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	GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG TWILIGHT OF A PRODUCTION

Incoming BSO music director James Levine may be bringing us a concert performance of Der fliegende Holländer next year, but we’re not likely to be getting fully staged Wagner in Boston (Das Rheingold instead of the Rockettes at the Wang?) anytime soon. So I was happy to be settling into a front-row Grand Tier seat at the Metropolitan Opera last Saturday for the first performance of this year’s production of Götterdämmerung. It’s the same old-fashioned staging by Otto Schenk, with Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s sets and Rolf Langenfass’s costumes, that the Met has been presenting since 1988 (and has made available on video and DVD), dark and atmospheric to a fault. There are indelible moments: Gutrune isolated upstage looking out at the Rhine while Günther and Hagen scheme; Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens in a forest clearing that recalls the Met’s blooming meadow for act two of Parsifal; Hagen looming against the horizon with his downturned spear the way Wotan did in the first three dramas, greed replacing god. But one can barely make out the Norns (Elena Zaremba, Yvonne Naef, Christine Goerke) in the prologue, much less Hagen and Alberich (behind a double scrim?) at the beginning of act two, and the collapse of the hall of the Gibichungs gives way to a murky and literal depiction of Hagen’s last-ditch attempt to snatch the ring away from the Rhinemaidens. The Bayreuth Götterdämmerung that Patrice Chéreau designed in the ’70s had more fire, and more redemption.

It doesn’t help that that Jon Fredric West’s Siegfried and Jane Eaglen’s Brünnhilde look like stuffed animals when they embrace (West fares no better with Margaret Jane Wray’s Gutrune). These days, tall, sleek performers who can act as well as sing are a luxury even at the Met. Eaglen was in steady voice, freer in the second act than the first, and she phrased the Immolation Scene more naturally than she did at Tanglewood last summer, when she was stranded by Jeffrey Tate’s distended tempos, but again "Ruhe, du Gott" didn’t rise to the occasion of a daughter’s farewell to her father, and here both "Siegfried, mein seliger Held" and the final "Selig grüßt dich dein Weib" were submerged by the rising orchestra. West sang powerfully, but he lacks a heroic physique and, worse, heroic grace in his movement. Wray likewise seemed to hunched and constricted in her bearing, and Alan Held’s Günther was all hanging head and slumping shoulders, though as Siegfried’s apparent treachery was revealed, that posture began to look like a choice, and a not inappropriate one. Veteran Matti Salminen’s Hagen dwarfed everyone in concept and presence, and his voice, if never as black as Gottlob Frick’s, has held up. He deserved, and got, the loudest applause, but you have to worry about a Götterdämmerung in which Hagen is the star.

The orchestra, as it does everywhere but Bayreuth, overwhelmed the singers; the black-and-white of their notes came through, but not the color of their personalities. Levine had the first and violins deployed antiphonally, as is his custom, with the basses behind the cellos to his left and the brass on the far right. The opening triplets had a weight that augured well, and he remains one of the world’s premier exponents of Wagner, but I wish he could have expanded Siegfried’s Rhine Journey the way Hans Knappertsbusch used to, the weight went out of the heavy chords in Siegfried’s Funeral March, and the Immolation Scene had no sense of apocalypse. Levine himself has also lost weight, and that’s a good thing. Word is that this production is about to be retired; perhaps the new one will have less physical heft and more emotional impact.