Jens F. Laurson privately calls our attention to, Wagner’s Ring: Tension and Delight, a piece he wrote for the blog maintained by Washington's Classical WETA 90.9 FM, in which piece he comments in general terms on the staging of Wagner's great tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in connection with the upcoming March 24th premier of Die Walküre, the second music-drama of the cycle that's being staged by director Francesca Zambello for Washington National Opera's production of the tetralogy, which staging she refers to as an "American Ring". At bottom, however, Mr. Laurson's piece comes across as a lukewarm apologia of sorts for Ms. Zambello's Regietheater approach to the staging of the Ring which apologia is, of course, perfectly understandable on civic boosterism grounds, but is otherwise largely indefensible.
Mr. Laurson first attempts to sort things out a bit by defining and distinguishing such terms as "Wagnerianism", Wagnerian, traditionalist, "originalist", Modernist, conservative, etc. His definitions and distinctions are at times fairly muddled but we don't wish to here quibble with any of them but instead go right to the heart of Mr. Laurson's argument in which he writes:
An opera that has a message that goes beyond the literal story it tells (and all great operas do), needs to be allowed to get that message across. And whatever means conveyed that message three-, two-, or one-hundred years ago are not likely the means that convey it nowadays. Points of reference change, symbols and conventions change. Scenery depicting a depraved society in 1850 looked different than such scenery would look in 1980 or 2007. An audience today would merely see costumes and conclude: “pretty” – but hardly register a social critique.
It is any good director’s job to identify the message(s) of the opera at hand, and then find a way to translate this into a language that is understandable to the audience. To merely re-create a version of the past, making sure not to introduce any new idea and add new fancy trims is the traditionalist’s choice; insufficient to anyone who wishes opera to be more than merely a museum of former art. [...] To treat Wagner this way would be highly inappropriate and unfortunate. Similarly it wouldn’t do to force alien or scantly related elements into the structure, although that’s very tempting, apparently.
The difficultly for a director who wishes neither to embalm the opera, nor to impose him- or herself on it, lies in translating the core elements of the opera into a modern language without making the latter dominate the meaning. Different interpretations of an opera’s core and meaning meet different attempts to interpret them and various different nuances and accentuations that give it a particular flavor. These legions of possibilities are exactly what make opera so attractive and exciting, even if only a few of them actually work well. This challenge is only more attractive (and perilous) in the most demanding and complex of operas, the Ring.
Francesca Zambello sets out to meet this challenge with her “American Ring” in a particularly daring and reasonably novel way. Instead of trimming localisms away in order to hone in on the message, alone, she aims at presenting the Ring’s truths in a new, familiar localism, a quintessentially American vernacular. This should be less daring than it may seem at first, given that the Ring is much less quintessential German than it is universal, even if the Rhein flows prominently through it, everywhere.
References to "messages" aside (the Ring contains no "messages" even though when writing the initial prose draft of the drama that was to become the Ring Wagner, the then political revolutionary, may himself have thought in such simpleminded, propagandistic terms), the above, when stated in this general way, all sounds perfectly harmless, even reasonable and right-thinking. The problems begin when an actual director takes the Ring in hand to "translat[e] the core elements of the opera into a modern language without making the latter dominate the meaning" — most especially a director who imagines herself Wagner's equal or superior as a dramatist, dramaturge, and philosopher.
As we wrote on this blog in January of last year concerning Ms. Zambello's proposed but not yet fully revealed "translation" of the Ring:
While a new production of the Ring is always cause for notice and remark, what makes this particular new production [i.e., the then not yet produced WNO production] worthy of notice and remark is that it's to be what its director, Francesca Zambello, calls "an American Ring."
Say what?
Well, you know, American. As in, Native American, perhaps. As in, Red-Indian American. As in, the magic gold residing in the depths of the Mississippi or Colorado, perhaps (Das Mississippigold just doesn't cut it, does it). As in, perhaps, Wotan as Kitcki Manitou, the Algonquin Great Spirit or Supreme Being, father of all. As in, perhaps, Erda as Atira, the Pawnee Earth goddess. As in, perhaps, Donner as Hino, the Iroquois god of thunder. As in, perhaps, Loge as Michabo, the Algonquin trickster god. As in, perhaps, Alberich as a proto-black slaver (there were such, you know), and the Nibelungs his stable of slaves.
Mind-boggling. Absurd.
But not so fast, please. Unlike the prima facie absurd Konzept of, say, the Chéreau, Kupfer, or Flimm Rings, the Konz..., er, concept of an American Red-Indian Ring cannot be dismissed out of hand as prima facie absurd. It in fact has possibilities. Genuine mythic possibilities; mythic possibilities in which Nature and the cosmic are both overarching context and underlying ground just as in the Scandinavian-Germanic-derived world of the Ring as envisioned and realized by its original creator. [...] [F]or this production one must withhold judgment until it's a fait accompli as its success or failure depends entirely on how Ms. Zambello and her team handle the new material, especially as it concerns that material's correspondence with Wagner's text, and most especially with Wagner's music; correspondences which the above mentioned Eurotrash productions failed grotesquely and abjectly to achieve, if such correspondences were even considered by the productions' respective directors as of any importance at all. If this "American Ring" satisfies those correspondences faithfully, imaginatively, and resonantly; remains unwaveringly and resolutely mythically grounded through and through; and the music forces involved are all first-rate, Washington National Opera might just find itself with a bona fide, world-class, true-to-the-Wagnerian-vision Ring on its hands.
Unhappily, on the evidence of her production of the Ring's first music-drama, Das Rheingold, produced last year at the WNO, Ms. Zambello's "translation" of the Ring is nothing of the sort. Instead, Ms. Zambello has "translated" Wagner's great cosmic drama into a squalid, confused, politically correct, quasi-Marxist, postmodern morality play much as did her apparent model, Patrice Chéreau, in his "translation" of the Ring for his 1976 Bayreuth Festival "Centennial Ring" production, and by so doing, as did Chéreau in 1976, trivialized beyond redemption that music-drama and the great tetralogy to which it's prelude, and, more disastrously, made absolute nonsense of Wagner's music and text and their inviolable organic unity.
It was not for nothing that Wagner set the Ring in a literally pre-historic and unidentifiable time and place, notwithstanding that the costumes created for the Ring's premier at the first Bayreuth Festival where the production was directed by Wagner himself — the only production of the Ring Wagner ever witnessed or had a hand in producing — were, to Wagner's great displeasure, in total violation of Wagner's direct instructions to the costume designer to create costumes that would be "a vivid and characteristic portrayal [of the characters] which will present us with appropriate liveliness, personal incidents from a cultural period that is remote from any experience or reference to an experience," and instead, by their design, made the Ring seem to be set very identifiably in 5th-century Germany or thereabouts. Wagner, great dramatist that he was, knew that by his setting the Ring in an indeterminate time and place the work — the drama — would thereby gain immeasurably in its timelessness, universality, and universal symbolism, which qualities — qualities that are among those principally responsible for the Ring's astonishing resonant power — are destroyed utterly by the willful, intrusive meddling of postmodern directors and their Regietheater approach whereby the director's "today-relevant" Konzept or "translation" disregards and supplants the timeless, universal, cosmic Konzept that was Wagner's own.
There is nothing — nothing — that can excuse or justify that sort of perfidious vandalism. As we've elsewhere noted, faithfully serving the vision — the Konzept — of the opera's creator as embodied in the opera's score (text, music, and nominal stage directions) is the opera director's Prime Directive, and any opera director who doesn't in his very bones understand that should never be permitted access to an opera house stage.
It's, sadly, too late for the WNO, but other opera houses would do well to take note.
Bigot Alert!
[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:58 PM Eastern on 30 Mar. See below.]
Sonofagun! How could we have missed it? Blogger Pliable of On an Overgrown Path is a bigot! A "soft bigot," to be sure, according to that ever vigilant sniffer-outer of bigots and bigotry, professional leftist Stirling Newberry of The Agonist, but a bigot nonetheless. After all, a bigot is a bigot is a bigot.
And what crime has that "soft bigot" Pliable perpetrated; a crime so heinous that we're exhorted to remove On An Overgrown Path from our blogrolls as due and proper punishment? Why, he — gasp! — had the unmitigated and egregious effrontery to link — actually link! — an article written by one of those "hard bigots" over at that bigot publication, The American Spectator; an article that spewed the vile sexist and racist notion that hiring quotas are counterproductive and out of place in elite organizations such as symphony orchestras where musical and technical excellence ought to be the central and foremost criterion in hiring decisions, and gender and/or race and/or ethnicity no criterion at all.
Heavens! Sound the alarm! Alert the authorities! It's the Nazis all over again!
Idiot.
(Our thanks to blogger Steve Hicken of Listen for the link to the post on The Agonist.)
Update (4:58 PM Eastern on 30 Mar): The Rest Is Noise guest blogger, Justin Davidson, takes a second (and more rational) run at it (we commented on his first run here).
Posted by A.C. Douglas on 30 March 2007 | Permalink