Too HIP to Be Square

Ask most opera lovers what comes to mind when they think about Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, and they’ll likely mention the huge voices and lush, booming orchestras of the so-called golden age of the 1930s and ’40s—not the transparent, mellow instrumental sounds and light, flexible voices typical of period-instrument performances. Indeed, when I mentioned to friends that I’d recently attended a memorable historically informed performance of Siegfried, the third opera in the Ring cycle, I was met with bemused looks.

Beginning in the mid-20th century, the historically informed performance (HIP) movement led to dramatic reinterpretations of Renaissance, baroque, classical, and some Romantic era music. Proponents relied on period instruments (or replicas) and scholarly research to convey the stylistic norms and sounds of those earlier eras. In general, this led to swifter tempos and thinner textures; musicians used vibrato and portamento (the smooth gliding transition from one note to another) sparingly, if at all.

Although of less interest to the HIP movement, Wagner has been performed on period instruments. Simon Rattle led the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Das Rheingold at the 2004 BBC Proms. The following year, the Harmonia Mundi label released a period-instrument interpretation of Der Fliegende Holländer. But performing a complete, historically informed Ring cycle on period instruments would have seemed far-fetched in 2016, when the conductor Kent Nagano joked with a musician from Concerto Köln, his period-instrument ensemble, that they should attempt just such a thing.

What began as a joke led to the period-instrument performance of Siegfried I saw on June 14, at the Dresden Music Festival, with the Festival Orchestra collaborating with Concerto Köln. (It was a concert performance—just instrumentalists and singers—not a staged one with costumes and sets.) Nagano’s initial goal was simply to publish findings about Wagner’s interpretative ideas. “It’s been quite a bit of detective work,” he told me over coffee before the performance. Wagner was influenced by Italian bel canto opera, which featured light, nimble voices and virtuosic ornamentation—in stark contrast to the heavier, more sedentary voices that are usually cast in Wagnerian roles. But after musicologists scoured the composer’s original scores and extensive writings about performance, they realized that he also wanted his musicians to use vibrato sparingly and only as a form of ornamentation.

In light of some of the testier debates that have unfolded over the decades about the “correct” manner in which to perform baroque music, Nagano emphasized that he is not trying to enforce his HIP Wagner as the “right” way but simply as “another way.”