Tyler Nelson rehearsing his part as Froh in Das Rheingold
When the curtain rises at Belmont University’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, the audience will behold a shimmering, high-tech realm. Powerful gods, resourceful demigods and malevolent dwarfs will inhabit this fantastical world. Watch out for bone-crushing giants.
The Fisher Center will also be awash in some of the most sumptuous, daring and loud symphonic music ever written, courtesy of the 19th-century German Romantic composer Richard Wagner. Nashville Opera will stage Wagner’s Das Rheingold as part of the celebratory opening of the new Fisher Center. Architects behind Belmont’s $180 million performing arts center modeled the new hall on some of Europe’s grandest opera houses. Naturally, John Hoomes, Nashville Opera’s longtime artistic director, wanted to mark the occasion with something big.
“It doesn’t get any bigger than Das Rheingold,” Hoomes tells the Scene. “It’s certainly the most elaborate, challenging work we’ve ever staged.”
First performed in 1869, Das Rheingold is the first of four operas that make up Wagner’s mighty Ring Cycle. The composer found inspiration for his sprawling libretto in Norse mythology. Das Rheingold’s plot, in a Wagnerian nutshell, goes something like this: Alberich, a member of a subterranean race of dwarfs called the Nibelung, happens upon a trio of river nymphs guarding a hoard of gold. The Rhine maidens reject the hideous little troll’s lustful advances. They also inadvertently tell him that anyone hateful enough to renounce love can fashion the gold into a ring and achieve absolute power. You can guess what happens next.
Meanwhile on a mountaintop, Wotan, the king of the gods, has a problem. He’s agreed to hand over Freia, the goddess of youth, to a pair of giants as payment for a grand hall called Valhalla. How can he get out of this miserable contract? Loge, a demigod trickster, has a suggestion: Why not steal Alberich’s ill-gotten gold and use it to pay off the giants? The treachery and deceit that ensue over the course of Rheingold’s two-and-a-half hours lay the groundwork for the entire Ring, and it sets the stage for the eventual twilight of the gods.
There are controversial elements to any staging of Wagner’s work. In addition to his powerful operas, he wrote antisemitic texts. And it’s been noted that several of his characters, including Alberich, can be interpreted as Jewish stereotypes. In April, Nashville Opera hosted a discussion — whose panelists included Rabbi Michael Shulman, the education director at Nashville’s Temple Ohabei Shalom, and Dr. Kira Thurman, author of Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms — to explore how to handle performing Wagner’s operas. The panel concluded that staging these benchmark pieces while educating the audience about the creator’s racist views is the right approach.
Joshua Jeremiah rehearsing his part as Donner in Das Rheingold
This weekend’s staging of Rheingold won’t be Nashville Opera’s first foray into Wagner. The company staged the composer’s The Flying Dutchman during the 1999-2000 season. But Hoomes insists, jokingly, that Dutchman doesn’t count as real Wagner. “Dutchman was Wagner’s first opera, and his style had not matured,” says Hoomes. “You still hear influences of Bellini and early Verdi in that opera.”
Hoomes says the decision to stage music from the Ring flowed from two unrelated conversations. The first was with baritone Lester Lynch following his appearance in Nashville Opera’s 2019 production of Madame Butterfly. Lynch mentioned that opera companies in Europe were showing interest in casting him as Wotan in various Ring Cycle productions.
“I told John Hoomes that I didn’t feel ready to sing the role of Wotan,” Lynch recalls. “Wotan is the biggest, baddest, most epic role in all of opera. For a baritone, it’s a destination role. But I told John if I could try the role out in Nashville first, well, maybe then I’d be ready.”
Later, Hoomes spoke with Bob Fisher, Belmont University’s recently retired president, about the new concert hall named in his family’s honor. “Bob told me he wanted Nashville Opera to perform at the new center, and he thought we should do something really big,” says Hoomes. “Then I remembered my conversation with Lester, and I started thinking about Wagner’s Ring.”
When it comes to staging operas from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, directors have often let their imaginations run wild. Productions have ranged from traditional presentations with singers decked out in breast plates and Viking horns, to bizarre avant-garde designs. Germany’s Bayreuth Festival, for example, once had a production of the Ring set at a West Texas motel and rundown gas station. So much for Teutonic mountaintops.
For Nashville’s first Rheingold, Hoomes decided to go with a production that is sleek, modern and high-tech. The main set will be a 28-foot-tall, high-definition video wall that will display original imagery by noted lighting and video designer Barry Steele. And forget the Viking horns. Designer Matt Logan has created a new collection of costumes for the opera’s cast. “We found inspiration for the opera’s look from graphic novels and Marvel Comics,” says Hoomes.
The decision to stage the first opera from Wagner’s tetralogy raises the obvious question: Is there a complete Ring Cycle in Nashville’s future? No doubt, Hoomes has assembled an ideal cast for it.
In addition to Lynch, the current production includes the dramatic soprano Othalie Graham as Freia. Graham is a veteran Wagnerian familiar to local opera fans for her performances in Nashville Opera’s Turandot and Girl of the Golden West. “I’d travel to Nashville to perform any opera for John Hoomes,” says Graham. “It would be wonderful to do a complete Ring Cycle.”
But a great cast alone won’t bring a complete Ring Cycle to Nashville. Says Hoomes: “In the end, it will take financial support of Wagnerian proportions.”
