind them, but we weren't allowed to see it yet) and the two of them the only lighted things on it, was a standout of the production (also Beate and mine's favourite in terms of stage design, which we weren't that enamoured with.

The shield and helmet of sleeping Brünnhild were encrusted, which given that two decades have passed really felt logical. Of course, Linda Watson does not look anything like a maid, but I felt that since this production emphasized the maternal element mixed up in the erotic one in the Brünnhild-Siegfried relationship, this actually worked. (It's in the text, too - at one point, he asks her whether she is his mother, and she calls him "child".) Naturally, this made me think of Connor and Cordelia, and I had the sudden vision of Wagnerians as fangirls going online after the first broadcast, err, performance, and saying "ew". *veg* ("She's his aunt, right?" said the gentleman who signs my cheques, who hadn't seen the Ring before anymore than Beate had. "Well, yes," I said. "This whole story is an ongoing advertisement for incest," he concluded. "I had my suspicions about Wotan and Brünnhild as well!")

The random present day passers-by were as random as they felt in the other operas, like an afterthought, there in one or two scenes, then gone; like I said in my Rheingold comments, the whole thing feels completely superfluous, and I really wish Dorst had foregone the idea. He, incidentally, was not there, for the third time in a row, to take the final applause, which makes it even more Christian Thielemann's production.

More sightseeing today, and on Monday, Götterdämmerung!