DVD of Das Rheingold Piques Viewer’s Interest
Das Rheingold: Staatsorchester Stuttgart, conducted by Lothar Zagrosek; stage director: Joachim Schlomer. Wotan: Wolfgang Probst; Fricka: Michaela Schuster; Alberich: Esa Ruuttunen; Freia: Helga Rós Indridadóttir; Mime: Eberhard Francesco Lorenz; Erda: Mette Ejsing; Donner: Motti Kestón; Froh: Bernhard Schneider; Loge: Robert Künzl; Woglinde: Catriona Smith; Wellgunde: Maria Theresa Ullrich; Flosshilde: Margarete Joswig. Studio: TDK/Naxos; video: 16:9; audio: dolby digital 5.1; extras: chapter selections; length: 152 minutes; rating: three and a half stars.
This modernization of the first opera in the Ring Cycle casts Wotan as a ruthless businessman with his scallop-haired wife, Fricka, sitting on the board of directors. Loge has his hair slicked back like a Mafioso and struts gloatingly across the stage. Capturing the opera’s horrific themes of greed, treachery, and betrayal, this daring conceit works. Wasn’t it G. B. Shaw who said that the entire Ring cycle is an indictment of capitalism?
One reviewer complained that there was too much “aimless, unmotivated movement about the stage.” I’m sorry, but this staging problem is common to many Wagnerian productions. You either have the subordinates stand still while the lead characters interact—sometimes lengthily—or you try to think up something inventive for them to do. If that something consists of having the Rhinemaidens fondle their gold suggestively, then so be it. In this fast-paced production sometimes innovation works, sometimes it’s preposterous. However questionable they may be to the helmet-and-loincloth traditionalists, most of these modernisms pique your interest (although I did miss Alberich’s dragon/toad transformation). But as Wagner once said to a countess when she puzzled over his libretto and staging, “The music! Listen to the music!” And most of the time, this crew delivers.
Conductor Lothar Zagrosek gives a spirited reading and coaxes more-than-adequate performances out of his cast. Listen to Froh’s (Bernhard Schneider) apotheosis to Freia in Scene 4, or the grotesque, slightly comic giant’s leitmotif in Scene 2. Only Wotan truly disappoints. This is no more evident than in his rendition of Scene 4’s “Abendlich strahlt der Sonne Augen,” referred to as a “magnificent peroration” in The New Kobbe’s Opera Book. As sung by the weary Wolfgang Probst, it is more the complaint of a CEO who’s grown dog-tired about all this squabbling over a ring.
– Peter Bates
