A Quick Note On The 2006 Bayreuth Rheingold

Finally got to hear this late this afternoon by delayed webcast (the streaming audio of the live webcast was impossibly bad), and I just want to note here a few reactions concerning Christian Thielemann's conducting as he's, for me, the central draw of this Ring. I've never heard his reading of any part of the tetralogy before, and had huge expectations given my experience of his stellar Wagner conducting with other of Wagner's works.

To start at the beginning (as good a place as any), while listening to Scene 1, I became convinced Thielemann had gone ill, and been replaced on the podium. This critical scene (critical for the entire tetralogy) was played out both on stage and in the pit bereft of all dramatic nuance. Smooth as a sheet of glass it was, and just as flat. Quite mind-numbing, actually. Things got a bit better with Scene 2, but didn't hit full Wagnerian stride until the trip down to Nibelheim. Things went nicely (but not outstandingly) after that until the Erda episode — easily the most profound moment in Das Rheingold, and one of the most profound of the entire tetralogy — where, for reasons unfathomable, Thielemann picked up the tempo, and fairly ran through Erda's entire doom laden monologue, blunting the episode's dramatic and mythic sense in addition to contradicting Wagner's score which notates this episode, Langsam (slow). Thielemann botched the tempo of the work's climax — the so-called "Entrance of the gods into Walhall" — as well, downshifting (without any warrant in the score) to a tempo so slow one feared the gods would never make it across the Rainbow Bridge before the start of Die Walküre.

All in all, and not to put too fine a point on it, we were not amused.