What’s a piano doing in the middle of Wagner’s Ring?
NewsStefan Herheim’s new production at Deutsche Oper is attracting a tsunami of ridicule.
He parades the cast in their winter underwear and puts a piano centre-stage, as a ‘musical-optical gateway to fantasy’.
photo: DeutscheOperBerlin
Among other irrelevancies, Mime is a Jewish caricature wearing a Wagner velvet cap and concentration-camp striped uniform.
Review here.
https://www.operaclick.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7917
This boring rant so pathetically misses every single shot it reminds me of Star Wars storm troopers.
I haven’t seen the production, but some of the described staging strikes me as interesting. I like the idea of the piano contextualizing the opera as Wagner’s fantasy–an instrument that transports the human mind to imaginary world that can become reality. Or nightmares….
I also like the flipside of the metaphor of the piano as the symbol of an affected bourgeois appreciation of the arts. A sort of Loriot laughter at cultural pretense, which in the case of the reception of Wagner resonates in many directions, including ironies we’d rather not think about like the very pointed Mime costume.
The problem with Wagner is that modern perceptions deflate his pretentions but in the process sometimes fill the room with noxious gas. Loriot’s hilarious ironies offer a kind of solution.
Wolfgang Schreiber, who wrote the linked review, mentions Loriot–a German comedian whose work centers around hilarious parodies of the educated German middle class–people sometimes referred to in German as bieder. He mentions in particular this sketch, “Mutters Klavier”, but it requires a good understanding of German:
https://vimeo.com/46083093
This hilarious sketch called Der Nudel can be appreciated without speaking German, though knowing German and caricatured German mannerisms makes it even more funny:
https://vimeo.com/448661156
Loriot was a consummate Wagnerian and an avid music lover. he even directed some operas to great acclaim. One of his hilarious sketches can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhj1xhv3rZI&ab_channel=LeonieSchmidt No German necessary. Watch him destroy a living room in 3 minutes, starting with a painting that is not entirely proper…
The woman he performed most of his sketches with was actress Evelyn Hamann who was the sister Gerhard Hamann, a cello professor at the Musikhochschule Trossingen.
What a load of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual BS!
No wonder audiences are drifting away.
Exactly! Always the same. Pompously intellectualised by those who can’t actually sing or don’t have the voice to sing Wagner or wannabee dictorate candidates! The music is on the page!
… wannabee doctorate candidates …
You have not seen it. I have. There are many things to say about this production, many reasons to criticize it, but it wasn’t in the least pseudo-intellectual. Isn’t it a bit pretentious, pseudo-intellectual even, to start bashing things you know absolutely nothing about?
Look at the position of my comment in this thread.
Oh, and a small addendum concerning the drifting audiences: the theater was almost sold out and the applause afterwards was long and loud. Strange that bashers always identify themselves with the entire opera-going public.
I always found the piano, especially what they call the ‘grand’ piano, a very bourgeois thing. We’ve two of them here & I cannot pass them without this sickening feeling of suffocating class suppression.
Sally
Well, let me tell you that the design and sound of a piano has been and IS very attractive to the human spirit. You can’t blame any human being for liking the instrument: it’s a magnet (even children disgustingly banging it.) A piano is an object of desire. And I would rather have anyone having one in their living room, like a flower vase, than a tv set playing a Disney movie. Please, love a piano, they need our bourgeois, pretentious love in these difficult times.
As you say, you haven’t seen it….
Nothing is new. Herbert Wernicke had a piano center stage in his 1991 (30 years ago) Ring production in Brussels. It was a central part of his staging throughout the entire Ring. And people dressed in clothing indicating a relationship with Jews? Also not new in the least.
There was a piano in a Brussels production 30 years ago?
Well, we all saw that, didn’t we?
The audience I am sitting with for this January 2022 is relatively young and they are loving it.
It took a while for me to notice the piano.
So much is expected of Herheim since his extraordinary Bayreuth ‘Parsifal’ that he doesn’t seem to have the right to slightly miss the bullseye from time to time.
Good way to put it. He misses the bull’s eye, but only slightly.
when is this going to stop?
I hear the ENO Valkyrie has had the fire turned off by the local council..surely something that should have been known about before. Looking forward to seeing the show in a few weeks with the marvellous Anthony Negus.
I just saw Rheingold tonight. It has its ups and downs but Mime’s outfit and the piano certainly aren’t the problem. As he did in his Bayreuth Parsifal, Herheim superimposes specific takes on the work that sometimes get in each other’s way. As a foundational story about the origin and abuse of power, which is the essence of Rheingold, this is one of the stronger productions I’ve seen. The second layer is about music (hence the piano) but it never becomes a coherent whole. The third take is comedy bordering on slapstick, which often works but clashes with the power story. So be it. I certainly is an intelligent interpretation by someone who thoroughly understands the work. And Thomas Blondelle as Loge was miraculous. He redefined the part.
I’ve just seen Rheingold tonight and am still processing it but I found the piano centre stage distracting and pointless – and the refugee chorus with battered suitcases the same. But I am going to wait until I have seen the entire cycle before coming to a final judgement. There are some stunning things in it -the entire Scene 4 was utterly breath-taking and the final images and actions were powerfully brilliant in preparing us for the next stage of the story.
But I am not sure that just any blue striped costume is, ipso facto, a concentration camp reference.
Indeed, I’d never seen Siegmund and Sieglinde as embryos until last night.
In his interview in the program, Herheim characterizes refugees as people who have lost their past and don’t yet have a future. They are stuck in the now, das “Es”, also (ok, this is wordplay) the scale of the prelude. Both refugees and the prelude stand for a “beginning anew”. In this version of the story, they are humanity which starts over – hence the undressing and the white underwear. Out of them grow Alberich, the Rhinemaidens and the Gods: always, some people will assume roles. At least: that’s what I made of it.
In the early 2000s I saw at Teatro Real (Madrid) a production of Tannhäuser of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden with the Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Daniel Barenboim that had always a grand piano on the stage: a white piano for Elisabeth, a black one for Venus.