Abstract
Based on rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera/Ex Machina co-production of Siegfried in October 2011, this chapter interrogates how Robert Lepage adapted Wagner’s third Ring instalment through scenography—the dialogic interplay of the bodies, objects and physical medias employed on stage—rather than shifts to the libretto or score. Lepage’s work is positioned as a development of Wagner and Appia’s prescribed Ring aesthetics, which were largely incompatible with the prevailing standards of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera production. This re-envisioning of Siegfried is also positioned as an adaptation that subverts aspects of the opera’s potentially problematic politics of representation through its evocative visual performance text.
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Notes
- 1.
In Lepage’s production, digital imaging and voice-sensitive technology create and increase the volume of bubbles that appear to be escaping from the Rhinemaidens’ mouths as they sing.
- 2.
Sections of this case study appear in my chapter ‘Making Music Visible: Robert Lepage’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera’ in Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation, edited by Vicky Angelaki and Kara Reilly. This material is reproduced here with the editors’ permission.
- 3.
My engagement with Siegfried includes attendance at the opening night performance of the opera on 27 October 2011 and a three-week ‘observership’, during which time I observed rehearsals led by Lepage and the conductor, Fabio Luisi, on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. This chapter has also been informed by my second three-week observership of Götterdämmerung in January 2012, as well as live viewings of each of the four Ring cycle operas.
- 4.
This chapter does not posit that Ring stagings should conform to the assumption that Wagner holds the ultimate authority with regards to producing his own operas.
- 5.
Wagner’s use of musical themes is distinct as it constructs the score (Grey 2008, 88), making the appearance, reappearance and modulations of leitmotifs the opera’s central dramatic component. Although instantly recognizable in any form (regardless of the key or instrument), leitmotifs develop alongside the characters they represent, rising an octave in tender moments or moving into a minor key to foreshadow trouble ahead (Metropolitan Opera).
- 6.
Debates have persisted over the last twenty years regarding whether Wagner’s racism is expressed in his works. In comparing the traits attributed to Jews in Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings with the descriptions of Mime and Alberich articulated by the other characters and stage directions in the Ring, I am inclined to agree with Theodor Adorno and Wagner scholar Barry Millington, who believe that Alberich and Mime represent Jewish people. Both the text in Wagner’s Ring opera and his essays, such as ‘Judaism in Music’, highlight the following as chiefly Jewish characteristics: ‘off-putting physiognomy and behaviour, cunning and calculation, greed, emotional shallowness, lack of homeland and native language and artistic sterility’ (Tusa 2014, 114–15).
- 7.
Each of the set’s twenty-four planks ‘is 2 inches wide, 29 inches long, and weighs 726 pounds. The axis is 5 inches wide. The planks can revolve a full 360 degrees. The set, which sits directly upstage of the deck where most of the action takes place, changes position every five to ten minutes throughout Das Rheingold’ (Barbour 2011, 54).
- 8.
For further reading on the early technological innovations that enabled aspects of Appia’s Wagnerian theory to take shape on stage, see Brandin Baron-Nussbaum’s chapter ‘Forgotten Wizard: The Scenographic Innovations of Mariano Fortuny’ (2013) from Kara Reilly’s edited collection Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology.
- 9.
This is not to suggest that interactive technology can replace the performer on stage; instead, my argument simply highlights the fact that Appia’s desire for interactivity can now be carried out through interchanges between three-dimensional scenic devices.
- 10.
In their discussion of the Metropolitan Opera’s co-production of the Ring with Ex Machina , Symonds and Karantonis note, ‘innovation in operatic productions is as much a strategy for revenue raising and securing future audiences as staging conventional revivals’ (2013, 12).
- 11.
Musicologist James Young has articulated that a return to the Bayreuth tradition is antithetical to a return to Wagner’s vision (2006, 124). Though my study does not privilege authorial intention, the divide between ‘Ring tradition’ as dictated by the aesthetics of the 1876 production in Bayreuth and Wagner’s actual vision relates to the Metropolitan Opera’s rhetoric for the millennial Ring, which frames the production as traditional.
- 12.
My translation.
- 13.
For a thorough debate on the topic of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas, see the online exchange between Barry Emslie and Mark Berry at: http://www.thewagnerjournal.co.uk/wagnerandanti-se.html.
- 14.
Theories on why McFerrin was supplanted by Anderson include that the Metropolitan Opera felt engaging a female African-American singer would result in a smoother transition for its patrons (Cheatham 1988, 6). Other sources cite the influence and power of persuasion of Anderson’s agent, Sol Hurok (Keiler 2002, 419).
- 15.
As costumed in Lepage’s Ring, Owens appears wearing long dreadlocks, a design choice that is arguably reductive.
- 16.
Of Chéreau’s Ring, some post-show comments were personal and vitriolic (e.g., after seeing the production one spectator commented ‘I began to feel once more my old hatred for France’ [quoted in Nattiez 1980, 72]). For his part, The Guardian’s opera critic, Edward Greenfield, described the staging as a ‘major fiasco’, ‘a joke’, full of ‘clutter’ and ‘dotty ideas’, while other reviewers failed to read the staging’s Brechtian text and assumed the scenery had to be moved by stagehands because it had ‘broken down’ (Millington, ‘Fidelity’ 273).
- 17.
Fillion notes that this is an integral aspect of Ex Machina’s process: ‘We always work with prototypes in a laboratory … You cannot just draw it, build it, and put it on a stage. You have to work with prototypes and models, to do the research to know if you’re putting on something that’s completely wrong’ (quoted in Barbour 2011, 56).
- 18.
The set was built by Scène Éthique, the Montréal-based scenic fabrication company. This is unusual, as the Metropolitan Opera normally builds its own sets.
- 19.
The terms of the settlement remain private.
- 20.
Andy Lavender notes that during rehearsals for Elsinore at La Caserne , Lepage and Fillion worked with a prototype of the set from the first day of rehearsal. A small group of stagehands joined them to manually run the set. The sections, scene lengths and order were decided by the scenography (2014, 105).
- 21.
Blocking rehearsals with the director occur separately from singing rehearsals.
- 22.
My translation.
- 23.
This is not to say that intimate knowledge of the set would have prevented every unplanned incident in performance, particularly since there were occasions in rehearsals when the set malfunctioned and the staff at Ex Machina were puzzled as to why.
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Poll, M. (2018). Adapting Wagner’s Siegfried: Making Music Visible at the Metropolitan Opera. In: Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy. Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73368-5_4
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