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Time Tunnel Ring
| Article
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20592 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
1,461 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
To heighten the timelessness of Richard Wagner's massive tetralogy Der Ring Des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungen), director Gotz Freidrich and his designer, Peter Sykora, dress the stage in wildly warring styles from different periods. This production for the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, which was first mounted last year and performed in two complete circles (it now enters the house's repertory piecemeal), is set in what its director calls a "time tunnel"--an enormous tube stretching seemingly endlessly to the back of the opera house and beyond, and within which the action unfolds.
Influenced in part, says Friedrich, by Henry Moore's 1941 watercolor Tube Shelter Perspective, the idea bears some similarity to Samuel Beckett's novella The Lost Ones, where in the inhabitants constantly seek, always disappointed, a light at the end of the tunnel in which they live. Pitched into a world of darkness, the characters of the Ring, human and otherwise, seek out the light lost to them by the disappearance of the Rhinegold.
Friedrich's conception of the four operas has proved controversial, yet when one thinks about it, it becomes clear that this monumental work--which includes everything from dwarves living underground to vanishing acts, a humongous dragon, and a woman had her horse leaping onto a funeral pyre--resists realistic interpretation.
It was Wagner's genius to fashion a libretto that has stood the tests of time and many tinkerings, be they abstract symbolic, psychoanalytic, or whimsical. In fact, nearly everything that can be done to the Ring has already been done to it. It therefore is heartening to witness a fresh approach. By setting the Ring in the "time tunnel," Friedrich not only lends the tetralogy a visual, intellectual, and emotional unity, but he also honors the text to a surprising degree.
It is Erda, the earth goddess, who during her first appearance in Das Rheingold declares: "I know how all once was;/ how all is/and how all will be." This suggests the idea that the world has always moved, and continues to move, cyclically. The dwarf Alberich renounces love for the power that the ring, forged from the gold of Rhine, will give him, setting in motion a series of cataclysmic events. Through her love for Siegfried, the Valkyrie Brunnhilde redeems the wayward world; and though the world ends tin the Gotterdammerung, or the twilight of the gods, it is reborn again. Another Alberich, fueled by lust for power, will come along, and another Brunnhilde will sacrifice herself for the betterment of
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