Munich Chords: The Valkyrie Rides Again

A few weeks before all four operas of Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen were premiered as a complete cycle in a purpose-built theater on a green hill in the sleepy Bavarian town of Bayreuth in the summer of 1876, George Armstrong Custer was marking America’s centennial by getting himself scalped half a world away at the Little Bighorn.

Both events were reported globally and resound down the century-and-a-half to their shared 150th birthdays this summer, even as America celebrates its 250th. At grand anniversaries such as these, the Zeitgeist rouses itself from history’s easy chair and gets busy, animating theatrical and political dramaturgs alike, and staging outrageous contradictions, uncanny echoes, moments of seemingly impossible infamy that careen into unprecedented idiocy—and vice versa.

For the Fourth of July weekend, I careened south from Berlin to Munich on the German Railway to fly with Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) at the Bavarian National Theatre, the building where the work was first performed in 1870, six years before being slotted into the second spot of the just-mentioned tetralogy a couple of hundred miles north in Bayreuth.

Meanwhile, back in the American homeland, Trump was returning to the scene of one of the Great White Father’s crimes. Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills provided the theatrical backdrop for his teleprompted, tuneless, epically boring aria to the “greatest country ever conceived.” In front of the American Valhalla, the long faces of American presidential heroes carved by a racist Danish sculptor and finished just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Babble-Loudly-and-Carry-an-Ever-Smaller-Stick tenor warned that, “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” Trump has long yearned to add his de-jowled mug to the quartet of Dead Presidents on display in South Dakota.

It was in the Black Hills in 1874 that prospectors, escorted by then-Lieutenant Colonel Custer, discovered gold on land not only sacred to the Sioux but also guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed just six years earlier.

Stolen gold also generates the story of Wagner’s Ring. Broken treaties too. Trump may be, for now, the American Top Dog, but Wotan is the Germanic Top God. Both consider themselves the biggest Big Boy Builder, although neither ever hefts a boulder or an I-beam; indeed, neither even lifts a finger. Wotan hired the Giants to build Valhalla, then, Trump-like, thought to stiff them. There is no greater stiffer than Trump when it comes to having skyscrapers and victory arches thrown up in his honor.

Wotan plans to fob his sister-in-law off to his disgruntled workers (those Giants); the American President mines the digital fool’s gold of Trump Coin, bullies the pups in the MAGA kennel, and plunders the public coffers to pursue his architectural immortality. The absolute power of the Rhinegold can only be channeled by those who renounce love. Trump doesn’t have the slightest inkling of what love is (except for himself), so he has no need to renounce anything.

In Die Walküre, neither the Rhinegold nor the Ring is seen, only referred to when, near the beginning of the second of the opera’s three acts, Wotan mansplains the salient plot points of the saga so far to his beloved warrior daughter, Brünnhilde. Those who might have missed the first opera learn that the precious metal is being hoarded by one of those giants who, thanks to the Ring’s magical powers, has turned himself into a dragon to protect his booty.

Even if the gold does not gleam on stage, its theft from the bottom of the Rhine River by the greedy dwarf Alberich at the outset of the cycle has thrown Nature out of whack. At the end of The Ring, the Gods and their Valhalla will go up in flames that only the floodwaters of the Rhine can extinguish, restoring environmental balance when the gold is returned to the bosom of the Earth at the bottom of the river.

Take note, Wotan of the White House! You have stolen the gold, real and symbolic. That your latest spectacle—“The Great American State Fair—Freedom 250”—had to be postponed because of Nature’s building fury is one of many Wagnerian omens. Putting off Apocalypse Now will only mean Apocalypse Later!

It was hot and sunny in Bavaria on the 4th of July, but the show could, and did, go on. An hour before the curtain rose at 5 p.m., the square in front of the National Theatre was covered with opera fans in shorts and sunglasses arrayed on the cobblestones for the “Opera for All” simulcast sponsored by BMW. One of the company’s late-model Bavarian muscle cars was on display next to the big screen. Begowned and tuxedoed celebrities, politicians, and donors entered on a red carpet up the granite steps between the imposing columns and into the marbled foyer.

In contrast to this pomp, the Munich staging of Die Walküre by director Tobias Kratzer was spare and gloomy. At the start, womanizing Wotan’s son Siegmund stumbles, wounded, into a little house in the woods. This showpiece of affordability has a sliding door, barbecue out back, pseudo-rustic paneling, and wood-burning inside, a couple of cases of bottled beer tucked in beneath the steep staircase. It’s the Bavarian equivalent of a mobile home.

The house belongs to a rural roughneck named Hunding. He drives up to the place in his muddy 4×4 and lumbers out of the vehicle wearing a raincoat and Teutonic cowboy hat and toting a ram that he has just shot. The hunter lays the fleecy offering at an altar erected in the front yard, kneels down, and prays. Once done with these pieties, he’s not happy to see a strange man at home with his wife.

The backstory is heavier than all the stones in Valhalla. For starters, Wotan fathered Siegmund out of wedlock, an infraction that is considerably more than minor, since Wotan’s wife Fricka is the goddess of marriage and motherhood, and the very deity venerated in Hunding’s two altars: one inside the house, one outside.

The infraction gets a lot less minor still when Sieglinde drugs Hunding, who falls into a deep sleep upstairs. She then throws her shawl over the altar next to the hearth, pulls off her panties, and, with Siegmund, who is actually her brother, gets down to the business of making the hero (Siegfried) who will be charged with trying to save the Gods from their inescapable fate.

What with a gun- and god-loving misogynistic Militia Man just wanting to be left alone by distant rulers, whether from Valhalla or Washington, DC, I almost expected Trump to appear on the video screen that continually dropped from above and sing, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!”

One is tempted to say that Wotan sang like a god, in this case in the person of American bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee. Now in his late thirties, Brownlee is already a near-legendary Wotan. His voice has vitality, depth, and clarity that can range, depending on what the drama calls for, from imperiousness to impetuosity to tragic vulnerability. Siegmund was sung with bluff vigor and controlled recklessness by the Swedish tenor Joachim Bäckström. The American soprano Irene Roberts saved the full self-sacrificing force of her Sieglinde for the final act when, after the death of her lover-brother, she embraces the duty of carrying the hero in her womb. Vladimir Jurowski commanded the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra with Wagnerian authority. Front and center above pit, the Russian maestro (an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin) himself became an operatic character of resolve and resourcefulness, the orchestra surging heroically one moment, conjuring desperate fate the next.

The helmeted gods in Teutonic rig moved through hard-scrabble present as if to suggest that the past is never really past. This chronological juxtaposition set up the central gag of the evening at the opening of the third act with the notorious Ride of the Valkyries.

Wagner’s orchestral forces swooped and thundered as the big screen lowered again at the front of the stage—and on the giant “Opera for All” canvas out front of the opera house. The film showed the various Valkyries on horseback cavalry charging through Munich’s nearby English Garden (one of the largest urban parks in the world), gathering up fallen heroes to haul back to Valhalla: a businessman drowned in a creek; a bike commuter felled by one of those BMWs; and other casualties of the modern, mercenary city. From high above Munich, Brünnhilde flew in a helicopter, and as the ride raced toward its shimmering finish line, she was seen having landed by parachute in the empty opera square, her arrival watched on the screen by the people filling that very place.

A Valkyrie rides through Munich’s English Garden. Photo credit: Geoffroy Schied.

This coy-clever nod to Apocalypse Now was at least the second reference to Hollywood hijinks. In the first act, Siegmund had rummaged around in search of the magic sword among a trunk full of weapons and pulled out a lightsaber.

Once dismounted and gathered in Valhalla, the Valkyries shrieked their angular, stabbing arpeggios—“Hoioho! Hoioho!” and “Heiaha! Heiaha! Hojotoho! Heiaha!” The young New York Wagnerite Natalie Curtis, who visited Bayreuth in 1896, thought these vocalizations akin to Native American music and sang the Valkyries’ battle cries for a Navajo delegation she accompanied to the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California, in 1903. Curtis convinced herself that they were impressed by what they heard.

Soon after the chopper-and-charger Ride of the Valkyries was applauded and laughed at in Munich, Trump made his own Air Force One flyover of Mt. Rushmore, inevitably conjuring strains of Wagner’s biggest hit, whose tune is probably even recognizable by the Philistine President. Back in DC, Apache (not Lakota!) attack helicopters swarmed above the National Mall. Wagnerian horns should have been blasted from the Washington Monument.

The draft-dodging Commander-in-Chief would also have been pleased by the look of the Munich production’s Valhalla, with its mirrors and gilded frames and flutings soon to take on massive proportions in the White House ballroom.

In Kratzer’s gimcrack splendor, with the salvaged heroes laid out naked on slab-like tables and salved back into zombie-like action, the Valkyries, Gods, and the human Sieglinde negotiated their own fates. For disobeying Wotan by defending her half-brother Siegmund in his duel with Hunding, Brünnhilde was condemned to an imprisoning sleep not on a rocky outcropping but on an IKEA mattress laid on the parquet dancefloor in the midst of the tasteless Trumpian décor.

The fire that then encircled Brünnhilde, now stripped of her immortal Valkyrie status, was but a tea light—a jokey prelude to the conflagration coming not just to the Teutonic Gods and their Valhalla but to many an offstage forest and fruited plain in this anniversary year and Super El Niño summer.

After the curtain calls, the audience streamed out between the theatre’s columns and down the steps. In the long northern evening above the square, the moon had risen. I thought of the Son of the Morning Star, of Trump and Wagner carved in the Rushmore cliffs, and of America in twilight and flames.