Siegfried, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Nov. 5 2011

We have a Siegfried! This morning’s HD Live broadcast of Siegfried with Jay Hunter Morris in the title role was so impressive that one of my friends could not contain herself, and used her iPhone at first intermission to send out a message to her fellow Ring-heads “Are you enjoying this as much as I am?” Not having such a phone, I had to wait until getting home before I could reply “Absolutely!”

Furthermore, the Met seems to be getting its act together with respect to La Machine, the 45-ton, 24-plank behemoth that dominates every scene, and still occasionally goes awry. (In the previous performance of Siegfried, I am told by a friend who was there, La Machine seized up at the beginning of the final scene, and Siegfried and Brünnhilde had to do some rapid improvising in their acting.) I think that La Machine serves the opera best when it takes a configuration at the beginning of a scene and then doesn’t move unless the story line calls for it, such as raising a few planks so that a dragon can appear.

In this production La Machine was used a lot as a surface to receive projections, many of which were effective. In the prologue, we saw what looked like a tangle of tree roots, with several snakes worming their way among them. In Act 2 in front of Fafner’s cave, we saw a well-vegetated hillside with half a dozen strictly vertical tree trunks. In Act 3 we saw some very impressive flames—if these were computer-generated, hats off to the programmers. Later in Act 3 the flames are confined to the outermost planks, while Brünnhilde is awakened from her slumber on a grassy meadow with flowers.

Aside from what was done with La Machine, this was a fairly conventional production, with Mime and Siegfried dressed in crudely-stitched leathers, a bellow and anvil for forging Notung. The Wanderer did appear without his eye patch; in its place he wore a large black contact lens and had black makeup around that eye. And Erda was dressed in a black dress covered with reflective pieces of what appeared to be mica. I heard one uncharitable comment comparing the dress to a disco ball.

There was one particularly unconventional element. In Act 1, in the “twenty questions” scene with Mime, the Wanderer carried a fairly hefty spear. It looked to be a good two inches in diameter, and the close-up was so close that I wondered why it did not have actual runes carved in it, to echo the line “With the runes carved on the shaft of his spear, Wotan rules the world.” But the shaft of the spear turned out not to be made of wood. At the beginning of Act 3, in the scene with Erda, the Wanderer popped off the tip and the butt of the spear and the shaft unrolled into a ten-foot-long parchment, with runes on it. So that’s how you get all of Wotan’s contracts onto the shaft of a spear! He and Erda then walked over the parchment as though it were a rug, presumably to show contempt for the old order that is fading away. The Wanderer did not roll up the parchment to reconstruct the spear that would block Siegfried’s way to Brünnhilde. After the parchment was unrolled, the Wanderer was left with just a length of metal of quite small diameter. It looked to be about as sturdy as a curtain rod. The Wanderer laid his curtain rod across the end of one of the planks of La Machine, and Siegfried hacked off the part of it just beyond the edge of the plank. Not very convincing.

One of the most important staging decisions in any Siegfried is, what to do for a dragon? According to Speight Jenkins, the dragon must be frightful. (Sorry, but trash compactors don’t make it.) This dragon brandished some very long sharp teeth, but otherwise it looked like an inflatable balloon suitable for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

Our cast:
Mime: Gerhard Siegel
Siegfried: Jay Hunter Morris
The Wanderer: Bryn Terfel
Alberich: Eric Owens
Fafner: Hans-Peter König
Woodbird: Mojca Erdmann
Erda: Patricia Bardon
Brünnhilde: Deborah Voigt
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Robert Lepage

And what a cast! Highest praise goes to Jay Hunter Morris, who had been the cover for Gary Lehman, and was tapped to step into the role when Lehman fell ill. (Interestingly, he had been a cover for San Francisco’s Siegfried this summer, and stepped into the role when Ian Storey found himself unable to perform that role in both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and chose to limit himself to Götterdämmerung.) Others may quibble, but I find it hard to imagine a better Siegfried. He sang beautifully—the slightly strange color in his voice that I heard in San Francisco’s Siegfried was not in evidence. He did have a small crack at the very end of Act 1, and his final note at the end of Act 3 seemed to be cut rather short, but everywhere else his voice was right where it needed to be. In his intermission interview a week ago, he said that the hardest part of the role was acting like an 18-year-old boy, but he brought that off very well. It was hard to believe that he is in his 40s—I haven’t tracked down a birthdate, but I have found in the Paris News the announcement of his engagement, dated 1988. He simply was Siegfried. I am so eager to catch the encore broadcast, assuming that it is scheduled.

Gerhard Siegel won points by avoiding the whining tone that is all too common among portrayals of Mime. Bryn Terfel’s voice could have been a bit darker, lending more gravitas to his “Heil dir, weise Schmied” in Act 1, but it still gave me goosebumps. Deborah Voigt could have been less dark in “Heil dir, Sonne” but that was also worth goosebumps. Both Eric Owens and Hans-Peter König displayed marvelous bass voices.

Bottom line: a triumph for Jay Hunter Morris, with great support from his co-stars. Clearly an alpha.