Is it oil? Is it youth? Is it tactile? Invisible?
For Wagner, the magic gold that’s stolen from the underside of the Rhine firstly of his four-opera “Ring” cycle, setting the plot in movement, was a tangible, shiny nugget.
It’s embedded within the riverbed, his libretto says, and its gleam fills the water till the dwarf Alberich, mesmerized by the powers it may unleash, rips it from the rock, to the despair of its guardians, the three Rhine Daughters. Formed into a hoop that circulates amongst completely different characters over the remainder of the 15-hour cycle, the gold confers authority but additionally wreaks havoc, inspiring envy, betrayal and loss of life.
Over the previous 50 years, administrators — together with Calixto Bieito, whose staging of “Das Rheingold,” the primary “Ring” installment, opens on the Paris Opera immediately — have interpreted the gold not as an precise piece of steel, however as an embodiment of no matter is probably the most valuable (and corrosive) useful resource on this planet of a given manufacturing. In a free-associative 2013 staging on the Bayreuth Pageant in Germany, the place Wagner first introduced the “Ring” in 1876, Frank Castorf steered that the gold was the fossil fuels that movement via and degrade nearly each side of up to date society.
That is a part of a decades-old pattern towards treating Wagner with audacious freedom — viewing his librettos as allegorical beginning factors, and updating and transmuting his plots and props to spotlight sure themes and steer properly away from the outdated horned-helmet-and-breastplate clichés.
“Lohengrin” would possibly happen in a laboratory fairly than medieval Antwerp; the title character of “Parsifal” could be dressed like a Latter-day Saints missionary. Bieito stated in an e mail that in his manufacturing, the gold is depicted, partially, as cryptocurrency, a element of his staging’s allegory of the ever-continuing rise of Large Tech.
Bieito’s Paris “Ring” takes its place amongst a burst of main productions of the cycle round Europe, some nonetheless unfolding. I spoke to the administrators of cycles in London, Munich, Brussels and Bayreuth about their approaches to the almighty gold, illuminating a few of the huge vary of potentialities in terms of staging probably the most influential epic in opera historical past. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
Barrie Kosky
Royal Opera, London
The gold comes from the earth, and it’s part of nature. However Wagner additionally makes it a bit exterior nature: It’s glistening within the water, it’s not of the water. We selected to current it to start with as a sort of fluid that comes out of an outdated, burned-out tree. I wished to offer this sense that the gold is like fats from the tree, just like the blood from the veins of the earth. I wished it to have a really natural really feel, a type of gold goo, like gold blood.
And we make very clear that this tree additionally displays a part of the physique of Erda — Mom Earth — who guides us via our “Ring.” In our manufacturing, Mom Earth is dreaming her dream, which can be our dream, so the gold comes from her physique and flows out of her physique and is stolen from her physique.
It’s a metaphor of what we’ve executed with valuable metals for hundreds of years. To extract metals from stones, pan gold from water, discover diamonds, we’ve actually ripped these components out of the earth’s physique. And naturally they’re stunning, however they’ve additionally been devices of greed and evil. Whether or not that evil is the gold mines or diamond mines in Africa, or whether or not it’s what individuals have executed for gold, what has occurred to them — that’s the brilliance of Wagner’s metaphor, it’s timeless. Particularly with the “Ring,” it’s important to discover one thing that’s each archaic and up to date. That’s the problem of Wagner.
Romeo Castellucci
La Monnaie, Brussels
As a logo, the gold means many, many issues. However for my part, the primary which means is about want. The gold, no less than originally of the “Ring,” takes the place of sexual power, sexual attraction, the intercourse drive. The primary picture in our manufacturing is the feminine physique coated in gold: the Rhine Daughters, who’re bare and painted in gold. There may be a variety of water falling from the ceiling, and the water washes away the gold, which melts off the our bodies and goes all around the ground. Alberich tries to hug the physique of one of many ladies; he tries to embrace them, and makes himself soiled with the gold however can’t actually embrace it.
You can’t contact this gold. It’s in every single place, in a means — like want. It’s an concept, it’s not an object. It drives you in a path, nevertheless it’s not an object. It comes from the water and it’s nonetheless a sort of water, fully liquid. It modifications form; it’s continuously in transition. The form of the gold is the form of your self. It’s sort of an power — a harmful one, as a result of everybody who touches the gold dies, in a means; you can not really understand want. I don’t suppose it has something to do with capitalism. It’s rather more profound, extra symbolic. It’s not so easy, for my part.
Tobias Kratzer
Bavarian State Opera, Munich
For me, the gold is not only a logo for cash, which might be the almost certainly interpretation. I wished to offer it a extra magical contact. For me, it’s nearly a supply of magic that may’t be managed, not by the gods or the mortals. And everybody has to cope with it one way or the other.
Within the first scene of my “Rheingold” — it’s all set in an outdated church that’s being renovated — the Rhine Daughters are youngsters, dressed sort of like within the Netflix sequence “Stranger Issues,” who’ve discovered one thing beneath the ground. A common energy, one would possibly say. It offers them magic talents; they’ll turn into completely different shapes. One turns into an outdated girl, one turns right into a goat, one turns right into a younger woman.
I by no means present it as gold. It’s extra of a golden fog, however it may materialize as gold water, or an object. Nevertheless it’s extra of a component — not the aspect of gold, precisely, however one thing that can be utilized. And it’s slightly tongue-in-cheek, how Alberich is catching this fog in sort of a plastic bag. It’s then in a glass tube within the second scene, appearing like one thing of a secret energy. It’s extra of an ingredient: In the event you convey it into contact with different objects, it transforms them or offers them different qualities. However by the tip, it can be used to do the one factor that neither gods nor males can do: to vary time, to reverse time, to fast-forward time.
Valentin Schwarz
Bayreuth Pageant
The “Ring” isn’t a lot a few given prop, an object, however concerning the carrying of the ideas and feelings of the characters who personal these objects and who put their wishful projections onto them. The “Ring” is about generational battle, about placing trauma onto the subsequent era, and unresolved conflicts and questions. And it’s about dominance and energy and affect. So it was a sort of epiphany: We considered the innocence of a kid. In any case, the ring itself is kind of ineffective in “Rheingold,” like a baby.
So we got here up with this concept of the gold being a baby, who’s stolen in “Das Rheingold” and over the course of the cycle step by step ages into the character of Hagen, who enters the plot in “Götterdämmerung.” And on the finish of that opera, our Hagen realizes that the kid of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, who isn’t in Wagner’s libretto however who we invented, is threatened with the identical destiny, the identical abuse, that he skilled.
A toddler can’t converse at first, however develops emotions and grows. At a sure level, it was necessary that this little one turns into part of the cycle, develops consciousness, and turns into a personality in his personal proper. However Hagen isn’t the tip. With the kid of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, these concepts and traumas perpetuate; they go on and on. There isn’t a finish to a “Ring.”
