RSS
Home
Warrior goddess Brunnhilde to be sacrificed at SFO part one
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
The warrior goddess Brunnhilde comes to SFO in June 2010.
SFO puts on Die Walkure, the classic opera full of battle cries, spears, helmets, flying horses, a history of Rhine maidens with ice water in their veins, flames on a mountaintop and a future of Valhalla burning and everybody after the cursed gold ring ever so unhappy. SFO's advisor Francesca Zambello, pictured below, will direct.
.jpg)
Nina Stemme, the Swedish soprano, plays Brunnhilde in Richard Wagner's epic myth.
Baritone Mark Delavan plays Wotan. He has an interesting history with SFO and it's exciting to have him back. On his own webpage, Mark says how this Princeton, New Jersey native ended up in the Merola program and became a Verdi baritone.
Mark writes:
I received my first big break with the San Francisco Opera young artists summer training program, "Merola". There I performed the title role of "Don Giovanni". In the fall, I performed the same role with the touring branch of the program, Western Opera Theater, where I continued to hone my craft. Following the tour, I received an Adler Fellowship with the San Franciso Opera Center. This gave me the opportunity to perform small roles, and understudy major roles for main stage productions with such great performers as Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Mirella Freni, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Leo Nucci, and Ruth Ann Swensen. In 1987, I completed my Adler Fellowship and began performing regionally.
In December 1989, my son Lucas was born. We moved from San Francisco to the Northeast . . .
Moreover Seattle will even have a big Wagner festival at the opera this summer with all four parts, meant to be performed as a festival. SFO will have a festivalette in Die Walkure, part II, the part with the heroine Brunnhilde. It's quality not quantity.
So about Brunnhilde, our heroine. Wotan her father the bass baritone and ruler of Valhalla sends Brunnhilde to break up a pair of incestuous twins. Wouldn’t you? His own children, though illegitimate and raised separately, have somehow met as strangers and fallen in love with each other. Siegmund and Sieglinde. Tenor and soprano.
Eva-Marie Westbroek the Dutch soprano, pictured below, plays Sieglinde. She's played it at the festival started by Wagner, the Bayreuth. He built an entire opera house for the Ring Cycle.
Christopher Ventris, the British tenor, plays the twin brother Seigmund. Raymond Aceto is the American bass from Ohio who plays Seiglinde's husband. He comes home to find a stranger in the house that mirrors his wife . . . but this bass has played a jailer in Tosca and an assassin in Rigoletto, Sparafucile. Makes one think of the Merola program's Jeremy Galyon, no?
Wotan’s wife Fricka doesn’t want to protect the twins as they are a source of humiliation. She's to be played by an actual German, mezzo soprano Janina Baechle.
So Wotan needs to re-prove his loyalty to his wife after the adultery. She pushes him to have the twins destroyed by yet another illegitimate daughter, the goddess and heroine Brunnhilde. The wife is probably punishing Wotan but also trying to reset those marital boundaries. Yet Wotan's daughter Brunnhilde is bound to have mixed emotions; as illegitimate herself yet a goddess, she will have compassion for her own half sister and brother. Illegitimate is such a harsh word, how about they are from a liaison as well. Similarly Fricka isn’t the evil step mother as in Cinderella, Fricka isn’t necessarily bad either she just is trying to do her own self serving job as goddess of marriage. To Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. It's a big and thankless job.
Die Walkure. It's about how the quest for power warps family relationships and only the truth can save. The writer of Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen M.D., writes about psychiatric themes in this monumental production: The abandoned child, the authoritarian father, the disempowered feminine. In the bookjacket she looks Japanese and she teaches at UC San Francisco. The book is from 1992. Wagner himself was almost orphaned when his father died young. However his mother married an artist. Wagner's new father had been a friend of his parents. Was the second husband Richard's biological father? In any event the man was a creative type and Wagner shared this love of the arts.
Wagner also loved his country. He was a proud German and his love of country showed in ways contrary to the existing government. Eventually he was forced into exile from his country and musical culture. It's this kind of pain Wotan shows when he is forced to leave his daughter and our heroine to die on a mountaintop. Anybody would be bitter and angry but Wagner's bitterness seemed to take the form of anti Semitism mingling with artistic jealousy. According to Wikipedia, Wagner stated the German people were repelled by their alien appearance and behavior: "with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." He argued that because Jews had no connection to the German spirit, Jewish musicians were only capable of producing shallow and artificial music. They therefore composed music to achieve popularity and, thereby, financial success, as opposed to creating genuine works of art.
Did I mention Porgy & Bess is coming to SFO and the cast has to be Black according to the will of the Gershwins?
Anyway, about patriotism and the theory of over-compensating, Dr. Bolen says the Kennedys are an example of a patriarchal group with the original one, Joseph, the ambassador to England, having an axe to grind for being humiliated as an Irish immigrant. His sons Joseph, John and Robert would try to fulfill their father’s obsession with the presidency . . .
To be continued.
In closing, what inspired today’s comments? I spent the last ten days hiking Pacific Heights down to the wharf, literally to the depths as I visited the aquarium and a shark swam over my head. I walked a pair of sweet French Bulldogs past the titans of San Francisco, strolling past brick mansions covered in over a hundred years of vines and history. Had an omelette at the Grove with my friend Theresa, who has never seen an opera but has a degree in theater . . . Here are some pictures, the first from next to the Presidio founded in 1776, at the corner of Broadway and Lyon.
This brick mansion on Broadway sports cathedral doors that make the home a religious experience.
And just for range from Pacific Heights to the depths of the bay, I witnessed the shark feeding at the aquarium.
Greer Grimsley Impressions, Passions, Stand by Me, Dreams
Fred Matthews sang Porgy & Bess 756 times
Fred Matthews produces Cavalcade of Stars III February 2009
Opera announces 2009/2010 season
Pacific Heights and Aquarium photos by Cindy Warner, Copyright 2009.
Headshots courtesy of San Francisco Opera
Contact the writer at SFOperaExaminer@Yahoo.com.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
.jpg)
