Richard Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen” at the Zürcher Schauspiel
Take it easy, Richie, you said yourself: “Children, create something new!” Richard Wagner spent nine years on Lake Zurich. It was here that his most important theoretical writings were written, here he read his complete “Ring” poem for the first time in the noble hotel Baur au Lac, and here he composed “Rheingold”, “Valkyrie” and half of “Siegfried”. On April 30, a new “Ring” will go into production at the Zurich Opera House with the “Rheingold”, and even before the tragedy of the tetralogy has begun, the satyr play can be seen at the Zurich Schauspielhaus.
It’s no longer about salvation, but – not so un-Wagner – about compassion: with the primal mother Erda, whose visions of doom are not taken seriously enough (Yodit Tarikwa, first the senior teacher of the three Norns, then the moral authority in the pseudo-critical accusations to the audience) . With the dwarf Alberich, who because of his unattractive appearance does not find any love in return (on the verge of going crazy: Nils Kahnwald). With the giants Fafner and Fasolt, who, as children of the builders of Valhalla, see themselves robbed of their youth (deliciously dubbed: Benjamin Lillie and Steven Sowah). With the dragon who was fratricide in native life. With the dumped wife Fricka (a highlight for Maja Beckmann in elegant pajamas, who discovered her independence in her old age), the rejected favorite daughter Brünnhilde (Wiebke Mollenhauer in a jogging suit between hand-to-hand combat and striptease) and finally with the family man himself, Wotan.
Correction male classics
As the final loser, Matthias Neukirch works his way up from the audience into a furious verbal twilight of the gods, into an imperial thunderstorm in the face of a world that he no longer understands and which only follows his effervescence on the verge of a heart attack, shaking his head. Not one line of this evening comes from Wagner himself. That was the condition for the librettist Necati Öziri to get involved in this project. As with his Zurich debut in 2019 with the “Engagement in St. Domingo – A Contradiction” based on Heinrich von Kleist, Öziri believes his task is to “correct” German, male classics. He probably suspected that he could get carried away with Wagner, because in a self-deprecating but much too long prologue he explains to the audience, together with his imaginary Turkish uncle, his concerns and inferiority complexes – “I did diving training and followed the entire bottom of the Rhine Searched for this shitty gold” – because he has never seen an opera, let alone a Wagner opera, and now has to defend his “family” against German high culture.
In doing so, he makes himself an accomplice for the viewers, of whom surprisingly few revealed themselves to be Wagner-affine when he asked them about their “Ring” experience with a show of hands. he critically takes the wind out of the sails of every objection with his preface. The objection also applies less to the adaptation to our colloquial language and the often witty, imaginative updating or reinterpretation of the biographies of Wagner’s protagonists as crimes of the evening’s dramaturgy, a series of monologues that director Christopher Rüping also always presents according to the same model: on the Ramp, run backwards, come forward again. It doesn’t turn into a play. That is why two substitute actions take the place of an action: the participation of the audience in front of the stage and the manufacture of candles in the background, for which Jonathan Mertz installed an apparatus with a large funnel. At the end, the audience stands in two patient lines at the sides of the stage to receive Holy Communion from the actors – in the form of the small candles that were poured during the performance. Wagner is dead, long live the religion of art!
Valkyrie ride in a cute rendition
The music in this production has even less to do with Wagner. Black Cracker is the musical director on stage, controlling the electronic collective work of eight Berlin-based performers, music producers, DJs and rappers on his computer. Among them are musicians who have a classical education, but then went a different way, like the drag queen Ixa Psyborg, who took on the Alberich scenes in “Rheingold”. Of course, this cannot be heard, because the Wagnerian sounds are all sampled and often perish in the boring hip-hop drone. Wagner’s music only sounds through twice: at the beginning with the prelude to “Rheingold” and then before Brünnhilde’s monologue with the inevitable ride of the Valkyries in the cute rendition with ocarina.
Wagner’s music is not destroyed by this, because one would have to know them very well and master their tricks. That’s probably not the point, because for Cracker and Öziri, hip-hop is synonymous with contemporary music. One could at least object to this: it all depends on the perspective. Anyone who has been socialized through pop music alone will not have missed anything. The others can soon go to the Zurich Opera House.