Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen -- Metropolitan/Levine

Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen -- Metropolitan/Levine - I will not speak to the DVD's technical virtues (or lack of them). Rather, I consider the most important aspect of this performance: its interpretation of the work. This MET "Ring" is often hailed as "definitive." If this is so, Wagner's masterwork is truly the stultifying waste of time his detractors claim. It is also argued the Levine version is "true" to the work (as the other version available on DVD, i.e., Boulez/Chereau supposedly is NOT). Yet comparison of the MET staging to Wagner's own published instructions reveals this version is no more "true" to them, either in spirit or letter, than is any other production of recent memory.

What the MET "Ring" does do to the work is distort it in ways that are both anti-dramatic and, worse, anti-logical. What can be said of casting the twin W lsung lovers as a black woman and a white man? If this were one of those surreal anti-realistic productions, well and good. Yet this purports to be a "faithful, realistic" staging! One cannot imagine what the uninitiated must think when, after playing Br nnhilde's mother-in-law, Christa Ludwig later walks on as her sister. Never mind she is far too old for either part! As for the host of brilliant staging possibilities offered by Wagner yet funked by this staging, the less said the better. One need only take one look at its dragon Fafner, a lump of paper mach goop even a two year-old would avoid, to realize this version does no service either to Wagner or its audiences.

One can only imagine this production's faithful advocates love it because it flies in the face of a 30 year trend of experimentation and "license." This version takes no license, true, but only because it is dead at birth.