OPERA REVIEW : West Berlin ‘Ring’ at Kennedy Center

Deutsche Oper Berlin’s production of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” is a long, loud, bumpy but often revelatory subway ride.

The company from West Berlin is now at the Kennedy Center under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Republic of Germany, the West Berlin government, and several German banks and corporations to celebrate the republic’s 40th anniversary.

The second of the two scheduled “Ring” cycles (four operas in each cycle) began Sunday, and the event has drawn Wagner enthusiasts from all over the country and beyond.

What has all this high international culture to do with a subway?

Well, Gotz Friedrich, the troupe’s general director and the perennial enfant terrible who first staged this “Ring” between 1984 and 1985, says a friend sent him a postcard picturing a Washington subway station with its spacious, coffered-cylinder architecture. That gave him the idea of setting the tetralogy underground, with the ghosts of the Norse gods and their antagonists doomed to replay their tragedy over and over, forever banished from Earth’s probably nuked surface.

As you might guess, the Washington Metro, in real life quite well maintained, looks understandably decrepit as designed for the stage by Peter Sykora, what with all that Wagnerian destruction going on.

Of course, orthodox Wagnerites being orthodox Wagnerites, Friedrich and Sykora got roundly booed at all their curtain calls during the first cycle, even while the singers and conductor Jesus Lopez-Cobos were relentlessly cheered.

There was some injustice there. Given the production’s admittedly far-fetched premise, this is the most truthfully emotional, not to say ferociously violent, “Ring” among the 10 this reviewer has seen.

But, as conducted by Lopez-Cobos and played by the company’s orchestra, it was often disastrous. This is not to condemn the singers, most of whom did strong work in the first cycle, or Christof Perick, who conducts the second cycle. The orchestra, throughout cycle one, gave Wagner the brass-and-drum treatment, sounding as if 76 trombones were in the pit (only seven listed in the program) and, for Siegfried’s Funeral Music, unleashed an undisciplined cataclysm more appropriate to Godzilla. When the brass artillery subsided, woodwinds emerged sour and mistuned.

You could take bets on when the next cue would be jumped and by how many beats. Balances were continually wrong, particularly in such showpieces as Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and the Valkyries’ ride. The seven harps Wagner called for at certain places were reduced to three and then drowned in the prevailing din. And perhaps one chordal entrance out of five was precisely sounded.

But there were vocal compensations. Robert Hale, an American bass relegated to second rank at New York City Opera in the early 1970s, has become a world-class Wagnerian bass-baritone, and his Washington Wotan was the cycle’s tragic center. Only at the close of “Das Rheingold” did he run out of steam. Otherwise, he dominated every moment he was on stage.

Less naturally sonorous than his only current rival, James Morris, Hale nevertheless goes deeper into words and shapes the music more subtly than that mighty Wurlitzer.

Spearing off Alberich’s right hand to get that Nibelung’s ring, collapsing at Fricka’s feet as if trampled by her morality, suffering unexpected pangs of remorse over his abandoned Walsung children during the riddle scene with Mime, threatening Siegfried with frightful authority, and, as precious few Wotans seem able to do, expanding just by demeanor Siegfried’s victory over him into the tetralogy’s ethical climax--Hale and Friedrich constantly fed off each other’s talents.

Friedrich exercised his talent by dreaming up ways to get so much incident through the turnstiles and into what he called in publicity a “tunnel of time.” As with San Francisco’s rather sillier “Ring,” the action jumps around the centuries, but this time-tunnel scheme makes a virtue of temporal looseness.

The godly ghosts have stopped looking at calendars, and so, Friedrich says, should we.

Alberich commands his Nibelung mine shaft by gleefully wielding laser prods. Mime’s smithy is set in foliage apparently painted in kindergarten. The Valkyries, except for Brunnhilde, are a motorcycle gang in punk makeup. The dragon is a belching locomotive. Convex lenses in the Gibichung hall’s columns magnify eavesdroppers’ faces into nightmarish ectoplasm. At the end, the subway explodes in a frenzy of short circuiting, diminished Saturday night by torches that refused to stay lit and other pyrotechnical contretemps.

The production’s most arresting sight turned out to be the first “Rheingold” scene.

The three Rhine maidens sing from within translucent fabric that billows as they move. In effect, they become the river itself, and the river is their spirits--caressing and threatening by turns. As the maidens sing in threes, the “water” piles up in threes as well. I had never known the scene could be so poetically realized.

Ordinarily, Brunnhilde becomes the central force of the “Ring,” but Ute Vinzing’s soprano didn’t show the right stuff, and its weakness, excepting a very occasional surprise in her top register, damaged a sympathetic portrayal.

But there was Rene Kollo’s vaguely acted but almost miraculously sung Siegfried. The tenor’s stamina and pitch-accuracy should not have surprised those of us who heard him in San Francisco’s most recent “Ring,” but, coming four years later, it did.

Tribute is owed also to Gunter von Kannen’s Charles Laughton-like, securely sung Alberich; Matti Salminen’s familiarly thunderous Hagen; Aage Haugland’s almost as thunderous Fasolt and Hunding; Karan Armstrong’s warm-voiced and touching Sieglinde and Gutrune; Kenneth Riegel’s slick Loge; Horst Hiestermann’s blood-chilling Mime, and Hanna Schwarz’s egotistically glamorous Fricka. What a bunch to find in your subway car.