A brilliant and complex Rhine Gold by Tobias Kratzer and Vladimir Jurowski in Munich

With a homogeneous cast, the two masters offer an evening of great musical and scenic intelligence.

For the Munich Opera, the Ring is a crucial but complex affair: certainly, the first two parts of the cycle were created at the Nationaltheater, but the last two productions since the beginning of the century did not have a very happy fate: in 2002, L’Or du Rhin directed by Herbert Wernicke is very promising, but the director dies before rehearsals for The Valkyrieso much so that the cycle completed in a hurry by David Alden, despite its great qualities, was only given until 2006. In 2012, the direction by Andreas Kriegenburg paled alongside the interpretation music of the two successive musical directors, Kent Nagano and Kirill Petrenko, and it too quickly disappeared from the program. The choice of Tobias Kratzer for this new cycle appears obvious: after a Dusk isolated in Karlsruhe, then his brilliant Tannhäuser from Bayreuth, he is undoubtedly the man for the job. And the spectators, as certainly the management of the house, can breathe a sigh of relief after the performance: no, the expectations that we all had placed in him were not disappointed.

But the staging isn't everything: let's start with the music. For almost all the roles, we will be able to find older or recent incumbents who are more brilliant, more individually striking (including on the same stage), but the coherence and quality of the preparation of the cast are no less remarkable. And we feel, what is most precious, that the joint work on the score goes hand in hand with the theatrical work, one nourishing the other. We could thus find what Nicholas Brownlee's Wotan offers in terms of colors and complexity of interpretation a little limited, but it is thus in full conformity with his stage character as a slightly lazy arriviste, less a tutelary figure than Never. The evening is largely dominated by the Lodge of Sean Panikkar, God of fire who does not hesitate to play with the slightest flame: his annoying character of an overconfident manipulator is very on point, and his sharp voice knows how to press where it matters. hurts.

Vladimir Jurowski had not previously conducted Wagner in Munich, so the stakes were not small for him; we will not say that he equals the metaphysical depths of his predecessor Petrenko, but his lively direction is that of a storyteller who constantly masters his effects, with a marked taste for depths and a sense of dynamics which makes always on point, while never forgetting to support the singers. The intelligibility of the text is spectacular, even though all the singers are far from having idiomatic German. We never get bored for a second, thanks to his attention to detail which always leaves something to discover, without forgetting the long term of the evening. The orchestra shows all its flexibility in this interaction with its musical director, capable of suddenly gaining volume, plunging into a sooty bass, suddenly finding transparency: a real theater orchestra.

The setting for most of the scenes is that of a neo-Gothic church, whose high pillars structure the space; a large shape covered with a tarpaulin can be seen. The evening opens with Alberich (Markus Bruck) who, after tagging “God is dead”tries in vain to end his life; he is disturbed by the three Rhine girls, young women of today, strong and free, and even a little witchy, not at all shy in the face of Alberich's enterprises: there is no doubt that Kratzer will not forget the characters thus created.

It is also in this church still under construction that the gods sleep: those who build it for them, of course, are the giants, black costume and Roman collar (and Matthew Rose like Timo Riihonen sing in accordance with this interpretation, neither clumsy , nor brutal): what they provide to the gods is not so much a fortress as a legitimation, first presented simply as the beta slogan « Sound Valhalla, sound Wotan » ; this is the meaning of this ecclesial framework, not the promise of any transcendence, but the means for traditional powers to anchor their superiority in a sacred discourse. The gods are then in pseudo-medieval costumes, a bit like the characters from the Nibelungen frescoes located in the Residence a few meters from the Nationaltheater.

To go down to the Nibelungens, Wotan and Loge must travel a much greater distance: a short, irresistibly comic film shows them taking a plane to find Alberich on the other side of the Atlantic, in his house with a garage transformed into a survivalist bunker: weapons of war on the wall, multiple surveillance screens fueling a hysterical relationship with the world, reinforced suitcases to prepare for the worst. Alberich can rehash his hatred there by exchanging remotely with his peers. During the trip, Wotan leaves his medieval trappings for a modern costume: however attached he may be to the past, he must make concessions to the present time, on the methods and not on the objectives.

All that remains for the gods is to slip into the altarpiece, like living statues, under the gaze of the crowd which invades the church and comes to worship them: there is no betrayal, no lies, no selfishness that the brilliance of supreme power combined with transcendence cannot redeem (it is not only in opera that we see this). Kratzer's narrative gluttony, the quality of the actors' work, his ability to analyze what is at the heart of the work, once again, work wonders.

At the end of the evening, there is only one frustration left, that of waiting: the rest of the cycle will have to wait, since The Valkyrie is not even on the program for the current season, not to mention the full cycles which will only follow in 2027. We must hope, judging by this start, that this time the Bavarian Opera will maintain its repertoire for a long time a production which has enough to strengthen the today somewhat shaky identity of the house.

Photo credit: © Wilfried Hösl

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