the gods fall in love
with earth
by Douglas Messerli
Richard Wagner (composer, based on Nordic
texts) Die Walküre / The Metropolitan Opera live HD performance
which I saw with Howard Fox on Saturday, March 30, 2019
The other day I saw the MET’s production of
Wagner’s Die Walküre, an opera I’ve now seen 4 or 5 times. Howard and I watched the
previous Metropolitan Opera’s production, Otto Shenk’s 1968 version, at least
twice on video (perhaps I saw that one only once, when Howard and I did a
marathon viewing over 4 days of the entire Nibelungen cycle at home); we saw
the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen,
directed by Archim Fryer, at the LA Opera in 2010; and the following year we saw a live-HD production of Robert Lepage’s
MET production with Deborah Voight (who played as host to this new production)
as Brünnhilde, Jonas Kaufmann, Eva-Maria Westbroek, and Stephanie Blythe. So,
despite the glorious new production we saw on Sunday—with Christine Goerke
playing the Valkyrie queen, Stuart Skelton as Siegmund, again the superb
Eva-Maria Westbroek as Sieglinde, Jaime Barton as Fricka, and Greer Grimsley as
Wotan—perhaps I should just remain quiet, allowing the thousands of other
voices who have written about this remarkable opera speak for me. I have signed
in to talk about it on at least three previous occasions.
Yet
these My Year volumes also serve as a
kind of personal memoir of my experiences, and I find it difficult,
accordingly, to not speak out—this time in brief—about one of the most glorious
productions of this opera ever performed. All the singers were at top form,
with Goerke, Westbroek and Grimsley representing the highest levels of vocal
art.
But I don’t need to talk about that given that so many other critics have acclaimed their performances. It is Grimsley, who in the intermission suggested that he plays Wotan not simply as a god but as a kind of Shakespearian tragic figure, who helped me, through his performance, to see another dimension—surely one discussed endlessly over the years since the opera premiered in 1870 (the MET first performed it in 1885).
What Grimsley demonstrated, more clearly than any other performer I have
seen, is that the pagan gods (and perhaps even the Christian one) loved earth
and its beings far too much. Zeus kept descending to our green planet for
sexual affairs with both men and women (Wagner, far more a homophobe than the
Greeks, does not hint that Wotan had homosexual affairs—although he certainly
does have a deep hankering after his favorite boy Siegmund). And that, we
discover finally in Die Walküre is the major problem, which will ultimately end in the downfall of
the gods. If the gods come down to earth seeking love and entering into the
daily affairs of the mortals, they, as his spurred wife Fricka reminds him,
have lost their conventional powers; their intermingling’s with the earthlings
not only suggest to the mortals that they might be imbued by the god’s power
and glory, but seeds doubt about Valhalla’s inaccessibility.
Siegmund,
the perfect example of a hero beginning to have his doubts, even refuses the
journey to the Norses’ heaven if he cannot take the woman (his own sister, with
whom he has entered into an incestuous relationship) who represents earthly
bliss, with him, and claims that he might rather go to Hell—quite literally. Perhaps
he has, given the fact that Brünnhilde returns on her
sky-traveling steed with his wife rather than him.
It his Wotan’s recognition of the errors of
his past that forces him to agree with Fricka that he must look less toward the
future and change, and more to the rules that he himself, in his original
godhead had enforced.
So
too has his beloved daughter, Brünnhilde, fallen in love, in
her many journeys there, with earth and its beings, including Siegmund, who,
defying her father’s insistence that she not intrude in his battle with Hunding
(Günther Grossböck), attempts to help save him from a certain death, must be doomed
herself to become one of the mortals—and in this production, high atop the
now-famed Lepage “Machine” she is crucified to later become a kind of female
Christ to the world with she has fallen in love. The theme, of course, is
repeated in the opera Siegfried. It
has always fascinating to me that in Wagner’s world, the Christ is not the dead
hero, but the woman who has sacrificed her own immortality for man.
Grimsley’s Wotan is almost sick to death
for his immortality, readily willing to die if only he might be able free
himself from his own restrictions, to become a “free man” able once more to
enjoy the sensual pleasures available, evidently, only on earth. If only
someone might come along Wotan sings, to, without his interactions to save
them, become a kind of hero who might deny the gods and destroy their power.
This is Nietzsche, of course, speaking through Wagner, or Wagner, prefiguring
the great philosopher.
But
it is also Ulysses defying Zeus and the other Greek gods; it is Augustine
speaking out against the Roman deities; it is Ibsen’s Brand denying his own
faith. Earth and all of its failings can be such a lovely place that even the
gods, who realize they must severely punish its sinful denizens, long to be
there. How the Christian God must have envied his Adam and Eve!
If
only the mortals stopped attempting to be gods!
Los Angeles, April 1, 2019
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2019).
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