The "Nibelung" Dramas.
May 11, 1903.
Whatever may have happened in former years, it was scarcely possible to leave the theatre after the "Götterdämmerung" performance on Saturday with any disposition to satirise the management for the failure of the stage effects in the final scene. In the course of the week Wagner's greatest work had been presented with considerably brighter intelligence and more adequate resource than ever before in this country, and it was piteous that there should be a slight humiliation at the end. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the "Ring" in its entirety has ever been better done, for the amazing excellence of the orchestral performance was to some considerable extent matched by the singers, and the dramatic realisation of the composer's intentions was good everywhere except in certain parts of the prologue, and showed positive genius at certain points in each of the main dramas forming the trilogy. The general impression was thus one of a great task nobly carried out, and the concluding fizzle, however tiresome and distressing to the stage managers, could but seem a trifling matter to any appreciative spectator. It is a terrible business, that finale of "Götterdämmerung." Conceived in a mood of frenzied protest, it bears a peculiar stamp of extravagance and violence. It shows Wagner as an Anarchist of the Bakounine type, undertaking, as it were, to "grasp this sorry scheme of things entire" and "shatter it to bits" on the off-chance that Nature might afterwards "remould it nearer to the heart's desire." A lifetime of noble endeavour and great achievement, with scarcely any response from the world but the crackling of thorns under a pot, had produced in Wagner such bitterness of spirit as little men are saved from by their natural limitations, and it is that bitterness of spirit which finds expression in the smashing and burning and drowning of the "Götterdämmerung" finale. Heroes and demigods, renouncing a hopeless conflict with the ugliness and meanness of the world, involve heaven and earth in one red ruin. Such is the significance of a tableau not worth a tithe of the time, trouble, and expense devoted to it.
By engaging Dr. Richter for the 1903 production the Covent Garden authorities made it clear that this time the nonsense of star performers who make cuts for their own convenience and sacrifice the composer's intentions to a performer's conceit would not be tolerated; and at the same time they gave the public the only possible guarantee for adequate rehearsal. For that privilege London has had to wait twenty-seven years since the original production in Bayreuth, though "Die Walküre" and "Siegfried" were long ago taken up into the ordinary Covent Garden repertory. There can be little doubt that "Rhinegold" is in all important respects the most difficult part of the "Ring" to make effective. Epic rather than dramatic in character, it presents to the actor an unfamiliar kind of task. He finds himself representing some creature that is scarcely individualised at all, and taking part in the interplay of elemental forces rather than of human passions. This goes far towards accounting for the fact that last week the "Rhinegold" performance fell very far below the level of all the rest. The representative of Alberic in the first scene seemed to take very little interest in the love-making with the Rhine maidens. He had apparently adopted the guide-book view of the dwarf as a creature merely of greed and hate, and had overlooked the "fruitful impulse"—to borrow Mr. Bernard Shaw's expression—which drives Alberic towards the Rhine maidens; for his acting was quite feeble and pointless, nor was it possible for him to carry out the stage directions that require Alberic to climb over the rock-work and rush after the Rhine maidens with the "nimbleness of a Cobold," the rock-work being much too insecure and the Rhine maidens too restricted in their movements. In that first scene the rise of the curtain reveals something like the glazed side of a huge aquarium tank, and it was apparently to the general effect of the picture as first displayed that all the attention of the scenic artists had been given. Nibelheim, with the clanking sounds of the Nibelungs at their smiths' work, was fairly well rendered, but here again Alberic's part was ineffectively done, and there was far too much fairy-tale prettiness and variety in the aspect of his crowd of slaves. At Bayreuth these victims of sweating and improper labour conditions are represented with horrifying truth as a huddled crowd of little earth-men, driven hither and thither by the cursing and lashing of their master, and, instead of being to some slight extent adorned and differentiated, uniformly grimy and abject. Stage prettiness was never more out of place than in the Covent Garden presentation of the scene. The setting was best in the final scene, where the Gods march over the rainbow bridge into Valhalla. In the rainbow there was a curious predominance of "greenery-yallery" tints to the exclusion of the primary colours, but it took its place well enough in a fairly effective stage picture with a prehistoric building on the heights to the left. Here the only point of inferiority to the Bayreuth presentation was in the meteorological background. After the magnificent orchestrated thunderstorm the sky is supposed to clear and the Gods to enter their new abode amid the glow of a most radiant sunset. But the secrets of atmospheric effect and cloud pageantry seem to remain for the present exclusively in the hands of Bayreuth and Munich, and these things, though they belong to the framework rather than the essential drama, seem to have loomed large in Wagner's imagination when he conceived the "Ring," and so to have a certain importance.