Chereau’s Ring

CHEREAU'S RING Jane Boutwell The new Bayreuth "Ring of the Nibelung" - an unorthodox, antiromantic view of Richard Wagner's monumental music drama - is the most intellectually challenging production that has been seen at the festival for more than a decade. It astonished and outraged a good portion of the opening-night audiences (each one of the four operas that make up the "Ring" was greeted with a wild mixture of boos and applause ), confused a number of prominent German critics, and reestablished Bayreuth in one short week as a workshop for young and controversial talent. If the festival functions as a marketplace for Wagner's musical and philosophical ideas, the "Ring," with its epic contemplation of the limits of authority and the consequences of unchecked power, is the intellectual center of the festival. Other operas are presented - this year they were "Tristan" and "Parsifal" - but Bayreuth is probably the only place in the world where most of the people one meets are discussing Wotan, Brunnhilde, Siegfried, Alberich, and Loge as if they were next-door neighbors. Thus, the debut of a sensationally different "Ring" on the occasion of the festival's one-hundredth anniversary a sentimental event celebrated with flags in the stieets, a municipal beer party, official speeches, and the reopening of Wahnfried as a Wagner museum - was a clear signal that Wolfgang Wagner, the festival's fifty-six-year-old director, had decided to join the operatic avant-garde. His grandfather, whose operas were fundamentally subversive in form and content, would probably have applauded. In, recent years, there has been a space-age "Ring" in Kassel, a Marxist "Ring" in Leipzig, and a theatrically eclectic "Ring" in London . Young directors coming from the legitimate theatre have looked at the Wagnerian epic from political, social, economic, and psychological viewpoints, sweeping away the romantic cobwebs and giving their audiences large doses of realistic and frequently unpalatable human behavior. In this context, Wolfgang's decision to produce a new "Ring," with a French team headed by Pierre Boulez, a specialist in contemporary music, and Patrice Chereau, the thirty-one-year-old wunderkind of the French theatre, was a necessary gamble. Bayreuth needed a "Ring" that would be respected by its peers and accepted by its opinionated and conservative audience. What emerged, however, was a brilliant and original production that offended practically everybody . Traditionalists, who had expected to see gods and goddesses sailing majestically through a cosmic never-never land, were confronted 84 "Iafner, the Singing Dgagn" from Siegfried. with a collection of grasping, self-centered late-Victorian capitalists dressed in the frock coats and crinolines of the period. Music lovers, who had come to admire the lush Wagnerian orchestra in the hallowed Festspielhaus ambience, were amazed to hears sounds of Mozartean clarity floating up from the orchestra pit. Political conservatives (some of whom recalled the Nazi era with a degree of warmth) were appalled when they realized that Chereau had turned Mime - the demonic dwarf who raises Siegfried from childhood and then tries to kill him into a fussy elderly Jew, an unpleasant public reminder of Wagner's anti -Semitism. (The usual villains in the "Ring" are Alberich, the dwarf capitalist who renounces love to gain power, and his son Hagen. For Chereau, Alberich is a pathetic loser and Hagen a pathological deviate.) The left wing was annoyed because there was no clear-cut political message. Chereau begins "Das Rheingold" in a world that is already half destroyed by the Industrial Revolution, and ends "Gotterdammerung " with capitalists in dinner jackets and longshoremen in work clothes dashing back and forth across the stage in panic, equally powerless to avert the impending catastrophe. But perhaps the most disturbed group of all was made up of the open-minded champions of the late Wieland Wagner. They were horrified to find that Chereau had jettisoned the entire postwar Bayreuth style - lighting, sets, and stage movements. In its place, there was a stage filled with cold-tempered neon light, large chunks of scenery, live animals - including an unscheduled appearance by one of the resident bats - and characters 85 who behaved with a realism that was frequently shattering. When word got out that the Valkyries were...