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'Ring' director Tankred Dorst booed in Bayreuth
2008-08-03
BAYREUTH, Germany (AFP) - Richard Wagner's "Goetterdaemmerung" or "Twilight of the Gods", the fourth and final part of his massive four-opera "Ring" is about the end of the world. The Gibichungs' palace comes crashing down, Valhalla goes up in the flames, the gods perish in the fire, Bruennhilde burns on a funeral pyre, and the waters of the Rhine rise up and engulf everything. Tankred Dorst, whose trite and banal reading of Wagner's great masterpiece is being staged here for the third year in a row and which brought the glitzy premiere week at the Bayreuth Festival to a close on Saturday, reduces the end of civilisation to a mere fire in a hotel lobby with a few guests running around in panic. The gods themselves do not burn, merely banners on which their pictures are painted. And after the fire has died down, a pair of lovers stroll by pushing a bicycle and a small boy wanders around, demonstratively covering his eyes with his hands. It was as if, after resolutely refusing to offer any interpretation of the "Ring" during the first three instalments -- "Rhinegold", "The Valkyrie" and "Siegfried" which were performed earlier in the week -- Dorst finally decided to draw some meaning out of the sprawling 16-hour tetralogy. A young man sits reading a book on the steps of the Gibichungs' palace throughout the six-hour evening, only finally getting up to stroll calmly off as the hotel burns. As the sun rises on the double wedding of Siegfried and Gutrune and Bruennhilde and Gunther, a giant cockerel walks down the hotel steps. And a young man wearing a huge ram's head is seen lying wounded and blood-spattered after the wedding guests have disappeared. Dorst is clearly trying to tell us something. But since no such chiffres were employed at all during the first three parts, it was not clear what. And following Dorst's lazy and haphazard directing throughout the rest of the cycle, it was by no means certain that the audience cared, anyway, by that point. The white-haired 82-year-old playwright and director was loudly booed when he appeared to take his bows at the end of the evening. German conductor Christian Thielemann, by contrast, received frenetic applause for a profound and meticulously detailed reading of the score, even if the brass section of the superb Bayreuth Festival Orchestra had a few intonation problems. The singers, too, triumphed, particularly US tenor Stephen Gould as Siegfried, one of the most taxing parts ever written, and compatriot Linda Watson as a commanding Bruennhilde. Of the rest of the sterling cast, British baritone Andrew Shore and German bass Hans-Peter Koenig as the evil Alberich and Hagen stood out most. "Twilight of the Gods" rounded off the first full week of this year's Bayreuth Festival, the 97th, which runs until August 28. The "Ring" is being performed two more times until then and there will also be repeat performances of the three other operas on this year's programme, "Parsifal", "Tristan and Isolde" and "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg".
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