der freier als ich, der Gott

I went to go see Die Walküre with the local opera company! (I missed Das Rheingold a few years ago -- I really wanted to see it, I think I was out of town.) The local opera company has had some troubles with having enough audience for the operas, so they've slashed the number of performances from 2 to 1, and then for this opera they showed it in the smaller theater, not the big theater that I've seen e.g. La Traviata at. This had certain issues. The theater is not big enough to have a huge pit orchestra; I think to make a pit at all you have to give up some of the seats? (I think?) -- so they had a slimmed-down orchestra (the entire opera seems to have been "arranged" by someone for a small regional opera company, with a smaller orchestra and also abridgement of the music/text), and put the orchestra on stage. Personally I loved this. I love seeing the orchestra, I love having an idea of what instruments are playing when, I love getting to think things like "huh, someone thought about not having the violins playing for three hours straight." But the lady sitting next to me really didn't like it at all. Oh well. Anyway, and then a big problem was that if the singers were near the back of the stage, their voices didn't carry at all, and since most characters entered from near the back, this was a problem for dramatic entrances.

As you can imagine it was a very spare production, which works very well for Walküre. (IDK how they're going to do Siegfried, though, if they do it next year or in another couple of years. Maybe they won't do it?) Basically the set was: some sticks artfully arranged, suggesting an entryway on one side of the stage. (The sword Nothung was also thrust into it at the beginning.) The sticks also had lights attached, which changed color for different scenes (e.g., at the fire at the end they glowed red and orange; I think they might have been bright neon colors to signify Valhalla). I feel like my description makes it sound tacky but it wasn't; I thought it was really really effective, especially given their constraints. The choreography was also excellent, not in the sense that one noticed it particularly, but in the sense that one didn't notice it but thinking about it afterwards they clearly did make good use of their small space, you always got the sense that characters were interacting and not that they were wandering aimlessly.

And all the singers were great. I mean, it's a regional opera company, we're not getting Met stars or anything (plus which I suspect that one of the side effects of having a small venue and small orchestra meant that you don't have to have quite the Wagnerian volume that you presumably have to have in a large opera house and having to sing over a whole orchestra), but they were totally worth hearing for three hours. In my opinion Wotan stole the show; he was the same guy (Wayne Tigge) I saw play an extremely scenery-chewing Scarpia when I saw Tosca in the fall (he got a ton of boos, he was great), only Wotan gave him more scope and more breadth to do character work than Scarpia had. I wished I had got a seat closer so I could watch his face better, and if they'd had a second production I would have legit considered seeing it again just for him :D The Brünnhilde singer was also very good, quite a character in her own right, and had a great rapport with Wotan; one thing I hadn't seen before was that both Wotan and Brünnhilde were just having a lot of fun with each other in their opening scene (the text supports Brünnhilde having fun, but the Wotans I've seen on video have been more reserved even then). Siegmund and Sieglinde were also great (I mean, I basically watch this opera for "So grüße mir Walhall" and it was great, and his Siegmund was believably in love and gentle to Sieglinde, while out of his mind with grief at his impending death and parting from her), although I felt like Sieglinde's big "O hehrstes Wunder" didn't come off quite as it was supposed to due to either the general acoustics or where I was sitting in particular (as she was facing away from me). Hunding was great though his voice wasn't quite as loud as Siegmund's or Sieglinde's; Fricka was also great although she had an annoying tendency of raising her hands when she sang.

Okay, I'm going to put my Philistine hat on now. I was VERY happy about almost all the cuts. There's a lot you have to have for the story, and then there's just a lot that is kind of... repetitive :P Do we need to have Siegmund's description of the ash tree? Do we really need to have Sieglinde and Siegmund talking for ages about how Hunding is chasing them? (We already know that from Fricka and if we didn't catch that, Brünnhilde tells him later.) They cut both of those and I was a big fan. They did keep all the deep myth/philosophy bits in the beginning of Act 2 with Wotan's conversations with Fricka and Brünnhilde, and that too is right, in my opinion.

The two cuts I didn't like were a) they cut Siegmund talking about how his father had promised him a sword, which made Fricka's assertion of the same a little later sound a bit weird, and b) they cut Wotan's whole address to Hunding after Siegmund is killed: "Geh hin, Knecht!" and I am Put Out about this because it's one of my favorite parts and our Wotan would have done it spectacularly. It's important both dramatically and character-wise!

Also, Brünnhilde got a hug near the end from Wotan, which, YEAH. I think I am just a fan of sopranos getting hugs from their father-figures? But in general I felt like this production really leaned hard on Die Walküre being fundamentally about Wotan and Brünnhilde's relationship, more so than about Siegmund and Sieglinde's romance and tragedy or Wotan's dilemma (which I'd always focused on before) -- aided by the minimalist set, I think, and also by Wotan and Brünnhilde having super father-daughter chemistry. I loved it.

So, yeah, I would still love to see this in a big opera house someday, but I am very very pleased with getting to see it live <3