DAS ENDE

A week exactly after Rheingold we were fronting up for Götterdämmerung. Knowing we'd be late at an after-party, we were already packed for a quick get-away the next morning. It was like it had ended before it had started, as is so often with Götterdämmerung - a late finish and an early start the next day to move on. Somewhere else. Leave it behind. Except I took a lot of this with me this time.

I'd link to the cast but in a brilliant stroke of genius, Opera Australia have removed all details of the Ring Performances and the Ring Festival from their website. Which is bloody irritating. On the Sunday morning we coughed up and went to a talk (there's one on each Sunday of each of the three cycles, but each with different participants) between OA chief Lyndon Terracini and Stuart Skelton (Siegmund) and the Wotan cover Shane Lowrencev.

Audience questions kept coming back to the production which Mr Terracini declined to comment on because he was interviewing director Neil Armfield on a subsequent Sunday (and a subsequent cycle) and couldn't preempt that. But, after prompting, he agreed to put the transcripts of that interview on-line, to the audible relief of those who, obviously, couldn't be there. And during an interval at Götterdämmerung I was given a firm assurance that it would happen. Well, if it did happen, it didn't happen for long. Thanks Lyndon.

So left with the published programme which has some brief Director's notes (along with four excellent essays about things Wagnerian and Ringy), here's the best I can give you of what Armfield has to say about his ideas:

* Love is exchnaged for wealth, and this is no arbitrary exchange

* The Ring is the story of a man "who recognises that the world is being destroyed by greed but is so compromised" by his own situation that he is unable to change anything, as are we all in one way or another.

* And "'it is essential'" wrote Wagner to August Röckel "'that everyone can recognise himself in Wotan'".

* Finally, the thematic message:
"But ours is a world in which species of animals and plants are being lost as they are being discovered. It's a world shaped by the mass movement of people escaping war or persecution or destruction of habitat. A world of miraculous developments of technology sitting on the most glaring inequalities of wealth and opportunity: the third world enslaved by the first.

One hundred and fifty years ago Wagner wrote The Ring as an incitement to both artistic and social revolution. He wanted the self-destructing world to be cleansed and to start over again. As we face deluge and conflagration in the 21st century, Wagner's götterdammerung is perhaps only a matter of time. He asks the essential question: is our love strong enough to save us?"


There's a short trailer which gives a look at the general feel of the staging - the Norns struggling to repair a fading tapestry of life; the Gibichungs in their noveau riche home gymnasium, the designer wedding in the marquee, the rifle club and the murder.






What was really starting to have an impact on me was how appropriate the casting was to the meaningfulness of this production. All were consistently in character in direction (and Neil Armfield is a genius at letting the actor evolve his own characterisation, under the 'gentle guidance', which is why it seems so from 'within') but also in voice. To that extent, this was one of if not the most satisfying of Ring experiences. I might well have heard some of the roles better sung, but there's more to it than that. Sometimes vocal imperfections (against an idealised perfect) are the more revealing.

I loved
the bitterness in Fyfe's Alberich,
the weary masculinity of Stensvold Wotan,
the glorious accomplishment of Skelton's Siegmund,
the wounds in Gordon-Stewart's Sieglinde,
the depths in Humble's Erda,
the persistence in Dark's Fricka,
the boundless confidence in Vinke's Siegfried,
the hapless sexlessness in Macfarlane's Mime,
the startled brightness in Fribig's Woodbird,
the weaknesses in Ryan's Gunter
and last but not least, and this is her opera - the determined, nuggety and ultimately very moving Brünnhilde of Susan Bullock.

She's interesting on stage, very committed, and uses her vocal resources with great intelligence and integrity. She was quite wonderful I thought, with that sense of struggle and battling through thick and thin, and her vocal resources matched that completely and her midrange was splendid and almost Shakespearean in its impact, on me, in those vital exchanges, we know what they are.

The first sms I received the next morning was "how was it - bleak or redemptive?" which is of course the real question, not how was the trill, or the high Cs, as much as I like trills and high Cs. I could only answer that the music was, as written and as wonderfully played, beautifully redemptive but the staging was uncertain, and pointing to the other way. K had tears running down his cheeks, and likewise. The final effect was overpowering, with this sense of something having been set in motion and while everyone knows that something must be done to avert calamity, no one yet has, or can access, the where-with-all to know what.

It was the final moments that pulled all these thoughts together: Siegfried death throes witnessed with the horror of what have we done; the gentle lifting of the body in loving embrace of fellowship; the washing of the feet and death mask ...

... the bizarre but riveting standing corpse drapped in black; the people piling up flowers in a Diana-moment; Brünnhilde's taking of some white lillies and joining her dead beloved in a perspective that looked as ridiculous as dolls on a wedding cake but as tragic as anything I have seen as they revolved slowly in the conflagration watched in strange detachment by the people. The people. This was all about people.

And that tinge of despair was what I took away all the while knowing there is another way. There is another way. The music tells us that, but who will listen. And can those who do, do anything.