LA Opera –‘ Siegfried’ The Story of the Hero and the Goddess

By Lydia E. Ringwald
 

With an opera cycle as famous as Richard Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen,’ with a history productions spanning several generations at prominent opera houses throughout the world, a new production may only best distinguish itself in a its signature set design and costume that offers a unique interpretation into the meaning the epic operatic tour de force.

Highly lauded set designer Achim Freyer experiments with avant-garde staging techniques that tilt on a balance between a three Ring opera production and a three Ring circus.  Ghoulish costumes and grotesque make-up have are touched with the aesthetic of  ‘Cirque du Soleil.’ But Freyer’s cartoon-like  miniature dragon looks like a prop from a toy store.

But tracing the origins of Freyer’s stagecraft derivation can be elusive. The hints Cirque du Soleil phantasmagoria often seem to reveal an even earlier derivation in German Expressionist painting and film. 

But Halloween style grotesquery, appropriate for such deep dark forest and underworld characters like the dwarf Mime, don’t sit well on the heroic and noble main characters Siegfried and Brunhilde. 

Freyer’s   Siegfried wearing dark blue/ green make-up costumed in exaggerated yellow dreadlocks seems to have been made deliberately overweight with thick animal skin pants.
Brunnhilde, costumed in an oversize gown painted with large sagging breasts with huge maroon colored nipples, looked vulgar, misogynist.

Although repeatedly trying to give the production the benefit of the doubt, it seemed in the end that Freyer is deliberately trying to degrade the main characters, to strip them of their nobility and power.

Perhaps Freyer is expressing his own embarrassment about the supernatural power of the hero and the Valkyrie.   Perhaps Freyer does not understand that Brunnhilde, a Valkyrie, is endowed with epic stature of a goddess and that Siegfried is a hero, a mortal endowed with supernatural power. But by reducing their stature and dignity, Freyer violates the integrity of a literary epic, a story of a hero and a goddess that dates from an early pagan culture that existed far before our time and before the confines of the conventional monotheistic religious belief systems now.

In the preceding story of the ‘Die Walkurie,’ Brunnhilde is punished by her father Wotan, a Zeus-like king of the gods and striped of her immortality.  Because of her compassion for Sieglinde and Siegmund in defiance of his orders, Wotan condemns his daughter to deep sleep in the middle of a ring of fire waiting for a hero bold and brave enough to penetrate through the danger and meet her at her own level.

‘Die Walkure’ culminates in Freyer’s imaginative and dramatic ring of fire scene. The suspense that drives the next story, ‘Siegfried,’ culminates with his penetration of the ring of fire and his triumphant union with Brunnhilde.

'Die  Walkurie’ ends in a suspense that is resolved in the ‘Siegfried’ sequel when the hero and the fallen Valkyerian goddess are united; when an immortal goddess falls to earth and a hero aspires the heights to meet her.

For the epic to be artistically effective, Brunnehilde must be a dramatized in her goddess image: magnificent, powerful and inspiring; Siegfried must be represented dramatically as a powerful and pure hero to be worthy of her.

The union of the goddess and the hero is an essential element in the epics of pagan cultures.
Demeaning the two main characters, hero and goddess, Siegfried and Brunnhilde, in costumes far less than their stature, violates not only the meaning and impact of this epic but of the great epic tradition of hero and goddess cultures of the past.

Although Freyer’s misunderstandings of epic traditions were disconcerting, his stage lighting was often quite effective. The neon streaks of light that splinter the stage as Siegfried forges the sword mimic magnified multiple flashing blades and are set to music in thrilling synchronization.

Even though costumes and sets often compromised the famous epic story, the power of the music was not sacrificed in the LA Opera production. Conductor James Conlon leads the searing sound of clashing metal trumpets and brass through Wagner’s phantasmagoric musical forest.

It was a luxury to listen to the live performance with all of the energy and power of voices the magnitude of John Treleaven as Siegfried and Linda Watson as Brunnhilde.

The Ring cycle actually consist of four operas and ends with ‘Gotterdammerung’ to be performed in March 2010.

An epic expresses the values and aspirations of an earlier ‘pagan’ culture that precedes our time. An epic represents a culture of goddesses and heroes that should remain inviolate; free from distortion by later religious belief systems.

Let’s trust that the final fourth Ring, after the three Rings we have already experienced, will be more loyal to the origins of the epic story on which ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ is based.