SEATTLE RINGS IN A BIZARRE ‘WALKUERE’

It began more than a dozen years ago when Glynn Ross--the Barnum and the Bailey, too, of Seattle Opera--decided to give the Pacific Northwest a taste of Wagnerian music drama.

Actually, it wasn’t just a taste. It was the taste: “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” The whole, convoluted, gnarled, rambling, massive, heroic, whopping, galumphing, thrilling thing, in all its 16-hour, four-part splendor.

Ross was no avant-gardist. He didn’t want a newfangled, neo-Bayreuth “Ring,” and he didn’t think innocent Seattle wanted one either. He passed up a century of cumulated symbolism and abstraction, thumbed his knowing nose at profound intellectual pursuits, left psychological penetration to the Wunderkinder in Deutschland.

With much optimism and not much money, with traffic-cop stage direction and decors that would have looked funny even in a hoary New Yorker cartoon, Ross gave Seattle the sort of “Ring” that could give antiquity a bad name.

Fearlessly, and perhaps inadvertently, he invoked the cardboard kitsch of the German provinces, circa 1915. At a time when every other opera company in the world had abandoned its horned hats, winged helmets, ornate breastplates, cloudy cycloramas and painted rocks, Seattle played the quasi-mythological cycle as if time had stood obligingly still.

The public loved it. The summer “Ring” soon became a happy local ritual and an international mecca for dauntless operatic traditionalists. Good Bruennhildes may have come and bad Siegfrieds may have gone, but their supervehicle ground on.

It ground on, incidentally, to the delight of full houses when the favored language happened to be German. It attracted healthy, but not quite full, houses when Andrew Porter’s British translation was offered as an illuminating alternative.

Now all that is history. Glynn Ross has moved his operatic wagons onward if not necessarily upward to Arizona. Speight Jenkins has taken over the blighted general-directorship. The costume relics, tattered canvases and papier-mache cliffs have been consigned to the trash heap they so eminently deserved. Gone, too, is the Porter translation, a comprehension crutch presumably made obsolete by the introduction of Supratitles.

Under the contextual circumstances, it could have surprised no one that Jenkins would want to give Seattle a “Ring” of his own. Nor could any thinking Wagnerian have expected him to come up with yet another literal, old-fashioned version of the sacrosanct tetralogy. Still, no one foresaw the sort of “Ring” that Jenkins has concocted in conjunction with the director Francois Rochaix and the designer Robert Israel.

At this juncture, definitive judgments may be a bit premature. The whole Rochaix-Israel “Ring” won’t be unveiled until the summer of ’86. But Seattle did see a portentous preview this summer in the isolated form of installment No. 2: “Die Walkuere.”

Some vignettes haunt the memory.

As the orchestra whips up the wonted stormy prelude, a Victorian figure in gray strolls out to a side stage. He looks uncannily like Richard Wagner--himself. He takes a seat at a desk bedecked for some reason with a skull, folds his arms in benediction and/or fascination and observes the inaction as the curtain on the stage within the stage rises.

Siegmund, Sieglinde and Hunding play out their triangular affairs in a sooty prison courtyard that happens to contain a row of empty chairs, a well-laid table and a tree stump with an 11th-Century sword stuck in it. The principals resemble petit-bourgeois pawns in a domestic saga of the Old West. The lady of the house serves the gentlemen apples for dinner. One can find no traces here of a noble incipient superman, a victimized primordial maiden or an evil tribal primitive.

At the climactic moment when spring and love are supposed to invade the hut, when the gigantic doors are supposed to open magically to afford the incestuous twins an escape into the night, a spotlight picks out a grassy mound at stage left. A stuffed faun grazes in frozen bucolic naivete atop the mound. Siegmund and Sieglinde, consumed with passion, fall to the earth at Bambi’s feet as the curtain descends.

As the curtain rises on Act II, Herr Wagner returns to take part in the action personally. He doubles as Wotan and spends a lot of time sitting on the steps of a wooden platform. Fricka, the erstwhile goddess of marriage, comes on dressed like Frau Minna Wagner or Augusta Tabor or a comically shrewish matron from the Gay ‘90s. She berates her husband for his immoral stances, weeps into her hanky, flourishes her umbrella, gets some laughs.

Bruennhilde, a very round and rosy Bruennhilde of the old school, appears to be the mistress of a strangely equipped tower. When we see it from the back, it is a contraption full of pulleys and steps and wheels and ropes and cranks and other archaic stage devices. When visible stage-hands eventually roll it around, the tower resembles a 30-foot phone booth with rocks painted on the facade. The front of the structure is adorned, in part, by an enormous, empty, surrealistic picture frame.

Big Bruennhilde appears in the portal at the top of her tower to herald Siegmund’s death. Then, in a moment of unbridled passion, she floats--or plops--down to the floor, lowered by Peter-Pan wires. When she should hasten to Siegmund’s side, she must ignore the Heldentenor. She is too busy grappling with the restraints of her quaint flying-machine harness.

At the beginning of Act III, the orchestra cackles and roars the uniquely pugnacious figures that accompany the “Ride of the Valkyries.” As always, one can hear the thunder, feel the impending excitement. Then the curtain rises on five wired sopranos mounted atop adorable plastic horses that gently bob up and down in the sky. Their battle cries suggest heroic lust. The lust is hopelessly contradicted, however, by sweet mock-equestrian maneuvers that suggest nothing so much as fun and games on a very sedate carrousel. Only the rinky-dink Fantasyland waltzes are missing. The audience applauds, of course, for all the wrong reasons.

When it is time for Richard Wotan to sing farewell to his beloved errant daughter, the resident baritone waves on some new scenery. The backcloth resembles a nocturnal panorama from “Star Wars.” The stage is a clutter of mystifying props: a huge table, an upended dollhouse, geometrical blocks painted with signs of the zodiac, a skull, two rows of gaslights, curtained alcoves, rocky flats, Bambi, the merry-go-round horses and a Grecian tombstone.

Big Bruennhilde strolls unaided to the tombstone, clambers aboard and nonchalantly lies down on her amply padded side. Dead-eye Dick follows like a faithful sheep dog. Eventually he waves his incongruous spear to make flames spurt from various props. Whoopee. Real flames. There is no ring of magic fire, however. In fact, there isn’t any magic.

This is going to be a difficult, and different, “Ring,” to be sure. At least it isn’t going to be boring.

Unfortunately, it also isn’t likely to be a poignant “Ring,” much less a shattering one. In their welcome flight from convention, Rochaix and Israel seem to have discovered a wealth of irrelevance and a paucity of illumination. They have managed to trivialize the eternal conflicts and to minimize the heroic stature of the protagonists.

In their laudable avoidance of theatrical cliches, they have reduced the inherent dramatic pathos to a series of silly let’s-pretend poses. Most damaging, they have introduced all manner of unintentional comedy where poor, ponderous Wagner could least afford it.

The theories behind the new “Ring” make admittedly interesting reading. Rochaix, a Swiss stage director with a strong Brechtian background, sees the “Ring” as “the story of a god who creates a world, invents it and its laws.” To Rochaix, Wotan is “the director, the author of a universe who discovers that his universe gets out of his control, that he more and more becomes an actor trapped in his own production.”

That is only half of the governing philosophy. Rochaix also sees the all-too-human Wotan as the alter ego of Wagner, a visionary poet trapped in a world of prosaic realities. “The story of Wotan and the ring and the story of Wagner and the ‘Ring’ are two sides of the same thing,” the director claims. This explains the pervasive image of the world as a theater and the metaphor of the opera within the opera.

As the critic Roger Downey observed in a perceptive article in a Seattle journal called the Weekly, “Wotan’s self-created universe is just as large--or as small--as the stage of the Opera House: a puppet theater where a puppet god plays out the dreams and frustrations of an invisible creator with puppets even less free and less conscious than himself.”

The problems with this interpretation become apparent, alas, as soon as the second character appears. Puppets don’t inspire sympathy, yet puppets can’t be regarded as puppets if they look and act like regular people. And the plight of regular people doesn’t move us much if the regular people are just pretending to be tragic heroes and heroines, archetypal villains and agonized gods.

Rochaix’s reliance on Brecht and vestiges of the theater of alienation puts an uncomfortable distance between the basic emotional impulses of “Die Walkuere” and the audience. One can take Wagner out of romanticism, but, in the final analysis, one cannot take the romanticism out of Wagner.

Israel, a bold scenic artist whose credits include major collaborations with Philip Glass as well as designs for “Lulu” in Amsterdam and “The Turn of the Screw” in Santa Fe, knows how to create telling stage pictures with keen psychological overtones.

“I don’t think in terms of flats and revolves and machinery,” he has told a Seattle interviewer. “In fact, I don’t like that stuff and I don’t think I’d do it well if I tried. What I try to do is compose in images that exist for themselves. The things you see on the stage aren’t meant to look like something, they are something. They are what they are and work in their own terms.”

In some specific musico-dramatic contexts, alas, they don’t seem to work.

Musically, this was a “Walkuere” worth taking seriously. It was masterfully conducted, albeit with more poetry than passion, by Armin Jordan of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Until now he was best known in America as the conductor--and face of Amfortas!--in the bizarre Syberberg “Parsifal” film. That, no doubt, will change. His 90-piece orchestra, dominated by members of the Seattle Symphony, proved attentive, responsive, proficient and rather wan.

The singing non-actors had little opportunity to shape and focus characterizations in this double never-never land. Still, most of them sounded imposing.

Roger Roloff introduced a young, mellow, lyrically oriented Wotan who nearly made it through the final farewell without tiring. Johanna Meier, the slightly matronly and initially unsteady Sieglinde, flirted with old operatic cliches but sang with pervasive warmth and urgency.

John Macurdy mustered a stream of cavernous black-bass tone--the real, rare thing--as the oddly amiable Hunding. Diane Curry did what could be done as a rich-voiced Fricka whose bustle served as a figurative straitjacket. Barry Busse, the potentially compelling Siegmund, went on in spite of a bad cold and probably shouldn’t have.

Linda Kelm, the Bruennhilde, was lauded by Jenkins in the program magazine as a once-in-a-century singer, “a true dramatic soprano whose voice always seems larger than Wagner needs.” Unfortunately, her physique also seems larger than Wagner needs. No willing suspension of disbelief could bridge the visual credibility gap she created. One could admire her vocal resources, but one could not invariably identify the generalized, generous sounds she made with the impetuous, noble, loving, sacrificing warrior maiden embodied in the music and text.

Some members of the audience are said to have booed the director and designer at the opening performance, July 28. Although there were no audible dissidents at the Aug. 3 matinee--a matinee that began Bayreuth-style at 4 o’clock--there were lots of empty seats.

That initially surprising fact may have had something to do with the mixed critical and public reception that greeted the premiere. It also may have had something to do with overambitious ticket prices, which ranged from $20 to $100. Repeat: $100.

If Seattle can raise $750,000 by November, the new $3-million “Ring” will be a reality next summer. “Perhaps,” says Rochaix, “ ‘Walkuere ‘86’ will not look like ‘Walkuere ’85.’ In fact, I hope not.”

The director isn’t the only one who hopes not.