Word: ringed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...role of Siegfried, had been fired (true). Soprano Hildegard Behrens, the Brünnhilde, had quit (false). The Hall production, with sets by Designer William Dudley, would be the biggest fiasco since ... well, since 1976, when Patrice Chéreau scandalized the good burghers with his iconoclastic, neo-Marxist Ring...
Hall, 52, has explicitly rejected Chéreau's revolutionary premise ("The Ring does not say that to me at all"), but offers in its place only the unremarkable notion that Wagner "elevated a fairy tale into adult myth." In staging the production, Hall said, he would try to follow closely the composer's own detailed stage directions to return to a romantic Ring. This faithfulness to the original-what the Germans call Werktreue-is admirable and, in this day of extravagant operatic reinterpretations, almost avantgarde...
...believe that a production should try to be as complex and contradictory as possible, and not give any one point of view markedly," says Hall. But the Ring, one of the most ambitious artistic engineering projects in history, needs strong, consistent guidance if a production is not to degenerate into a series of pretty stage pictures. Characters must be sharply focused, their complex relationships made clear. They cannot be allowed to wander aimlessly across the stage, as Hall lets them do in Rheingold, or strike arbitrary, stylized postures: Wotan singing to Brünnhilde while lying flat on his back...
...Doing all four parts of the Ring in a single summer is, of course, quite impossible," says Hall, rightly pointing out the difficulty of mounting four new major productions at one time. But the ability to do the quite impossible is a prerequisite for those who would tackle Wagner. After all, Wagner did it himself...
Hall's increasingly evident failure to produce a coherent view of the Ring rankled the highly critical, proprietary audience as the week progressed. Lusty boos began echoing through the acoustically perfect Festspielhaus (designed to Wagner's specifications) at the conclusion of Die Walküre, reaching their apogee at the end of Götterdammerung. Both Hall and Dudley, who had refused through the week to take curtain calls, were jeered when they finally came onstage-accompanied for protection by Solti, the entire cast and the Bayreuth orchestra...