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Will they relive what has gone on between those crumpled sheets, or will they – hollow laugh! – put things right? Alexandra Steiner (Woglinde), Stephanie Houtzeel (Wellgunde) and Wiebke Lehmkuhl (Flosshilde). Intriguingly, it is the Rhinemaidens who take occupation of the gods’ room once they have vacated it to deal with the giants. But the complexity of the web of power relations, not only between characters, but between forms of power, is really the thing. (Rhine)gold is here crucial: as itself as the oil that powers so much of what we see, petrol pumps in the forecourt as the shiny stuff of hegemonic trash culture (think Donald Trump, on whom, more soon) as the agent of the motel’s ‘rainbow’ rebranding in the fourth act even, perhaps, as something hallucinogenic, narcotic, when Froh’s mysterious ‘clearing’ of the air leaves the pleasure-seekers in the bar – something now, as the rainbow flag and tight-fitting costumes for all genders and orientations – in a state of trance-like animation. Yet the relationship between the social and the æsthetic – and this is just one relationship amongst many in this complex world – also needs to be considered. Hedonists reject and scorn the dwarf because he is ugly. The ressentiment is also æsthetic, of course: Wagner once remarked that he had every sympathy for Alberich’s turn against the Rhinemaidens. The relationship between Valhalla and Nibelheim is not entirely different in the age of neo-liberalism, but nor is it the same. That is the psychological – and, in some senses, socio-political – impulse for the challenge of capital to the established political order or at least it was in Wagner’s time. For the question is social too: Alberich’s proto-Nietzschean ressentiment is born of his lowly place in Wotan’s society. But Wagner is not Nietzsche – even if Nietzsche is far closer to Wagner than he ever, even earlier on, wishes to admit. How might we characterise that liebesgelüste? It may – as I have argued elsewhere – be understood partly, at least when considered from the standpoint of the history of ideas, as an important precedent for Nieztsche’s will to power. In both work and production, though, things are far more complicated than they might seem. Like the first scene of Das Rheingold, one might say, for what Wagner called Alberich’s liebesgelüste (‘erotic urge’ he was at that time disdaining traditional capital letters for nouns). On first glance, like much mass culture, it might seem to be all about sex. However, for anyone wishing to read my previous reviews, they may be found here: Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung.īack, then, to the Golden Motel: the trashy Texan (Route 66) location for the action. Any Hegelian and/or Marxist – perhaps more to the point, any historian or philosopher of history – could tell you that.
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Even if ‘correct’, that correctness is of limited use: few things are so pernicious as anti-historical elevation of the momentary to the permanent one has only to think of the runes inscribed on Wotan’s spear, or, more generally, the bourgeois universalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. No one, perhaps, is so unreliable a narrator as the person convinced of the absolute truth of his or her recollections. That, after all, is part of the message – at least part of the message I have taken – from the video work in this production. One’s memory can play tricks, of course, and what I perceive as difference may or may not so I may be misremembering, or indeed may simply not have noticed certain aspects before I may also be viewing them in different contexts, the world – mostly to its disadvantage – having ‘moved on’ considerably since 2014. I shall not re-read my first reviews until afterwards: not because I entertain some absurd fantasy about coming to the production anew, for my present experience will clearly be coloured by prior experience yet, by the same token, I see no especial reason to have the former over-determined by the latter. Photo: Enrico Nawrath / Bayreuther FestspieleĪnd so, two years after my first viewing, I am returning to Frank Castorf’s Ring. Roberto Saccà (Loge), Caroline Wenborn (Freia), Iain Paterson (Wotan), Nadine Weissmann (Erda) and Karl-Heinz Lehner (Fafner) in Frank Castorf's production of Das Rheingold, Bayreuth Festival, 2016. Bayreuth Festival (1) - Das Rheingold, 20 August 2016 Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold (Frank Castorf), Bayreuth Festival - Der Ring des Nibelungen