‘I can continue to work with the details, but the question is: will it take us any further now?’ says the Danish stage director Kasper Holten, wiping the sweat off his forehead. He has been working hard for nearly four hours with a small group of advanced-level opera students from the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen. I have commissioned Kasper, as everybody calls him, even the critics, to conceptualise, rehearse and perform a fourteen-minute passage from the end of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold – all to be done during the course of a one-day seminar. It sounds impossible, yet he is not starting from scratch: he knows the scene thoroughly, for he has recently directed all of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Royal Danish Opera, where he has been artistic director since 2000. Now, however, the challenge is of a far more scholarly nature: he must attempt to concretise and visualise the ideas proposed in a musicological essay written directly for the occasion by Carolyn Abbate, professor at Harvard University.
The creative Ring seminar takes place in the spring of 2006 in a huge white rehearsal studio in the newly built opera house in Copenhagen. Approximately twenty Nordic scholars and graduate students from departments ranging from Modern Culture and Aesthetics, Danish, German, Philosophy, Music and Theatre Studies are sitting in a semicircle around Kasper and the singers. We are playing a kind of active audience, continuously taking part in the concept definition and meddling in the ongoing process of stage direction. Our suggestions have thus far failed to disconcert Kasper. We have started off with a realistic approach, which corresponds beautifully to Kasper's usual directing style. The concept is inspired by Carolyn Abbate's essay, playing out her focus on the rivalry between the brothers Wotan and Donner.
Four intense and meaningful hours – but now the intensity is oozing out and the meaning is disintegrating. There is a gloomy atmosphere. ‘We have two hours left according to the plan. Should we stop now, or …? What would you like me to do?’ Kasper asks. A few faltering proposals are made by the academics present, but nothing really kindles. ‘Maybe you should try to realise the idea in the essay about embodying the leitmotifs; that is, show them on stage every time they appear in the orchestra’, one of the scholars suggests. Kasper, who so far has not shied away from new challenges, now hesitates. ‘That's bound to become farcical’, he objects, but nevertheless sets to work, albeit somewhat against his will. As Abbate herself had anticipated, it becomes a rather awkward business. The uncanniness of the music turns almost grotesquely comical when the unseen, all-knowing voice from the orchestra pit is suddenly given a body. The voice behind the statement loses authority and credibility; it becomes a downright busybody when attached to a body that is busy teaching us the moral implications we can hear elaborated in the music itself.
We soon abandon the idea of having an actual narrator on stage. We decide instead to spread the musical narration over more persons, more bodies miming the omniscient messages of the music. And that does not help either; it develops into an involuntarily ludicrous underlining of Wagner as an ‘enthusiastic mimomaniac’.Footnote 1 A few minutes later Kasper gesticulates despairingly: ‘Well, have you had enough now?’ But we have not. ‘Try to keep going in that direction, there's something in it that works – the stylised treatment of the music, perhaps it just shouldn't be as closely connected to the leitmotifs’, someone replies. Kasper continues, and gradually something grows in the hands of the sceptical director, something strange, something which revives the intense feeling of the first attempt and points to new and exciting possibilities.
The choice of excerpt from the Ring depended on which singers from the Royal Academy we had at our disposal. A scene between Brünnhilde and Siegfried, for example, would have been impossible with such young voices. The extremely limited rehearsal time was also a factor to be taken into consideration. And it was important that the material contained enough aesthetic and dramatic challenge – in short, there had to be something to ‘act on’, at the same time as the scene would have to reflect essential problems in the Ring as a whole. After some deliberation, the choice fell on the end of the Rheingold, from Donner's ‘Hört, ihr Riesen! Zurück und harret: das Gold wird euch gegeben’ (Listen, you giants! Come back and wait: to you the gold will be given), through Loge's ‘Ihrem Ende eilen sie zu, die so stark im Bestehen sich wähnen … wer weiss was ich thu'!’ (They're hurrying on towards their end, though they think they will last forever … who knows what I'll do!).
Our fragment of scene thus starts a little abruptly, well into scene 4. Erda has just paid the gods a visit to warn Wotan not to keep the ring which Alberich has cursed. Now Wotan stands frozen, immersed in thought. This is why Donner first asks the Giants to accept the ring as the final instalment of the gods' debt to them for building Valhalla. Finally, Wotan awakes from his trance and throws the ring onto the Giants' hoard; Freia is ransomed. The Giants now start fighting over the ring, and the fight culminates in Fafner's killing of Fasolt. The gods stand petrified; the ring has claimed its first victim. Wotan wants to go to Erda to get rid of his new companion, fear, but Fricka holds him back and indicates the fortress as the safe alternative. Donner literally clears the air with his hammer, and Froh shows the gods to the rainbow bridge leading to the newly built fortress. As the gods are walking across the bridge, Loge makes ironical remarks about their ridiculous attempt to repress death. This is where our selected excerpt ends, in principle, because after this the voices of the Rhine-daughters are heard and, unfortunately, we do not have three suitable singers at hand.
One of Carolyn Abbate's main points in her book Unsung Voices Footnote 2 is that the composer is no longer alone at the centre as creator of the work – there are several narrative voices at large. Wagner cannot sing his composition himself; when his work is produced, he is dependent on other active subjects who, as it were, usurp the creative voice of the work and give it phenomenological life. The ‘voices’ may be attached to the body of a singer, but they may also appear as disembodied ‘song’, as specific narrative gestures in the orchestral accompaniment. This focus on Wagner's polyphonic narration technique undermines the notion that music is one voice, the authority of which is ensured through its non-verbal nature. The ‘voices’ are capable of speaking both with the text and against the grain of it, and they are often unreliable, sometimes even mendacious. The performative focus on the significance of the musical voices and their relation to the bodies on stage was an obvious aspect to explore in a workshop, and Abbate's general open-mindedness towards the enigmas and the ambiguities of the works would be the ideal starting point for the scholarly discussions. Abbate was the self-evident choice as our dramaturg – and, fortunately, she was enthusiastic about the idea and quickly went on to write the ‘sketch for dramaturgy’ which would serve as the point of departure for the project. It reads:
Beginning and end
What would be conventional, in speaking about Das Rheingold, would be to start with the most famous radical beginning in opera, the long E-flat prelude that represents in music the idea of the prelapsarian: that which is before time, before history, in a world without telos.
But paradoxically, why not begin with endings? Wagner throughout his life had one very marvellous and uncanny musical habit: at the eleventh hour, at the very end of some opera, he will introduce a new motif or theme at a point when standard musical rhetoric and dramaturgy would normally require only recurrences and recapitulations of already established musical ideas that had gone before. In Tristan, this happens for Isolde's monologue after Tristan's death in act 3 – not the famous and demented ‘Liebestod’ (which is all musical repetition) but an earlier passage where she attempts to call dead Tristan back to life with these terrifying words: ‘awaken for just one hour, just one more hour’. Perhaps here the introduction of a new musical idea represents the hopeless wish for a continuation that cannot take place: as if one were bringing a child into a world with only a few more minutes to exist.
In Rheingold, the last-minute motif has an entirely different force: in the orchestra, right before Wotan sings ‘so I greet this fortress, safe from horror and dismay’ (the stage directions tell us, he sings ‘resolutely, as though seized by a grandiose vision’) there is a C major arpeggio played by the trumpet. This eleventh-hour motif, unlike that in Tristan, seems at first to be indeed ‘resolute’ – a fanfare, announcing the arrival of the king, the cavalry, heroism and victory. And yet: Wotan's announcements have a way of collapsing and disintegrating that should make the audience suspect that this new grandiloquence is no less hollow. After he puts the ring on his finger for the first and only time, Wotan says ‘now I hold the thing that exalts me: of the mighty, I am the mightiest lord’. We hear a ‘fanfare’ there, too, a sweep of triads in the brass instruments, but it crumples into musical nothingness and doubt as soon as it reaches its highest note.
Perhaps we should remember that earlier, collapsed fanfare when we hear this eleventh-hour trumpet? We are not, it would seem, ‘safe from horror and dismay’. But the way music makes this point is subtle. The C major fanfare is obviously music to be noticed; it is self-important, but is its suddenness and newness not also asking us to wake up, to think, to be watchful?
Rheingold's final lines, sung by the Rhine-daughters are: ‘truth and fidelity is only here, in the depths: everything above is false, and cowardly’. From the moment the Rhine-daughters begin singing, the music seems to represent Illusion per se: the six harps that strum along to their song sound like one harp multiplied by a delirious hallucination into too many harps, and the absence of ‘solid’ bass notes suggests music paradoxically near (because it is so audible) and far (because we are somehow ‘not hearing’ an important part of it). And why do the Rhine-daughters sing to a Polonaise? Wagner uses the unmistakable ‘snapping’ rhythm of the polonaise, which is an aristocratic dance, the dance of a dispossessed order. So the music that accompanies an apparent triumph, the entry of the gods into Valhalla after the end of a day of trouble and near-disaster, is also always already a sound from the past, a sound of defeat. Perhaps the most radical sound in Rheingold is the sound right at the end: the final D accidental chord, which is repeated over and over with the ‘snapping’ Polonaise rhythm, repeated way too many times. What do those repetitions suggest? That resolution is impossible, no matter what you hope and how loudly and how many times you shout ‘Ende’? That musical bombast multiplied upon itself merely bears witness to its own hollowness?
Opera composers, film composers: they often talk about finding a fundamental ‘tone’ or colour that will characterise the sounds they invent for the drama. One fundamental colour in the music for Rheingold is prescience: music that, although young, seems to know exactly how it will die, eighteen hours later, in Twilight of the Gods. In Rheingold, after all, we first get the Ring's primal musical representation for midnight, when Erda sings ‘everything that is will end; twilight begins for the Gods’. It is interesting that her line in German (ein düst'rer Tag dämmert den Göttern) makes it clear that the ‘twilight’ is not in the hypothetical future: it begins right now.Footnote 3
Much ado about Nothung
There are two particularly interesting issues in this opening text by Abbate: the seeming hollowness of both the eleventh-hour motif and the Polonaise, and the young music's premonition of its own downfall. Let us start with the eleventh-hour motif: it is usually called the ‘Sword’ motif, because it is later connected to the sword called Nothung, which Wotan lets his son Siegmund find, and which is reforged by his grandson, Siegfried. But of course the musical motif contains far more than this label can possibly describe.
In Rheingold as directed by Wagner, Wotan, seized by a great thought, should pick up a worthless-looking, worn-out old sword left by Fafner and, pointing it at the castle, he should cry his famous: ‘So – grüss' ich die Burg, sicher vor Bang und Grau'n’ (Thus I salute the stronghold, safe from dread and dismay).Footnote 4 This motif points to future deeds, as Wagner's friend watching the rehearsals, Porges, recalls. So if we look at the greater Ring-cycle, this eleventh-hour motif is the necessary philosophical germ for the narration to come, and in that respect it is a beginning rather than an end: in the beginning there was deed, Goethe's Faust was convinced, and something similar seems to be the case in Wagner's Ring-cycle. The creative deed is simple in Wagner's work – (the) God picks up a sword – but being connected to a great thought and to music (ascending C major arpeggio acting as a musical mime of Wotan's sword-swinging gesture) the deed grows into a heavyweight philosophical idea, which epitomises the mythical trilogy we are going to experience. The deed of the god is pregnant with deeds of human beings and, who knows, perhaps it is even pregnant with a future deed: the burning of Valhalla?
The ‘Sword’ motif penetrates the surrounding A flat major, and that it is tonally out of synchronisation with its musical context suggests that its C major key is, in itself, of semiotic importance. As Carl Dahlhaus points out, C major is known as a typical sign of simplicity and integrity.Footnote 5 In Rheingold it is initially used in the conventional way in connection with the Gold fanfare, but as the Gold fanfare is later quoted by Loge in his narration (Rheingold, scene 2) in a very manipulative way, C major's status as untouched purity is suspended; it has been smudged and debased. What should we make of Wotan's C major fanfare, then: is it true, or is it a deception? The obvious answer is that it is both true and deceptive – as ambiguous as the Ring-cycle itself.Footnote 6 But are such subtle musical discussions of any importance to the development of an interesting concept or interesting performance? In a Regietheater performance it is not necessarily obligatory to follow the composer's intentions, and the majority of the audience would not know C major from A flat major anyway, so why should we bother? There are many reasons why. To push it to extremes, anything goes in Regietheater as long as it ‘has an effect’. But for something to ‘have an effect’ it is no doubt an advantage to be acquainted with as many appropriate options as possible, and in that respect Wagner's use of tonality is a highly interesting basis for developing options. And, as a matter of fact, we do not know to what extent the audience reacts unconsciously to the musical undercurrents with which Wagner has enriched the work.
According to Abbate there is also another reason why we should take a closer look at the musical details of this motif: the ‘Sword’ motif is thrust forward at the last minute in Rheingold and that, in itself, calls for the attention of the audience, she writes. Abbate therefore asks if the late and sudden introduction of the motif functions as a wake-up call, inviting circumspection and scepticism? If this was a symphony, I would not hesitate in answering ‘yes’, because the musical motifs in a symphony are almost always very carefully prepared and developed; conversely, if Wagner's work was a traditional opera, I would not hesitate in answering, ‘no’, because in opera it is not at all anomalous to have a last-minute motif – for example, in Mozart's Don Giovanni when the statue of the Commendatore finally speaks, or in Le nozze di Figaro when the Count makes his apologies to the Countess – but this is something in between, this is a music drama that uses symphonic means in its unfolding, and therefore our reactions to the last-minute motif probably depend on our musical habits and individual expectations.
The Intendant at the Stuttgart Staatsoper, Klaus Zehelein, in point of fact emphasises that the sudden appearance of the ‘Sword’ motif in Rheingold was actually one of the main reasons he divided the four operas of the Ring among four different directors for the 1999–2000 Stuttgart production. The lack of basis for the ‘Sword’ motif in Rheingold seems, in his opinion, to make it impossible for the motif to function as a convincing provider of coherence between Rheingold and the subsequent opera, Walküre. The ‘Sword’ motif is, as Jürgen Schläder explains in an essay on the production, a particularly important ‘partial aspect’ (partikularer Aspekt) of the drama; the motif is not just another brick in a structural totality, on the contrary, Zehelein sees it as a negation of the preceding narrative, breaking up the totality and insisting on full attention.Footnote 7
Klaus Zehelein was also the dramaturg for the Rheingold production in Stuttgart; in cooperation with the director of the production, Joachim Schlömer, he developed a concept whereby Wotan washes his hands in a basin and dries them thoroughly at the sound of the ‘Sword’ motif so that he can triumphantly show his ‘clean hands’ to the audience on ‘so I greet the castle’. Zehelein and Schlömer succeed here both in showing how the motif supersedes the previous action and in using its plot-disturbing character to make the audience aware of their role as spectators: the figure on stage, Wotan, tries to make us participate in his self-appointed absolution by showing us his clean hands, but the majority of the audience probably dissociate themselves from this attempt; we have, after all, seen too many ‘leaders’ playing the same trick.
The impact of a musical motif in an opera is dependent on the other artistic effects, not least the movements on stage. A director instructing Wotan to stay immobile while the ‘Sword’ motif sounds is underscoring the motif's lack of musical motivation, and we will hear it as a moral alarm clock calling to us from beyond the illusory world of the drama; but if the motif is accompanied by a striking gesture on Wotan's part, it works as a statement from the character on stage. In our performance of the scene we first used the ‘Sword’ motif in the traditional ‘swinging’ way and then, later, in the ‘alarming’ stationary way. The swinging gesture was part of a realistic directorial vision in which Wotan would take a bottle of expensive champagne from a table and open it in order to get everybody plastered – including himself.Footnote 8 This underlined the self-deceptive content of the simple, lively C major fanfare, making Wotan's gesture look like a desperate attempt to let bygones be bygones.
Abbate later writes that the Polonaise sounds as a voice from the past, a voice of defeat, because it is an aristocratic dance of a dispossessed order. At Wagner's time the Polonaise may not have been a dance of a dispossessed order, as both the dance and the aristocracy were still very much in existence; so perhaps it was not Wagner's intention to give the impression of something past and defeated through the Polonaise. But listening to a Polonaise today gives us precisely that feeling, and for that reason we should consider Abbate's notion.
She raises the additional question as to whether the Polonaise is hollow. Against the backdrop of the sinister development of the drama up to now, its grandiose quality does, of course, appear hollow, but would it seem hollow if we only listened to the musical expression? This question resulted in considerable disagreement among the scholars at the seminar because, on the one hand, the polonaise is definitely festive; it has a delicious elegance and appealing melodic charm – characteristically, one of the scholars had used it as the introductory jingle to a music programme he had made for radio. On the other hand, its ending has a tendency to appear self-important, puffed-up, verging on the ridiculous. In this specific passage, Adorno's claim that Wagner's music acts ‘as if time had no end’ is certainly apposite.Footnote 9 The insistent repetitions of the final chord are indeed suspicious; Adorno was probably the first to notice the dark side of the repetitions in Wagner's musical structure:
Thanks to the repetitions and the dramatisation of gesture the expression is falsified. Built into the whole structure and reified, the mimetic impulse degenerates into mere imitation and, ultimately, utter mendacity … If the expression is to exteriorise itself as sensuous gesture in the way Wagner's practice requires, it is not able to rest content with unassuming self-statement: it is forced to assert itself pointedly and the intensified process of repetition inevitably leads to overstatement. The mere fact of repeating something in an identical form involves an element of reflection. When the impulse to express something occurs a second time, it turns into an underscored commentary on itself.Footnote 10
Nevertheless, the expression of the music is once again highly dependent on the performance: on the interpretation and the temperament of the conductor, of course, but also on the realisation on stage. In Patrice Chéreau's famous production in Bayreuth (1976), the hollowness of the music is underlined by the way the gods move as they enter Valhalla; they do it with an almost painful bodily reluctance. Not even the gods themselves believe in the musical illusion. And in Joachim Schlömer's Rheingold in Stuttgart (1999), at the end the gods have fled from the picture altogether, only the victims of Wotan's Valhalla project are left: three freezing Rhine-daughters, two miserable, broken-down Nibelungs, and the dead body of a Giant in a morass of garbage around a dried-out, slowly rotating fountain – ironically accompanied by the festive, self-glorifying music of the gods.
At last we have reached Abbate's ideas about ‘prescience’ being the fundamental colour or tone of the Rheingold music. Abbate depicts Wagner's music as a living organism which seems to know its own destiny. In my view the majority of the music in Rheingold is not markedly prescient, but I agree that the specific leitmotif depicting ‘twilight’ could be experienced as a Sibylline spirit pointing to the End, not just to the motif's own end and ‘the End’ as a philosophical idea and an unavoidable part of life, but also to Wotan's and the other gods' personal end. Erda's ‘Alles was ist, endet. Ein düst'rer Tag dämmert den Göttern’ (All things that are – end. A day of darkness dawns for the Gods) is musically formed as an arc mirrored around a central axis: the musical descent that accompanies the mentioning of the twilight is an inversion of Erda's personal rising leitmotif from the first part of the arc. As a matter of fact, the gods' twilight is depicted in the music slightly before the textual appearance of the word, and since this prediction changes the drama in a radical way, it gives the impression that here music really acts as motivation for the drama; it gives birth to the drama, as Nietzsche would have put it. So the music is at this crucial point not just aware of its own end, but is causing its own end.
Excursus: The end was the beginning
We know, of course, that the Ring libretti were written backwards, that Wagner wrote The Death of Siegfried in 1848, writing in a new poetic form never before used for opera, that he could not compose the music: he stopped just short of 200 measures (the Norns' scene and the duet) and froze. Then, an artistic trapdoor opens for Wagner: he descended in 1850–3 into an artistic underworld, where fragments have to be made whole and failures redressed. Wandering in this underworld, he meditated about the nature of memory, and realised at last that the music for The Death of Siegfried could not exist until he wrote music for a past time that could be remembered as Siegfried died. So he decided to expand the Siegfried tragedy into its own past, eventually completing the three other poems (for Siegfried, Walküre and Rheingold). Strange, how this archeology left its traces in music. In Rheingold, there are so few sounds that seem young or naïve (the Rhine-daughters' pure jubilation in scene 1) – and so many, like the ‘Tarnhelm’ motif, that seem to come from under the earth, as if they had been excavated from primeval time. The paradox is that while music can only exist in present time, some music in the present can imply age and remoteness even without being the repetition of something already heard.Footnote 11
Archaeology in the Copenhagen Ring
How can music seem ‘old’ and ‘remote’? If we take the ‘Tarnhelm’ motif, a probable explanation is that the motif ends on an open fifth. The chord is experienced as ‘strange’ because it lacks tone ‘gender’; it is more in keeping with the overtone series than with major–minor tonality, and thus it seems to date back to a time beyond good and evil. When it interacts with Wagner's late Romantic tone language, an air of something ‘uncanny’ is added. Wagner was clearly aware of this effect. He mentions in Mein Leben that to him the open fifths of the violin had always been connected with eerie spirits and ghosts, which meant that in his youth he had always been seized with joyous horror when the orchestra was tuning up.Footnote 12 Wagner was, moreover, by no means the only composer to use the open fifth with this purpose, and the long tradition certainly contributes to ensure the effect on the audience – Beethoven, for example, used the open fifth in the opening of his Ninth Symphony and Wagner himself used it in his Fliegende Holländer to the same effect. In the last century we have grown much more accustomed to open fifths in classical music, so the uncanny effect has weakened considerably, but I can think of at least two good reasons why the ‘Tarnhelm’ motif still gives the impression of being an ancient archaeological find. First and foremost because unconsciously we still remember the opening of the Rheingold Overture, where the beginning of the world was described with an open fifth for thirteen bars; secondly, because the ‘Tarnhelm’ motif is first presented in an underground setting.
Wagner wrote the libretto for the Ring backwards, but after that he composed the whole cycle from the beginning, which means that the Rheingold music is the work of a younger composer and the music for Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung the work of an older and more experienced artist. Yet, Abbate says, the music for Rheingold seems generally ‘old’, and she sees the reason for this in the fact that the opera is the last link in a process of remembering, moving backwards from Siegfried's death. The explanation of this phenomenon is, of course, that text and music are not conceived independently, as we might be tempted to think when hearing of the overall procedure. Wagner's Ring is in many ways already a Gesamtkunstwerk in the preparation of the libretto; the text is devised by a composer and musical fragments would probably often be the starting points, consciously or not, for the text.
In his book on the poetics of the music drama, Oper und Drama (1851), it was still Wagner's thesis that a melody should be based on a text or something happening on stage; the music should be ‘justified’ by means of poetry, drama or choreography. Rheingold is definitely the part of the cycle which contains the most ‘justified’ motifs. After Wagner's reading of Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in 1854, his poetics changed, however; music now emancipated itself from the other arts, it took on an ‘An-sich’-character, thereby functioning as the very foundation of drama. Music became an ‘idea’ of the world, and drama only ‘indicated’ this idea.Footnote 13
This mixture of retrospective music becoming ever ‘older’ and ‘stranger’ as it digs into the archaeological layers from Götterdämmerung to Rheingold, and ever-more emancipated music from Rheingold to Götterdämmerung was visualised in Kasper Holten's complete Copenhagen Ring (2003–6): during the overture to Rheingold the audience was shown a flash-forward to the end of Götterdämmerung, the point at which Brünnhilde sets fire to the lumber room where all of her family history is stored. In this way, the whole Ring narrative was transformed into Brünnhilde's recollection of the development of her family and her own gradual emancipation.
Team Wotan
If you are listening to a recording of Rheingold and can only hear (not see) who is singing, you can be misled at a critical point. After Erda's warning to ‘avoid the ring’, Wotan is frozen in thought and indecision, and the music becomes directionless, quasi-silent. Then, suddenly, there is a decisive about-face (some loud, self-possessed chords) as if acoustic shoulders had been shrugged and someone's head cleared of musical cobwebs. Then a baritone voice sings out: ‘Giants! Come back and wait – you will be given the gold!’ That is Wotan's decision to make, but it is Donner who sings, who intervenes to turn the plot in a particular direction – the combination of timbre (low baritone and bass can sound similar in a wide range) and dramatic expectation (this should be Wotan singing) leads to an illusion that Wotan is singing.
Who are these minor superheroes, Donner and Froh, who seem to have so little to do or say, and whose hour on the stage is so brief?
How seldom does one think of them. But this is a strange moment, when Donner seems to ventriloquise Wotan and step into his place. One could almost imagine whole operas that could have been written and were not: suppose at this instant, Rheingold led off into a saga of Donner and his Oedipal rivalry with the old god? The baritone timbre is of all operatic timbres the most beautiful, assigned to early autumn characters, male characters who are beyond the youthful hysteria of Tenor, but not yet aged into the downhill slope of Bass. True baritones are extraordinarily rare in Wagner's work; he shunts them aside into more minor roles as if he did not know what to do with them. Yet Donner is given the great vocal pièce de resistance in Rheingold, the conjuring of the storm in scene 4, which is, with the Rhine-daughters' jubilance in scene 1, a rare instance of pure, elemental exultation, as if being able to sing with such power, and so beautifully, were something that stands outside epic tragedy. Donner and Froh, who disappear into the thundercloud and reappear at the head of the Rainbow Bridge, strike the other gods ‘speechless with astonishment at the glorious sight’ – a sight including the two ‘incidental’ characters who create the path into the machina.
Wotan, unlike Loge (who becomes Fire) and Donner (who is ‘Thunder’) or Froh (‘Happiness’) is not an element. In this sense, he has no presence, no aura of his own: all he can do is command the elements temporarily, and ask that they lend him their special effects when he needs to look larger, have thunder for his entrances and exits, or fire as his spotlight.Footnote 14
All the world's an opera stage: a realistic version of the Rheingold scene discussed in the light of Performance Studies
In her essay, Abbate invites us to take a closer look at the minor characters in Rheingold, Froh and Donner, these ‘incidental’ superheroes who clear the path for the others into Valhalla. This is an odd angle which, we all agree, might be interesting to try out. What happens if you base the drama on the minor characters, for instance by focusing on Donner's relationship to Wotan? Such an idea, where the thoughts of the minor characters suddenly become the main element, is known from, among other works, Tom Stoppard's Hamlet paraphrase Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Wagner's scene has a similar classic status, so why not test it?
Donner in particular is interesting. As Abbate mentions, his voice is quite similar to that of Wotan. In Rheingold Wagner designated both roles to a voice which he called ‘Hoher Bass’. These roles have a tessitura that is too high to be sung comfortably by a bass and too low to be sung by a typical baritone. As a matter of fact, these Wagner roles (together with Alberich and Fasolt from the Ring and the Dutchman, Hans Sachs, and Amfortas from other Wagner operas) produced a totally new addition to the terminology of commonly recognised categories of singing voice, namely the bass-baritone.Footnote 15 There are important German predecessors that call for this type of voice, and it gives food for thought that they often perform as couples, for example Mozart's Count Almaviva and Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro, or Don Giovanni and Leporello in Don Giovanni. Those power-struggling master–servant couples could very well have been in Wagner's mind when he wrote the music for Wotan and Donner (and for Wotan and Alberich, of course); they certainly contain the kind of rebellion-simmering relationship that Abbate points to in her essay.
These considerations about the singing voices could be used in an avant-garde production based on the outlines of Performance Studies. One of the most prominent European scholars in this field is the German professor of Theatre Studies, Erika Fischer-Lichte. Having gained a distinguished reputation in Semiotics,Footnote 16 she later turned to Performance Studies, opening up a methodological combination of the two, albeit preferring to explore how things happen, rather than merely what happens.Footnote 17
Performances are characterised by being ephemeral and transitory, and by having the potential to transform the audience through the experiences, reactions and reflections that the ongoing interaction between audience and stage produce. This is the core of the matter for Fischer-Lichte. She regards performances as art events in their own right, referring to Wagner as an important forerunner in this respect, among other reasons because he, in his Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1848), built upon Goethe's idea that a theatrical performance can be viewed as an autonomous work of art, defining performances of his own music dramas as the only conceivable and valuable artworks of the future. Furthermore, she has an eye for the importance of rituals in performances, much like Nietzsche who traced back the origin of Greek tragic theatre to a sacrificial ritual of dismemberment, a ritual that annulled individuation as it transformed those present into members of a single community.Footnote 18
A theatre performance is not limited to a series of readable signs; it also contains moments that cannot be explained as being representations of something: they are not semiotically readable, but phenomenologically concrete. Every performance generates certain moments that defy semiotic meaning, moments where the actual configuration of the materials employed – bodies, voices, rhythms, sounds and tones – comes into existence purely in the process of the performance.Footnote 19
All these features apply to opera as well – some of them even more noticeably, because the perception of the singing performer oscillates, and always has oscillated, between credible representation and an admired auto-deixis, as Lehmann calls it.Footnote 20 The singers are often divas or divos already known to us from other performances or from recordings, and this knowledge colours our perception; and even if we leave this out of account, we would still be aware of their personal profession the minute they sing a particularly beautiful cadence, sing out of tune, or fail to reach a top note. A singer's bodily being-in-the-world is altogether more evident than that of an actor, not least because of the enormous physical effort a singer makes when producing sounds that rise above an orchestra of maybe 100 instruments. This exhausting sound production has a direct effect on the audience, for our perception is not limited to vision, it occurs – perhaps even more effectively – through bodily sensations: as spectators we have a secret urge to re-enact the singer's performance, to execute the same movements and produce the same sounds in the throat, and there is absolutely no reason to try to hide this performative fact in a postmodern performance.
Seen from this performative angle, focusing on the slide between the semiotic and the phenomenological aspect of the characters on stage, it must be particularly uncanny for the Wotan-singer and the Donner-singer that Fasolt, the only other bass-baritone on stage, is killed: it is one of their kind who has been silenced. In a staging that builds upon this view, Fasolt could be strangled by Fafner and the two others could immediately seize their own precious throats in horror at the sight. It would have been interesting to experiment with acting out the scene purely as a singing contest between the two bass-baritones: Donner's elemental song could then have been a provocative presentation of an up-and-coming young singer's natural talent that Wotan would have to surpass in a subsequent ‘aria’, using all his ingenuity and technical skill. Donner could have accompanied himself, ‘hammering’ on the piano. At the end, Wotan would think he had won the duel, because he succeeds in conjuring up a new, triumphant fanfare (the ‘Sword’ motif) from the orchestra pit, a kind of applause supporting his desire for immortality. Heroes die all the time on stage, but divos remain immortal, and this is Wotan's dream: to remain immortal. What Wotan does not hear, however, are the thoughts of Loge, the critic, about burning them all.
Although these ‘Performance Studies’ ideas were not discussed directly at the seminar, they popped up in disguise later on. Here – at the beginning of the seminar – the item on the agenda is to pin down which story we want to tell and at which level it must take place. Should it be, for example, high politics or family drama? After some discussion, we decide to set the story in intimate surroundings. The general concept emerges as a family reunion, a sumptuous lunch on the occasion of the Whitsun holidays, inspired by the Danish film The Celebration directed by Thomas Vinterberg (1998). The mood is, as in Vinterberg's film, very gloomy; on the surface, everything is neat and perfectly arranged, but below the surface there is smouldering hatred of the selfish, child-abusing patriarch. There are lots of skeletons in the cupboard – skeletons which in this Wagner scene acquire a very tangible expression.
We begin by giving each of the characters a personal status: Wotan is the dominant head of the family and Loge his inner demon, Donner is an active sportsman, Froh a gentle, shy artist, Freia is a gorgeous model, Fricka a political activist, and the Giants are criminal bikers. In the relationship between Wotan and Donner, Wotan is essentially a thinking person, whereas Donner is an acting one.
Our scene opens with Donner's words ‘Listen, you giants! Come back and wait: to you the gold will be given’. In some productions Wotan is given this line, probably in recognition of the fact that this important statement rightly belongs to the superior god, Wotan. But this redistribution of lines cheats the audience of confrontation with the unpleasant recognition that thoughts and actions are often unpredictable, and that even normally resolute leaders can suffer shock and apathy. In our scene Donner challenges Wotan's status as head of the family from the outset by grasping his spear, telling the Giants to return and take the gold. Wotan does not even notice this, being completely absorbed in reflections on Erda's enigmatic warning not to keep the ring. At long last he awakes, just in time to realise that the decision about paying the ransom for Freia has already been taken by Donner. He confirms the decision by snatching his spear out of Donner's hands, calls back Freia, and throws the ring on the hoard. According to Wagner's notes in the score, the Giants then release Freia, who ‘joyfully hurries over to the gods, each of whom embraces her at length in an excess of joy’. In our version there is a slight difference: Freia gives everybody a hug except Wotan, and the otherwise complacent father figure is left in sheer bewilderment with his open arms suspended in mid-air for a couple of seconds. The unveiling of Wotan as an egoistic power seeker, who has readily pawned a close member of the family for a new building, must have left its bitter trace in Freia's mind, and her physical repudiation of Wotan as her redeemer can also have a physical effect on the audience who identify with the characters on stage.
Fafner now begins to load the hoard onto his wagon, regardless of Fasolt's protests. The singer playing Loge has, with an apologetic smile from the director, been commissioned to sing his lines from the edge of the stage while Wotan moves around on stage, Wotan thus being the only one able to hear Loge's voice. At the point where Loge persuades Fasolt to relinquish the hoard and instead insist on keeping the ring, thereby causing the Giant's death, the words of Loge are whispered by Wotan in Fasolt's ear, which shows Wotan as a cynic using Fasolt as a guinea pig to test if the ring really is deadly.
After Fafner's cold-blooded killing of Fasolt, everybody becomes paralysed with fear. Long pause. Then Wotan begins to move, thinking aloud. At first his thoughts are expressed through his own voice, confirming that the curse was effective; then Loge's voice takes over, expressing his malicious pleasure in his enemy's cruel fate; and finally – again in his own voice – Wotan groans in mortal dread. Only Erda can end this dread, he believes; therefore he must find her, and he walks searchingly towards the place where she disappeared. Fricka tries to persuade her husband to relax and enjoy his new stronghold, but Wotan pushes her aside as if she were a piece of furniture blocking his path. Now it is time to reintroduce the oedipal rivalry: Donner's words ‘Schwüles Gedünst schwebt in der Luft; lästig ist mir der trübe Druck’ (A sultry haze hangs in the air; its lowering weight lies heavy upon me) refer, in our version, not to some visible fog in the background, but to the stifling atmosphere Wotan's conduct has just generated, and they are directed at the wronged hostess. Donner takes his wretched ‘mother’ in to lunch and, provocatively, he takes the seat at the head of the table himself.
Everyday life is full of performative actions, and ritual performances connected to situations around a table are manifold. Some of the most habitual ritual performances at festive occasions are, of course, speeches; they are ‘restored behaviours’ or ‘twice-behaved behaviours’ as Schechner would call them.Footnote 21 In Vinterberg's The Celebration the turning point is a speech made by the son of the patriarch. When everybody is assembled at the table, he takes out two sheets of paper from his inside pocket, one green and one yellow, and asks his father to choose between the two. The father does not know that the yellow sheet contains a harmless speech and the green one the family secret, so he cheerfully chooses the green one, thereby ironically setting up his own downfall.
In our scene Donner only has one text, Wagner's score, but that text does not necessarily have to be sung as a harmless ‘yellow’ support of Wotan's power. In our Whitsun lunch concept, Donner's hammer is a bottle of schnapps that he hammers on the table while he sings. He becomes lord of the mists, not just through his hammering, but also – and primarily – through his vocal performance. His song is at the same time a show-off and a showdown. What, then, is the family secret Donner discloses? On the semiotic level, he tries to hammer into the heads of his family that Wotan has just grossly abused the female members of the family and that he should not be allowed to get away with it. On the phenomenological level, his imposing singing performance tears down the fourth wall of the theatre and shows everyone the truth of the matter: performance is power, and power is performative; and that goes for theatre as well as for life.
The applause that follows Donner's performance is deafening. Yet his success is transitory; Wotan is back with a look on his face that cannot be misunderstood. Donner stands up and shambles over to his own chair, where he takes up the battle from a new angle. He asks his brother Froh to continue. But Froh is not a revolutionary, he is a shy and starry-eyed artist. So, somewhat puzzled, he tries to get out of the awkward situation by reading aloud a poem he has written for the occasion. When he has finished, Wotan rises. He proposes a toast in champagne and everybody drinks and eats till they drop. The singer of Loge (Wotan's thoughts) has the last word, telling us that he believes the characters on stage are speeding towards their end, and that he will not follow their blind path; instead he might change into the shape of flame.
We had reached the end of the scene and now had a short break from the rehearsal, which we used to discuss the concept and staging procedure with the singers. They were all satisfied with the way their characters had been interpreted, except perhaps the singer of Froh, who had expected his self-effacing character to display a greater degree of conventional masculinity. They were also enthusiastic about Kasper's realistic directing, which gave them the possibility to display their acting talents to the fullest. They had to remember a lot of complex reactions and quick movements, and for the majority of the singers this had a negative effect on their singing performance, but in the long run they would very probably have been able to exploit the realistic movements to their own benefit.
At this point we reached the crisis described at the beginning of this article. We had now played the scene through twice and there was still plenty of time left. It seemed unnecessary to use more than two hours correcting details. As the aim of the seminar was not a final performance, we could focus on the process and the different possibilities in the score; we were free to disregard the conventional rehearsal style aimed at a finished product, and strangely enough this freedom made us feel uncomfortable and insecure. The realistic family concept had proved workable, and in places even spell-binding, but there was still a common feeling that something was lacking. The problem was voiced when one scholar finally remarked: ‘The thing grows too insignificant when the culmination of the scene is a popping champagne cork. We will have to reach a higher level, a political or a mythical level instead.’ We never got around to trying that; instead, we turned to something completely different, and no less interesting.
Tempo
As the Giants squabble over their wages, Loge tells Fasolt, in an aside, to ‘let your brother snatch the gold – just keep your eye on the Ring’ – in essence, signing his death warrant, since Fasolt's attempt to seize the Ring leads instantly to his death. Sudden death: unlike Siegmund's, or Siegfried's, or Fafner's, or even Mime's, we have no warning; there's no long fight beforehand, no telegraphing the event through music. Fasolt's death is musically present, in that the blows of his brother's hand are translated directly into sound, the strokes of the kettledrum. In terms of the different kinds of musical symbolism Wagner employs, this is a kind of null point, the most basic and direct and primitive way that music is a sign, when music is barely one level up from actual sound or sound effect. It is a brilliant abrogation of compositional virtuosity and of the operatic rule that no death can be unprepared. This instant, shocking realism: what should we make, then, of the potentially unbearably kitschy follow-up when the ‘Curse’ motif is bellowed by trombones, and Wotan says ‘now I see how fearful the Curse can be!’ And the dissociative psychosis in Loge's cheerful ‘Wotan, what great luck you have!’ Or Fricka's snuggling up and cajoling, ‘does not the noble fortress await its master?’
Perhaps the only solution is to shape not just the staging, the visual aspects and the gestures made by the actors, but to change time and tempo itself: to allow an immense, unauthorised (i.e., un-notated) ‘frozen’ silence to sit for several seconds in the orchestra – sit long enough for the audience to realise that it is ‘too much’ – right after the last ‘twitches’ in the strings seem to announce a flame gone out, and right before the ‘Curse’ motif is played. And, perhaps, to disrupt tempo again, to introduce small, dissociative musical silences before each of the ‘reactions’ to Fasolt's murder. In this way, Donner's paean to the weather, so beautiful and elemental, becomes hyper-realistic as well: not so joyous after all, but singing to drown out fear, the musical ritual that tries to efface the dark.Footnote 22
Fasolt's death and a hypothetical experiment with Lars von Trier's ‘enriched darkness’
In her essay Abbate mentions the naturalistic rendition of the sound of the murder of Fasolt. A series of strokes of the kettledrum (underscored by the lower strings) are heard in the music, which can evidently be linked to Fafner's deadly blows to Fasolt, as Abbate suggests. Wagner did not conceive the drum strokes as sound effects depicting four fatal blows; his stage direction in the score states: ‘Er [Fafner] streckt Fasolt mit einem Streiche zu dem Boden’ (He fells Fasolt with a single blow). This stage direction is written immediately above a fortissimo fully diminished-seventh chord, which is followed by a brief pause and a rapid ripple towards ten decelerating strokes, the last of which has a double grace note. Wagner probably imagined that the fatal blow would fall on the diminished chord, and that the following drum strokes should depict the dying of Fasolt.
If you choose to follow Wagner's intention, you could, for example, let the strokes of the kettledrum accompany Fasolt's staggering steps before he falls, or you could let the music speak for itself while the victim is lying motionless on the floor. But, as I mentioned earlier, at this seminar we do not feel obliged to follow the author's intentions, so the idea of using the music as a realistic rendition in sound of a series of fatal blows is appealing. Of course, we are not the first to solve the murder scene in this fashion; Harry Kupfer, for example, let Fafner kill Fasolt with three deadly blows (in his Barcelona production, 2004), and Joachim Schlömer had Fafner kicking his brother to death on the kettledrum strokes (in Stuttgart, 1999). But the Ring has so rich a production history that you cannot expect every detail of a new production to be ground-breaking; the important thing is that the details should work convincingly within the framework of the conception, and this they do, we think. And when the pianist instinctively intensifies the drum strokes that are mimed as blows with a club, the effect is so strong that we choose to stick with this solution.
Then follows the bombastic braying of the curse in the trombones, and its trivial expression is enhanced by the brutal crescendo of the kettledrum rolls. We try to put in the pauses that Abbate suggests in her essay, but it does not really work. The conductor is unhappy with the idea, mainly because the pauses cannot simply be ‘inserted’, the dynamics will also have to be changed significantly if it is to work from a musical point of view; so the attempt stays strangely half-hearted. Wagner's music, we have to admit, is still invincible.
During the ‘Curse’ motif all the gods have to remain petrified, according to the stage direction, while Fafner throws the ring into the sack and unhurriedly scoops in the rest of the hoard. If the focus is placed on Fafner's uncannily indifferent, greedy movements of his arms – he has, after all, just killed his brother, but is now totally engrossed in his own pleasure at the newly acquired treasure – the motif can be linked to this callousness, so that it does not exclusively refer to the dying, which we have already heard sufficiently rendered in music. In this way, the motif is allowed to appear just as trivial as it really is; for this may be the most uncanny feature of the curse of the ring – that it turns its owner into a living dead, a trivial servant of his own lust for power: ‘Dem Tode verfallen, fess'le den Feigen die Furcht; so lang'er lebt, sterb'er lechzend dahin, des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht’ (Doomed to die, may the coward be fettered by fear; as long as he lives, let him pine away, languishing, lord of the ring as the slave of the ring). In marrying power, you also marry death.
Immediately after the ‘Curse’ motif, Wotan exclaims, appalled: ‘Furchtbar nun erfind'ich des Fluches Kraft!’ (Fearful now I find the curse's power!) Then the ‘Curse’ motif is heard again, this time even more forcefully and in a sequenced form. The repetition of the motif is insistent in an extremely annoying fashion; Adorno does have a point when he criticises Wagner's immoderate use of sequences, emphasising that ‘the repeated gesture is compulsory, but the repeated expression is tautological’.Footnote 23 This time, the motif is hardly linked to Fafner any longer, but rather to Wotan himself. Is it the omniscient voice of the orchestra we are hearing? Is it Wotan's inner voice? Is it an echo of Alberich's voice? Is it a warning? Or a statement of fact? The possibilities are legion.
The fact that the two variations of the ‘Curse’ motif are played by the trombone alone (accompanied by a shuddering roll from the kettledrum) opens up the possibility of a daring solution in the spirit of Performance Studies: The ‘voice’ of the ‘Curse’ motif could become visible if we let one of the singers play the simple melody on the trombone on stage; the challenge could be given to Alberich, who could be placed on a platform above the gods. During the first version of the ‘Curse’ motif his figure should be hidden in the dark, so that the locus of the intruding, musical ‘voice’ would be impossible to determine with any degree of certainty. As the motif strikes for the second time a spotlight on Alberich could be faded up, in order for us to see his expressionless trombone playing. This would increase the audience's impression that Alberich is still on top of things. We are reminded that he is the inventor of the ‘Curse’ motif and his laid-back playing of the motif has a direct, alarming effect on all of us, including Wotan, because as an instrumentalist Alberich is no longer as vulnerable as he was as a singer; then he was just a body in the world with nothing between him and the world, now he has a powerful instrument as an intermediary and that makes an uncanny difference. Transforming himself into an instrumentalist he even moves out of the world of the drama and into that of the orchestra, gaining an extra-diegetic power and omniscience.Footnote 24
It could be interesting to amplify the idea about the hidden person in the dark and test the kind of ‘enriched darkness’ that the Danish film director Lars von Trier invented for the Ring production which should have taken place in Bayreuth, 2006.Footnote 25 Lars von Trier wished to make a performance which communicated the emotional qualities of Richard Wagner's work with the level of stage lighting never exceeding 5 per cent. This proved technically impracticable in the long run, because uninvited light again and again tended to rub off on objects that should have been totally hidden; nevertheless, the seminal idea about ‘the enriched darkness’ is extremely interesting and if used in smaller doses it would probably also be technically feasible. In Lars von Trier's view, the ‘Idea of Opera’ is: illusion and presence. Opera is to be performed ‘live’ – with the unique quality of the moment, for living people by living people. The essential feature of illusion is that it does not exist, or rather it only exists in the mind of the spectator. ‘How do we place it there?’ von Trier asks. ‘Simply by hinting’, he answers, ‘by showing things that make the spectator deduce and “see” the illusion which then just isn't shown. This is common dramaturgy: if A through B leads to C, then we will show A and C and let the spectator take care of the B himself! This is the simple recipe for conjuring tricks.’
Transferring these ideas to our scene, we could begin as described, letting the spotlight on Alberich's threatening trombone-playing be the A. He could again be drowned in total darkness, and to ‘Es naht die Nacht: vor ihrem Neid biete sie Bergung nun’ (Night draws on: from its envious sway may it offer shelter now) Wotan could slowly climb the stairs to the balcony, accompanied by the crescendoing tremolos of the strings. Then B follows: on Wotan's last word ‘nun’ he could enter the dark area, where Alberich is supposedly still residing. The tension rises in accordance with the string-tremolos' molto crescendo. Then a complete silence could be imposed; a thud could be heard – silence. Now C: Wotan steps out of the darkness with Alberich's trombone in his hand, accompanied by the eleventh-hour motif (the ‘Sword’ motif); he raises the instrument high above his head, singing triumphantly: ‘Thus I salute the stronghold, safe from dread and dismay’. What happened in the dark? Did Wotan kill Alberich? Or did he just stun him? Has Wotan conquered the Curse? Or does he only think so? In this preliminary evening, much is still left to the audience's imagination. But a germ has been sown, our notion of the ‘Sword’ motif has been visually coupled with the ‘Curse’ motif, and that has given us a suspicion that Wotan's great idea is no less egocentric and power-abusing than Alberich's cursing.
The presence without a body
Archeology: there are many ways in which Rheingold is not the beginning, not the youngest or freshest of the Ring operas but, like something ancient, had to be found by excavation, as Wagner dug back into the story before Siegfried's death, before his youth, then before his birth, then long before. ‘Underground’ is where the entire third scene takes place; Freia is buried in gold and then has to be dug out. Music, too, participates in this chthonic game. Wagner takes care to produce a primary musical ‘voice’ in the Ring – the omniscient orchestral voice – so to speak ‘out of the depths’. Famously, the first scene establishes a number of symbolic musical motifs, most of all the ‘Ring’ motif, the looping down and up sound that we first hear as Wellgunde sings ‘the world's riches would be won by whoever makes a ring from this gold, which would confer to him unlimited power’. For all of scene 1, only people sing the motif, but as soon as the orchestral postlude begins, the orchestra repeats the sound alone. At first, it can only repeat, as if it were a lifeless surface. But then, it begins to change the motif, as if it were tasting different flavours on its tongue, trying to decide which was the right one, the form of the word that will have meaning (and eventually, it turns the ‘Ring’ motif into ‘Valhalla,’ meaning that Alberich's power and Wotan's are equally founded upon theft and cunning). What we hear in this orchestral postlude is thus the sound of a mind coming into being, or a creature acquiring language and thought, and the ability to make interpretative asides about what it observes on stage.
Unlike the characters in the opera, this disembodied voice seems to stand morally outside the plot. In a similar way, the unseen Rhine-daughter voices at the end of the opera have that ‘voce dal ciel’ effect common to angels, prophetic birds and unseen oracles. But of course that is the effect that all disembodied voices have: they come from ‘God’ or ‘Authority’ (the omniscient voice-over narrator in film noir). What would happen if the Ring were performed with an embodiment of the orchestral narrator as a visible presence? That is, if we removed the mystery and acousmatic authority from the musical ‘voice’: by consistently translating all the ‘I Know A Secret’ leitmotifs into gesture, or mime, and visual effect? The redundancy would come to seem comic. But would that visibility not also expose the entire silly economy of invisibility and knowledge?Footnote 26
A body ritual: a stylised version of the Rheingold scene, developed out of a miscarried ‘Mickey Mousing’
After the realistic version of the scene and the following midway crisis, Abbate's criticism of Wagner's manipulating, unseen voices now becomes the centre of a new approach. By degrees, we have learned to look upon music accompanying the characters in an opera with certain scepticism. Adorno, among others, has warned us not to believe Wagner's seductive musical voices, especially when they seem to come from the characters on stage. Adorno points out that the music anticipates the judgement of society, carrying its heroes on in a jubilant or suffering way, and
the more it attempts to make the listeners believe that the decision is theirs, the more it has to appear immediately as being one with its characters, on one side of the division between singer and hero. Thus, the speaking poet in the costume of the ‘masters’ must claim mythical identity with his creations and musically imitate his characters as their actor.Footnote 27
Now Abbate calls attention to the fact that musical voices can be even more seductive when they are not heard in connection with a character on stage, because disembodied voices have the effect of God or Authority speaking.
Abbate's dramaturgical idea is not, however, about disembodying the singing voices; on the contrary, she proposes to embody the omniscient, narrative voice of the orchestra, and that will be our next concrete challenge. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, we soon abandon the idea of having a narrator on stage, not least because the orchestral music consists of many voices which are not always in accordance. The characters are instead instructed to move in a specific way every time a leitmotif is heard, producing a kind of ‘Mickey Mousing’Footnote 28 by increasing the musical redundancy with another layer of redundancy. The experiment did not work, presumably because too many of the leitmotifs in Rheingold have just that narrative function which Abbate identifies, and ‘Mickey Mousing’ does not work unless it loosens its ties to the plot; yet the ‘Mickey Mousing’ of Wagner's leitmotifs is not necessarily a lost cause. In a scene from Götterdämmerung, where the motifs more often serve the musical structure, it might have a chance of succeeding. But ‘Mickey Mousing’ should be handled with caution, regardless of which of the Ring operas one chooses to use it in. For the leitmotifs are, as is well known, not stationary specimens; they develop continually and thus their meanings also become displaced; they often end up being their own complete opposite, or become statements so ambiguous that it is impossible to capture and explain their meaning.Footnote 29 And this was our key problem: by attaching the leitmotifs to particular movements we made them appear to be unequivocal signs in their own right, and thus we painted ourselves into a corner which was painfully similar to the worst instances of symbol-orientated fundamentalism in Wagner's own era.
However, the laughter at ‘Mickey Mousing’ has a collateral, critical quality worth considering. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker touch on this issue in their co-authored article ‘Dismembering Mozart’; they describe how Mark Morris, in his choreography to Mozart's Piano Fugue in C minor, instructed each dancer to play out his single fugal voice, so that every musical gesture brought its unvarying and inevitable physical response. The audience reacted with hilarious laughter, and this laughter engaged a complex aesthetic intuition. The dance was simply too exact an inscription of the music, so ultimately the audience was led to mock its redundancy. Abbate and Parker explain:
Correspondence – a classical aesthetic category – had become laughably absolute. By engendering banality, predictability, and ridicule through such precise means, Morris subverted a fundamental assumption that all of us bring to ‘reading’ ballet: that gesture and motion should be generated by and correspond to music.Footnote 30
The repeated doublings of the music deride both the gods on stage and Wagner's teleology, and this is of course dramaturgically refreshing, but in this scene – we have to admit – it takes more than it gives, considering the potential of the work. Having had a good laugh at the results of the method, the staging therefore turns into something more Robert Wilson-like; the singers stand in fixed positions or move around in slow motion. Luckily our stylised version is not confined to mere aesthetics, probably thanks to the lack of beautiful costumes and colourful stage lighting. We are also much too close to the singers not to be affected by the physiological, sweat-dripping effort of their performance. Furthermore, the singers achieve a high degree of intensity in stylisation, because they have just played through the realistic concept. Their bodies are now familiar with the part, able to condense it, thus saving the stylised version from appearing rigid, boring and toothless.Footnote 31
Our concentration grows appreciably as the rehearsal progresses, and eventually the structure of the music becomes crystal clear. In our daily life, vision constitutes about 80 per cent of our sensorial activity; there is no need for that now and so, by reducing the importance of vision, much more space becomes available for hearing. We listen as we have never listened before. And what we hear is also completely new, because the singers finally have the reduction of stage activity they needed in order to be able technically to sing these demanding parts. The singers' performance is even better than at their first run-through of the scene when they had stood completely still, because now they are concentrating on their bodies and their singing technique.
Kasper, too, is now unstoppable. He gives free rein to the conductor and the pianist and gives continual direction while the music is playing. At the point where Fricka tries to win back Wotan's attention from Erda, Kasper tentatively takes hold of Wotan's wrist and slowly lifts the singer's hand to Fricka's cheek. Her head is resting for a moment in Wotan's hand, and she is told to hold that posture long after Wotan takes his hand away. A glance around the auditorium reveals that several of us are actually sitting with our heads tilted a little: Fricka's affection coupled with Wotan's indifference has gone straight into our own bodies.
The music rolls on, and one by one the characters are led into a line by Kasper. Donner, Froh, Freia, Fricka, and finally Wotan walk to the festive music as if in a trance, and continue to walk on the spot when they stand abreast of the others. To their left is the dead body of Fasolt, he is stiff as a poker, as if rigor mortis has already set in. The demi-god Loge, who is outside this ‘ghost parade of gods’, is singing contemptibly about how he would like to turn himself into fire and devour them all. While he sings, he moves in circles around the gods, faster and faster. This is where our scene was meant to have stopped, but no one stops: the singers' feet go on moving, the pianist is playing, the conductor is conducting, everything goes on until the last note of Wagner's Rheingold has died away.
Afterwards we asked ourselves what happened. In a way, you could say that this time we finally arrived at a successful version of a ‘Mickey Mousing’; for when the characters had reached their downstage goal their legs did not stop, they continued to take ‘the last step’ on the same spot, as if they were captured by the tempo and the rhythm of the music. We had adapted Abbate's ideas about the hollowness of the music, and unconsciously translated her ‘embodying of leitmotifs’ into a poststructural ‘embodying of rhythm’. By experiencing and realising the music's never-ending, rhythmical progression, we took part in the music in a physical sense; we were touched by the music in a very concrete way.Footnote 32
The slow motion and the tableau made an impression as if standard time and normality had been suspended. The restrained time made us aware of time itself, and in this way one of the most significant features of opera's ontology also became clear – namely, the fact that time is bound to be suspended for shorter or longer periods, as one finds in classical opera parodies in which the heroine continues to sing ‘Oh I'm dying, I'm dying’ unendingly.
But why was this stylised version so moving? The figures on stage ceased to be semiotic characters in an opera, and the phenomenological singers emerged from behind the characters. But this explanation is not complete. The figures were neither singers nor fictitious characters, they were reduced to bodies carrying out a ritual, and their slow ceremonial movements caught on with us, the audience, making us spontaneously and subconsciously want to repeat their gestures, partake in their bodily ritual. Our empathy with the figures on stage made the room expand, and a social community arose, which had not been there before. By purifying and stylising the expression, Kasper had succeeded in bringing us into a state reminiscent of a trance. We were focusing intensely on the slow, precise motions of the performers – the less they moved, the more we were moved – and we thereby lost our sense of both time and place. It was scary and fascinating, and perfectly in the spirit of Wagner's music. This somnambulant ritual had transformed the theatrical space into a sacred space, and only one person escaped the ecstasy – Loge. He was never more threatening, more diabolical, than when he placed himself outside the ritual community. Loners are dangerous – who knows what they will do!
