Boycotting Castorf's Ring

We all know opera lovers are weird, right?

Whether it's waiting in the freezing cold in the early hours for standing room at the Wiener Staatsoper; staying up all night to try and grab tickets as soon as they go online; or grovelling outside the performance venue brandishing a "Ticket Wanted" signs, night after night.

No price is seemingly too high, no queue too long for a hardcore fan to catch a glimpse of their idol.

But even among opera lovers, Wagnerians seem to be a breed apart, a little bit weirder than most.

I'm not just talking about the 10-year waiting list for a ticket to Bayreuth or the endless vitriol you'd be subjected to if you dare suggest that Wagner might not have been a very nice person.

I'm talking about the vast sums of money that the self-appointed keepers of Wagner's Holy Grail -- you know the ones, the trainspotters of the opera world who insist the only way to stage The Master's works is to abide by his libretto and stage directions to the letter -- are prepared to pay not to see a production that they have decided "desecrates" the composer's memory.

Yes, you read that correctly. The tens of thousands of euros a Wagnerian is willing to pay NOT to see a Wagner opera.

Just such someone, calling themselves Erich Fischer, has bought a small square of space in the high-brow arts section or Feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently to proclaim to the world that "out of reverence and love for Richard Wagner, we will not be taking our seats in Ring II in Bayreuth."

Aus Ehrfurcht und Liebe für Richard Wagner werden wir unsere Ring II Plätze in Bayreuth nicht einnehmen. erich-fischer@gmx.info

I'm not sure the world knows or cares who Erich Fischer is.
But he apparently feels it imperative to inform us that he doesn't like Frank Castorf. And he placed five such adverts in the FAZ over different days to do so.

He could have just quietly returned his tickets, or given or sold them on to someone else.

But no, here was someone who has waited long enough -- or was rich enough -- to have obtained tickets not only to Bayreuth's Festspielhaus, the Holy of Holies in the whacky and wonderful cult that calls itself Wagnerism, but also to the most anticipated and talked about event in the Wagner Bicentenary.
And he feels compelled to tell the world he isn't going to use them. "Out of reverence and love for Richard Wagner."

There is no explanation of his reasons or his motives.

I tried to contact Erich Fischer via the email address provided, but he hasn't responded so far.

A quick web search revealed that a man of the same name is a 75-year-old Munich-based former entrepreneur who has set up the philanthropic Internationale Stiftung zur Förderung von Kultur und Zivilisation (International Foundation for the Promotion of Culture and Civilization).

According to a downloadable pamphlet on the foundation's website, Erich Fischer was the owner and managing director of a micro-chip company. And he set up the foundation in 1995 to "promote art and culture, mainly in the field of music; improve the living conditions of senior citizens; and further develop civilization."

The foundation's achievements so far seem to have been putting on afternoon concerts for senior citizens and financing music lessons for school children and prisoners in an attempt to re-socialise them. 
Another laudable project is to stage neglected works of music from all eras and engage young and up-and-coming musicians to perform them.

There even seems to be a Wagner connection: a special project to present a pocket two-hour, five-singer version of Rienzi in a number of towns in cities in Germany and Switzerland during the Bicentenary Year.

Could this be one and the same man?
If so, how does that all tie in with someone who is willing to shell out €24,000 (that's the estimate of another daily Berliner Zeitung) to inform the unsuspecting world that he won't be making use of his tickets to Bayreuth?

I think it's fair to assume that Erich Fischer hasn't actually seen the offending production, so my question to him would be on what grounds is he boycotting it?

Sadly, I don't honestly expect to receive any answers.
But like I said, Wagnerians are a pretty weird bunch.

UPDATE:
Two days after I posted this article, I received an email from Erich Fischer's secretary, confirming that the man who took out the adverts -- five in all, on August 10, 14, 15, 17 and 19 -- was also the same Erich Fischer who set up the Internationale Stiftung zur Förderung von Kultur und Zivilisation.
She promised me that he would get in touch in due course.
He hasn't yet. I'll keep you posted about his reply. But I'm not holding my breath.

Salzburg Festival, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg
August 9, 2013

 

Eva - Anna Gabler
Magdalene  - Monika Bohinec
Hans Sachs - Michael Volle
Walther von Stolzing - Roberto Saccà
Veit Pogner - Georg Zeppenfeld
Sixtus Beckmesser - Markus Werba
David - Peter Sonn
Kunz Vogelsang - Thomas Ebenstein
Konrad Nachtigall - Guido Jentjens
Fritz Kothner - Oliver Zwarg
Balthasar Zorn - Benedikt Kobel
Ulrich Eißlinger - Franz Supper
Augustin Moser  - Thorsten Scharnke
Hermann Ortel - Karl Huml
Hans Schwarz - Dirk Aleschus
Hans Foltz - Roman Astakhov
A Nightwatchman  - Tobias Kehrer

Conductor - Daniele Gatti
Director - Stefan Herheim
Sets - Heike Scheele
Costumes - Gesine Völlm
Lighting - Olaf Freese

Konzertvereinigung Vienna State Opera Chorus
Vienna Philharmonic


Once this Wagner Bicentenary Year is over, probably the biggest question we'll all be asking ourselves is why wasn't Stefan Herheim allowed to stage the 200th Birthday Ring?

Sadly, it has become something of a truism that to hear the best Wagner singers and see the best Wagner productions you needn't (shouldn't?) go to Bayreuth.

I really don't believe that Frank Castor's Ring is the unmitigated disaster that everyone says it is.
It has tantalising, albeit isolated, flashes of brilliance.
And that is a great deal more than can be said of the previous production by Tankred Dorst, which was so unremittingly dull and dire that it must rank as one of the worst Rings I've ever seen.

Vocally, too, Bayreuth's Bicentenary Ring was anything but worthy of Wagner's Festspielhaus, in this year of all years.
Just look at the line-up of the concert performances of the cycle at this year's Proms to see that the world's current best Wagner singers were everywhere this year but on the Green Hill.

Yes, Bayreuth still has arguably the world's best Wagner orchestra. And it looks set to remain so in future with Kirill Petrenko taking his place alongside the festival's unofficial GMD Christian Thielemann among the ranks of the festival's great conductors.

But all in all, Bayreuth really should be ashamed of the shambles it has made of the bicentenary celebrations, after a shoddily-prepared Birthday Concert on May 22, the Festspielhaus still clad in scaffolding, Wahnfried reduced to rubble and the Markgräfliche Opernhaus closed to the public.

In artistic terms,  it is Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier who should take the blame for the muddled and directionless management of the world's oldest summer music festival. 

Of the various productions staged under their leadership, only Hans Neuenfels' Lohengrin and Stefan Herheim's Parsifal have really proven up to the mark.

Otherwise, it's a list of could-have-beens: Lars von Trier pulled out of the 2006 Ring to be replaced by Tankred Dorst. And it seemed like groundhog day again when Wim Wenders got cold feet for the Bicentenary Ring, which was then handed to Frank Castorf.

Following Sebastian Baumgarten's (literally) execrable Tannhäuser, future productions aren't looking especially mouth-watering either.
I've never found any of Katharina's productions -- from her Der fliegende Holländer in Würzburg in 2002 to her Meistersinger in Bayreuth in 2007 and Rienzi in Bremen in 2008 -- to be at all convincing.
Yet she has entrusted herself with the new Tristan in 2015. And Jonathan Meese -- a sculptor, painter, installation and performance artist of some notoriety in the German-speaking world -- will make his directing debut with the next Parsifal in 2016.

It is rare, but not impossible, for guest directors in Bayreuth to be asked back.
Among the 23 who have worked there since 1951, only August Everding and Götz Friedrich have ever staged more than one opera in the Festspielhaus.
Everding was responsible for Der fliegende Holländer in 1969 and then Tristan und Isolde in 1974 and Friedrich for Lohengrin in 1979 followed by Parsifal in 1982.

Since then, however, it seems to have become some sort of unspoken rule for directors not to return.

But surely, given the critical and popular success of his astonishing Parsifal, an exception could have been made for Herheim?

His magical and masterful re-interpretation of Meistersinger for this year's Salzburg Festival -- apparently the first staging of Wagner's only comic opera here since 1938 -- certainly gave us ample opportunity to fantasize about what he wonders he could have worked with the four-opera Ring.

Herheim updates the story, set by Wagner in the mid-16th century, to the so-called Biedermeier period in Germany in the first half of the 19th century.
And the action is all a fairy-tale, a dream on the part of Hans Sachs (who is actually Wagner himself) who rushes on stage before the overture in nightshirt and cap to scribble down his nocturnal imaginings.

We could be in a painting by Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885).

Sachs is a lonely widower, longing for the love and physical contact of a younger woman (Eva).

In the opening scene, the Nuremberg church where the congregation is singing is Sachs' own writing desk.
It's Märchen-time where the characters, the Mastersingers and Walther enter through a crack in the oversized window, the Singstuhl is the bridge of a violin and the guild members sit on thimbles engraved with their names.

It's sort of Meistersinger-meets-the-Nutcracker, and so crammed full with delightful details that the five-and-a-half hours fairly whizz by.
In fact, it's a Meistersinger you could easily take your children to.
The Festwiese at the end of Act 3 is the life-size close-up of the toy-play that Eva and Walther and David and Magdalene indulge in on the far-side of the stage.

But it precisely therein that lies the rub, a niggling qualm about such a technically perfect production.

It is all so utterly charming and enchanting that we forget that Meistersinger is Wagner's most problematic opera, hijacked and misused by the Nazis as a hymn to the supremacy of German art. And it is for that very reason that it is still treated with distaste today by even the most dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerians.

In his Bayreuth Parsifal, Herheim was not afraid to make the festival's Nazi past one of the central themes of his interpretation.
His use of swastikas and goose-stepping soldiers onstage drew loud boos from audiences every year.
So it is puzzling to say the least that he side-steps the issue so completely in Salzburg's new Meistersinger.

It is a matter of fierce debate whether, for example, Beckmesser is an anti-Semitic caricature.
But no matter what your position, the violence of the riot scene at the end of Act 2 is always deeply disturbing and the prelude to Act 3 all the more desolate for its musical depiction of the trail of devastation and destruction that the riot leaves behind.

In Herheim's reading, the riot is actually rather anodyne -- a few fairy-tale characters such as the Frog Prince and Hansel and Gretel misbehave, nothing more sinister than that.

In Sachs' (in)famous monologue at the end of Act 3, a sudden change in lighting made me sit up, expecting a dramatic new development on stage.
But it was all over in a blink of an eye, and I was left asking myself whether I'd missed something.

Vocally, Michael Volle was the star of the show. His was a superlative Hans Sach, richly nuanced and deeply moving.

And he was near matched by the excellent Markus Werba as Beckmesser.

I found the two female leads much more problematic, with Anna Gabler, to my ears, clearly miscast as Eva. Her voice is much too heavy for the role and her intonation was frequently off.

Monika Bohinec made little impression as Magdalene. Peter Sonn has a pleasant enough voice as David, but only really found his form in Act 3.

Much as I admired Roberto Saccà in Frankfurt's Idomeneo last season, he, too, seemed miscast as Stolzing, his tenor sounding tired and worn, his vibrato too wobbly for my liking.

Among the Meistersinger, Georg Zeppenfeld was excellent as Veit Pogner and Oliver Zwarg was also very impressive as Fritz Kothner.

Tobias Kehrer, on the other hand, was also seriously off-pitch in the small walk-on role of Nightwatchman.

Daniele Gatti, who conducted Herheim's Parsifal in Bayreuth, didn't always seem at ease here and, surprisingly in this score, the Vienna Philharmonic was not at its best.

Gatti, Gabler and Saccà were all loudly booed at the end.

Herheim's staging ia a co-production with the Opéra National de Paris and it seems that the Met in New York wants it, too. So hopefully there will be plenty of opportunity in the coming years to re-visit and relish this intelligent and visually stunning new Meistersinger.














 

Salzburg Festival, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Curtain calls on August 9th, 2013

Curtain call 

Anna Gabler and Markus Werba

Michael Volle

Markus Werba, Michael Volle and Roberto Sacca

Daniele Gatti

Daniele Gatti

Daniele Gatti and Michael Volle

Salzburg Festival, Gawain

Felsenreitschule, Salzburg
August 8th, 2013

Gawain - Christopher Maltman
The Green Knight/Bertilak de Hautdesert - John Tomlinson
Morgan le Fay - Laura Aikin
Lady de Hautdesert - Jennifer Johnston
King Arthur - Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Guinevere - Gun-Brit Barkmin
Bishop Baldwin - Andrew Watts
A Fool  - Brian Galliforf
Agravain - Ivan Ludlow
Ywain - Alexander Sprague

Conductor - Ingo Metzmacher
Direction and stage - Alvis Hermanis
Costume - Eva Dessecker
Lighting - Gleb Filshtinsky
Video design - Multimedia Design Studio "Raketamedia", Moscow

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra
Salzburger Bachchor


Avis Hermanis, in the programme note to his new production of Harrison Birtwistle's Gawain at this year's Salzburg Festival, insists that the opera's eponymous hero "displays many similarities" with Joseph Beuys, "one of the most important visual artists after the Second World War."

And that is the reason, Hermanis argues, that some of the most famous works and happenings of the German sculptor, performance, installation and graphic artist are so meticulously re-created on the stage of the Felsenreitschule.

They include Das Rudel (The Pack), Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt (How to explain pictures to a dead hare) and I like America and America likes me.

But if we're really honest, the connection never appears to be anything more than tenuous.
And it is debatable whether Salzburg's international audience is so au courant with their Beuys as to be able to catch all the visual references anyway, let alone make the connection to Birtwistle's reworking of the 14th century Middle English romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Hermanis' premise, as attractive as it might sound, never really appears anything more than an  artificial intellectual conceit that leaves much of the audience baffled as to what is going on onstage, at least judging by the brief, albeit friendly applause at the end.

The director's idea, on the other hand, to transplant the action from the court of King Arthur to a science fiction in the not-too-distant future where an ecological catastrophe has wiped out most of mankind is infinitely more compelling.

Against the imposing rock-hewn backdrop of the Felsenreitschule, the magnificent stage set creates an apocalyptic, post-Chernobyl, post-Fukushima world where humans are forced to live like animals, to scrounge and scavenge and even eat each other in order to survive.

We could be on a film set from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.

Nature is taking hold of the world again, with green moss invading every nook and cranny.  

Indeed, for Hermanis the figure of the Green Knight, who appears in King Arthur's court at Christmas to throw down the challenge to Gawain, is "a kind of nature deity ... who wants to offer a last chance to the survivors after the human experiment has failed."


The opulent visuals are a perfect match for the irresistible, primaeval power of Birtwistle's steam-roller of a score, written at about the same time as Earth Dances, (possibly his best-known work outside of the UK).

The choice of Gawain, with its powerful re-telling of Arthurian legend, is also a particularly apt one in the Wagner Bicentenary year, with distinct parallels -- and obvious differences -- to Parsifal.

Maybe it's because I came fresh from Bayreuth last week, but to my ears the hunting horns of Act 2 also had unmistakable echoes of Tristan or Hunding's horn in Act 1 of Die Walküre.

Musically, Salzburg could not have assembled a better cast.
Thanks perhaps to the fact that all but one of the soloists are native speakers, diction was astonishingly clear, even in the cavernous space of the Felsenreitschule.

With vocal writing as fiendishly difficult and vertiginous as this, it would be unfair to single out any one singer for particular praise.
But how much more mellifluous on the ear were the stupendous Jennifer Johnston and Laura Aikin as Lady de Hautdesert and Morgan le Fay than their counterparts on the Collins Classics recording of the original Royal Opera House Covent Garden production.

It was John Tomlinson who created the dual roles of the Green Knight and Bertilak de Hautdesert in that production and he leaves his undeniable stamp of authority here, too, even if the top of his register has gone.

German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin was stunning as Guinevere.

But perhaps most impressive of all was Christopher Maltman in the title role.
His rich baritone, cultivated but never over-mannered, makes him one of a top crop of British Lied interpreters at present.
But he also has an irresistible stage presence and I was lucky enough to catch him when he popped over to Frankfurt recently -- while he was in Salzburg rehearsing for Gawain in fact --  for a couple of guest appearances as Posa in Don Carlo.

The ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra was awe-inspiring in its mastery of Birtwistle's highly complex score. But that was hardly surprising with Ingo Metzmacher at the helm.


One can only hope that the performances  are being captured on CD.

Bayreuth Festival, Götterdämmerung

Festpielhaus, Bayreuth
July 31st, 2013

Siegfried - Lance Ryan
Gunther - Alejandro Marco-Buhrmeister
Alberich - Martin Winkler
Hagen - Attila Jun
Brünnhilde - Catherine Foster
Gutrune - Allison Oakes
Waltraute - Claudia Mahnke
1st Norn - Okka von der Damerau
2nd Norn - Claudia Mahnke
3rd Norn - Christiane Kohl
Woglinde - Mirelle Hagen
Wellgunde - Julia Rutigliano
Flosshilde - Okka von der Damerau

Conductor - Kirill Petrenko
Director - Frank Castorf
Sets - Aleksandar Denic
Costumes - Adriana Braga Peretzki
Lighting - Rainer Caspar
Video - Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and Chorus


How does a director stage 16 hours of opera and yet have nothing much to say about his main protagonist?

Frank Castorf can certainly spin a good yarn.
His Rheingold and Siegfried are breathlessly told, even if Die Walküre, set in faraway Azerbaijan, is much more static.

The cast of thieves, gangsters, whores and pimps who peopled the first three parts all reappear in Götterdämmerung.
This is a Ring for the cinema generation, for audiences brought up on the films of Quentin Tarantino, with breathtakingly detailed, Oscar-worthy sets by film designer Aleksandar Denic.

Castorf's exposé of the violent underbellies of both capitalism and communism is splattered with blood and sexually explicit, not a reading for the faint-hearted.
But there are plenty of flashes of the surreal, comical and bizarre, too.

There are copulating crocodiles in Act 3 of Siegfried. And earlier, the bear chased by the eponymous hero in Act 1 dons a bridal veil, briefs and high heels.
That same figure subsequently reappears in Götterdämmerung, this time to push a pram full of potatoes down a flight of stairs at Brünnhilde at the bottom.
It seems to be a quotation from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin but there is no dramatic or poetic logic for it being there.

For the finale of Wagner's tetraology, we're back in the now familiar gangster milieu somewhere in East Berlin, where Siegfried is again a small-time criminal with golden lamé jacket and the court of the Gibichungs a fruit and vegetable store and adjoining kebab stand.
Hagen is a punk with Mohican haircut, Gunther a biker with peroxide hair and Gutrune wears a 50s-style flower-print dress.

The idea may not be entirely original, but the characters are drawn effectively enough.
All except for Brünnhilde, that is, who doesn't seem to fit into Castorf's story at all.

It had been the same problem in Siegfried.
The first two acts were grippingly narrated.
But as soon as Brünnhilde comes on the scene, everything unravels, and Castorf suddenly veers off the edge to an absurdist world of Forest Bird-eating crocodiles.

The director's  own disinsterest in the heroine and his inability to connect with her appear to be mirrored in Siegfried's blatant boredom on stage.

In Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde similarly has no discernible function whatsoever. She is no whore, no gangster's moll. In fact, Castorf doesn't seem to have  much idea who she is at all -- or any real interest in finding out.
She remains a dramatic blindspot, an enigma, which is unfortunate, given that she is possibly the single most important character in the entire Ring. Without her, there can be no serious interpretation of Wagner's opus magnum.

In his defence, Castorf had warned people in the run-up to the festival not to expect too much, certainly not a new Ring of the century, arguing he had  had insufficient time.

But to be honest, now that the staging is complete, I have a nagging suspicion that the result wouldn't have been much different even if he had had four years instead of two.

There are many visually striking moments -- for which set designer Denic must take most if not all of the credit. But Castorf's heart never really seemed to be in it. The staging lacks cohesion and a unifying Über-concept.
He'd claimed that his Ring would be about the battle for oil as the modern-day equivalent of Wagner's gold.
But oil appeared only fleetingly, almost tangentially.

His critique of capitalism and communism is not especially biting or trenchant, either.
Gang warfare and petty crime flourish under both systems.
Big deal.

In fact, on closer examination, many of his ideas reveal themselves to be rather facile and seem to have occurred to him on the spur of the moment, rather than being part of a deeper, wider scheme and pre-occupation with Wagner and his oeuvre.

The Norns in the prelude to Götterdämmerung, for example, slaughter chickens in a voodoo ritual.
And more voodoo appears later on in Castorf's ubiquitous use of video projection.
That might sound original.
 But is the fate of the gods and of humanity dependent on nothing more than a bit of witchcraft?

The fall of Valhalla, too, is no Armageddon, but one huge  anti-climax.
Brünnhilde throws the ring onto a burning oil drum. And if Alberich really wanted, he could easily fish it out again. But he just sits there, staring at the paltry flickering flames.
Denic had conjured up an exact replica of the front of the New York Stock Exchange for the final act.
If Castorf had been interested in a critique of capitalism, why not blow it up?

Of course, Castorf had explicitly said in an interview with Der Spiegel -- whether he was being disingenuous only he can  know -- that the whole enterprise shouldn't be taken too seriously.
And when he and his team finally showed themselves at the end of the fourth evening, the director started to insult the booing, whistling and jeering audience by gesturing that they had a screw loose.

He is entitled, naturally, to think what he likes about Bayreuth audiences.
But if he regards opera and Wagner in particular with such disdain, why take on the bicentenary Ring in the first place?

Vocally, too, the last of the four evenings was not particularly festspielwürdig.
Lance Ryan's voice, no Heldentenor, is sounding increasingly frayed and worn at the edges in the role of Siegfried and Attila Jun's Hagen is mostly gruff and gargly.
Both were booed at their curtain calls.

Alejandro Marco-Buhrmeister, on the other hand, was a towering Gunther and Allison Oakes excelled as Gutrune.
The Norns and the Rhinemaidens were all well sung.

Catherine Foster is hugely impressive as Brünnhilde with her beautiful, well-rounded soprano, lyrical with a dramatic edge, but never shrill or forced.

But the real star of the entire cycle -- and surely the Bayreuthers' new darling -- was Kirill Petrenko, whose astonishingly wise, endlessly shaded and tautly-paced conducting really made this a Ring to remember and one which will surely be talked about for a long time to come.

We've had the Chéreau Ring and the Kupfer Ring in Bayreuth.
This new cycle will definitely not go down in musical history as the Castorf Ring.
The Denic Ring? Perhaps. But above all, it will be remembered as the Petrenko Ring.


 

Bayreuth Festival, Siegfried

Festspielhaus Bayreuth
Jujly 29th, 2013

Siegfried - Lance Ryan
Mime - Burkhard Ulrich
Der Wanderer - Wolfgang Koch
Alberich - Martin Winkler
Fafner - Sorin Coliban
Erda - Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde - Catherine Foster
Waldvogel - Mirella Hagen
 
Conductor - Kirill Petrenko
Director - Frank Castorf
Sets - Aleksandar Denic
Costumes - Adriana Braga Peretzki
Lighting - Rainer Caspar
Video - Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

I'd been all set to eat my hat and concede that Frank Castorf is a genius, I really had.
But then in the final scene of Siegfried, two giant crocodiles crawled on stage, copulated and proceeded to eat the Forest Bird.

My initial reaction was to agree with someone behind me who complained that they really felt someone was "taking the piss." 
After a night's reflection, however, I hoped there could be more to Castorf's reading. But he certainly doesn't make it easy for the audience.

The first two acts had been superb, easily the most gripping and successful of Castorf's Ring so far. 
In the first, Mime brings up Siegfried in a caravan at the foot of Mount Rushmore. But it's not the heads of former US presidents that are carved into the cliff face, but those of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Siegfried, who literally grows up in the shadow of the different faces of communism, has become a seedy little gangster (like his grandfather Wotan in Das Rheingold). He dresses like a pimp, has long, slicked-back hair and wears clunky neckchains.

He and Mime keep a slave chained like a dog to their caravan, reminiscent of Lucky in Waiting for Godot.

In Act 2, we encounter Der Wanderer and Alberich, easily recognisable as the two sleazeballs we first met in Castorf's Tarantino-like Rheingold. And Fafner is another ganglord, this time wasting money on tacky gifts for his hookers in Berlin, Alexanderplatz.
(That's actually where we briefly see the crocodiles for the first time,  But there is so much going on at the time that they go almost unnoticed.)

In Die Walküre,  Castorf  whisked us away to Baku, Azerbaijan. Here, we're back on more familiar territory, at least for those who had experienced a divided Germany and who recognised Alexanderplatz in East Berlin with the distinctive facade of the Centrum Warenhaus department store, the World Time Clock and the underground and suburban train stations.

(However, I did ask myself whether non-Germans would recognise and understand the very specific historical references.)

Communist East Germany was ruled -- Castorf was telling us -- by the same gangsters and small-time criminals.that we had seen in the Golden Motel on Route 66 in the capitalist USA in Das Rheingold,

The weapon that Siegfried forges in Act 1 is not Nothung the sword, but a Kalashnikov rifle, which he uses to mow down Fafner. And he stabs Mime to death with a switchblade.

Just as in the first two parts of the Ring, Aleksandar Denic's sets take your breath away, as intricately and meticulously designed and visually arresting as they are.
And unlike in Die Walküre, Castorf's direction was consistent and thoughtful, utterly believeable in its careful recreation of a gangster milieu.

I was hooked.
Even when Siegfried tries to hump the Forest Bird -- cast here as a dancer from the carnival in Rio -- and things then get really graphic in Scene 1 of Act 3 when Der Wanderer forces Erda, a whore, to perform fellatio on him.

Here, it seemed, Castorf was not merely the notorious shocker and provocateur, but a thinking man's director who could tell a good story with the fast, breathless pace of a gangster movie.

But then, suddenly, things got very weird. 
In their final love scene on Alexanderplatz, Siegfried gets drunk and practically ignores Brünnhilde -- who stands forlornly in her wedding dress -- and the two giant crocodiles appear.

The story had been  so grippingly told, the milieu so convincingly recreated that you could almost overlook the little inconsistencies that arose between the libretto, the music and Castorf's updating of the story.
But he then completely threw us all with this surreal, bizarre final scene.

For the first time in this bicentenary Ring, I felt like joining in the deafening chorus of boos (which I didn't, I hasten to add). 

I still wanted to clutch on to the hope that someone like Castorf doesn't introduce such elements for no reason. He was trying to tell us something.
On my daily morning run, I had plenty of time to try and figure out what.

On both occasions before the crocodiles appear -- in Act 2 in the scene with Fafner and in the final scene of Act 3 -- the hyper-realistic Mount Rushmore set is transformed into a line drawing.
It's as if Castorf is preparing to take the characters -- and the audience -- away from the gritty realism of the movies to a more abstract, symbolic level.
And the crocodiles symbolised greed, eating and devouring everything in their way.

Siegfried is a user. And he is already bored with Brünnhilde, in contrast to the heroine who really is in love with the hero and is prepared to  marry him.
But he just swigs back the alcohol, bored and arrogant, and throws morsels of food to the crocodiles.
High up, we see a projection of the bloodied corpse of a blonde, dirndl-wearing woman mauled by an old man. 
Is this perhaps the fate that awaits Brünnhilde at the hands of Alberich at the end of Götterdämmerung?

Musically, there was little to complain about.
The singers were much more convincing than in the first two Ring instalments, notably Wolfgang Koch as Der Wanderer, Burkhard Ulrich as Mime and Martin Winkler as Alberich.

I've never been a great fan of Lance Ryan, whose loud, barking voice has little do with Heldentenor to my ears. But here, he seemed much better suited to the role of small-time gangster.
Nadine Weissmann was as impressive an Erda as she had been Das Rheingold and Mirella Hagen excellent as the Forest Bird. 

Catherine Foster's Brünnhilde is turning out to be a real discovery, too, less dramatic and more lyrical than usual in the role, but singing with great beauty.

Kirill Petrenko continues to astonish in the pit with a wonderfully nuanced and skilfully wrought reading.

It will now be interesting to see whether Castorf continues along this radical, highly symbolic meta-level in Götterdämmerung. If he does, he is sure to lose a great many of the audience.
But I'm sure that Castorf, being Castorf, isn't too concerned about that. 

Bayreuth Festival, Die Walküre

Festspielhaus, Bayreuth
July 27th, 2013

Siegmund - Johan Botha
Hunding - Franz-Josef Selig
Wotan - Wolfgang Koch
Sieglinde - Anja Kampe
Brünnhilde - Catherine Foster
Fricka - Claudia Mahnke

Gerhilde - Allison Oakes
Ortlinde - Dara Hobbs
Waltraute - Claudia Mahnke
Schwertleite - Nadine Weissmann
Helmwige - Christiane Kohl
Siegrune - Julia Rutigliano
Grimgerde - Geneviève King
Rossweisse - Alexandra Petersamer

Conductor - Kirill Petrenko
Director - Frank Castorf
Sets - Aleksandar Denic
Costumes - Adriana Braga Peretzki
Lighting - Rainer Caspar
Video - Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra


Following a Rheingold that was full-to-bursting with exciting new ideas, Frank Castorf obviously decided to go for a few long, cold beers during Die Walküre.

The singers were practically left to fend for themselves, particularly in Act 2, in another breathtakingly opulent set by Aleksandar Denic -- this time a wooden-framed oil rig in Baku, Azerbaijan at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Not that a Siegmund of Johan Botha's size and stature can do much moving around onstage, anyway, let alone run through a forest in a storm, flee with Sieglinde and then fight to the death with Hunding.

But there was so much singing at the ramp that -- were it not for Denic's magnificent set -- we might not have been in Wagner's Holy of Holies at all, but watching a tired and dusty repertoire production anywhere in the world.

OK, there was Castorf's now all-too-familiar use of live video projection to reveal what is going on somewhere deep inside the set.
We see Sieglinde slipping sleeping potion into Hunding's drink and then their abortive love-making before Hunding nods off and Sieglinde sneaks down to Siegmund.

There are also faux newsreels of Russia during Stalin's time. 

For some reason, we also see a woman eating a cream cake, first daintily with a spoon, then with her bare fingers and finally greedily gorging herself on it. 
A dress is also delivered to her as a gift.
But quite who she is, or why we should care never really becomes apparent.

She wanders onto the stage during Wotan's scene with Fricka  in Act 2, to be angrily waved away by him.
Is she simply one of his infidelities and floozies, the reason for the breakdown of his marriage?

Nevertheless, the use of video  is nowhere near as intrusive as in Rheingold.

There, it was easy to get distracted from the music.
Here, the relative lack of action finally allowed us to sit back and listen to the music and appreciate the sensitivity and elasticity of Kirill Petrenko's conducting
Here seems to be a great Ring conductor in the making, a  musician with a fine sense for the overall architecture of the score, but one who also really listens to the singers and lets them breathe, never allowing the orchestra to drown them. 

It's just a shame that Bayreuth hasn't been able to line up a better cast to do him justice.

No matter how generous I try to be and even allowing for premiere nerves, Wolfgang Koch is no Wotan, at least not one worthy of Bayreuth, just as Claudia Mahnke isn't suited to Fricka.

With a gripping pair of actor-singers, such as I heard in Bryn Terfel and Sarah Connolly in London's recent Ring, who have the necessary scope and nobility of tone, the breakdown of their marriage at the start of Act 2 can be heart-breaking.

But here, Textverständlichkeit was far from optimal and Koch, in particular, seemed more concerned with merely getting to the end than coaxing any particular meaning out of the words.
Wotan's monologue was every bit as boring as people frequently complain it can be and -- without any supporting direction from Castorf -- dragged interminably.

Bayreuth's new British Brünnhilde Catherine Foster is much more lyrical than we're used to in this role.
Hers is a lovely voice and the ease with which she sang her opening Hojotohos was impressive and boded well. 
But she remained so underpowered in Act 2 that she was -- unjustly -- booed at the intermission.
Neverthless, it soon became apparent that she had  been saving herself, because she switched on the drama in the final act without ever sounding squally or overtaxed.

Act 1 is, of course, everyone's favourite part of the Ring and Botha, Anja Kampe and Franz-Josef Selig magnificently did it justice. With singing like that, the lack of personenregie didn't really matter.
The Valkyries were all fine, too, and it was here in Act 3 that the stage came to life, finally. 

Rheingold must be the easiest part of the Ring to stage because there is so actually a story to tell, while Die Walküre and Siegfried have less to offer in the way of real action.
But after the almost over-busy Vorabend, it really felt as if Castorf had got bored and gone AWOL.

So it will be intriguing to see how he handles the next instalment on Monday or whether he skives off again here, too.