Yesterday’s second post was dedicated to music and Mascagni, so, to follow the thread, in today’s first post I’ll briefly look at the latest production of Wagner’s Die Walküre that opened on Tuesday night at Milan’s La Scala.
Since the '60s the opening night of the season at La Scala attracted protests.
Things weren't different this year as various groups – including students protesting against the government's education reform, workers angry at the government's culture cuts and migrants demanding residence permits – gathered outside in protest.
Even La Scala was hit by the government cuts and, as demonstrators and riot police clashed outside, the echo of the protests arrived inside the theatre with maestro Daniel Barenboim reading a statement before the performance in which he expressed his concerns about the cuts and his worries about the death of culture, highlighting in his speech that protecting culture is a duty.
Most of the features about this new production of Wagner's work mentioned Belgian director Guy Cassiers's use of technology and visual effects and praised Barenboim’s direction.
Almost nothing was said about the costumes that I actually found rather interesting since they were designed by Belgian Tim Van Steenbergen.
A graduate of Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Van Steenbergen also worked as Olivier Theyskens’s first assistant.
After launching his first collection in 2002 in Paris, he set up his own company and developed collaborations with various brands and labels including Swarovski, Italian Novella and French Lancel.
Van Steenbergen regularly designs costumes for international movies, theatre, dance and opera performances and he has so far worked for various directors and theatres.
His fashion designs are usually characterised by draped motifs and developed with great respect towards tradition and craftsmanship.
His costumes for Richard Wagner’s opera cycle "Der Ring des Nibelungen" were created following the same high quality standards.
For Die Walküre the designer moved from the main themes of Wagner’s piece – love, incest and rebellion – and combined them with oppressive, dark and gothic atmospheres.
While Wotan's warrior daughter Brünnhilde (Nina Stemme)’s costume featured the designer’s trademark draped motifs, Fricka (Ekaterina Gubanova)’s included some vivid splashes of dramatic red, yet the most interesting effects were achieved through deconstruction or accumulation.
Wotan (Vitalij Kowaljow) for example looked as if he were wearing a rucksack made out of yards of fabric piled up on his back.
Van Steenbergen often added random pieces of fabrics to his costumes almost to create body distortions and enhance, change and transform some parts of the singers’ bodies, from the back to the bottom or the shoulder area.
This trick added to Wagner's opera a sense of experimentalism and drama that are often missing in more traditional performances of classic opera pieces.
In a way the rebelliousness of characters such as Siegmund, son of the god Wotan, in love with his mortal sister Sieglinde, and of Brunnhilde were portrayed through deconstructed elements, while the yards of fabric piled up here and there could also be a hint at the main themes of Wagner’s tale, that is power tangled with familial love and incest and the struggle to free oneself from social conventions metaphorically depicted maybe by the fabric that entangled, wrapped and trapped the singers' bodies.
If you'd like to discover more about Van Steenbergen's costumes but you missed Die Walküre on its opening night (it was also broadcast on different TV channels), you can still catch up with it in various cinemas all over the world, just check out this list to find a cinema near you.
La Scala is in its second year of staging Wagner's four-opera Ring cycle by 2013, as part of the celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the German composer's birth, and I genuinely hope that this ambitious plan and Van Steenbergen's costumes will maybe inspire more young fashion designers all over the world to start working for the opera.
I'm sure they would inject into it some much needed freshness and also help attracting a younger audience.
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