My amateur's assessment of Götterdämmerung at the Met: orchestra superb, singers spotty, production dull.
In his review in the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini kindly suggests that the vocal problems may have been caused by the earliness of the noon curtain. In any event, and whatever the reason, the singing lacked polish:
Singing her signature role of Brünnhilde, [Jane] Eaglen had a problematic start. Sustained tones were sometimes off-pitch, her vibrato wobbled, and her low-range singing was breathy and weak. ... Perhaps she was pacing herself for the final "Immolation Scene," to which she brought a disarming blend of lyrical poignancy and fearless power.
Perhaps Tommasini is overcome with kindness or perhaps he had a better seat but, to my ears, what started as a weak performance continued in that vein until, at the end of the opera, I was worried if Eaglen would be able to sing to completion. She managed to project the high notes in the final scene but everything else was washed out; what should have been a thrilling conclusion to the cycle was merely adequate.
Like other forms of nostalgia, opera nostalgia can quickly turn into a parodic version of itself ("Zinka Milanov was the century's Desdemona; you've never really seen Otello if you never got to see her perform," etc.), a cranky or bitchy idealization of a past Golden Age which must necessarily leave the present lacking. So it's with some trepidation that I write the following: as I sat in the opera house on Saturday, I really missed the performances of my first Brünnhildes, Gwnyeth Jones and Hildegard Behrens. (A gentleman sitting behind me trumps this: he was on hand to see Birgit Nilsson's final cycle at the Met.) And what I missed most about Jones and Behrens was not the vocal performance alone, but the acting that goes along with it.
Eaglen's reputation is that she can hit the notes (which is rare enough) but does not provide the subtleties of performance that her roles often require. And when the ability to hit the notes seems in question, deficiencies in acting become more apparent. And boy were they ever on Saturday.
When she discovers, in the second act, that a disguised Siegfried has deceived her, Brünnhilde turns to confront him, an important dramatic development that eventually leads to Siegfriend's death. On Saturday, Eaglen's expression of outrage took the following form: initially facing one direction (lower stage left), she heard the news, quickly pivoted around to face the villain (upper stage right), jabbed her finger in his direction ("J'accuse!"), and concluded by placing her hands on her ears (in a "Hear no evil" kind of way), as if to blot out any remaining lies that Siegfried might have to tell. It's opera as the Hal Roach Studios might have imagined it.
But maybe Eaglen, as Tommasini suggests, was just having a bad day. Because I really, really liked her performance as Isolde earlier in the season (but poor Ben Heppner as Tristan... that's a subject for another time). The person sitting next to me and I were in agreement: Eaglen should take acting lessons from Deborah Voigt - or, better, the Met should defer its next run of the cycle until Voigt adds Brünnhilde to her repertoire, which may be coming sooner rather than later.
About the Met production, not much can be said beyond: it's boring. When the production was mounted in the 1980's, the Met seemed determined to present the mother-of-all conventional stagings (in part, no doubt, to differentiate itself from Patrice Chéreau's innovative Bayreuth production of the 1970's), but the result is mostly drab. It's how Illustrated Classics might have imagined the Ring, but with less color.
My memory of the San Francisco production (where I saw Gwynie and Hildie) is that it mixed tradition and innovation in a manner that was ultimately successful. But, of course, everything always looks better in memory.
Posted by gminter at April 28, 2004 10:54 AM