Wagner work given a breakaway from cliche

A female voice floats from a loudspeaker, sounding calm amid the morning chaos inside Los Angeles Opera's costume shop downtown. “We're ready for a dwarf in Fitting Room 2,'' the voice intones.

In recent days, the costume shop has been transformed into a world of dwarfs and giants, maidens and monsters. Some can grow taller or smaller.

Body parts and clothing accessories defy all conventional rules of proportion.

“It blurs the line between what's a costume and what's a set piece and what's a prop,'' observes John Musselman, administrative assistant for the shop, from his post at the front desk.

Fitting Room 2 may be ready for a dwarf but on this particular morning, a few weeks before the opening night, Los Angeles Opera is nowhere near ready for the first chapter of its most ambitious undertaking to date: the company's $32-million production of Richard Wagner's four-part mythological epic about gold and greed, The Ring of the Nibelung.

The first opera of the four, Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), opened recently; Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) begins April 4 and Siegfried will be unveiled on September 26.

Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods) is scheduled to arrive at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 23, 2010.

Scampering through the costume shop, paintbrush in hand, is Achim Freyer, the director-designer at the helm of all four operas.

This bearded, 74-year-old German sporting black Converse-style sneakers and a swirling meringue of white hair, has become — with all apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien — Los Angeles's new Lord of the Ring.

Now you see him, now you don't; he is tweaking the seam of an overcoat or painting red veins on the white of an enormous eyeball.

Freyer's daughter, Amanda, who serves with her father as costume designer, is busy in the backroom with a brush.

Freyer's mission: to create a timeless world for Wagner's epic that pays homage to its distinguished history yet rejects all previous staging conventions.

“We have so many technical things that Wagner did not have,'' he says.

Talked into attraction

The director — who confesses “my English is small'' — communicates with non-German speakers during rehearsals with the translating help of Christina Baitzel, special assistant to Los Angeles Opera General Director Placido Domingo for the Ring.

When he switches to English, Freyer's brief words sum up the personal toll of the job that has gobbled up four years of his life: “I have too many to do!''

After decades of gloomy Northern European winters, the Berlin-born Freyer, when in Los Angeles, likes to follow the sun.

In the sun, Freyer's hair looks less like meringue and more like a white-hot flame as he talks about how he got cajoled into this gargantuan undertaking by the late Edgar Baitzel, formerly Los Angeles Opera's chief operating officer.

Before his international career as a director of theatre and opera, Freyer trained as a painter.

About four years ago he reached a point when he decided to give up stage work to “paint, paint, paint, all the time''.

That was about the same time Baitzel approached Freyer about directing a new Ring cycle. Baitzel died last year of cancer; Christina Baitzel is his widow.

Freyer says Edgar Baitzel, also a German native, chatted with him about bringing out a production of The Threepenny Opera by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill — a logical choice for Freyer, who was a Brecht “meisterschuler'' (master student) and has staged work for the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, in 1949.

But, Freyer recalls with a laugh, Baitzel told him “The Ring is better'' in a manner that suggested trading a piece of musical theatre for about 15 hours of Wagner was like choosing an apple instead of a banana.

Freyer resisted; he considered himself not only done with stage work but also finished with Wagner. “I had done Tristan und Isolde.

That was enough,'' he exclaims, referring to a 1994 production in Brussels, Belgium.

But then, Freyer says, he and Baitzel, who had overseen productions of the complete works of Wagner in 1983 as assistant manager of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Germany, started talking of gesamtkunstwerk, the blending of disciplines.

“I thought, I can make a painting with the story,'' Freyer says. “I think I can do the gesamtkunstwerk. I tried to find a way of painting with theatre and music.''

Trust in prowess

Los Angeles Opera music director James Conlon — who counts among his credits nine Wagner-heavy years as chief conductor of the Cologne Opera in Germany — is confident that Freyer is capable of creating the “timeless, placeless place'' in which the Ring, Conlon believes, must exist.

“I think the power of myth always goes beyond the mundane,'' the conductor says. “The biggest cliché of the last few decades has been to reduce the subject to a specific.

“I've seen Marxist Rings, Freudian Rings, Jungian Rings, Rings in tuxedos — all the things that in the 1950s and 1960s were considered rebellious are clichés now,'' Conlon continues.

“The Ring is Freudian and it's Jungian and it's Marxist and it's Keynesian and Buddhist and Christian — it's all of those things but not one of those things.''

Another of Conlon's Ring requirements: that the visuals not upstage the opera.

“In the case of Achim Freyer, he has lived with opera as a part of his culture — he is not someone who is ‘dropping in' on The Ring,'' Conlon says. “The drama is in the music.''

Freyer agrees — but among his many dreams is to stage a Ring without music, with actors speaking Wagner's text to emphasise its poetry.

He would also like to stage Dante's Divine Comedy someday and has his eye on mounting Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), a poetic French novel about an evil misanthrope consisting of six cantos written between 1868 and 1869 by the Comte de Lautreamont.

The work has been cited as an inspiration by Surrealist painters including Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp.

“While in Los Angeles, despite the demands of Ring, Freyer plans to continue another of his dreams: his painting.

His 1970 watercolour Seestuck (Seascape) is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until April 19 in the exhibition Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Culture.

And Los Angeles's Ace Gallery plans a show of his work in 2010 in conjunction with Ring Festival Los Angeles.

“It is completely separate, but it is the same person,'' Freyer says of himself as director and as visual artist in his quirky, gesamtkunstwerk-y way. “I do The Ring, and I paint.''

And despite his initial reservations, The Ring now holds a place among his dreams.

“When I hear a work for realisation, it's like I am pregnant, and I must give birth — I know, the image is very feminine,'' he says.

“The piece is so strong and so hard and so philosophical and so political that I must tell it on the stage.''