Music: OPERA: Conductor Herbert von Karajan

Total Conductor

Richard Wagner conceived his Ring des Nibelungen as combining voice, orchestra, acting and settings into a perfect expressive unity, a “total artwork.” That phrase could very nearly describe Austrian-born Herbert von Karajan. At 59, Von Karajan not only is the world’s foremost conductor but concerns himself with every aspect of his epic productions, including direction, stage design, lighting. Head of the Berlin Philharmonic, director of the Easter and summer festivals at Salzburg, Von Karajan last week added the Metropolitan Opera to his realm by conducting and staging Die Walküre, first item in a new Ring that he will produce at the Met over the next four years. Since certain natural laws prevented him from singing all the roles, he drew considerable assistance from a superlative cast headed by Supersoprano Birgit Nilsson. Otherwise, it was Von Karajan all the way, in a performance of stunning quality.

He minutely supervised the spare, expressionistic sets designed by German-born Günther Schneider-Siemssen, a longtime Von Karajan protégé. The extraordinary lighting design, ranging for the most part from grey to basic black, was Von Karajan’s own. The cast was handpicked, and the hand was his. He guided the Met’s orchestra through what amounted to a graduate seminar on Wagnerian sonority, galvanizing that frequently scraggly ensemble into a pliant, rich tonal fabric.

Red on Black. Von Karajan’s Walküre was hardly a love feast for the traditionalist who prefers bombast in Wagner. The five-hour morality saga of human love in conflict with divine power—and of divinity in conflict with itself—has hardly ever sounded so subdued and lyrical. Without the need to outshout torrents of sound from the pit, the singers often performed at little above normal conversational tones.

Visually, Von Karajan’s conception was akin to the antiscenic expressionism of postwar Bayreuth productions, with a few meager props on a bare stage to suggest rather than spell out the setting. But he went beyond the Bayreuth style in meshing musical values to stage pictures. The music, too, frequently sounded spare and delicate, engaging the listener’s imagination rather than overwhelming his ear.

The restraint made the opera’s few moments of overt action all the more effective. As Hero Siegmund and Villain Hunding waged their battle at the end of Act II, a single, blinding white beam split the backdrop, silhouetting the struggle in all its throat-catching violence. When Wotan summoned the magic fire at the finale, the blackness was pierced by a single red spot, transforming Wotan’s spear into a tongue of flame; in the inexplicit staging, these moments stood out in a relief that old-fashioned literalness could never achieve. The orchestra, which Von Karajan subdued to the point of regretfulness during the love scene between Siegmund and his twin sister Sieglinde in Act I, later blared and crackled as Wotan and Fricka haggled about the implications of incest, thus highlighting Wagner’s philosophical meditations on the Ring rather than the story itself.

Operatic impresarios have attributed the drop in Wagner’s popularity to the absence of full-blast singers, but Von Karajan’s achievement suggests a happy solution to the problem. His low-keyed approach encourages performers to sing Wagner without strain. And why not? After all, he says, “what is forte? There is no absolute value. We try to make music-drama, not opera.”

Certainly the approach worked in Walküre. From Tenor Jon Vickers (Siegmund) and Newcomer Gundula Janowitz (Sieglinde), listeners heard the creamy lyricism of Wagner’s love music as only unforced vocalism can produce it. American Baritone Thomas Stewart’s Wotan had the slight reediness of a singer not fully matured but promising. Nilsson, the Brunnhilde, who can outshout half a dozen Wagnerian orchestras at once, concentrated instead on the compellingly human qualities of the role.

Von Karajan’s Ring, which is being mounted with a $500,000 grant from Eastern Airlines, may or may not end the current Wagnerian decline at the Met—and Manager Rudolf Bing’s well-known distaste for the German master. In the 1890-91 season, 39 of 70 Met performances were Wagner; in 1965-66, the last season at the old house, ten out of 212. Lacking the heroic singers to do justice to his demands, Wagner could return to new glory on the shoulders of a heroic conductor.