German critics are up in arms it would appear over an act of onstage fellatio in Siegfried, the third installment of Frank Castorf’s controversial new production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
Opinion had been divided over the Das Rheingold, set in a seedy motel on Route 66, and Die Walküre, set in an oilfield in Baku. But the legendary director of Berlin’s Volksbühne seems to have crossed a boundary with Siegfried, set in East German era Alexanderplatz.
“Blowjobs, crocodiles and a communist Mount Rushmore”, laments the German newspaper Die Welt “This Ring of the Nibelung is not to be taken seriously.” Reading between the lines of their review, however, it appears that the offending act of oral sex is a case of coitus interruptus. “Wotan has spaghetti hanging out of his mouth like Don Camillo”, they explain. “Then he forces the goddess of wisdom, Erda, to her knees. But just as it is about to come to oral sex, the waiter appears and forces Wotan to pay the bill for the spaghetti and the red wine.” According to the doughty Die Welt critic, “After the last notes of Siegfried came the most rabid booing of the season.”
The classicalite website was equally condemning. “It was bound to happen in a staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle someday, but few would have expected that in Wagner’s own opera house, in his bicentenary year, his hero Siegfried would kill the fierce dragon Fafner with a machine gun instead of a magic sword.” They went on to add that “Crocodiles copulated on stage during the love duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried”, adding slightly pointlessly that this was “something the famed composer never had in his libretto.” According to them, “several people noisily left the opera house – which has no aisles down the centre, only side exits – after Siegfried pumped Fafner full of lead.”
Audience opinion has been more positive. Theodore McGuiver, for example, posted the comment on the popular Slipped Disc website: “The sight of Erda giving Wotan a blow job at the end of Act III Scene I (Träumend erschau mein Ende [Dreaming I see my end] – you couldn’t make it up) prompted someone in the audience to say something mid-performance, though I didn’t catch what it was she said. Siegfried has certainly provided some, er, challenging images but one thing you can’t say about this Ring is that it’s boring. Musically it’s fabulous and the sets are extraordinary; tighten it up dramaturgically and we could have a classic on our hands.”