Well, at least we got to hear Andreas Schager sing. This is no small satisfaction. Schager is currently one of the worldʼs leading Wagner tenors, and a Heldentenor at that, a noble hero from the first bars of whatever he happens to be singing. For the past six years his calendar has been jammed with nearly every lead Wagner role at major houses throughout the world, from The Met to the Vienna State Opera. All this from someone who grew up on a farm in the Austrian mountains with no exposure to or education in classical music, and didnʼt sing a serious note until he was 19 years old.
Entering the world of Wagner was akin to a religious experience for Schager and, like any convert, he is eager to share his faith. This makes him a spiritual twin with Selcuk Cara, a German stage and film director, sometime opera singer and Wagner devotee. With the help of conductor Matthias Fletzberger and violinist Lidia Baich (Schagerʼs wife), the two men have created a project to bring their musical hero to the masses. Or at least to audiences that would not normally sit through a four- or five-hour opera.
Faszination Wagner comes in two parts. The first offers a taste of Rienzi – the overture, and Schager singing the anguished prayer “Allmächtʼger Vater, blick herab!” – followed by an instrumental “fantasy” Fletzberger created from themes in Tristan und Isolde, featuring Baich as a soloist. The second half distills The Ring down to a series of arias by Siegfried, starting at the moment of his death in Götterdämmerung and then recapping key moments in the earlier operas – essentially a set of flashbacks focusing largely on familial relationships, which was the subject of Caraʼs doctoral thesis.
Ostensibly knitting all this together is a film – actually, a flood of often unrelated images – accompanying everything except the overture. These are projected on a massive 21-meter screen at the rear of the stage. The idea was to create an authentic Gesamtkunstwerk, and incidentally a multimedia presentation to hold the interest of the uninitiated. But it turns out to be more baffling than beguiling, mostly abstract nature images, usually superimposed in multiple layers. In the program book, Cara offers a lengthy description of the travails he and his crew endured in the filming, climbing mountains, traversing gorges, crossing perilous swinging bridges, sweating in Austriaʼs oldest smithy. But aside from some engaging close-ups of wolves at play, the finished product looks like something created in a studio, artful but not insightful, with little evidence of natureʼs grandeur.