Peter Hall and Georg Solti combine on a controversial Ring
All Europe has been sweltering this summer as temperatures have soared into the 90s. But the hottest spot on the Continent last week had to be the small West German city of Bayreuth, site of the annual Richard Wagner opera festival. Inside a broiling, stifling Festspielhaus, an elegant first-night crowd shed its tuxedo jackets along with its customary solemn decorum as it watched, with growing disappointment, impatience and finally anger, a new production of Wagner's 16-hour, four-evening German myth, Der Ring des Nibelungen, by two British knights, Director Sir Peter Hall and Conductor Sir Georg Solti.
Bayreuth, located 41 miles northeast of Nuremberg in the gently rolling Bavarian countryside, is a rumor mill that makes Washington, D.C., look like a Trappist monastery. Long before the curtain went up on Das Rheingold, which opens the cycle, the cafés were humming with musical gossip: Tenor Reiner Goldberg, Solti's original choice to sing the difficult role of Siegfried, had been fired (true). Soprano Hildegard Behrens, the Brünnhilde, had quit (false). The Hall production, with sets by Designer William Dudley, would be the biggest fiasco since ... well, since 1976, when Patrice Chéreau scandalized the good burghers with his iconoclastic, neo-Marxist Ring.
True, alas. But whereas Chéreau's épater le bourgeois production eventually was seen as a bold, original interpretation that one could take or leave but not ignore, Hall's is something else again. It lacks precisely the quality that defined Chéreau's work: a conceptual framework.
Hall, 52, has explicitly rejected Chéreau's revolutionary premise ("The Ring does not say that to me at all"), but offers in its place only the unremarkable notion that Wagner "elevated a fairy tale into adult myth." In staging the production, Hall said, he would try to follow closely the composer's own detailed stage directions to return to a romantic Ring. This faithfulness to the original—what the Germans call Werktreue—is admirable and, in this day of extravagant operatic reinterpretations, almost avantgarde.
"I believe that a production should try to be as complex and contradictory as possible, and not give any one point of view markedly," says Hall. But the Ring, one of the most ambitious artistic engineering projects in history, needs strong, consistent guidance if a production is not to degenerate into a series of pretty stage pictures. Characters must be sharply focused, their complex relationships made clear. They cannot be allowed to wander aimlessly across the stage, as Hall lets them do in Rheingold, or strike arbitrary, stylized postures: Wotan singing to Brünnhilde while lying flat on his back in Die Walküre, for example.