‘Siegfried’ in Rome. A scene in which they share a kiss: the inevitable beauty of Wagner’s drama

Ready, set, go: Mime (voiced by the tenor Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke) strikes the anvil in vain with the sword that is supposed to enable Siegfried (not Ranucci, the fearless hero, now without Report*) to slay the dragon Fafner, holed up in his cave, and to secure the ring for him, when Daniel Harding, music director of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, steps down from the podium with a sombre expression and interrupts Siegfried, the second day of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, which marks the opening of the new season at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. We are in Rome, at the Parco della Musica, and a coup de théâtre in such situations is not out of place. At first, the audience is baffled. They hear a low, persistent hum in the background (which, as it turns out, was a sort of microphone interference), blending with the sombre beats of Wagner’s score. A few minutes of silence, a murmur in the hall, dimmed lights. The orchestra’s concertmaster, Carlo Maria Parazzoli, goes backstage and everything seems to be sorted out. They start again from the beginning and for five hours it is nothing but Wagner.

So much for the missteps; now for what works. Wagner calls for voices capable of lending weight to every word of the German text. Michael Volle is Wotan in the guise of the Wanderer and, in both physique and voice, seems the very embodiment of the god. Ever-present, never a dip in intensity, a slip or a moment of hesitation. Imposing and quintessentially German, he received well-deserved applause in the auditorium and later at dinner, where, upon entering, he asked for a beer, provoking laughter from those sitting nearby. Clay Hilley, the American tenor who sings about the scathing reviews he has received on social media (the series is called “Bad Reviews Sung Well”), is a convincing Siegfried, and captures his purity well. He is playful without descending into the banal when he tries to imitate birdsong with his reed pipe, and convincing in the intense moments and in the long duet in the third act with Brünnhilde. The Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid, as Brünnhilde, might perhaps have dared to be more varied in her timbre, rather than settling for a single, forceful, aggressive tone. The orchestra was excellent, rendering Wagner’s symphonic sweep superbly, and Harding conducted it with confidence. The result was a coherent and serious interpretation, and a fine performance, in a city where the Ring was conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler with the RAI Orchestra back in 1953.

The staging adds little: it is almost static, with few changes from one act to the next, and ends up making life even more difficult for the singers, who are positioned high up, far from the audience and forced to cut through the orchestra’s wall of sound. Why not stage the Ring in concert form, as the Accademia had already done between 1988 and 1991 – one production per season – with Giuseppe Sinopoli conducting? A photographic exhibition in the foyer of the Sala Santa Cecilia and a screening in the Sala Sinopoli of ‘Il ghiaccio in tasca. Mio padre Giuseppe Sinopoli’, the documentary by his son Giovanni presented at the Rome Film Festival.

The hall is packed. Someone is dozing off. Wagner is a tough act to follow. During the intervals, at the various refreshment points (one must refuel even during musical marathons), the objection is the usual one: the music is beautiful, but it takes almost an entire act just to forge a sword or share a kiss. This objection overlooks the famous ‘art of transition’ so dear to Wagner: every change of mood must be built up until it becomes inevitable. The third act of Siegfried arrived after a twelve-year hiatus, during which Wagner composed Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The long scene following the kiss is the time Wagner’s characters need to change. Even that initial hiccup might be a mysterious and necessary jest on the part of the German composer.