Seriously: is there any composer--hell, any artist of any type--laboring under a longer shadow than Richard Wagner's son? I have my doubts. And naming him after his Ring Cycle hero was just adding insult to injury. I suppose, however, that his name must also have opened doors for him. Well, here's this, recently released for the first time on DVD.
So the plot: I must say, it was rather hard to follow, though whether that's the opera itself or the production is hard to say (more on that later). I was thankful for the summary in the booklet. It's Crusade Time, and there's a knight, Fridolin, who is supposed to be crusading. But he's not. He has forsaken his oath and is living in Byzantium as a guest of the Emperor. He is in love with a woman named Iris, daughter of the court jester, but she won't return his affections because she wants him to crusade. Meanwhile her father, Gomella, has his problems: he's in trouble for stealing from the emperor, but he'll be spared if he can procure his daughter for him; the emperor doesn't like his wife and wants another heir, his current son being sickly and degenerate. Gomella agrees but finds a prostitute who looks sort of like his daughter to send in her place (although then Iris is also kind of into the emperor). At a banquet, it turns out that the emperor's brother had a plan to assassinate him, which fails, but Fridolin, having prematurely celebrated this plan, is now in the doghouse and has to choose between being executed or the humiliation of having his head shaved and made Gomella's co-jester. He chooses the latter. The empress kills herself and her son, having learned of the emperor's infidelity. Fridolin's father comes by and is disgusted by his son's abasement, which makes him want to make up for what he's done. Suicide seems the only choice, and he stabs himself. The crusaders attack. The emperor goes off to face them, presumably to his death. Gomella runs off. Iris confesses her love for Fridolin. He dies. She loses consciousness from the smoke but is carried off by her attendants. THE END.
Does that sound Wagnerian? Well, there is a sort of sin-and-redemption thing that might make you think of Tannhäuser, though it would be pushing it to say that Fridolin really redeems himself. But it definitely has that sort of feel, confused plotting included (I legit can't figure out if Wagner wrote his own libretti, like pa--the booklet doesn't seem to include any credits, but it does seem like something a Wagner would write). But as to the central questions--how's the music and does it sound like dad?--all I can say is pretty good and kind of, probably? You'd undoubtedly get a better answer from a Wagnerian, but it definitely did at least in places remind me of père, not least in its aria-less style.
But we have to talk about the production here, because that's where we really run into problems. Is the drama effective? Is it well-told? Well, it's hard for me to judge, because either way, this does a piss-poor job of bringing it across. It's not bad because it's regietheater or Eurotrash or anything like that; it's bad because it's bad! A equals A! This was recorded in August, deep in pandemic-times, and as such it has a "digital orchestra." What's that? Not wholly clear. There IS a conductor, who is...well, he's waving his arms around anyway, so I assume he's doing something, but there's no physical orchestra in the house. Kind of weird, but okay, I don't have any huge problems with that. What I do have huge problems with is the overwhelmingly cheap feeling that pervades the entire thing. I don't think opera productions have to be hyper-lavish, but it's all in how you work with what you have, and good lord, every penny not spent on this is very visible onstage. You basically have an empty stage with these pink and green columns and a video screen in back projecting allegedly-relevant video footage. The singers are dressed in an unexciting mixture of modern-day and sword-and-sandal-type stuff. Whatever drama there is here, it's leached away by the opera's circumstances. Rarely have I been less whelmed. And there's really no excuse for any of this, because this is not some scrappy low-budget production from an up-and-coming company: this is flippin' Bayreuth! They could've done better! What chain of decisions led to this? I ask you!
It is seriously you gee ell why, it ain't got no alibi, and what's more, the feeling of cheapness extends to the DVD. The video recording--which seems like it should be a gimme for something recorded in 2020--is frequently really murky-looking, and the sound engineering is doubtful: the singing often seems swallowed up by the music (which is part of why I'm reluctant to judge Wagner's work). You know me; I'm willing to put up with some lousy quality for the sake of an opera, but there's really no reason that this should be as bad as it is, given the context. JEEZ, even the subtitles are bad: clearly very indifferently machine-translated from the German, filled with weird phrasings and obvious grammatical errors--and towards the end, there are a couple of lines that aren't even translated--the subtitles remain in German. Just a REAL clown show, I have to say. Frankly, everyone involved should be ashamed of having put out such a shoddy product. DVDs put out by Naxos usually have a baseline level of quality that this fails to reach. If Bayreuth wants to rekindle interest in Wagner fils, they're going to have to do better than this.
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