The Met’s Ring
I saw the Met Opera’s Ring Cycle last week!
For those of you fortunate enough to not have already heard about the Met’s Ring ad nauseam: This season, the Met revived the Robert Lepage Ring production, the most distinctive feature of which is the so-called Machine, a 45-ton apparatus made up of metal planks which can rotate independently of each other and onto which images can be projected. The Machine had a lot of problems during its debut in 2010-2: it failed to work at critical moments, it creaked, the Windows logo was once displayed on it for a few seconds onstage while the computer rebooted, etc., all in a production that cost the Met $16 million. (Even aside from technical problems, the amount of artistic value contributed by the Machine is open for debate, but I’ll get to that later.)
I didn’t go into this Ring with a blank slate, because it’s basically impossible to avoid other people’s opinions about the Machine (which has overshadowed every other aspect of this production) and its shortcomings. For some people, the Machine has become a symbol for the Met’s wider strategy of trying to remain relevant with visually lavish and superficially “modern” stagings that are devoid of content. I (and everyone I’ve ever gone to the Met with) have similar beefs with the Met, so I can’t say that I was unbiased about this Ring, but I tried to keep an open mind.
Unfortunately, after nearly 20 hours spent in the opera house, I don’t have many surprises to report. Whatever its flaws, the most important thing about this revival is that the singing was mostly very good. In particular, I thought Michael Volle as Wotan was excellent. His scenes with Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, full of fine-grained emotional detail, were the most moving scenes in the cycle, and I felt real sympathy for his Wotan alongside contempt and pity. For better or for worse, it’s the strength of Volle’s performance that ultimately unified the experience of the entire cycle for me, by making it a story about Wotan’s decisions and their inevitable consequences, the noble qualities of his offspring notwithstanding.
The bad news is that, whatever the larger themes emerging from this production are, they’re not coming from Robert Lepage. The Machine amounted to a boring, traditional set for 99% of the time in practice. The configurations were relentlessly literal: at various points, the planks transformed into trees in a forest, planks of a wall or roof, slabs of a gently sloped mountain, and (worst of all) just a flat projection screen for whatever. A low point was in the second act of Siegfried, where the woodbird was a “realistic” rendering that drained all the magic out of the scene.
There were some visually interesting uses of the Machine, such as the descent to Nibelheim on a curving staircase and the ascent to Valhalla on the Rainbow Bridge. But the real problem was the lack of any meaningful relationship between the Machine and the dramatic content of the Ring. The Machine is sleek, mechanical, and inhuman in scale, and projecting natural textures onto it only emphasizes its unnaturalness. (It’s not an accident that the most successful uses of the Machine featured purely abstract, geometric projections and shapes.) The human singers, especially in their clichéd medieval fantasy costumes, often appeared absurdly small and alienated from their surroundings and each other, which is a bizarre idea to convey in an opera about gods and demigods with complex familial relationships. Intimate domestic scenarios played out in enormous, awkwardly rectilinear boxes, and the dark primeval forests were made up of flat, uniform trees. What was the point of the Machine if it would just end up unfolding into a series of static traditional sets, but much more incongruous and ugly?
I left Götterdämmerung frustrated, and not just because of the underwhelming ending (a funeral pyre less impressive than Norma’s from the previous season; another ultra-literal, lazy projection of flames followed by water; statues of the gods toppling, unpleasantly calling to mind Saddam Hussein). There’s more to be said about this production, but maybe it’s not worth the further effort. It wasn’t terrible, and the music did the work. Here’s to a more interesting 2019-20 season!
I also saw Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Met (on the same day as Götterdämmerung), which was considerably better than the Ring, and a clever Don Giovanni at Juilliard. This newsletter is long enough, though, so I’ll save those two for later.
I’m always happy to receive fan/hate mail, so feel free to reply to this email address with your thoughts. See you next time!