Opera Australia’s Götterdämmerung receives its first performance in Brisbane tonight.
It has been my pleasure to attend Opera Australia’s Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and Siegfried over the past week, and as I write this, I find myself yearning for this epic cycle’s final, tragic instalment, Götterdämmerung.
I have always resonated with Wagnerian scope. Indeed, I should like to reflect it one day in my own music dramas.
To have absorbed The Ring Cycle live has intensely heightened my attraction to the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art.
I have never felt such excitement in opera as at the conclusion of Die Walküre’s second act – a moment which was slightly more thrilling than the successive Ride of the Valkyries).
Indeed, perhaps Wotan’s rage, captured emphatically by Daniel Sumegi and Philippe Auguin’s 80-strong Queensland Symphony Orchestra, was inhibited only by QPAC’s Lyric Theatre, the pit of which is unfavourably dry.
But such a critique is little more than sonic pedantry. As The Ring Cycle seldom rears its colossal head in the Antipodes, beggars certainly cannot be choosers.
Opera Australia’s offering is by no means insignificant. The Wagnerian whisper about me is that this production, the offspring of Brisbane, dwarfs Bayreuth, Germany’s, recent efforts.
And of dwarfs, Warwick Fyfe’s portrayal of Alberich has been, for me, the standout performance, closely followed by Hubert Francis’ Loge in Das Rheingold. Wotan (Sumegi), Brünnhilde (Lise Lindstrom), Siegfried (Stefan Vinke) and Siegmund (Brisbane’s treasured Rosario La Spina) have all risen passionately to the fore.
In general, this Nibelung pilgrimage has impressed upon me the effect of surtitles in opera. Note that I use not words like necessity or convenience, but rather effect. Are surtitles necessary to capture The Ring Cycle’s grand and sometimes abstract libretto? Yes, I believe they are. To that end, they are also convenient. Their effect is transformative.
No longer is the audience at all times transfixed upon the drama before them. Instead, at the beginning of every phrase, eyes rise to the theatre’s roof, skim half a sentence, then fall back to the stage.
This is a mechanical and addictive movement and reminds me of those many years I spent spectating tennis. It is a movement which also changes our understanding of the experience of opera. It was Rossini who, in 1867, told Emile Naumann that “Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour”.
If this be true of the German, the Italian’s concerns are now drastically mitigated by surtitling, which proves consistently to be an engaging stimulant throughout a work like The Ring Cycle.
And yet this remedy is not totally borne of Richard Wagner’s craft. What was once an all-immersive musical experience has been overlaid with written text; modern audiences are now asked to both listen and read, simultaneously. We can have no idea how all this might alter the medium of opera.
And it is no secret that many are striving to alter that medium. My opinion is that there is a real push to discuss and critique operas through their innate or perceived extra-musical qualities, rather than through the music itself.
In this article’s opening remarks, remarks so broad that they could hardly constitute any kind of serious review, I confine my observations purely to matters of music and sound. Music is, to me, the most important metric by which music should be measured.
Others, it seems, do not agree. A new study emerged in August, titled Risky Business: Policy Legacy and Gender Inequality in Australian Opera Production published by the International Journal of Cultural Policy.
Its authors, Caitlin Vincent (Melbourne University), Katya Johanson (Edith Cowan University) and Bronwyn Coate (RMIT), argue that between 2005 and 2020 state-funded Australian opera companies have discriminated against women.
These concerns prioritise the production of opera, but Dr Vincent goes further. In 2019, she wrote that “opera is stuck in a racist, sexist past”, taking one issue with the “Muslim caricatures” in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. She suggests, as an appropriate strategy, that Entführung be written so as to “remove racist language”.
How ironic it is then that Mozart did not seem to consider any of Entführung’s characters mere caricatures. In fact, he fought for amendments to Gottlieb Stephanie’s original libretto.
In a letter to his father, dated September 26, 1781, Mozart wrote: “In the original libretto Osmin has only [one] short song and nothing else to sing, except in the trio and the finale; so he has been given an aria in Act I, and he is to have another in Act II.”
When Leopold Mozart responded, criticising the libretto’s general literary quality, his son sent another letter, dated October 13, defending Stephanie. “In an opera,” he wrote, “the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music … when music reigns supreme and one listens to it, all else is forgotten.”
There can be no better rebuke. So, should Mozart and Stephanie now be condemned as racist, and should their work be rewritten by those who, through little more than their own interpretations, find it “problematic” (to quote Dr Vincent)?
The fact remains that Wagner’s innermost thoughts, thoughts which may or may not have influenced themes in his operatic oeuvre, and thoughts which have been the subject of immense debate in recent times, have not yet been enough to dismantle his musical legacy.
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His art sings above the noise. For what it is worth, I too can find problematic scenarios in the arts – such as those Australians who parade as composers and yet who privately employ orchestrators to disguise their lacking skills.
We are, in all things but especially in the great and noble art of opera, besieged by hypocrisy. Of course, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But it is not so much a case of casting as it is wandering like Wotan, seeking the future of our world.
Alexander Voltz is a Brisbane-based composer.
Opera Australia’s The Ring Cycle continues at the Lyric Theatre, QPAC, until December 21.
opera.org.au
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