<<  -- 8 --  Roderic Dunnett    MESMERISING

McIntyre's was a wonderful performance, informed by all the stage experience and beguiling musical qualities this supremest of Wotans endlessly exudes -- not effortlessly, but by a fantastic self-immersion that verges (pace Brünnhilde) on self-immolation, and which over the years made fanatics like Martin Graham bike to Bayreuth and whistle up the hill past Haus Wahnfried just to sniff the Valhalla air.

Just to hear McIntyre literally weep the words 'Das andre' -- the omnipotent impotent who craves for 'otherness', rear his mighty mane at Brünnhilde's impudent challenge ('Ha, Freche du! Frevelst du mir? ... reize mich nicht! Besorge, was ich befahl') or wail Wotan's equivalent of Prospero's abjuration ('Zusammenbreche, was ich gebaut! Auf geb' ich mein Werk'), is like watching the psychological implosion of some great Ibsen master-builder.

After all, when depression really grabs you, all you can possibly want is 'das Ende'; I wonder how many times Wagner himself reached that point (let alone his idol Beethoven, or his spiritually worn-out, Mephistophelean peripatetic conundrum of a priestly father-in-law, the unlikely Abbé Liszt).

And so, spear (slightly prematurely) in ruins, this gigantic Wotan wanders away -- terrifically lit, or (as in Siegfried) consciously underlit, by Guy Hoare throughout this fabulously memorable Longborough Ring cycle -- into the night, having failed dismally -- unlike his appalling grandson, who then jettisons his -- to locate for himself a 'liebes Gesell'. A fahrende Geselle, perhaps -- just think: had Wotan been gay, or a bit less greedy and grandiose, there might have been none of these little problems -- and no opera -- at all.