Die Walkure

[silverflight8]

Just got back from Die Walkure. It's past midnight, it was so long and my mind has been blown. Oh my god it was amazing. I have so many thoughts and I need to sleep because tomorrow is an early day but I am so fjiwoehdsfv about everything.

aaaaaa

(but we were totally cheated of the Ride!! agh and the sword theme is gonna haunt my dreams, it was everywhere)

Comments

[spiralsheep]

\o/

[silverflight8]

It was faaaaabulous. Though I must say I liked Acts II and III much better than Act I!

[dhampyresa]

TELL ME EVERYTHING!

[silverflight8]

OK FIRST IT WAS FABULOUS

and also I hope you meant "everything" because this is seriously tl;dr (oops).

I went to the dress rehearsal (it was part of a youth opera thing, meant to introduce young people to opera (?) - I attended a session about it, watched the first act, then got tickets to the dress. We got to talk to the concertmaster and also the conductor, and the conductor talked a lot about the score, like the leitmotifs and the thematic elements of the score. They gave us some reductions of the score to illustrate the leitmotifs as well as a few passages in the first act, so we could follow what he was saying.) So when I went I'd already seen the first act.

The set! omg it was SO dark in the first act. First impression: tons and tons of girders and catwalks all over the stage, strung with lights but with a very um, industrial feel? The house of Hundig was really confusing actually; it was like shattered rooftiles (picture laminated tiles) with dirt everywhere and a fire on stage left which was the hearth. At first I thought it was outdoors! There was the tree in the little circle of rocks and such, but it was already broken into three or four huge pieces and the sword was entirely hidden. It was so so dark. Honestly, I was half falling asleep during some of it--I swear, it was the darkness. Regarding the tree: I heard that when they do Das Rheingold, in this staging, the tree is whole and golden. (I can only imagine how it'll be staged in Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. Pile of sawdust?)

Plotwise, where I mostly fell asleep was the part when all of a sudden SPRING LIGHT comes in completely randomly. The first time I watched it I was like go for the sword you idiot and it was ages, ages, ages before he did, while still going on and on about love and light and everything. The first time I watched I knew they were siblings but hadn't absorbed much from the synopsis, so the whole time I was like "they're not going to do the incest thing--I'm misreading all the love words--these are not romantic overtures, you've read too many romance novels--they're not going there--they're not going there--oh my god they did" as Sieglinde and Sigmund fell to the floor in an embrace as the curtain came down.

Since I saw the dress I think several singers marked their voices so as not to overextend themselves for the performance (which I believe is tonight!) But in particular I loved Brunnhilde (she was amazing. A powerhouse and she could do the huge powerful bursts and the incredibly delicate parts like when she asks Wotan whether her crime was so terrible that she should be demeaned like this, after her sisters flee. Just an astonishing range, including vocally, to pull off the different emotions and scenes she had to play) I also really liked the singers for Sieglinde and Siegmund.

Also there's that part in Act I when Siegmund finds out he's landed in the house of his enemy without a weapon and is on his knees yelling his head off to his dead father (WALSEEEEE except no capslock can possibly convey the intensity) oh my god. It was like an avalanche of sound. He first started facing stage left, and turned while still belting, then sang Walse again, but moving from right to left. I swear the vibrato became an actual half-step trill (my friend was like "you can hear the Doppler effect"). There's supplication to the heavens and then there's that.

There was no running in the beginning--the orchestra played while the curtain was down. Also no horses. I really loved Hundig's entrance. He was carrying a naked sword in one hand and as the music played his theme he'd walk, and then stop, then walk as it played again, and it was incredibly menacing. He was also dressed in this huge bulky coat--think Hagrid.

Incredibly cheesy stage direction: at one point, when Siegmund was describing the battle (about his attempts to rescue the girl being married off) the stage was bathed in light that looked like a slowly flickering flame, like a really bad powerpoint gif. It was terrible. There was a girl lying in the back, dressed in white, who kind of sat up and waved her arms around and then fell. Super cheesy. There were several figures back there actually; I'm pretty sure they were lying back there the whole time and only did the part of re-enactments.

Oh my god, Valhalla. They turned the stage lights ON REALLY BRIGHT and there was tons of white from the wrapped up corpses. Oh yeah, the corpses. Oh my god. The Valkyries were tossing corpses to each other (sometimes from above, from the girders) and they were terrifying; all wrapped in white, kind of like a human dummy. With head, and torso, and rather short legs, and there was clearly some bendability in the knees so they could kind of cradle them. Ugh. Other friend described them being like slenderman.

That part where Wotan gets sad about Brunnhilde made me all ;____;

(To do the ring of fire, they brought in two torches each and put them around her. I'm pretty sure the girls that brought them in were the singers who played the Valkyries.)

Oh yeah, the Valkyries singing together! Exactly what you'd expect when eight soloists sing together (everyone jabbing their elbows into each other's harmonies) but really effective for Valkyries. And for confusion and fear generally. That was cool. Some of the Valkyries were so young looking though!

Thing I was really grateful for: different voice parts playing different roles. Like, Hundig and Siegmund shed their coats and so they were dressed fairly similarly and though I had fairly good seats, orchestra level but near the back, there was no way to see stuff like facial expression, etc. But there is no way you can confuse Hundig for Siegmund. If they'd been both played by tenors I'd have probably had trouble sometimes. The difference when Hundig first sang was amazing.

People kept dropping Northung. Stop that! Like, literally five minutes after Siegmund FINALLY pulls that sword out of the tree, he snatches it from Sieglinde and then just drops it on the floor.

That sword theme played every single time the sword was even mentioned. Whether or not the sword made an appearance, sometimes even before they had sung the sword or even before the surtitles had included the word "sword". It was REALLY obvious.

I really liked the twins' love leitmotif and also the unearthly Valkyrie cry. At first I thought something was wrong with the surtitling, since it wasn't subtitling for us, but then I realized they weren't saying anything, they were singing a battlecry.

Also prop-related: when Hundig enters the first time, he's carrying a hanche of meat, which he first slaps onto the tree (with a very unconvincing sound). Later he grabs it and to intimidate Siegmund he takes the knife out of it and licks it. That's totally what I'll do next time I need to intimidate someone. Take a knife out of a bloody leg of meat and then lick the blade while staring at them.

Oh, speaking of that. The orchestra really gets its "say" during the performance. The singers would sing their bit, interact or something, and then the orchestra would play its own comments while the singers sort of stood there, or walked around without saying anything. It took some getting used to. It's definitely a stylized telling of a story; big long pauses everywhere. It takes them forever to do anything!

I was glad there weren't big long arias. I know they're good for showing off virtuosity but I personally don't really like them very much (why not just recitative the whole thing?) I liked the monologues of Wotan in the second Act just fine--long but full of information, indicative of his feelings, etc. Also I think if Wagner wanted to include arias for his singers he'd have had to stage each individual opera on two days too.

The power of the gods seemed very wobbly. Wotan is supposed to be very powerful, but he's limited by his choices (I suppose?) and the gods around him, like Fricka. Speaking of Fricka, I hope she was marking her voice; she didn't really

SO YEAH. I really liked it--objections notwithstanding--there was so much that happened omg. I have to say I liked Acts II and III better than I (the first seemed so randomly placed, since isn't Das Rheingold about the gods too? But I suppose that's so that Siegfried's backstory is explained).

[dhampyresa]

Thanks for the super in-depth review! This is exactly what I wanted when I asked about everything. (That Walse sounds amazing, omg.)

[silverflight8]

Aw, yay! I am glad. That above is mostly what the inside of my brain is like.

Oh my god I wish you could have heard it. It was monumental :P