Siegfried

It's a week since I saw this, and it's about time that I wrote a review. But I have been either tired or busy ever since, except at work, but writing long reviews of long operas isn't the smartest thing to do at work.

I have somewhat ambiguous feelings towards Siegfried as an opera. I don't feel the same emotional involvement as I do with Die Walküre, I don't have the same feeling of light and hope that I do for Rheingold, and I don't think the orchestral music is as glorious as is Gotterdammerung.

And, having sat through this a couple of years ago and not really enjoyed it, plus it was coming so soon after a glorious and special Walküre, so my expectations were very low.

I enjoyed the vorspiel (incidentally, I have had an amusing 'search request' for 'vorspiel foreplay' - I suppose it is a literal translation, but I don't think they carry the same actual meaning...!). It opens with a curtain down, covered with various equations, like differential calculus or maybe thermal dynamics. Mime (Gerhard Siegel) wrote E=mp3, which made me laugh, but no one else seemed to - perhaps the seemingly complex equations confused people, which is ironic, because I bet 90% of the audience can read musical notation better than I can.

I promptly fell asleep, to wake with a jolt at John Tomlinson's entrance as Wanderer; the scene between him and Gerhard Siegel as  Mime passed quickly enough. Siegfried is basically a whole sequence of duets. I enjoyed the Forging Scene.

Taken overall, Act II was a real highlight. A lot of people thought that the staging was naff, with a stag and a doe being wheeled on to reprsent Siegfried's parents. I didn't mind that. I loved the slaying of the dragon scene. Both Peter Sidhom (Alberich) and Philip Ens (Fafner) acquitted themselves well in brief appearances. And I more or less enjoyed the Woodbird scene, although being near the top of the Amphitheatre, I think I saw more than the director intended of the puppetry. I liked it when Ailish Tynan was lowered on a wire to actually be the woodbird. I thought she sounded gorgeous.

The first scene of the final act will stay in memory for a long time. It is an amazing piece of theatre. The stage is dominated by a slab which spins at some speed (and always on a tilt). Onto this were projected abstract images of clouds and so on. John Tomlinson's vocal performance was good, his dramatic portrayal was amazing, and Catherine Wyn-Rogers as Erda was memorable.

The second scene wasn't bad, either. And then the final scene started. I was pleasantly surprised at how pleasant John Treleaven as Siegfried sounded in his monologue at the beginning. I even had hopes for the Love Duet. Sadly, my hopes were dashed. It was really really awful. Treleaven absolutely murdered it; Lisa Gasteen finished it off. She was so  bad in this, a significant contrast with her performance on Die Walküre, and, as I was subsequently to find, in Gotterdammerung, as I had also noted in the original exposition of the production, that I can't help but wonder whether she is being dragged down by her singing partner. It is such a shame because it ought to be one of the musical highlights of the Ring.

And it completely ruined the mood for me. For the second half of Act 1, all of Act 2 and for the first scene of Act III I had been indulging in serious crying. It really is an indulgence and a great catharsis. It's not like my tears of self-pity or of exhaustion, and it's not like crying at a funeral. Crying at an opera (or a film etc) is a form of entertainment, because the sub-conscious knows that the emotions are manufactured and finite, with no consequences. And yet, the Love duet, I couldn't cry.

Overall, I enjoyed the performance much more than I thought I would. This is largely due to the way it was written (thank you Wagner!) and also to the orchestra. I'm not really sure what to say about the orchestra and its conducting. There was no place where I sat up and thought - gosh, I have never heard it played that way before. I feel that I have heard the opera, the cycle, sufficient numbers of times to know when something is going spectacularly badly or well, but other than the occasional duff note or chord, somewhat inevitable in live performances of this length, there was nothing that really hit me. I suppose that that mean that the interpretation was bland; I can't really say. I am not sure that I want an interpretation that is so idiosyncratic that it challenges my comfortable familiarity. And I can't say I have any great expertise in assessing orchestra or conductor, except that I know when something gives me a warm feeling or leaves me cold. I was tending to warm feeling.