Flies in the ointment: Die Walküre at the ROH
Die Walküre
Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Lower Slips B4, £13
18 October 2018
ROH page
I brought my Ring Cycle to a tangled but at least complete close with this Walküre, and while I would have preferred to stick to the story’s order there were still advantages in seeing it jumbled. The main of these was to admire not only Nina Stemme’s voice, stamina and musicality, but also the nuanced dramatic colouring she brought to the role, extraordinary given its physical challenges. Following Götterdämmerung with Walküre juxtaposes the last view of Brünnhilde with the first, and threw into sharp relief the transformation in Stemme’s sound and presence as Brünnhilde experiences and suffers.
There was a less enjoyable comparison between Emily Magee’s Gutrune and her Sieglinde. In Götterdämmerung I was disappointed by Magee’s quiet sound, so different from what I remember in Die Frau ohne Schatten a few years ago; it made Gutrune, a role of such potential, annoyingly irrelevant. Unsurprisingly, the effect is much worse with a character of Sieglinde’s musical and dramatic centrality. Here Magee was not only quiet but pushing, hardening her sound and driving it unpleasantly sharp. A mediocre Sieglinde puts a cap on how good a Walküre can be, and the contrast between her fellow cast members was stark.
This is because the rest of the cast maintained the gloriously high levels set in this Ring Cycle. I’ve not always enjoyed Stuart Skelton and had little love for his Tristan at ENO recently – but he is on phenomenal form as Siegmund, singing with remarkable plangency and daredevil volume that reaches a flabbergasting high point in his invocation of Wälse. Sarah Connolly, too, as Fricke is extraordinary, sparring off the equally wonderful John Lundgren’s Wotan with a dramatic clarity that couldn’t be bettered. I last saw Ain Anger as Pimen in Boris Godunov and like then he threatened to steal the show, his Hagen blading through with upsetting cruelty. And then there’s Lise Davidsen, pitched in as Ortlinde, ridiculously louder than her fellow Valkyries; I’m not sure it’s a great idea to have done that but it certainly makes for a few exciting moments.
Unlike the production. A theme of this Ring Cycle for me has been to bring Keith Warner back from Coventry where I sent him in 2007, appreciating now the many pragmatic things he has done in this production. I feel I probably would not have been so well-disposed if I’d seen this Walküre earlier in the cycle. Some bits are still reasonable: I quite like making Brünnhilde’s rock a larger version of Sieglinde’s prison/home; I enjoyed the obedient leaping of fire into Wotan’s hand. But there can be no forgiveness for a Ride of the Valkyries so feeble as to be embarrassing – in fact, embarrassed, the poor Valkyries shamefully prancing in a manner in every way inadequate to the music.
Musically perhaps the main thing I lost when missing my original place in the cycle was the better acoustic of the Upper Slips; further forwards in the Lower Slips everything is less blended. This time on the left of the auditorium, I was also in direct firing line of the trombones, which you really don’t need in this opera; the horns and violins were sometimes inaudible. It was still very exciting – I mean, what a piece – but despite enjoyable clarity from the cellos I ended up ranking this performance closer to the raggedness of Rheingold than the superlativity of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, helped on by some truly outrageous brass fluffs.
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