Wagner - Das Rheingold at La Monnaie

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday November 5 2023

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production, sets, costumes and lighting: Romeo Castellucci, with Paola Villani (sets), Clara Strasser (costumes), Benedikt Zehm (lighting). Choreography: Cindy Van Acker. Wotan: Gábor Bretz. Donner: Andrew Foster-Williams. Froh: Julian Hubbard. Loge: Nicky Spence. Fricka: Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Freia: Annett Fritsch. Erda: Nora Gubisch. Alberich: Scott Hendricks. Mime: Peter Hoare. Fasolt: Ante Jerkunica. Fafner: Wilhelm Schwinghammer. Woglinde: Eleonore Marguerre. Wellgunde: Jelena Kordić. Flosshilde: Christel Loetzsch. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra.

Photos: Monika Rittershaus

An artist I know well has nearly always worked on long-term projects, in some cases spanning ten years or more, with exhibitions marking various stages along the way as the projects - and the artist's life - progress. Each 'iteration' both develops and transforms what's gone before. It contains external references - for example to different cultures, or to themes common to many, that we may or may not twig to - and internal ones to previous stages in the artist's evolution, keeping some ideas, shedding others. So, though you can appreciate the work just as it stands before you (and people do, rightly so), you can't plumb its depths without being familiar with the artist's full oeuvre, of which it incorporates a kind of condensate or concentrate that gives it density and coherence over time. 

In the past, I've sometimes been a bit flippant (if you can believe it) about Romeo Castellucci's work, but I have to admit that his Moses und Aron and Zauberflöte are among the most memorable and satisfying productions I've ever seen. Now, having spent some time trying to fathom Castellucci's approach to Das Rheingold, it seems to me something similar is in play to what I just wrote about the work of the young artist. You can admire it, and enjoy puzzling your way through it, with no more than whatever erudition and cultural baggage you may possess, but the deeper you delve into the details, the richer the experience becomes.

Castellucci, it seems to me, enriches the story as told by Wagner's text and music by weaving around it a web of links with the themes/issues it raises, as they appear in different cultures, mythologies (especially Greek) and historical events. The result is to position it in a broad and variegated context of eternal, universal themes: the recurring cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth, wax and wane, light and dark, sun and moon... But like any good artist, he's uncompromising. He dives into his own wide-ranging references, collected over a lifetime, and if we don't recognise all of them, our experience, while still rich, will be less intense. In addition, in the case of Das Rheingold, he uses the ring, the circle, the disc... as a unifying form in the overall design scheme, drawing the production tightly together, visually and thematically speaking. And the whole production makes it clear the gods are doomed from the outset.

I'll try, now, to give a brief (!) overview of what is a minutely detailed, virtuoso staging.

Before any music starts, the house is plunged into darkness, including the music stands in the pit and even the emergency exit signs. Night, and silence. Then, still with no music, a large metal ring (about 4 or 4 and a half feet in diameter I'd say) falls with a metallic bang on the dark stage, and spins, like a coin, more and more obliquely, till eventually it settles. Then the famous, portentous E-flat chord begins, but the stage remains obscurely lit and the three Rhinemaidens are never clearly visible: they may be dressed in dark, slinky gold, we can't quite tell, but it would make sense. They are doubled by three dancers, and the movements of both singers and dancers seem calculated to bring the Three Graces to mind. A kind of golden mist descends, this time recalling Danae and the lust of polyamorous Zeus (/Wotan), pierced in time by a vertical shaft of sunlight. Alberich, deliberately made up (so it initially seems: see his transformation later) to look monstrous, is shackled to a long, dangling steel girder until he renounces love, upon which he is set free. The floor with its gold-dust slips away under his feet and rises at the rear of the stage: this will be echoed in the final scenes, bookmarking the visual side of the production.

Scene two is brightly lit: dark and light alternate throughout. We see a variety of white marble sculptures and reliefs from different places and periods being assembled, against white walls, to finish Valhalla. Obviously, Castellucci didn't choose these at random. Each has its significance, and I am very much indebted to Wanderer's blog post (on wanderersite.com) for cataloguing them. The post is in French, but even so I recommend reading through it, as it goes into great detail about the production, picking apart the multiple references and their probable meaning, and anyone who doesn't read French can easily paste the paragraphs into a decent online translator. (I personally always use Deepl.) In a quite spectacular coup de théâtre, near-naked extras roll in and fill the whole floor space with their writhing bodies. Walking over them naturally makes the gods' movements precarious in the extreme. Wotan and Fricka teeter across the pullulating carpet of fleshy pink in black, baroque crowns. This time, unless I'm too naïf, the symbolism is obvious. The gods are dressed in rather 'Greek Orthodox' black costumes recalling those you may see in photos of a performance Castellucci organised, shortly before this Rheingold, at the archeological site of Eleusis, west of Athens, delving into the famous Eleusinian Mysteries centred on the myth of Demeter, Persephone, her abduction by Hades and return to her mother, the supposed origin of the seasons, and a symbol of the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. (Eleusis, or at any rate Elefsina, where the ruins are to be found, is now probably better-known to people driving to Corinth and the Peloponnese for its oil refineries and chemical plants than the ancient rites, though the site, accessible by bus from Athens, is well worth a visit.) From the programme notes to Das Rheingold, it's clear that Castellucci sees a significant parallel between Persephone and Freia, and of course the ancient story feeds into his concept.

When the giants enter, one of the ponderous reliefs collapses to offer them a platform, pinning down some of the writhing extras. Freia is similarly pinned down once captured. To make the giants look bigger, children mime the gods' parts; and when the gods start to age, they're replaced by elderly extras, thus giving us, en passant, a nod to the three ages of man. When Fafner sings, Fasolt lip-synchs, and vice-versa: they're one. Loge, played with wonderfully knowing désinvolture by Nicky Spence (in a kind of purple safari suit with shorts and a single sock), is something of a conjuror, and arrives with a (real) flame in his hand. You wonder how he does it without burning himself badly till, with a smirk and a wink, he draws a false arm out of his sleeve. Clucking and doing a chicken dance, he pulls eggs from his mouth and throws them, one by one, at a succession of portraits of Wagnerian dive and divi, including our present Wotan, making a black (not egg-yolk-yellow) starburst splash on each. No respect for the gods, at all: chicken-dancing Alberich rules the roost.

In Nibelheim, in the dark again, we find Alberich and his workers forging four-foot rings, live on stage. The magic helmet is a smaller ring Alberic wears, like a slave, around his neck. His transformation into a toad is spectacular: he peels off not only his overalls, but a whole hideous, wrinkled face mask and body suit, and as he loses the ring and his power, appears totally naked before us. In a production made up of striking images, what follows - in contrast with the levity of Loge's conjuring tricks - is perhaps the most harrowing of all. Wotan and Loge, now robed in white in a white set, with a large white disc on the rear wall, implacably shackle the naked Alberich to one of the newly-forged hoops, attached to a motor-driven winch, cover him in black paint (or ink or oil, recalling the director's Moses und Aron at the Bastille), like a negative anointing, and torture him till he gives up the ring. Whereupon he plants an oily black handprint on Wotan's face: the curse, and a black, eight-pointed star the same as those you see in photos of the Eleusis performance (also recalling the starbursts of ink made on those photos by Loge's eggs) beside the disc on the wall, and Wotan falls prostrate in the slick of black left on the stage, soiling his robe. (I spent some time searching online for the possible significance of that black, eight-point star. It turns out it can have many meanings in different contexts. As it appeared in the Eleusis performance, it would make sense for it to be a symbol of the cycle of birth life and death, of creation and destruction. Wanderer, on the blog I mentioned above, sees it as a sign of the curse and of fate, combined.)

These days, many demands are made on singers by directors, but this scene was probably the most demanding I can remember witnessing. Scott Hendricks displayed exceptional commitment to Castellucci's vision, stark naked (and looking remarkably fit) on stage, slithering around in viscous black, suspended by his wrists, yet still phrasing beautifully. An astonishing performance to which you could only react with a resounding 'bravo'.

The final scenes were perhaps a little too self-consciously esthétisantes for my taste, but the stagecraft was still intriguing and immaculately carried out. All the gods, in possession of the ring, are now in white. When the giants come for their reward, stagehands scrape the white disc at the rear to reveal the gold, as if it were a giant, circular scratch-card, with the gold as the jackpot. I'm not sure that was in Castellucci's mind, but I've seen it suggested he does have a discreet sense of humour. This gold disc falls spectacularly to the floor, sending up a cloud of the scratched-off dust. The giants hold the tails of enormous black crocodiles, suspended vertically, one male, one female. (I haven't worked out what that was about. Wanderer thinks it could be a nod to Castorf's production of Siegfried.) When Fasolt is killed, the male crocodile falls with a thud. (Interestingly, Castellucci directed Alessandro Scarlatti's Il primo omicidio in Paris in 2019, but if there was any echo of that here, I didn't catch it.) Now it's time for the gods, Wotan still graphically stained and with the mark of Alberich's hand on his cheek, to enter their new home. Typically, there would be a staircase for them all to walk up, but no: while on the wall there's a faint rainbow, where the disc fell flat is now a gaping hole, and one by one (incongruously bringing to mind Dialogues des Carmelites, as the garrulous nuns head for the guillotine), in a curiously moving twist, evoking not an apotheosis but a collective suicide, the gods stand at the edge of the chasm, arms outstretched, and fall back into it.

The production ends with Loge, chirpy as ever, as if master of all, licking a plate and with a couple of those ink-bomb eggs tucked into his socks. As Wanderer puts it (I translate), 'The meal is over, but he still has some tricks up his sleeve.'

Musically, this Rheingold may be disconcerting to diehard Wagnerians. The programme notes imply that the director was actively involved in the casting. As his vision of the work involves 'desacralising' and humanising the gods, he seems to have preferred less 'heroic' voices  than those Wagnerians might expect. In particular, his Wotan and Alberich are clearly two sides of the same coin, so it may be he deliberately sought to avoid a strong contrast between them, vocally. Gábor Bretz makes an unusually youthful Wotan and sings the part beautifully but not always audibly enough: what you do hear is so good you'd really like to hear it better. Scott Hendricks, on the other hand, is one of the two absolute stars of this show, singing better than ever before, perhaps to some extent driven to it by the dramatic demands of the staging, as I mentioned before: he put in an astonishing performance, and I'm sure I'll never forget it. The other is Nicky Spence, whose Loge is unusually lyrical and beautifully phrased to suit his mercurial personality, but with a hint of heroic potential. Peter Hoare's mime is truculent à souhait, but of course the chances of showing it are limited. I wasn't so keen on the giants, though  I preferred Schwinghammer to Jerkunica.

Marie-Nicole Lemieux sings a sound Fricka, firm in voice and with a rich, fruity timbre. My neighbour was very keen on Annett Fritsch's Freia, but I could personally have done with a sharper, brighter, more distinct sound at the top. Nora Gubisch's opportunities to shine as Erda are, like Donner's, relatively limited, but she's better employed here than frolicking about on the same stage as Ann Boleyn in Saint-Saëns' Henry VIII last spring. The Rhinemaidens were disappointing; in particular, the 'renunciation' Leitmotif lacked impact: it should surely send shivers up and down your spine, but here didn't.

Alain Altinoglu's orchestral approach in this Rheingold is, to my ear, very different from his magnificent, sweepingly symphonic Parsifal at the Bozar concert hall in 2022 - perhaps to accommodate the less heroic voices, perhaps because the work itself is Wagner of a different period and kind, perhaps both. It looks back (so I thought) to Wagner's predecessors, rather than forwards to the gigantism of the likes of Schönberg in the Gurrelieder, Zemlinsky, Korngold and so forth. More Mendelssohn than Mahler, clear and full of detail; and as ever, he's totally in tune with his players, the singers, and the action. Brussels is lucky to have him.

This has been a long article for such a relatively short Wagner work. Sorry about that, but I found the production intriguing, convincing, striking and thought-provoking, if occasionally a touch too 'designer chic' for me. I'm now looking forward to Die Walküre in January - though not so much to writing it up, which risks being another long haul...