Written notices before Act II of Siegfried cautioned of a loud noise to come, but after this Act, and still more by end of the opera, one felt that the warning was misapplied. Yes, the gunfire as Siegfried dispatched Fafner was indeed ear-splitting, but it was as nothing compared to the spiritual shocks of a production which seemed hell-bent on working against the very idea of narrative integrity. Castorf’s postmodern dramaturgy (he is a known exponent of postdramatic theatre) turned Wagner’s plot into a collage of random juxtapositions and paradoxes, and while there were plenty of visually striking moments, the whole point seemed to be that there was no greater whole, nor indeed much point. As such, the third part of this production of Ring went considerably further than his Rheingold, which merely provided a strong misreading of the tone of Wagner’s drama. Welcome to music [post] drama.
Some common motifs in the cycle so far: power is often expressed through exploitation of women (both Wotan in Das Rheingold and Fafner here ran a string of prostitutes); violence will be inflicted on the stage props at some point in the evening; and the dramaturg, Patric Seibert, may end up being the most prominent person in the entire production. His non-singing roles so far include a barman in Rheingold, a soldier who hides in a chicken coop in Walküre, and in Siegfried both the bear in Act I and the waiter in Act III. These aren’t just Hitchcockian cameos either – he was often cynosure of all eyes, as when he headbanged along to Siegfried’s forging song.
As in the previous two instalments, the set designs of Alexander Denić were gorgeous to behold, but rather more enigmatic than before: the opening Act took place against the backdrop of a quarry dominated by a Communist Mount Rushmore, with gigantic heads of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao in place of the US Presidents. But whereas earlier in the cycle the stage rotations just gave another perspective on the same structure, this time the reverse side revealed in Act II was entirely different: an area in front of the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station in Berlin. These two spaces alternated, with several scenes crossing over from one to the other: the “Forest murmurs” scene began in the urban setting, although the final slaying of Fafner took place in the other. The video projections were mercifully less intrusive here than in previous parts – one ingenious moment during the Act III Wotan-Siegfried confrontation saw their faces superimposed onto two of the Rushmore heads.
This was not a production which made any effort to make Siegfried likable. In Act I, he tore up books and burned them, an act heavy with symbolic resonance (especially from a Berlin-based director), and after dispatching the would-be murderous Mime, he rather gratuitously emptied a sack of rubbish on him. Aside from tiring slightly at the end of Act I, Stefan Vinke was in good voice throughout. As Mime, Andreas Conrad was particularly good at conveying malevolent glee, and needless to say the anempathetic production stopped us feeling any sympathy at his fate. Albert Dohmen was strong vocally as Alberich, although again the production worked against our understanding his character as the primeval antagonist.