That’s the running time of “Das Rheingold,” the prelude peopled with gods, dwarves and giants fighting over the gold that will cast its curse over the story. Then, at the beginning of “Die Walküre,” which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Monday night and will be screened in cinemas worldwide Saturday, we see a gesture that feels personal and true.
A stranger seeking refuge asks the lady of the house for a drink of water. As she gives it to him, their hands touch. He drinks, and the music surges: Something other than thirst needs quenching.
They are twins — Sieglinde, bittersweetly sung by the soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, and Siegmund, the leonine tenor Stuart Skelton — separated in childhood. It is their combustible, transgressive love, sparked over that first sip of water, that plants the seeds for the end of a world built on rules, power and greed. Skelton and Westbroek were bright stars in a cast led by the blazing soprano Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde. The conductor Philippe Jordan presided over the orchestra, where he whipped up voluptuously sulfurous playing from the Met players.
Casting the “Ring” is a task almost as herculean as singing it, and the Met can feel smug about much of the talent it has assembled for this revival. In Goerke, the house has found a Brünnhilde who marries vocal vitality and emotional presence in each radiant note. She takes on the physically grueling task with ninja-like focus and suppleness.
But “Die Walküre” demands a production that magnifies the work’s psychological nuances and eminently human conflicts.
This isn’t it.
Robert Lepage’s high-tech staging tickles the palate of the Instagram age with an expensive gadget made out of rotating planks that configure themselves into sculptural backdrops and surfaces for video wizardry. As a set, this behemoth is stiff, clunky and dangerous. Whenever singers are made to scramble atop its wobbly planks — mindful, perhaps, of the stumble Deborah Voigt took as Brünnhilde in 2011 — their movements are stiff, clunky and self-conscious.
And when singers don’t arrive with a fully formed idea of their characters, or the vocal resources to fill them, the machine’s smooth planes coldly project their hesitancy into the auditorium. That happened on Monday in Greer Grimsley’s Wotan, who came across as detached and bitter.
For much of the opera, the god Wotan stews in a marinade of anger, shame and impotence, torn between the implacable laws that shore up his rule and his yearning for an act of free will — like the shocking sibling love of Siegmund and Sieglinde — that could tear down his own power construct. In a long monologue, he sings of his conflicting desires and of the gnawing curse placed on the ring. The orchestra acts like a CT scan of his brain: Reflecting his subconscious thoughts with telltale leitmotifs, the musical tags denoting emotions, events and people.
But at the most chilling moment, the music shuts off completely, leaving the singer to stare into a gaping black silence. That abyss is framed by Wotan twice crying “Das Ende!” (“The end!”), once with desperate power, the second time quietly. Grimsley’s outcry lacked nihilistic conviction, and his unsteady echoing answer felt neither cleansed nor changed.
By contrast, Goerke’s Brünnhilde, who has observed her father’s despair, responded with singing of fingertip delicacy, a precise and private sound that clearly marked the awakening of compassion as her character’s destiny. But Goerke was also capable of zinging fortes in her “Hojotoho!” war cries that Wagner sets to something like a proto-ambulance siren.
Jamie Barton’s portrayal of Fricka, Wotan’s wife, was also brilliantly purposeful and vocally commanding. Her flamboyant mezzo-soprano, with its inky depths and flickering hues, rendered the character as guardian of legal integrity. But, in the surprisingly tender tone in which she passes the responsibility on to Brünnhilde, she hinted at a deeper sense of not only the futility, but also the undesirability of being proved right.
Personifying that undesirability is Hunding, Sieglinde’s cuckold husband, who has every right to demand revenge no matter how unsympathetic he may be. The bass Günther Groissböck sang the role with crisp intention and lethal bite. He was a fine foil for the pair of incestuous lovers whose passion simmers and flickers even in his stern presence.
Westbroek’s singing mirrored the gradual abandonment of domestic and moral constraints, chiseled and dark-limned at first while still under her husband’s roof, then more florid, voluble and bright as Sieglinde gives in to passion. Skelton’s Siegmund was heedless from the start — perhaps too much so, as he pushed his beefy tenor to supernatural extremes in the shouts of “Wälse! Wälse!” with which he invokes ancestral protection.
His tenor sometimes sounded frayed in subsequent phrases. But it was the sort of come-hell-or-high-water commitment that Wagner’s brilliant and megalomaniacal creation demands.
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Event Information:
‘Die Walküre’
Through May 7 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.