Gotterdammerung was beautiful. Mats Almgren as Hagen and Frances Ginzer as Brunnhilde were especially fabulous; the Norns and Rhinemaidens were both beyond fantastic. The Rhinemaidens especially – their little theme-y funny-keyed bits, when I shut my eyes, were transporting. But there's the problem with this show. It was really boring to look at, besides a glitch that stopped the curtain from opening before Siegfried and Brunnhilde’s love scene in the Prologue. Though the singers took it in stride, that glitch just added to an overall dime store feel. And you can’t have dime store feel with a fucking 5.5-hour opera, certainly not Wagner.

Here’s what I mean – here's Wagner’s stage directions for the final scene of the opera after Brunnhilde sends Wotan’s ravens to Loge to tell him to burn down Valhalla, decides to immolate herself and her horse in Siegfried’s funeral pyre, and tells the Rhinemaidens to regain the Ring by plucking it from her ashes (oh, yeah, spoiler alert):

“With a single bound she urges the horse into the blazing pyre. The flames immediately flare up so that the fire fills the entire space front of the hall and appears to seize on the building itself . . . At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood, surging over the conflagration . . . the hall of Valhalla comes into view, with the gods and heroes assembled . . . bright flames seem to flare up in the hall of the gods, finally hiding them from sight completely. The curtain falls.”

The COC had the nerve to quote that in their programme so I was expecting some serious fucking sweetness. You know how they did it? Brunnhilde sang a final song to her invisible horse and calmly got into a bed with Siegfried’s corpse, the Rhinemaidens took the ring off her finger and offstage red light was used to show Valhalla burning. WHAT THE FUCK. No, no, no. The whole point of Wagner is that he was about the whole package – the music, the words, and the STAGING. The STAGING.

And you know what counted as a Valkyrie costume in this production? A black Victorian dress with a bustle. NOT COOL. Valkyries are killing machines who ride around battlefields on flying horses. Why would they wear a black Victorian dress with a bustle? And all the warriors were wearing business suits. And the Norns had crappy secretary black skirt suits going on, and the Rhinemaidens had three different costumes, two of which were stupid (Norn-ish secretaries and blue-haired pseudo-raver chicks messing around in very substantial underwear) and one of which was boring. And the power-line set was lame and didn’t make sense most of the time. And . . . and . . . fuck you.

The idea of a minimalist Wagnerian production is as just plain wrong as a quiet riot or an aggressive marketing campaign for Steal This Book. Wagner knew when he put his stuff together that it was more than an opera; it was a complete artistic event. INCLUDING THE FUCKING STAGING. Have I written that already? Anyways, this idea was probably why it was cool to make his operas five point fucking five hours long. And why I feel cheated by last night.

For once I’m not blaming television, I’m blaming tobacco advertising laws#. Gotterdammerung was damn near sold out on a Thursday so I doubt the COC is hurting for ticket revenues, but I understand you need more to mount the sort of production that has highly paid sopranos galloping into funeral pyres. Tobacco advertising gave Canadian arts organizations that more. But noo, gotta protect the poor brainless consumers from a product you don’t even have the balls to criminalize, even if that means subjecting them to fucking minimalist Wagner. The feds really should have thought of a strategy to get the slack that the cut-off in tobacco ad revenue caused in the arts community. Maybe not direct funding, but a better system of tax-breaks or something.

I don’t know.

To accentuate the positive, musically it was thrilling. The thing that shocked me the most is how happy and triumphant it was at the end – echoes of the 1812 Overture. As though the twilight of the Gods was something to be celebrated. Not only natural, but desirable. So I don’t feel like I wasted 5.5 hours, but I think the COC should have spent its budget on something it could afford to mount properly, like Der Rosenkavalier or something. Also, a lot of the people around me spent the last act profoundly asleep.



#I think the site was put together by Du Maurier, so grain of salt, please.