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Castellucci is an auteurist director who makes the extraordinary appear pure, who conjures surprises that baffle and amaze, generally self-indulgently, however typically brilliantly. Driven extra by imagery than plot, he has been greatest suited to staging oratorios or live performance works like Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony. When it was introduced that he would direct his first “Ring” in Brussels, there have been scattered groans amongst opera followers who puzzled whether or not his non-narrative model might maintain 15 hours of music.
His “Ring” does go towards the grain. He isn’t staging the 4 operas with a single idea, like Valentin Schwarz did along with his acerbically human drama on the Bayreuth Festival; every installment will stand by itself. And Castellucci isn’t aiming for blunt relevance. It has lengthy grow to be trendy to decorate up the “Ring” as an eco-fable, or in up to date costumes. Patrice Chéreau’s centennial manufacturing at Bayreuth in 1976, maybe essentially the most well-known staging, is a Marxist allegory of modernity. Castellucci, although, returns to the summary method of Wagner’s grandson, Wieland Wagner, that dominated Bayreuth after World War II.
He trusts the libretto to inform the story, and he trusts it to be well timed by itself. After all, the “Ring” has at all times been related; that’s the nature of mythic storytelling. And he isn’t misguided in having the operas stand alone. They are distinct — “Siegfried,” for instance, an interjection of opera buffa, and “Das Rheingold” a seamless, proto-cinematic imaginative and prescient for the artwork kind’s future. In the primary two installments, Castellucci has introduced an prolonged, visible essay on the essence of every work, his staging behaving like Wagner’s rating in continually commenting on and illuminating the motion. The outcomes have novelistic sweep and ambiguity, and are each persuasive and breathtakingly theatrical.
The world of “Das Rheingold,” in Castellucci’s manufacturing, is considered one of tribalism and violent hierarchy. Valhalla, the lately accomplished residence of the gods, is a fortress constructed on loot. Wotan and Fricka, its rulers, enter by navigating — perhaps even trampling — the our bodies, made to look nude, of numerous individuals laid out throughout the stage. Surrounding them are statues and reliefs primarily based on the Elgin Marbles, the Greek friezes which have lengthy been housed on the British Museum.
