Gustav Niedlinger today.
Pity poor Alberich, not just the character, but the singer. A great Alberich is worth his weight to opera houses in gold, and he will rarely ever be engaged for anything else. Much more than Wotan, it's the kind of part you're destined to spend your entire career doing. There's no giant repertoire for a bass-baritone voice which is both heroic and comic. And yet this ugly character must be sung by one of the most gorgeous voices in existence.
Like Milton or Goethe before him, Wagner doesn't generally deal in three-dimesnional human beings, but his archetypes are capable of stunning complexity. Alberich, and his son Hagen, are perhaps the fullest musical explorations of evil ever realized by any composer. In Alberich's last appearance in Götterdämmerung, appearing in Hagen's waking dream, Wagner uses every quiet unnatural orchestral effect he can summon - muted strings bowing on the fingerboard, hand stopped horns, all manner creeping glissandos (string slides), all kinds of rhythmic syncopations to disorient us from familiar paths, and the winds play what are still the most evil chords a composer has ever discovered. In this musical moment, we are face to face with nature's chthonian side, the innermost hidden parts of the forest where the most dangerous animals live and destructive forces fester, where light doesn't penetrate, and threats to one's person are as much the invisible organisms likely to drain you of life without your knowledge as wolves and bears are to tear you apart. Without this scene, there's no Sibelius 4th Symphony or Tapiola, no Alpensinfonie or Don Quixote from Strauss, no nachtmusik from Bartok and no scherzo in Mahler 7.
And against all this musical ugliness, Wagner requires a voice of stunning beauty and power to articulate a text which is a terrifying and blatant revision of Hamlet's encounter with his dead father: "Hagen, my son! Hate thou the happy! This joyless and sorrow-laden one lov'st thou so as thou shouldst.... The world will be ours, for in thy truth my faith is firm; thou sharest my wrath and hate.... avenge me, the ring to win me, in Wälsung's and Wotan's despite! Swear to me, Hagen, my son! Be true, Hagen, my son! Trusty hero! Be true! Be true! True!"
From the moment Niedlinger intones, in performance after performance, 'Schläfst du, Hagen Mein sohn?' And puts a little bit of extra emphasis, glissando, and u sound into 'Sohn', we know that we are in the rare presence of a singer who understands his extremely complex role at level of its very atoms. Conductors are so dependent upon their orchestras that they can afford to have a much larger repertoire, and many of them have as many as a couple dozen works that they can convince experts they understand at the deepest level. But the orchestra is a community organism, and no conductor truly 'plays' the orchestra, let alone embodies it. Opera singers, on the other hand, must internalize their roles at the deepest levels of their physical presence, some are lucky to get a single role which they can properly embody as Niedlinger did Alberich for nearly twenty-five years on the international stage.
There are so many live Ring recordings in the 1950/60's vintage. It was, in many ways, Wagner's final hour as Europe's cultural colossus. It was as though Europe, and obviously Germany particularly, required one more immersion in Wagner to come to terms with the full implications of where his destructive ideals led them. After World War II, Bayreuth, the summer festival of Wagner's music dramas that Hitler viewed as his spiritual oasis, was no longer a place where one would go to see costumes made with the breastplates and horns of German mythology. It was, rather, a place of bare sets, stage blocking that had far more in common with religious/political ritual than theater, the action upon the bare stage infused with all manner of avant-garde light. It was as though the productions were designed by Albert Speer and Anselm Kiefer. The memories of the recent German past were so vivid that there was no longer any process of Wagner without conjuring those memories.
It was taken for decades that Alberich was, in some ways, a metaphor for the eternal Jew whose corrupting, loveless influence starts the world down the path of greed and lust for power. But in light of what Germany underwent eighty years ago, did Alberich manifest their eternal enemy, or was Alberich a manifestation of themselves?
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