I’ve been going to the opera all season, as usual, but not writing about it. Not being a particularly gifted reviewer, I generally prefer to simply enjoy the production, discuss it over a drink or two afterwards, and then move on. Every so often, though, something really piques my interest (or really pisses me off) and I decide to get all long-winded about it. This season, so far, it’s Wagner’s Siegfried, which was an excellent production on a lot of levels. The voices were spectacular, the sets and lighting were, for the most part, both functional and colorful… and the costumes. The costumes were really unconventional and, to me, really appealing.
Siegfried is a challenging opera. Yes, there’s the usual things: it’s Wagner and he’s a longwinded bastard (remind you of anyone?); the Lyric starts it at 6 and you don’t get out til 11. Musically, too, it’s a tricky animal: no choruses, not even any real arias to speak of. It’s largely sung dialogue, with a huge number of musical themes meandering throughout. Moreover, unlike many operas, if you’ve got your eyes shut and are just listening (provided, of course, you don’t understand German), you’ve got absolutely no inkling of what’s going on. The musical themes are that abstract. Finally, and perhaps most difficult of all, there’s no secondary characters in Siegfried. I’ve already mentioned the lack of chorus, but there’s not even a maid, or a sidekick, or a choirboy love interest. Everyone is an archetype. Gods, monsters, sinister dwarves and heroes, and that’s it. As a result of all this, it’s quite a challenge to make Siegfried accessible at all. Of course, there’s always the option of skipping it entirely or leaving after Act 1 (I know a lot of people who favor this strategy), but I’ve gotta hand it to the production design team this time around, particularly set/costume designer John Conklin, and most particularly his costuming choices.
Since everything about the opera is so abstract, it’s often been the approach of the scene design team to keep things as visually simple as possible. Siegfried winds up dressed in furry cloaks, everyone’s in varying shades of brown, gray and black, and everything… well, everything sort of melts together and puts you right to sleep. Conklin takes a very different approach to this production, clothing his characters in archetypal costumes borrowed from a number of different mythologies and traditions, each according to practical needs and the role of the archetype in this particular story.
Wotan and Brünhilde, as in Die Walküre (last season’s Wagner production), are clad in a quasi-postmodern combination of leather and cotton. For Wotan, this works more or less because he’s the wandering mystery man in this story, and well, what’s more mysterious than some dude with an eyepatch in a leather trench coat and fedora? Brünhilde’s only around for Act 3, and it’s a direct continuation of her role in Die Walküre, so that’s that.
The Nibelung dwarves, Mime and Albericht, are treated very differently from one another. Mime, the blacksmith/crafty craftsman who’s taken in Siegfried and raised him (and is pretty much just waiting around until he can figure out how to sic Siegfried on the Dragon (we’ll get to him in a minute) and get the Magic Ring back), is costumed as a traditional machinist. It took me a while to work out the costume, so I’d guess it could be a bit clearer (at first, he looked like a steam engine mechanic to me), but ultimately this works for me: Mime furthers the story through his crafty nature and through his craftsmanship and instruction. Albericht, on the other hand, by this point in the Ring story, has been relegated to a second-level guardian of sorts. Fafner the giant, who’s got the Ring, has transformed himself into a Dragon (as you do) and is now guarding the Ring in a cave in the woods somewhere. Albericht, because he knows that eventually someone’s going to come along and try to take the Ring, waits outside the cave, ostensibly with the intention of killing whoever comes for the Ring before they can get to it – or maybe just to make sure that it’s the right person who gets it in the end. You’ll have to ask Wagner which it is. Either way, Conklin costumes him as a Ronin, a samurai without a master but with his own cause.
Fafner and the Dragon present another kind of challenge, which Conklin manages by using traditional Kabuki techniques. The dragon itself is a multi-piece skeleton sculpture manipulated by a crew of 15 (by my count), and once Fafner comes out for his longish singing piece, he stands and delivers downstage from a giant puppet, which acts out the gestures to match his lines. This is traditional Kabuki – the human actor, clad simply (in this case, in a long black asian-influenced coat), stands immediately downstage of his puppet, which is responsible for the brunt of the phyisical representation of the role. The human is the voice, the puppet is the body. This works out particularly well in an opera scenario, where having a singer inside a giant mask is counterproductive to say the least.
Arda is treated a bit differently (refreshingly so) than usual. As the Earth Mother, I’ve most often seen her in forest greens and muddy browns, perhaps with a bit of lichen thrown in for variety or somesuch. This time, though, she rises on a lift from beneath the stage, clad in flowing orange silk robes. This is a different kind of earth mother – not the surface but the fiery center that sleeps beneath it. It’s a brief appearance, but the contrast between her (as representative of the old gods) and Wotan’s current incarnation was stark and telling.
Finally, there’s Siegfried. He’s a bit of a tricky one to pin down – both innocent/wild child/nature boy and hero/heir apparent to Wotan’s power. As I mentioned earlier, the most commonly seen solution is to drape him in wolf pelts and call it a day, and Conklin actually didn’t stray far from this approach. Siegfried is in traditional pastoral fairy tale gear: think cartoon character, even. Complete with little white horn on a thong across his body. The only unfortunate thing about this is that, owing largely to the physicality of the performer, this costume wound up reading not so much as hero as the hero’s lovable sidekick. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Magic Helmet, when he acquired it from Fafner/Dragon, looked like nothing so much as a lovely sequined handbag. I’m feeling magnanimous, though, so I’ll give Conklin the benefit of the doubt here. If he’d had a performer with more decisive movement habits, a more hero-like physique, chances are this costume would have worked out perfectly. Except for the handbag. That was just silly.
Overall, I can see how the production might seem disjointed, even schizophrenic, borrowing elements from all these cultures and mythologies, but I prefer to think of it as a kind of illumination. When you have few aural cues to help you understand what’s happening, when all of the characters are equally important and, in most cases, complex representatives of multiple concepts in multiple stories, these visual cues provide a link to the character’s particular purpose this time around. Entirely aside from which it’s a lot more fun to look at than all-gray-all-the-time, which seems to be a popular design choice for Wagner’s work (see the Lyric’s production of Parsifal, back in 2001-2002). In a world where absolutely everything is abstract, why not use the most evocative abstractions you can think of? Might help. I think it did.