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A slide show of stage set designs for the Metropolitan
Opera's Ring Cycle (1987-2000): Götterdämmerung |
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Das Rheingold | Die Walkure | Siegfried | Gotterdammerung |  |
"In Götterdämmerung, the lift played an important role once again... First some of it formed the great ceiling of the Gibichungen hall, on which the funeral for Siegfried takes place, before everything collapses in that dreadful disaster. I outline for you here only some of the stage effects. I must add, that we also had to think about each individual voice. The chorus master and the soloists, who could not always sing in the foreground, had to be placed such that no structural obstacles hindered the sound of their singing...
In the second act, in the beginning, there is the important scene between Alberich and his son Hagen. Everything is dark, it is a deep night on the banks of the Rhine. At most there's a couple of small star reflections on the water, and then the slow morning dawn... One must listen carefully to Wagner's music. It is wonderfully and precisely indicated, where day breaks...
In the last act, the scene of the funeral procession, where Siegfried's body is brought from the forest into the Gibichungen castle, remains visible for the most part, until slowly the curtain closes on the darkened scene to strains of the powerful purely orchestral funeral march, and the next scene emerges gradually from the shadows. Finally the crumbling of the hall... everything goes back, so to speak, to its original state at the beginning of Rheingold. And life begins again, as if after an atomic disaster, which destroys the world... in a day far off, new life begins from nothing: you see the Rhine rise. It was a really great effect but enormously complicated, with scrims and lights, showing the ruins of the world to some extent - then suddenly people, who have survived... all looking at a phenomenal light in the background, which becomes brighter and brighter moment by moment . It is conciliation, a deliverance... a wonderful end, which repeats with each cycle." *
*[From G. Schneider-Siemssen in conversation with K. Pahlen: Die Bühne, mein Leben , Springer Verlag 1996; (The Stage, My Life - English translation by James Mulder, in press)]
Elsewhere in FanFaire... more on Richard Wagner, The Ring Cycle and the Ring at the Met.
