‘Siegfried’ and ‘Twilight’: Wrapping Up WNO’s Ring

Just before the start of the third and last act of “Twilight of the Gods” — which is also the last act of the complete Ring Cycle being staged by Washington National Opera — some of the people who had attended all four productions in the course of a week looked around and nodded at one other in the seconds just before the lights would dim again one last time.

“My god,” one woman said. “It’s over. I can’t believe it. It’s kind of sad.”

There was quite a bit of that “We few, we happy few” feeling about this unprecedented mounting of the entire “The Ring of the Nibelung” at the Kennedy Center by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello. The experience was exhausting; the last production alone was six hours long including two intermissions. The entire cycle racked up approximately twenty hours.

But the experience was also exhilarating. Even as the cycle presented challenges of stamina and — in the age of the short attention span and Twitter — forced abandonment of our devices for prolonged periods of time (Act 1 of “Twilight of the Gods” was two hours), the four productions built a momentum of excellence rarely seen — or heard, for that matter. This Ring came as close as you can possibly get to Richard Wagner’s notion of “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a synthesis of remarkable music, poetic and free-form writing and a compelling narrative.

The production got off to a clean, affecting start with the prelude of “The Rhinegold” and never looked back, running like a powerful, speed-building train through “The Valkyrie,” “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods” in a way that focused the heart, the imagination and the mind, carried along by Wagner’s magnificent music, presented in a way that made it a true partner and facilitator of the narrative, as well as providing enormous pleasures in the playing and listening.

Wagner tossed around and inserted leitmotifs — musical identifiers of themes and characters — like some medieval farmer throwing seeds for a hundred different vegetables. Some, such as Siegfried’s trumpet sounding and the Valkyrie theme, are practically Muzak in our pop cultural memories, but all of them serve as reminders, like musical magic breadcrumbs.

In the Ring, this becomes important throughout, because characters at various times recap how they got to a particular point in the narrative, often repeating the same story from a different point of view, pushed along by the music. Everyone has their story to tell, each in their own expository and musical way. The result is that by the end of it all, you can’t get the characters — those who survived and those who did not — out of your head for a long time.

In “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods” (in German, it’s “Gotterdammerung,” more akin to “Armageddon” than to twilight), it’s the hero awakened to his many tasks of heroics: slay the dragon, capture the gold and the ring, defeat the god Wotan, pierce a ring of fire, awaken the warrior princess Brunnhilde and, most difficult of all, fall in love. In “Twilight,” it’s betrayal, tragedy and murder, as well as the gigantic self-sacrifice of Brunnhilde, which results not only in her immolation but in the destruction of Valhalla.

“Siegfried” is a true heroic epic, an adventure and a fulfillment of a great love finally achieved and experienced. It’s the Siegfried and Brunnhilde show, with great moments by two old foes, an unmatched schemer in a narrative that has quite a few and, of course, the dragon.

The dragon, which is a transformed version of Fafner the Giant (who murdered his brother to gain the gold, the ring and everything), looms like a solid steel monster, impenetrable but not undefeatable, as it turns out. He’s a dark, huge, menacing creation of the modern age, of modern man, a clanging, battery-driven menace that Siegfried overpowers and kills. He also does away with Mime, the whiny, plotting, overweeningly-greedy-with-a-large-and-sweaty-sense-of-entitlement brother of Albrecht, the mining dwarf who originally stole the Rhinegold and fashioned a ring from it, a ring that bears his deadly curse.

American tenor Daniel Brenna is an energetic, full-throated Siegfried, chomping at the bit, ignorant as only an innocent can be, a superhero for his age, but posturing like a modern one. He has a single-mindedness and a directness that are both appealing and annoying. He has no sense of mortality or of the seriousness of killing either the dragon or Mime.

In Siegfried, we begin to see more clearly Zambello’s subtext of environmental rust and decay; Siegfried himself seems to have been raised by Mime in a trailer park that was used badly by a twister sometime in the past. The projections designed by Jan Hartley and remounted by S. Katy Tucker are increasingly dominated by industrialism run rampant, with polluted water, factory smokestacks, rusted trains and blighted urban landscapes. The theme — the conceit, if you will — is never forced. Rather, its use is accumulative. It becomes an overlay, an atmosphere in the design.

Wotan — so ably sung and played by Alan Held, makes a final appearance here, first in a scene with Alberich (the remarkable Gordon Hawkins), in which they walk like the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” with amiable, almost nostalgic banter, and then as the last obstacle to Siegfried’s rescue of Brunnhilde.

“Siegfried” climaxes in an astounding courtship and fulfillment of Siegfried’s and Brunnhilde’s love. It’s a long, almost proud duet of mutual attraction, misunderstanding and coming together as fate wanted and would have it. Brenna and British soprano Catherine Foster (who missed doing the role in “The Valkyrie” due to injury) rise to the occasion in sweeping vocals — especially Foster, who has to navigate through the realization that she is no longer mortal, that she isn’t who she is and also that she has been rescued by the love of her life. This results in the initiation for Siegfried of the idea that love is not just an overpowering passion but a tug of war. Brunnhilde’s “I-love-you-don’t touch-me” exclamations confuse him more than trying to figure out how to kill the dragon.

In “Twilight,” things go south for the lovers, but end in triumph for the literal ring and for the Ring that is Wagner’s (and perhaps opera’s) crowning achievement. Certainly it was such for Zambello, but equally for Philippe Auguin, the WNO orchestra conductor who restored the music to its brilliant qualities, overriding the opera’s sometimes exaggerated reputation as a personification of Teutonic mythology.

What’s so affecting and surprising about the enterprise is how intimate an epic it is. There are so many full and focused scenes in which only a few characters occupy the stage and our attention, to be replaced by a gathering horde in the mines, a small group of gods, a warrior force or sheer spectacle: the death of the dragon, the arrival of the Valkyries, the fiery imprisonment of Brunnhilde and, of course, the destruction of Valhalla itself.

In the end — and from the beginning — the Ring Cycle was a rewarding experience, in ways one suspects that few audience members ever anticipated. We few, we happy few, indeed.