Tenor Richard Croft is inching backward up a 70-degree incline, while singing, on the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. One of a dozen computers parked on tables in the nearly empty auditorium controls an interactive projector that makes flames appear to flicker at his feet. Behind the steep surface that juts high above Croft’s head, stagehands grip a cable attached to his belt, trying to keep any slack out of the line as he moves, fly-like, on the wall.
Welcome to the marriage of high technology and old-fashioned stagecraft that is Robert Lepage’s first production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.
The Canadian director and his company Ex Machina have been working for three years on a four-opera extravaganza that Met general manager Peter Gelb says is “more complicated and more challenging than any production put on this stage before.”
As the computer-controlled stage machinery begins to move during an orchestral interlude in this piano-dress rehearsal of Das Rheingold (the Ring’s first part, which opens the Met’s current season Sept. 27), the complexity and the challenge become stunningly apparent.
The surface Croft was standing on rises up and begins to twist, as its 24 constituent planks splay into a stage-spanning staircase that ripples around a spine-like horizontal axle. Never mind that some steps are nearly vertical – gravity works differently here. The gods glide along the planks, the fractured surface is flooded with colour and texture, and the music sinks into the infernal rat-ta-tat-tat rhythm that Wagner uses to represent the subterranean scene of the crime that sets the whole cycle in motion.
“Wagner was obsessed with making the Rhinemaidens look as if they were really swimming, with having giants walk on the stage,” says Lepage during a break in rehearsal. “He needed to find or invent the machinery for these coups de théâtre, and each new Ring brings a solution or a proposition for them. We knew that video imagery, interactive video, all of these new tools that are available would be put at the service of that. Even if the staging is extremely conventional, the support for it is cutting-edge.”
Extremely conventional? In some ways, yes.
“Most of the action is very simplistic,” says Bryn Terfel, the Welsh bass-baritone who sings the pivotal role of Wotan, chief of the gods. “There’s not much movement. In essence, every Wagner production is like that.”
When Terfel saw his costume, with its breastplate and chain mail, he knew its provenance right away. “Look at pictures of the old Wagnerian singers. The costumes are back to those old productions at Bayreuth” – the really old ones, from before the revolution that shook Wagner staging in the 1950s. But nobody in Wagner’s theatre back then had a stunt double, as Terfel does.
We tend to think of Ring productions as either traditional (like the one Otto Schenk did for the Met in the eighties) or far-out (like Phyllida Lloyd’s 2005 cycle for the English National Opera, in which Brunnhilde blew herself up like a suicide bomber). Lepage doesn’t work in those terms.
“Every time a stage director does a new Ring, they have the intention of refreshing it, and the way some people do that is to set it in the present day, or bourgeois 19th-century Vienna, or Nazi Germany,” Lepage says. “They want to get even with Wagner for so many things. My way is to go back to the roots, and ask: ‘What exactly is the story about? What was the first production like? What can we keep from that, and what doesn’t really fly any more?’ ”
Lepage and his team (including set designer Carl Fillion and retired Radio-Canada opera broadcaster George Nicholson) spent a year mulling over that question, studying the Ring and its world in general terms, going back to the Norse and German legends that Wagner read and borrowed from. They looked at Wagner’s musical technique, especially the recurring short themes (leitmotivs) that he used to link every event in the Ring with all the other parts of his myth narrative.
