When it comes to the Ring Cycle, musicians and directors are often confronted with the 20th-century marketing maxim: “What becomes a legend most?” After two dense acts of murder, incest, and no small dose of backstory, Act III of Die Walküre opens with the Walkürenritt, the cavalcade of Brünnhilde’s eight sisters and a musical number that has permeated manifold angles of pop culture—from Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd to the 1/9 Air Calvary Regiment in Apocalypse Now. Owing to this, Wagner Journal editor Barry Millington calls the Ride of the Valkyries in his entry for The New Grove Dictionary of Opera “hackneyed,” but adds that it “has much to recommend it, especially when sung and staged. The scoring illustrates a characteristic device of Wagner’s: a brass theme in unison cutting across a dense texture, in this case of trilling, antiphonal woodwind, and swirling string arpeggios.”
Put more simply, soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer calls it “a sigh of relief.” Harmer sings Ortlinde in the Metropolitan Opera’s new and controversial production of Die Walküre, helmed by Robert Lepage, which opened in April of this year (she also sang Freia in the new Ring’s Das Rheingold and sings Gutrune in Götterdämmerung in the coming season).
“Wagner was a genius to start [Act III] with just this incredible musical motif that we’ve been waiting for all night,” Harmer says. “He was no idiot. He knew that Act I was long and Act II was a lot of storytelling. There’s a lot of information coming at you—particularly from Wotan.”
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All of this tension and meat breaks almost literally—indeed, nearly the first half hour of Walküre’s third act features no male voices—in the Ride, a notion that Lepage expanded upon using his production’s infamous set: a 45-ton set piece comprised of 24 planks manipulated to tell the entire four-part legend. Nicknamed “the Machine” by audiences and Met staffers alike, the set is used gradually increasingly throughout all four operas—barely in the early stages of Rheingold and with an organic progression throughout Walküre that spikes at the top of Act III as eight Valkyries “ride” the planks, reins in hand, as though they were horses. (Götterdämmerung promises 3D technology.)
On the production’s opening night in April, the audience went wild—a stark contrast to the Met’s last Ring, a storybook Otto Schenk production that brought the curtain up in the middle of the interlude that wasn’t conducive to an audience reaction. “They realized we were in the middle of this scene and they didn’t want to disturb it,” says Harmer, one of the many Schenk veterans now singing in this shiny (albeit heavy) new Ring. For the Valkyries, their ninth cast member is not always as professional as the singers onstage: among other mishaps, mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti (Siegrune) fell off the Machine during April 28’s Ride. She was not seriously injured and continued the scene and the show’s run.
Yet for all it takes, what the Machine has given this new production is a dream for singers: “It projects the voice out,” explains mezzo-soprano Marjorie Elinor Dix, who plays Waltraute and who, like Harmer, also appeared in Otto Schenk’s Ring. “In the old production, they had assumed doublings on solo vocal lines because they weren’t able to be heard. That made Wotan’s job very hard, too.”
“We had the moment with Maestro Levine where he said, ‘This set has now put you guys front-and-center where you should be, and it’s wonderful, so let’s take away those doublings,’” adds contralto Lindsay Ammann, who not only made her Met debut as Rossweisse but also her Wagnerian role debut. “I think one of the greatest things was getting to be an individual Valkyrie, having our own characteristics and personalities coming through, but also really feeling like a group of sisters.”
Wagner’s Valkyries are a unique lot to the Ring and opera in general: apart from the trio of Rhinemaidens in Das Rheingold, the whole of the Ring Cycle offers no other ensemble piece. Such an instance could allow the taut dramatic line to slacken. In large ensemble numbers like the sextets from Lucia di Lammermoor and Il barbiere di Siviglia, time tends to stand still as characters take account of their feelings. The Valkyries’ scenes in Act III, however, continually move forward.
“When you think of some other musical sextets or quintets, there’s a lot of repetition,” says Dix. “You don’t have a lot of repetition [in Walküre]. You have the famous ‘Hojotoho’s, but that’s just on that one little section. There’s a lot of different lines coming, one after the other, and the action moves through two different scenes: first all the joking around and the camaraderie and the excitement of meeting on the battlefield. You’re sort of getting acquainted with these girls. And then along comes Brünnhilde and she’s got Sieglinde with her and the sword and everything’s excitement, excitement. And then you have Wotan and so it’s pretty intense. . . . From the very first notes to ‘Weh!’ at the end, it doesn’t let up. It’s a half-hour ensemble.”
“My experience is usually those big Mozart ensembles in La clemenza di Tito or Don Giovanni,” adds Harmer. “Those types of ensembles, you almost become choral singers. There is an emphasis on blending, as there should be—that’s what it’s written for. Wagner didn’t write it to be blended.”
Losing the doubling is a rarity for this scene. In Bryan Magee’s Aspects of Wagner, the author notes that even Bayreuth, with its acoustics practically bespoke to the demands of Wagner’s works, cannot project the voices. He writes: “ . . . Rudolf Kempe once complained to me—and no one could call him a noisy conductor—that there were some scenes in which it was simply not possible to get enough volume out into the auditorium: the Ride of the Valkyries, for instance . . . ”
Allowing each individual singer to shine is also revelatory of Wagner’s dramatic and structure and allows the Valkyries to shine as eight individuals, weaving their musical lines together to create a stronger whole. “The differences between the Valkyries is very important,” says soprano Molly Fillmore, who made her Met debut as Helmwige. Dix concurs, emphasizing how the characterization plays out differently than when, in doubling up lines, the Valkyries start to sound more like the Von Trapps.
Harmer notes that the fugues at the end of the Valkyries’ scene are particularly telling: “Those fugues, the way Wagner writes it, the voices have to come out individually.” Extremes dominate the orchestrations and vocal lines, with mezzos scraping the bottoms of their ranges and sopranos going above the staff. Blending is an impossibility. Harmer describes the scene as “this outcry of emotion from eight individual girls who are losing their sister, and that’s a big moment.” While there is cohesion, there is never a less “ensemble”-sounding moment in this ensemble.
Some challenges, however, still remain. Wagnerites are fervent—and often fastidious—fans who will travel around the globe to see a Ring Cycle in its entirety, especially a new production (and especially one such as the Met’s which has been touted almost in tandem with Peter Gelb’s assumption of the top leadership role within the company). Moreover, the Ride is a work that every opera-goer, regardless of knowledge or fandom level, knows. Being able to perform such an iconic work without coming off as, in Millington’s words, hackneyed, is a feat. Or is it?
“I don’t know if pressure is the word that I would use, but I would say that it’s more tangible,” says Ammann. “Being a part of this scene is more tangible to people in general because of the connections that it has with people’s pasts, childhoods, whatever.” Of course, with the tangibility comes a rush. All four of the eight Valkyries I spoke with for this article used the word “cool” at one point or another. “It’s hard with a capital ‘H,’ but fun with a capital ‘F,’” states Dix.
“Whether you’re on the stage or you’re in the audience or you’re watching in the movie theaters, when you hear those first chords, there’s something internal that happens,” says Ammann. “We’ve heard it growing up our whole lives. It brings back so many memories to every single person.”
The legendary status of the Valkyries takes a backseat to the demands of Wagner. “Those fugues are hard,” says Harmer. “If you don’t look at that for a couple of days, it goes away. I think that was Wagner’s way of saying that these are intelligent and strong women, because they’re given intelligent and strong music.” Harmer also draws parallels to the other characters she plays in the cycle—the goddess Freia, whose immortality shines in the music, has a far less dirty job than the Valkyries, also reflected in her leitmotifs. When Harmer takes on the role of Gutrune, however, she notes that her music is wholly uncomplicated, reflecting her mortal status and, as such, her lack of knowledge beyond the one moment.
“There isn’t any time for nervousness,” says Dix who, when starting out as Gerhilde, was the first of the eight ladies to sing. “There’s just one line delivered after the other. It’s precision, and often you’re dealing with precision movements too. You’ve got quite a few people onstage at once and the lines coming one after the other.”
Dix also notes, however, that once you’ve mastered the role of one Valkyrie, you’re close to mastering all of them (Fach providing). “You pretty much know everybody’s parts by the end,” says Fillmore, who has sung three separate Valkyries in New York, San Francisco (alongside Harmer), and Germany. “You just have to, so you know what to react to. It’s like every other scene that one is in.” Other Valkyries in the Met’s new production have sung several of the roles as well, a few even performing as Brünnhilde in other houses—and for Ammann, she sees her work in this role as a gateway drug to meatier Wagnerian feats. Unlike other roles, the group setting provides a great deal of support and opportunities for growth.
Musicality aside, there is also the team dynamic of this scene, one that is predicated largely upon nine musicians creating a moment in opera both grand and intimate—an army of soldiers are reassembled and brought into Valhalla, while a family of sisters loses one member to eternal sleep. Like a string quartet, as Valkyries depart and enter the Met’s cast in particular, there is the balance of seniors and freshmen, neophytes and sages, that has to be constantly restored for cohesion.
“I was lucky enough to be a part of a group of Valkyries, most of whom had done the Schenk production with each other. There were a few of us coming in as new Valkyries for the first time, and each individual kind of found their own place in the group,” says Ammann. Fillmore was also making her official Met debut in the role, having covered Helmwige in the Schenk production’s final spin. “It’s a really supportive group of women,” Fillmore notes (Deborah Voigt even hosted a girls’ night for her fellow Valkyries at her apartment in the name of sisterly bonding). “For a production like this, which does take so much concentration, that’s what made it so enjoyable. . . . We were just very lucky to have a group of women who could not only sing and act together, but talk together and support each other very well.”
