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 On the evening of May 7, 2005, darkness engulfed the ornate auditorium of the Teatro Amazonas Opera House in the northern city of Manaus, the only sound to be heard - the primeval groan of a low, E-flat bass note - emanated surreptitiously from the theater's packed orchestra pit.
No, it was not another power outage so typical of the region, but was, in fact, the prelude to Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), the first of his four-part, sixteen-hour Norse saga, known collectively to fans as The Ring of the Nibelung - a cautionary pre-Tolkien tale that ambitiously tracks the corruption of a mythical world-gone-wrong through its utter destruction and redemptive rebirth.
At the curtain's rise, three nubile nymphs, called "Rhinemaidens," are seen to frolic off the waters of the onstage riverbank. They are soon joined by the gloomy figure of a troll, the Nibelung Alberich (sung by Brazilian bass Pepes do Valle). Seeking to catch one of them off guard, he is teased then aroused by the maidens' obvious charms.
Despite his loathsome visage, the sprites continue their amorous play by deliberately tempting to lure the poor creature to a watery grave.
Disgusted by their taunts, the lustful gnome resolves to wreak vengeance on them: if he cannot steal their hearts, he gathers, then their fabulous treasure trove will be his instead. Renouncing love forever, the Nibelung plunges into the depths and swims off with the horde of gold, leaving the Rhinemaidens behind to mourn the loss of their luster.
To solidify his power-base, Alberich later coerces his minions into forging an all-powerful ring - the object of each character's singular pursuit and the ruinous cause of their eventual downfall.
Little did the audience of eight-hundred strong realize it was the German composer himself who started the by-now familiar trend of lowering a theater's houselights, in order to force his public to pay closer attention to the works at hand - works that Wagner had long desired to have performed in a house built to his own exacting standards.
The locale chosen was a picturesque tract of land a brief walking distance from the town of Bayreuth, a humble, middle-class burgh ideally situated in northern Bavaria. Thus it was that in 1876 the celebrated annual Summer Music Festival was inaugurated there.
By contrast, Manaus at the time was but a hollowed-out clearing in the middle of the tropical rainforest. Today, it is a bustling business and commercial center, thanks to the so-called Zona Franca (Free Trade Zone), with a population of over a million and a half.
Still, the significance of a German-language Ring, a supremely challenging endeavor for any opera company - whose scenic and musical demands have tested the mettle of lesser theaters - performed on Brazilian soil, cannot possibly be overlooked. This was to be a monumental undertaking of truly historic proportions.
The expected budget for the event, reported to be around 3.2 million reais, or US$ 1.6 million - the equivalent of one American greenback for every resident in the Amazon capital - would have to make due not only for the Ring but for other works anticipated for 2005, including a run of Rossini's The Barber of Seville.
With that in mind, two complete cycles were planned: one for May 7, 8, 10 and 12, and the other for May 14, 15, 17 and 19.
For the past few seasons, however, single performances of the various Ring components have been fully mounted and staged in Manaus, with Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera in the cycle, the first up in 2002, followed by Siegfried in 2003, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) in 2004.
This year's new production of Das Rheingold (made possible by state grants and private-sector donations) was unveiled only as an integral part of the whole.
"It was a kind of test to see how the Brazilian voices were going to function," Luiz Fernando Malheiro, principal conductor and artistic director of the Amazonas Opera Festival, told Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. "Any apprehensions I may have had were ultimately unjustified."
Although heavily billed as the first complete Brazilian Ring cycle, in actuality the Festival's "low-budget and low-tech" approach is only the second time Wagner's epic tetralogy was presented in the country: the first one, in 1922, took place in Rio and was done by a visiting German troupe contracted by legendary impresario Walter Mocchi.
But how did the seeming incompatibility of a Ring in the rainforest come about? The answer is deceptively simple and can be traced back to the naïveté of one Aidan Lang, the show's 47-year-old British-born director, whose previous experiences boast of stints in Manaus and São Paulo, as well as appearances with Glyndebourne's touring wing, the Netherlands' Maastricht Festival, and the Buxton Festival in England, which he still runs.
"Malheiro and I were talking about what we should do next one year and he suggested something German. 'What about the Ring?' I joked. Well, that'll teach me."
A Formidable Task
The task at hand was a formidable one, to be sure, and not to be taken lightly, considering the stifling work environment they all had to endure (and sweat) in, and the high degree of planning undoubtedly involved in the project.
"If I offered this to Welsh or Scottish Operas, they would tell me to think again." Remarkably, though, the success of the series was well worth the extra effort.
"To be able to do a Ring cycle here, for an audience that has never seen one, is absolutely extraordinary," an exuberant Lang declared. "It's the ultimate gig in the ultimate place," even if that place turned out to be a rather steamy tropical jungle.
Canadian tenor Alan Woodrow, who sang the role of the young Siegfried, concurs with the director's views: "The climate here is very hot and very humid, but I think that because of that you can sing well. After all, singers inhale steam to help get their voices into good shape, but with the 90-percent humidity here, you don't have to do that."
Notwithstanding the on-again/off-again air-conditioning system, nature sometimes has a way of taking its own precarious path, especially with regard to lumber use.
"They're very good with wood," said Lang of the stagehands, "but we do have to remind the set-builders to use screws. Because of the humidity, nails tend to pop out."
Other exotic hindrances were almost as life threatening, such as the incident where Japanese soprano Eiko Senda suffered an intense allergic reaction to a native spider's bite moments before curtain time. A massive dose of antihistamine was administered to Senda just in time for her stage cue.
In spite of the potential hazards of opera in the Amazon wilderness, the bill for the two cycles went blissfully unnoticed by most patrons - with the best seats in the house going for a top price of US$ 20.00 per ticket, all of the performances were quickly sold out.
Equally attractive to the foreign press were the production's raked platform stage, complete with scientific and molecular décor (both cost-cutting, space-saving devices), and its pro-ecological message.
"I'm especially proud of the helmets, which are made of papier-mâché," boasted Ashley Martin-Davis, the British set and costume designer. "They look like aluminum, and of course the singers love them because they have almost no weight."
In a land where the average person's monthly wage can be just as skimpy as Rio's scantily-clad Carnaval participants, that speaks volumes for the locals' creativity and resourcefulness in the face of ever-mounting political and economic problems.
Said Mr. Martin-Davis, "(It) taught me that if you have the labor and the ingenuity, you can always make the materials work for you."
"When I first came to Manaus in 2002, it was definitely a very big new experience for me," voiced American soprano Maria Russo, an opera singer from upstate-New York who was cast as Wotan's favorite daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde.
"Even now, it sometimes seems amazing that we are actually doing this here. I've done a lot of Rings, and this is definitely not your ordinary situation. It's extreme."
(To be continued…)
Joe Lopes, a naturalized American citizen born in Brazil, was raised and educated in New York City, where he worked for many years in the financial sector. In 1996, he moved to Brazil with his wife and daughters. In 2001, he returned to the U.S. and now resides in North Carolina with his family. He is a lover of all types of music, especially opera and jazz, as well as an incurable fan of classic and contemporary films. You can email your comments to JosmarLopes@msn.com.
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