Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen - Complete Ring Cycle (Levine, Metropolitan Opera)
by Brian Large
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DVD details
Actor: Birgitta Svendén, Heinz Zednik, Hildegard Behrens, James Morris, Siegfried JerusalemDirector: Brian Large
Writer: Richard Wagner
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); German (Original Language), Unknown; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Chinese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Box set, Classical, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 941 unknown-units
Published: 2011-10-24
DVD Release Date: 2002-11-12
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Deutsche Grammophon
DVD Reviews of Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen - Complete Ring Cycle (Levine, Metropolitan Opera)
DVD Review: Andenken
Summary: 4 Stars
Whatever Robert Lepage puts on the Met stage in 2010-12 (as I write, the first installment, DAS RHEINGOLD, is but weeks away), whether the reception is rapturous, scornful, or some mixture, one can expect nostalgia for Otto Schenk's now-retired production, sets by Günther Schneider-Siemssen. This was unveiled at high noon of the Reagan era and was taped for broadcast when still relatively new (1989-1990). It held up sturdily and pleased crowds through the first decade of our present century. By no means the most probing or intellectually stimulating RING staging of its day, nor even as scrupulously faithful and traditional as its adherents would have you believe, it comes closer than anything else on DVD to something Wagner would have recognized. I daresay the composer even would have heartily approved of long stretches. The stage pictures are often quite beautiful in their Romantic calendar-art fashion (an example being the gods' entrance to Valhalla, rainbow bridge and all, at the conclusion of RHEINGOLD), and from time to time Schenk's orthodox representation combines with the Met's impressive technical and monetary resources in genuinely stirring ways (the zealous realization of Wagner's stage directions in the final five minutes of GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG, singled out by Jon Alan Conrad in his excellent Met Guide review).
There are performances upon which one could scarcely improve. James Morris's Wotan/Wanderer is vocally Golden Age stuff. It would be almost churlish to complain that his expressive work is not the equal of his singing; he meets any reasonable standard, and he looks the part to an unusual degree (this being 1989-90, we can pass lightly over the mullet). Heinz Zednik's Mime is master-class material, as expertly sung as in the earlier, more radical Boulez/Chéreau/Bayreuth staging (now also on DG DVD), but acted and made up in a more conventionally grotesque way -- no longer the Victorian nebbish. The great bass Kurt Moll's Hunding all but walks away with the first act of WALKÜRE: voice for miles and an unexpectedly shaded characterization to go with it. Matti Salminen, once the Hunding for Chéreau, contributes a creepy Hagen to GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG (watch him observing Brünnhilde before their scene together, like a sinister black-voiced bird of prey). Earlier in the cycle, Salminen and Jan-Hendrik Rootering had effectively partnered as the giants.
Christa Ludwig, as Fricka and Waltraute (roles she had recorded 20 to 25 years earlier in various segments of two classic audio cycles, the Solti/Decca and the Karajan/DG), sounds audibly near retirement and is a mite old-fashioned in stage deportment, but recognizable as the sovereign artist she was: it is a fine farewell and a fine souvenir. Perhaps the nicest surprise is Siegfried Jerusalem as Siegfried in the final two installments. One despairs of ever hearing and seeing a Siegfried who has it all, and like most of the modern ones, Jerusalem is modest-scaled, even undersized in the face of this role's punishments. But he is more pleasing of timbre and more likeable than most of the competition (both from 1990 and from the two decades on either side). Dawn Upshaw makes a lovely Forest Bird, but one doesn't often hear a bad one.
Ekkehard Wlaschiha's work as Alberich might have been better experienced on an audio recording; the character's monster-movie getup seems to me one of the production's miscalculations. The same holds true for the reptilian Loge (Jerusalem again; luxury casting); for the gorgeously intoned but virtually non-acted Sieglinde of Jessye Norman; and for the less gorgeously intoned but diligent-enough Siegmund of Gary Lakes. (The Wälsung twins seem to be operating in their own costumed concert performance; it's up to their foil, Moll's Hunding, to supply what dramatic juice there is in that act of WALKÜRE.)
The strength and weakness of the casting is Hildegard Behrens's Brünnhilde. This estimable artist gives an effort worthy of her role's heroic stature, and she is never less than dramatically engaged and artistic in turn of phrase. She benefits from the concentrated nature of this undertaking, truly suggesting the character's through-line from first entrance to immolation. But one must overlook unsolved problems in all three relevant chapters. She is vocally best suited to the WALKÜRE Brünnhilde, but the Halloween-costume-like battle armor and the compact sizing of her voice conspire to make her seem diminutive, whatever her height may have been (it is difficult to get Dame Gwyneth Jones's stunning warrior-goddess in the Bayreuth staging out of one's mind's eye here). In the SIEGFRIED Brünnhilde, the shortest assignment of the three but the one with the most demanding tessitura, Behrens sounds uncomfortably near the limit of her resources from beginning to end. GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG begins well enough, but something goes wrong during the Waltraute scene and stays wrong -- I have never heard a commercial release in which the singer of a major role sounded more *hoarse*. The performance is not a total loss, and Behrens even gets some expressive utility out of her froggy sound in the ugly ensuing scene with "Gunther"/Siegfried, sounding terrified and vulnerable to a degree managed by few exponents of the role, and achieving great pathos. But at no point in this long opera's final two-thirds could her singing be called easy on the ears.
By 1990, Maestro James Levine had gone most of the way toward transforming the Met Opera Orchestra into the world-class ensemble it is today. The playing as such -- especially at the level of texture -- is glorious. Unfortunately, here, Levine the musician is not the equal of Levine the orchestra trainer and technician. He seems to have been influenced by the records of a certain breed/generation of Wagner conductor, and his Met Wagner (*all* of it, including the later videos of TRISTAN, MEISTERSINGER, and PARSIFAL) is a glutinous, secondhand homage to what he heard in his formative years. Certain interwar and postwar German Kapellmeisters might have led Wagner performances as slow as Levine's (this is saying a great deal), but those men had an idiomatic sensitivity to the minute adjustments that enliven long, gradually building and unfurling movements. Levine knows where he wants to end up, and how quickly he wants to get there, but details of the old route elude him and he refuses to pursue one of his own. In Wagner, he has spent a career trying to recreate a *product* without being in the least in touch with the process that gave it internal consistency. I have not a doubt in my mind that Levine loves this music as much as anyone alive does, and as much as it is possible to love any music. But he never shows an inclination to do more than "savor" it, and his sweaty embraces squeeze the life from it.
Levine does have one card up his sleeve, and he plays it often: Following an especially uninflected, buffed-into-somnolence passage, he tends to punch out a motto with rude, exaggerated force and volume, especially in the brass. There is a prime example of this Soltian gesture near the end of WALKÜRE, when we've had the Wotan/Brünnhilde "Trance" intermezzo for a bit, and the "Fate" and "Spear" mottos suddenly break the mood by returning in succession. A strong dynamic shift is built in, of course, but Levine is as heavy-handed in rousing us as he was in putting us in the state from which we need rousing. One supposes this is his notion of "contrast." The maestro also comes up short purely as an accompanist, his singers often fighting both to sustain and to be audible (poor Gary Lakes, forced to hold those notes in "Wälse! Wälse!" for so long that one fears he may keel over). I sorely miss the very different side of Levine one hears in such documents as the 1983 video of Berlioz's LES TROYENS (Troyanos, Norman, Domingo). His ultra-expansive approach to Wagner is fractionally better suited (at least, less debilitating) to the later two RING operas than to the earlier two (RHEINGOLD, especially, dies on the vine), but his leadership is the biggest impediment to remaining upright through 941 minutes of a generally attractive and persuasive memento of its time and place.
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