Opera critic, Stranger Genius Award-winner, and all-around good egg Rebecca Brown has been keeping a diary of her first experience of watching the full Ring cycle at Seattle Opera, the final one under the guiding hand of SO general director Speight Jenkins. You can read her previous installments here and here.
Siegfried, act one: Two guys are in the woods. One is a short, old, unattractive guy (leering and dark-haired in the Lego photo), the other a tall, young, handsome guy (pretty vacant, with long, wavy, reddish hair in the photo).
- RB
The old guy, Mime (Joe Pesci in the remake), who foster-fathered the young guy, Siegfried (Liam Neeson a decade ago in the remake), is trying to make a super sword so the kid can kill the dragon and get the loot (Ring, etc.) the dragon is guarding. He also hopes to kill the boy after the boy kills the dragon, so he brews a deadly potion for the boy to drink. As my wife, over tiny donuts in the press room, observed: “Not much really happens in this one.”
“This one” being Siegfried, the third and, thus far, much the longest of the four operas that comprise the Ring cycle. “Not much… except they just talk about what we already saw.” We saw, in episodes one and two, the love-at-first-sight meeting of siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde and we assumed the (offstage) conjugal relations. We saw the pregnant Sieglinde rescued from the wrath of Wotan by Valkyrie girl-gang leader, Brunhilde.
We saw that all, but Siegfried didn’t. So in act one, we sit through Siegfried learning about what we already know. Wagner is not generally admired as a constructor of well-made plots. (That’s a JOKE! Wagner is notorious for intricately inane plots.) But even Wagner would not waste an act on repeated blather. This first act is not about forward movement but about seeing who Siegfried is. While he presses to find out who his parents were, we get to see the kind of person he is: impatient, annoying, full of himself. Not nice to old people, insensitive. But also resilient, persistent, fearless. Siegfried (a robust Stefan Vinke in his Seattle Opera debut; he’s a keeper) struts and strides and faux-spars his way across the stage, into Mime’s face and straight into our charmed, teenage-boy hearts. But he wrenches from Mime the story of how his dead father, Siegmund, left behind a super powerful, though broken, sword and how his mom died in childbirth.
Mime still has a few things to learn about Siegfried, too. In act two, the Wanderer (aka Wotan, in Gandalf hat and a woodsy Keanu Reeves Matrix coat) tells Mime that only a fearless person can repair Siegmund’s dragon-killing sword then get the Ring, the girl, etc.
Seigfried’s “fearlessness” is the quality needed for one to mend the sword, get the ring, i.e., to save the world.
What is it about “fearlessness” that’s so important?
What does it mean to not feel fear? If you don’t fear does that mean you don’t feel? Like there’s nothing you love or love enough to fear that you will lose it? Or hate to think of its suffering? Do you not fear because you’ve never suffered and therefore you do not fear suffering again? If you don’t feel fear, can you also not feel sympathy? Or compassion? (Not the same things…) If you can’t feel fear are you kind of inhuman, i.e., heartless? Are we only as complete or big or deep as our flaws? As our capacity to lose? Is there a price to pay for never suffering?
Maybe “innocence” is like that too. Like if you’ve never had your brain or heart or body smashed, you don’t need to pray or beg or long for getting over that. Maybe you’re innocent because nothing bad has ever happened or actually anything really good? Can you have joy without also knowing regret or fear?
Annoying and self-absorbed as Siegfried is, he’s also fearless. It’s surprisingly easy, once the sword has been made, to (spoiler alert!) kill the dragon. I love what Seattle Opera does with the dragon. We see the dragon tail first in a great comic set piece when Siegfried mistakes its nethermost region for the dragon’s head. The full dragon, huge and lumbering (you can see why Siegfried is not afraid) is a sweet Northwest-y mix of Chinese parade dragon, Sherry Markovitz bright colors and mosaic-like fabric bits, as non-threatening as a “monster” in a child’s bedtime book. The actual slaying of the dragon is almost anti-climactic. Then, feeling he has been betrayed by the old guy, Siegfried kills Mime, but doesn’t even feel mixed about it. The most unpleasant thing he feels is loneliness. He has, however, been splashed by the blood of someone he’s killed, and he is growing up, which begins to bring about in him some weird kind of longing. So when he hears (from a talking bird) of another lonely person, a lady sleeping on a rock, he is hooked. He sets off to find her (Brunhilde).
In act three, love, and what it does to one, ensues.
Before act three, however, general director Speight Jenkins came out to announce that Allwyn Mellor had been stricken with allergy attacks, so Lori Philips, whose Turandot was much admired this year, would be stepping in to sing Brunhilde. While not as peppery as Mellor, Philips served well. I nominate her for the deus ex machina award.
Another notable (though non-singing) role was that of the bear: Not an actual ursidai, but played expertly by a human male, JC Casiano, a supernumerary with Seattle Opera since 2005 and, judging from his press photo, quite cute. (He is also a dancer with Seattle’s Westlake Dance Center.) The bear was not cute, but lumbered with an exquisitely ursine gait, bringing a shimmery glow to his reddish-brown coat and, doubtless, a twinkle into his wise, gentle, Siegfried-befriending eyes and sensitive plantigrade paws.
To recap our love lessons thus far: (1) Do not trust pretty girls or powerful men. (2) Family love can be creepy. (3) Love can make you lose your confidence but also some of your cluelessness, obnoxiousness, and lack of sympathy for other humans. It can also make you crazy (both crazy-crazy and happy-crazy) and teach you fear.
Whether love, etc., can change the world or not, we will examine in episode number four, The Twilight of the Gods.