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Thoughts about The Ring, 2001
Excerpts from Kasper Bech Holten’s diary concerning work with The Ring, beginning in the summer of 2001 when the concept was taking shape.
Thursday May 15, 2001 – in my office
Well, we’ve started. Today we had the first proper, organised meeting about The Ring – my dramaturge Henrik Engelbrecht, set designers Steffen Aarfing and Marie í Dali, lighting designer Jesper Kongshaug and myself. Michael Schønwandt turned up at 11 o’clock, fresh back from London. Of course, we’ve chatted with one another before: Michael and I in the breaks during a choral competition – with Steffen and Marie in a very informal way over a few glasses of whisky sometime before Christmas. And with Henrik the other day on the ferry, on the trip home from a very tedious performance in Lübeck. But now it’s down to business. Today we met in my office at 9:30 and had a meeting that lasted till 3.
  
It was a brilliant start. I’ve been really nervous wondering how to get going on such a huge project, - how to come to grips in a concrete fashion with such a fantastic work as The Ring. Getting started means limiting yourself from day one, and I have been sort of stalking around the task without really daring to confront the question of what to do with it. I have probably also been too focused on exactly what to do with The Ring instead of approaching it from within and discussing what the work means to each of us, why we want to stage it, and what sort of space we can bear to be in and develop in for the next six years.
But today we finally went headlong into it. With some fantastic, highly associative, and lively discussions about matters both great and small, and with a lot of surprising themes becoming very clear very fast. It felt good to get our fingers into the task itself, rather than simply discussing our ideas about it, our expectations, previous performances and so on.
We aired a whole range of ideas about power and love and it’s striking that if you see The Ring as a sort of Mystery Play (heaven – earth – hell), all these ideas want to be there in the centre of things, in the battlefield where the fighting will take place, in the midst of the multitude – in mortality, in love? They all seem to be constantly striving for a place in that central boxing ring.
In Wagner’s day the romantic view of the world (Wotan as the romantic poet gathering the strands of the Gesamtkunstwerk) struggled with modernism (Siegfried, who transgresses all boundaries? Or Alberich?). But in our day and age, The Ring probably deals more with the idea of leaving behind a world which can be explained by simple ideologies – with great, comprehensive keys of interpretation (very masculine), with Wotan’s spear – and entering a world which is multiplex, individualised, naïve, multiethnic, globalised. Perhaps this is why Wotan has to create Siegfried, who is to be a child throughout his life: As a child, without prerequisites, perhaps he is able to embrace this multiplicity? Yet it is the feminine element, the wisdom of Brünnhilde, which proves able to liberate the world – the feminine in contrast to the masculine attempt to exert control, which embraces the whole world in one single interpretation.
And then there is the idea of the virtual space: One large, ungeographical space where you leave no traces behind you and where experiences are stored in new ways… also an exciting idea. Jesper will continue to toy with the idea of neural networks.
Thursday 21 June, 2001 – in my office
Steffen stopped us all in our tracks in a most refreshing and provocative manner by putting forward a perspective quite opposite to the one we have been working with up till now. Until now we have approached major themes like globalisation, multicentricism, and the development of genetics, the scientific drive for immortality etc, etc. Steffen suggested: What if we saw it as a family reunion? It’s fantastic to see things in miniature, too.
It will most likely be extended into a family saga, but it certainly is a fascinating angle: À la Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, etc. I can just see it: Alberich chasing the maid at the family gathering at Uncle Wotan’s – an uncle who no longer has control over his company. He steals all the shares, or whatever. One of those really good, classical family dramas. And who knows: Finally, after all those years, Siegfried destroys the family dream by snapping – not the spear, but Uncle Wotan’s huge, dominating flagpole. A nice thought….
Wednesday 18 July, 2001 – in a hotel in Bayreuth
Here we are in Bayreuth. It’s marvellous. To go to Bayreuth and work on The Ring for a whole week is an ok start, let’s face it. It feels good to be here, but it will doubtless also be a good investment. We started with a structure meeting today before things take off this evening with Die Walküre (They leave Das Rheingold until last in dress-rehearsal week, which is a shame).
We are more or less agreed that the family saga (inspiration: the sagas, Thomas Mann, Godfather, Bergman, Dynasty) is a good place to start. It is a familiar story, it brings familiarity to the characters, and it narrows the perspective: Alberich, Mime, the giants, and all the rest are various clans, part of the family, but there is a common mythology, there are common rules, there are ancient behavioural patterns. It’s like a sort of contemporary version of the old "Look behind you, Look behind you" which works so well in children’s theatre. The audience already knows that there’s something behind him (or before him!) which will make things go wrong – before the guy on the stage knows it. That’s always the best way!
But will it be too miniscule? Perhaps Marie was right when she said that great moments are in fact tiny moments which are magnified to assume almost mythological proportion. The famous moments which a family always talks about – or just knows are there in the past. The time Dad smashed a glass in anger – it might be magnified into him shattering the whole glass wall behind him at the same time, or immediately after. Small moments pile up on top of each other and become mythological moments – and that’s how family history becomes its own mythology with its own tales and rituals. It’s an exciting thought, and it’s fun how the whole world in this way may be mirrored in a family’s mythology.
Have never been to a dress rehearsal down here before. God knows what you’re supposed to wear. I’ll try a suit and tie.
Wednesday July 25, 2001 – in the plane from Frankfurt to Copenhagen
That was Bayreuth. I didn’t write anything down about the different days there – which I had meant to do – but I just couldn’t be bothered. We have been immersed in The Ring non-stop and round the clock (only interrupted by a bit of the Tour de France on TV and a couple of jogs – and there was an extraordinarily delicious and sumptuous dinner yesterday at Bürgerreuth), and I simply couldn’t find the energy to sit down and think it all through and write about it again each time there was a break.
It has all been wonderful and very, very fruitful. Much better than we had dared hope, and we have put in some work which we most certainly would not have been able to at home – to be together, fully concentrated, in Bayreuth, for such a length of time – to see The Ring, to talk about it, to work through it systematically – all this has given us a sense of having started off on a journey together. We sat in the conference room for four whole days and worked slowly but surely, scene by scene, through The Ring. Played music, read passages of text silently or aloud for each other, discussed the situations and possible solutions….Our ambition was to finish in two days, but it turned out to take the whole week just to get through it all. We were, however, pretty thorough in our analyses. Everyone has been totally open and honest, and all ideas have been aired without anyone raising their eyebrows at them. And occasionally the craziest ideas turned out to be the best ones.
The old idea of traces took shape when Henrik put forward the idea of an attic – the family’s lumber room. And that idea merged decisively with the idea of a family saga when I got the idea that it might all take place while Brünnhilde is standing in the lumber room, while Hagen and Günther have gone out to kill Siegfried. At that moment she – our heroine, in contrast to an endless number of Rings over the past 20 years with their focus on Wotan – must go back to the family lumber room, seek out all the old things, and relive in her memory how it had all come to pass. How things had come so far that she now had to sacrifice her husband. She will understand…."dass Wissend würde ein Weib!
The prologue of Das Rheingold describes how memories come welling up one by one, pile up, expand, she tries to remember how it all began…Once upon a time… and then the Rhinemaidens appear in her memory and the next few hours are about Brünnhilde’s attempt to understand why things had gone as they did. The knowledge that she will need in her final, grand confrontation with her father in the lumber room… a desperate woman who accuses her father but also forgives him. And who finally drops the match she originally lit and burns down the whole caboodle. The family’s history must be incinerated, all traces destroyed. What is left behind?
This is how we will stage Brünnhilde’s Ring. The woman’s Ring about the sacrifices women have to make. And the cruel sacrifices that love demands.
Well, there are lots of good thoughts and ideas in circulation now, but it all seems refreshingly tangible. Steffen and Marie are now going home to do their designs, and lots of things have to slot into place. Luckily, there is still time. We will be meeting again on the evening of 28 August. That will be good. There mustn’t be too long between meetings if the pot is to be kept on the boil.
It will be intriguing to hear Michael’s reaction to it all, but he sounded enthusiastic when I mentioned the thing about Brünnhilde’s memories to him on the phone the other day.
We’re about to land. It’s time for lights out.
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The four operas
Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
Götterdämmerung
Articles
Kasper Bech Holten:
The Journey Begins
Henrik Engelbrecht:
Vision and Reality
Kasper Bech Holten:
Thoughts about The Ring, 2001
Chronology:
Wagner, Die Walküre and Der Ring des Nibelungen
Gallery
See the photos from Die Walküre
Biographies
The Ring Team...
The Cast
See the cast
Biographies are available at www.kglteater.dk
Die Walküre is sponsored by the Bikuben Foundation
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