Encircling the “Ring”

No staging of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” can avoid controversy. Wagner himself grumbled over the scenery and costumes for the inaugural production of 1876—“R. is very sad, says he wishes he could die!” Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary—and the discontent of the Wagnerians has not ceased since. Patrice Chéreau’s centennial staging of the cycle at Bayreuth is now acclaimed as the great Wagner feat of the modern era, yet at the time it elicited howls of rage. Will Robert Lepage’s version of the “Ring,” which finishes a run at the Met this week, recover from the drubbing it has received in the print press and on the Internet? Anything is possible, but probably not. This “Ring” has few defenders, and they are far exceeded in vehemence by its detractors.

In a column in March, I went out on a limb and declared that “pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.” Anthony Tommasini, in the Times, called it “the most frustrating opera production I have ever had to grapple with.” Justin Davidson, in New York, wrote, “There’s hardly a moment in any of the four episodes when you sense the director’s passionate involvement with the characters or their moral dilemmas.” Brian Kellow, in Opera News (published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild), announced that “we are in the midst of a very bad period,” and went on to quote my “Ring” review. Heidi Waleson, in the Wall Street Journal, perceived “no sustaining vision.” Jeremy Eichler, in the Boston Globe, tapped in the final nail: “In their fetishization of technological brilliance at the expense of just about everything else, Lepage’s productions remain a chilling, cautionary tale.”

Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, has stood by his director. In April, he gave an interview to Tommasini, justifying the “Ring” and, more generally, his theatrical choices. Backing away from a previous claim that opposition to this “Ring” had stemmed from its “revolutionary” nature, Gelb proposed that “Robert Lepage may be the first director to execute what Wagner actually wanted to see onstage.” It’s a curious line of argument, since the previous Met “Ring,” directed by Otto Schenk, made a show of adhering strictly to Wagner’s stage directions. (In a 1987 review of that production, Peter G. Davis observed that the phrase “faithful to Wagner” was part of the publicity buildup.) All the same, the interview offered welcome news about future seasons: Gelb mentioned a Willy Decker production of “Tristan und Isolde,” a “Lulu” by William Kentridge, and, at long last, a New York staging of Messiaen’s “Saint Francis of Assisi.” There’s a catch, though: the director of the Messiaen is to be Robert Lepage. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.

Gelb believes that this “Ring” is “more popular than its critics allow,” in Tommasini’s paraphrase. If this were so, I expect I would have heard more support for it from readers. However, out of several dozen letters and e-mails that came my way, only one disagreed with my review. Two readers went to the trouble of purchasing thank-you cards to convey their sentiments; in my twenty-year career as a critic, I have never received multiple thank-you cards. Many reported that the Live in HD experience was no better than the live one. A reader who once worked at the Met offered a detailed critique of the transmissions, saying that the reliance on closeups prevented the audience from experiencing operas in their theatrical totality. (Zachary Woolfe, in a pair of Times pieces, has weighed the pros and cons of Live in HD; I raised some questions in a column on the Tulsa Opera and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City last fall.) Even Lepage’s lone defender didn’t push too hard. “I really loved the production, perhaps because I don’t have anything to compare it to,” she wrote. She added that Wagner’s cycle “is so much more than any representation can ever show—and maybe that tension between what we feel it could be and what we actually see, which we know is insufficient, is part of its greatness and its mystery.”

That point is important. The challenge is immense, and every “Ring” comes up short to some degree. What troubles me about the Lepage version is that it makes so little obvious effort to grapple with the specific complexities of the work. Instead, as Woolfe points out, it applies a high-tech stagecraft that has appeared elsewhere, notably at Lepage’s Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. In an interview with Daniel J. Wakin of the Times—the paper’s Wagner coverage has reached the saturation point—Lepage gave his own response to the criticism, lamenting the persnicketiness not only of “specialists” but also of “cranky operagoers who sit ‘with the score on their laps’ and never look up hear a creak in the set, ‘and they get all—’ Mr. Lepage finished the sentence with a lemon-sucking face.” It’s one thing to go after critics; it’s another to put down hard-core fans, those who occupy the upper balconies and the standing room night after night. The remark leaves the impression—right or wrong, I cannot say—of a guy who simply doesn’t like opera very much. There was immediate backlash. Zerbinetta, the pseudonymous proprietor of the blog Likely Impossibilities, encouraged readers to tote a list of leitmotifs around the Met in a gesture of defiance. Perhaps a well-thumbed score is the new Valkyrie helmet.

In the days before Gelb, the Met habitually maintained a stony silence in the face of criticism. You understand why: these defensive interviews have had the effect of creating a sense of controversy where none really existed before, despite the best efforts of scattered scribblers. Even more counterproductive was Gelb’s reaction to a WQXR blog post about the “Ring.” The current direction of the Met remains dispiriting.

Photograph of Bryn Terfel as Wotan by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux.