“Die Walküre,” the second opera in Wagner’s mammoth “Ring” cycle, is a major tipping point in the drama. Power begins to shift away from Wotan, king of the gods, and toward his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde. But when the curtain closed at a new “Walküre” at the Opéra Bastille on Nov. 27, the production’s triumph had more to do with engrossing world-building and splendid singing than with the Spanish director and professional provocateur Calixto Bieito’s commentary on power dynamics, which landed with a pedantic, inelegant thud.
This “Walküre” didn’t exactly break new ground with its setting in a postapocalyptic dystopia — opera stages seem to be filled nowadays with postapocalyptic dystopias — but it succeeded in its specificity. With unified designs by Rebecca Ringst (sets), Ingo Krügler (costumes), Michael Bauer (lights) and, especially, Sarah Derendinger (video), Bieito constructed a decayed environment that is inhospitable to life, where characters need an oxygen mask and protective clothing to venture outdoors. Wotan, like a desperate autocrat, builds a surveillance state to shore up his power as the world around him crumbles.
Throughout the show, the audience could see the grainy, real-time footage of an onstage security camera projected onto the set. Several scenes confined the characters to a claustrophobic, rectangular box. Infrared and night-vision mediated their experiences, while metal scaffolding, filing cabinets, computer servers and a robot dog (which elicited boos from the audience at the top of Act III) bespoke a new, inorganic reality.
A clinical, stifling atmosphere reflected a carefully controlled world where it’s hard to breathe. The endless clamoring for technological innovation had become the characters’ undoing. It’s a classic “Ring” trope: People are very good at ambition that turns into self-destruction.
For all the specificity in the staging, the conductor Pablo Heras-Casado went the opposite direction in the pit, favoring a smooth traversal of the score. The orchestra made objectively beautiful sounds, particularly the handsome low strings and the rounded-off brasses, but Heras-Casado flattened out the leitmotifs. They are supposed to weave emotional complication and subtext into a particular scene, signaling fatefulness, bitter memories or a glimmer of hope, but Heras-Casado subordinated them into decorative effects. One hopes that he gives them more thought before Paris Opera presents its full “Ring” cycle next year.
The singers did marvelous work. In the grueling role of Siegmund, the tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac was astonishing, combining a sizable yet handsomely knit timbre with impressive reserves of power and a lieder singer’s attention to dynamics and shading. As his sister-lover, Sieglinde, the soprano Elza van den Heever was a canny vocal actor. She began the opera as an abject, abused hausfrau, singing with an acidulous tone and clipped phrases, and gradually evolved her approach into the ringing romance of her self-discovery in Siegmund’s arms.
As Wotan, king of the gods, the British baritone Christopher Maltman demonstrated the charismatic hauteur of a natural-born leader with his ripe, capacious timbre. In a velvet smoking jacket, he sauntered about the stage with pride and dismissiveness while mansplaining the idea of love and marriage to his wife, Fricka, the actual goddess of marriage. He played Wotan’s narcissism and self-pitying despair to the hilt, but he failed to pivot to genuine feeling for Wotan’s Farewell in Act III, when he must condemn and disown his beloved Brünnhilde in music of heartbroken grandeur.
Fricka and Hunding are the opera’s no-fun, hidebound moralists. As Hunding, the Austrian bass Günther Groissböck, who has presence to spare, sang with a parched tone, but cannily pointed it for maximum incisiveness. As Fricka, the mezzo-soprano Ève-Maud Hubeaux, dressed in a blue cape and matching gloves straight out of Mrs. Waterford’s closet in Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” checkmated Wotan in his own game of logic with a stabbing, righteous indignation.
“Die Walküre” (“The Valkyrie”) is named after Brünnhilde, but the opera’s title is more of a nod to her narrative importance than to her musical responsibilities at this point in the cycle. Nevertheless, the soprano Tamara Wilson made a remarkable impression, showing off a blend of prettiness and power in her middle and upper registers and a natural physicality that could be touching or humorous. Her polished timbre, tight vibrato and supple phrasing betrayed no effort. That kind of singing bodes well for Brünnhilde’s proper set pieces in the cycle’s next two operas.
As resignation depleted Maltman’s Wotan and idealism fired Wilson’s Brünnhilde, Bieito made that power shift explicit in two pantomimes. In the first, following a heated exchange, Brünnhilde walked over to her kneeling father, draped him in a woman’s ball gown and used the stick of a hobby horse to choke him in some kind of masochistic humiliation ritual. In the second, Wotan lay down among the lifeless bodies of fallen heroes. It’s clear that Wotan’s time is up, and Brünnhilde, in her ascendancy, must overthrow him, destroy his life’s work and obliterate his ego in order to undo the mess he’s made of the world. Of course, the problem is that the music doesn’t actually say any of this yet; Wagner will say all of this later.
After all the good work of the cast and creative team, including Bieito, the gratuitous pantomimes felt like a shame. But then, as Wagner would surely attest, the will to self-destruction is strong.
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