City in a ring

The Mariinsky Theater showed its “Ring of the Nibelung” in the capital

Valery Gergiev's ambitious mega-project - his own version of Wagner's tetralogy "The Ring of the Nibelung" - was finally performed in Moscow, on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater. It took him a long time to get there; he didn’t come to the last Golden Mask, instead going to Baden-Baden. Then Gergiev seemed to change his mind about bringing him at all. Now, finally, the Mariinsky “Ring”, which Gergiev himself calls contradictory and ambiguous, but at the same time epochal, has covered the city. Tickets were sold out and the hall was packed. And the most remarkable thing about them was that they did not dissolve after the first intermission. During the second breaks of the last two operas of the tetralogy - "Siegfried" and "Twilight of the Gods", the format of which exceeds the five-hour frame - here and there one could notice people yawning quietly, not so much from boredom, but simply because after a hard week of work and several hours of listening to music, at the beginning of eleven at the performance they already really want to sleep. But they hold on and don’t leave. After all, it is unknown whether there will ever be another opportunity in life to hear and see all four of Wagner’s operas, which have become one of the fundamental texts of culture both in themselves and including the director’s and musician’s own interpretations.

The last component was precisely ignored by the exhausting and phantasmagoric action. Having decided to do without relying on cultural reflection, manifested in the modern director’s craft in general and in approaches to “The Ring” in particular, Gergiev doomed himself to reproaches of naivety, barbarism and contempt for the basics, but at the same time he got out of the circle of endless comparisons of old and new reinterpretations.

He fought with directors for a long time, staged “The Ring” in pieces, first in one version, then in another, and finally completely exhausted directing as such in the tetralogy. Now the name of Yulia Pevzner, who remade the first opera “Das Rheingold” after Johannes Schaaf, does not appear in the program at all. And the name of Vladimir Mirzoev, who had a hand in the layouts of “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods,” is as conventional as most of the mise-en-scenes and characters in a lush and at the same time laconic performance.

Gergiev himself and set designer Georgy Tsypin are presented as the ideologists and developers of the concept. Apart from music and visual images, there is essentially nothing else in the performance. In fact, it is a score deployed in space with the help of stunning decor with a distinct anthropomorphic intonation, magnificent tricks by lighting designer Gleb Filshtinsky and the excessive imagination of costume designer Tatyana Noginova. For more than fifteen hours in a row, giant humanoid figures in different shapes and positions tower over the stage, turning into ladders, dragons, or some kind of funny opera spectators nodding their heads. And between them crawl and hover some entities, using electrical wires to depict everything, from water to fire. The combination of gigantism and booth, fog and tinsel gives the spectacle a wildly majestic and at the same time funny outline, allowing Gergiev to feel unfettered.

The images of heroes, gods and other Wagnerian creatures are developed in no more detail than the images of Petrushka and the Policeman at the fair. There is practically nothing to talk about here, if you do not describe in detail how exactly Siegfried resembles the beautiful-hearted Tarzan. The majestic gloom of the tetralogy in the Mariinsky version is permeated by at least comedy, if not stiltedness, which, however, is completely harmless.

The main parts in the performance are divided between at least two, or even three performers. Moreover, the same singers appear in different performances in different roles. This makes a little ripple, let's say, in the ears, but gradually the musical meaning of the production becomes clearer. Gergiev presents The Ring to himself and the public not as a pretentious, meticulously written theatrical text with calculated subtexts and monolithic vocal images, but as a symbol and representation of his own (Mariinsky) power.

Hence there are already three Brunnhildes, one more beautiful than the other: the cold Olga Savova, the mighty Larisa Gogolevskaya and the final Olga Sergeeva, who actually pulled out not only the part, but almost the entire tetralogy on the acting shrillness and passionate beauty of her voice. Hence the two Siegfrieds: the infantile Leonid Zakhozhaev and Sergeeva’s wonderful partner in “Death of the Gods” Viktor Lutsyuk. The same results in the unevenness of the orchestral sound: the coarse grind of “Das Rheingold”, the feeling of high-quality, but unbearably hard work in “Die Walküre”, the approximation, every now and then replaced by magnificence, in “Siegfried” and the massive beauty of “Twilight of the Gods”. “The Ring,” in fact, is all in pieces: the balance is sometimes established, sometimes blurred, stunningly played episodes are followed by mumbled ones, musical time sometimes stops, sometimes jumps, strain alternates with brilliance, languor turns into its own insufficiency, the phantasmagoria of a fairy tale turns into pale a ghost and a hectic crowd of timbres, and naive comedy meets drama that is not even ancient, but downright Egyptian. But the result is still a rather strong feeling of the whole - exhausting, strangely bubbling, amusing and demonstrating an invincible will to power (at least over overwhelming musical material). This is probably why the last part of the tetralogy sounds most expressive and voluminous - as a triumph of Gergiev’s incredible will and a block of sadness.

Yulia BEDEROVA