Richard Wagner, Siegfried (1876)

Oh my goodness. Is it even possible to summarize this? I guess we'll find out. Let's try to do it as quickly as possible. Mime, Alberich's brother, has raised Siegfried, but not because he loves him, just because he wants access to dragon-Fafner's treasure. Siegfried also hates his foster-dad, he just sticks around because he wants to learn about his parents. Wotan shows up in disguise as "the Wanderer," and he makes Mime play a riddle game, apparently for exposition purposes. Mime can't craft the sword, Nothung, from the fragments, so Siegfried does it himself. He doesn't know fear, so Mime is going to take him to see Fafner to teach him. Wotan meets Alberich--keeping watch on Fafner's cave--in the woods. They have a conversation for seemingly no particular reason. Then Siegfried and Mime arrive at the cave. Mime retreats and after a bit of dicking around, Fafner comes out and Siegfried kills him. Having consumed some dragon blood, he gains the ability to understand birds, and a bird tells him to take the ring and helmet, which he does. Alberich and Mime argue for a bit. Mime comes back and offers Siegfried a poisoned drink, but the blood also allows Siegfried to read Mime's thoughts, so he kills him. The bird them tells him about the sleeping Brünnhilde, so he's off to find her. Wotan summons Erda and has a conversation about whether the events in motion can be stopped (spoiler: no). Siegfried meets Wotan, who tries to stop him, but he breaks Wotan's spear and Wotan is apparently fully resigned to there being nothing he can do. Siegfried wakes up Brünnhilde with a kiss, and they're in love. The last words of the opera are "hail jubilant death," which seems ominous.

MY GOODNESS that was hard. See, if the problem in Die Walküre was that there wasn't enough incident, the problem with Siegfriedis that there's a whole lot of it, but much of it doesn't really seem to mean anything. Like, seriously, almost everything with Wotan and Alberich's entire appearance feel pretty superfluous. I mean, sure, the music, but other than that (a pretty big "other than that," of course, but...).

Another thing that took me a bit off-guard here is what a doofus Siegfried is. He spends A LOT of time in the first act hollering about how much he hates Mime; of course, it's true that Mime wants him dead, but he doesn't know that at the time, and it really comes across as awfully petulant and whiney. And then let's note that when I say Siegfried "doesn't know fear," I don't just mean he doesn't experience fear himself; I mean that he's literally unfamiliar with the basic concept of fear (although, at least per the subtitles, he does refer to people as "cowards" a few times, so not sure how well-thought-out that was). When Mime is telling him stories about the ferocity of Fafner, he just stands there grinning dopily (in both versions I saw). According to the Wikipedia page, this was originally intended as a comic preface to the grimmer Götterdämmerung (originally entitled Siegfried's Death--hello, SPOILERS!), and some of that certainly remains, though it feels a bit incongruous in the context of the whole.

So...yeah, I once again saw the Schenk and Lepage performances. Honestly, it's a bit exhausting watching two of them in a row like that; yes, it helps you grapple with the work as a whole, but I may wimp out and just watch one Götterdämmerung. Anyway, the usual comments apply: as in Die Walküre, I find Lepage mostly preferable. Schenk's version has Fafner as a kind of unparsable mass of tentacles and stuff, which is better than the big ol' snake that the Lepage uses, but on the other hand, Lepage has him turned back into a human (well, giant) after being mortally wounded, which struck me as an excellent touch. Also, Lepage's infernal machine again does good forests, and the animated bird projected thereunto is cool. Anyway. Enough said about that.

According to Renée Fleming, the part of Siegfried is considered the most difficult tenor role in opera, if not the most difficult role period. I must admit my philistinism and admit that I'm not quite sure why that should be, but...it is what it is, and if there's one reason to prefer the Lepage production, this is definitely it. In the earlier version, he's played by...Siegfried Jerusalem, who was Loge in Rheingold. And I liked him a lot there, but oh my he does not fit here. He just does not remotely look the part, and he has this very seventies hairstyle that...urg. He's just kind of smarmy and ridiculous most of the time; granted, the part itself is intrinsically kind of ridiculous, but I don't think it should be so like this. In Lepage, he's played by Jay Hunter Morris, who apparently took the role just a few days before rehearsal started after two other tenors backed out. Given that, it's kind of astounding how good he is; he's a strong singer and he makes the character more appealingly goofy and less obnoxiously so (and my goodness, in his backstage interview, he has this Texas drawl along with the most endearing golly-gee small-town-boy-in-the-big-city attitude--DON'T TELL ME if he has terrible politics). I'm also boggled to learn that he was forty-eight at the time; he doesn't look seventeen, but he doesn't look remotely that old either.

Again, the usual singers do their usual jobs. Eric Owens is again fantastic as Alberich. Both Morris and Terfel are fine as Wotan, although for some reason Terfel has stringy blond hair instead of curly black this time, and I don't know WHY they can't be consistent with how they handle his missing eye (covered by his hair in Rheingold,an eyepatch in Walküre, and now...nothing; it's still supposed to be gone, but it just looks like he has a black eye). We've got to talk about Mime, though.

Boy, that sounded ominous, didn't it? And yes, you probably knew where I was going as soon as I said it. But it's worth saying, I think. So. People talk about Wagner and anti-Semitism, and let's face it, typically they really don't know what they're talking about; it's just the whole "this person who's supposed to be so great ACTUALLY SUCKS" thing that you also see with Walt Disney. But look, I don't claim to know what was going on in Wagner's mind, or how these things were perceived or presented back in the day, but BOY does the character, as written, come across as the most vile anti-Semitic caricature: avaricious, manipulative, murderous, hideous old man with designs on handsome, guileless Aryan youth? I mean, come on. Obviously, no production, post-World-War-II at any rate, is going to do anything but try to avoid making these connections, but you can easily see how this would be a nazi's favorite opera. However, I did say that this is the character as written. It definitely doesn't have to be that bad as performed. The key, I think, is to find the character's humanity. He's never not going to be a villain, and he's never going to be a great guy, but I think if you can avoid portraying him as just this blank monster, he'll be perceived as more of an actual guy and less of a thing that you can't help but hang these toxic tropes on. To cut to the chase: I think Gerhard Siegel in the Lepage production does a decent job of this; Heinz Zednik less so. To be fair, it probably has as much to do with costuming and make-up as with the specific singers, but it is what it is.

GOOD GOLLY. Yes, I liked this, but I definitely liked it less than its predecessor. Notwithstanding the rapturous final love duet, it doesn't really have the kind of emotional intensity that I got from that one (seriously, that "War es so schmählich?" sends chills down my spine just thinking about it). Anyway, I'm starting to see why people think of this whole thing as a bit daunting. Amazing music, for sure, but...phew. No, I haven't done myself any favors in that regard by doubling my viewing time, but still. Well, I'm certainly keen to see how it ends, so check back at some point in the future. Though I'll probably watch a few less...crushingoperas in the meantime, as a palate-cleanser.