SAN FRANCISCO -- It's "Ring" time in the West. Tuesday night, San Francisco Opera opened its summer season with Wagner's "Das Rheingold," the relatively brief (2 1/2 -hour) prologue in his four-opera cycle.
The new production proved but a peek into Francesca Zambello's fascinating concept of Wagner's damaged gods, dumb-cluck giants, malicious dwarfs and clueless mortals as Americans headed down the wrong side of history. The full cycle will be on display in San Francisco in summer 2011.
West Coast Wagnerites should be well sated by then. Next summer, Seattle Opera will bring back its more traditionally minded "Ring." In summer 2010, the upstart Los Angeles Opera will mount its first "Ring": Achim Freyer's visually fantastic approach, which it will begin unveiling, an opera at a time, next season.
San Francisco, though, is the appropriate starting place. The Metropolitan Opera brought a cycle from New York to Baghdad by the Bay in 1900. San Francisco Opera mounted its first "Ring" in 1935. Its most recent was in 1999. Pictures from 1935 reveal a laughably primitive staging. By 1999, Wagner's epic of the creation of modern society had a pertinent post-apocalyptic appearance.
"Rheingold" begins in the river Rhine, where underwater maidens guard gold. In San Francisco on Tuesday, Alberich, a '49er with his pan, forswore love and stole the hoard. The gods were the idle rich of the Roaring '20s, lounging on a veranda as Valhalla was being built. Fasolt and Fafner, the giants as oversized construction workers who looked like Popeyes with scissorhands, were lowered down on steel beams. Loge, the wily god of fire, became a magnificently deceitful lawyer. In Nibelheim, the dwarfs' realm, child laborers mined coal. Was that a croquet mallet that Donner, the cream-suited dandy thunder-god, was swinging?
These are strong images. Zambello, according to the program notes, will build from them a parable about modern America, its legacy of arrogant corporate power and the defoliation of the environment. Though a co-production with Washington National Opera, Tuesday's "Rheingold" was said to be a significant revision of the 2006 staging, about which there has been ridicule in the blogosphere, and many cast members were new not only to the production but also to their roles.
