Götterdämmerung at Eurajoki Bel Canto, the 12th of August, 2022

Eurajoki Bel Canto finally – after all the Covid issues – reached the final opera of the Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, ”Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods). The Ring cycle requires a lot of stamina from the backside of the audience and especially this time, since the cycle was performed in the Eurajoki church, whose benches are not exactly backside friendly. But what doesn’t one do for an interesting Ring cycle.

The simplified storyline of ”Götterdämmerung” is the following (it continues directly from the end of the previous opera, Siegfried): Siegfried leaves Brünnhilde and arrives to Gunther and Gutrune (siblings). Hagen, who yearns for the ring that Siegfried has given to Brünnhilde for her protection, has convinced Gutrune to give a love potion to Siegfried, who because of that forgets Brünnhilde and falls in love with Gutrune. The idea is that Siegfried will help cheat Brünnhilde to marry Gunther with the help of the magic helmet in order to get Gutrune as a spouse. Hagen manages to get Siegfried swear on his life that he has not promised marriage to Brünnhilde, which turns out to be a lie, when Siegfried’s memory gradually returns, and Hagen kills Siegfried. Brünnhilde follows Siegfried to the pyre and the ring flies back to the Rhine, from where it was originally stolen.

It has been an incredible experience to hear the whole Ring played by an organ and sung almost without exception by Finnish singers. The production members have also improved the setup the whole time. In the beginning the performers, who were on the organ gallery, were only projected on the walls of the church, then came the monitors, and in this last opera even the cameras were placed so that you could actually see the performers rather well on the monitors. And now the libretto was in two languages (German and Finnish), when it had earlier been only in Finnish. And the size of the libretto was a more user-friendly A5. The bigger A4-librettos were still available with bigger font for those whose sight required it.

Eurajoki Bel Canto has managed to find good singers all the operas. This time the biggest disappointment was that Hannakaisa Nyrönen, who was originally supposed to sing the role of Brünnhilde had got ill (I was so looking forward to hearing her in this role!) and Kaisa Kraft sang the role having had a week to rehearse the role. Considering the circumstances, she did rather well, but of course, you cannot absorb all the emotions after such a short rehearsal.

The absolute king of the evening was Mika Kares in the role of Hagen. He was the only one who did not need the score and he put his soul into the performance. No wonder he has become a successful singer also outside Finland. The other singer that I want to especially mention was Samuli Takkula in the role of Gunther. He has improved his performance opera by opera and he was an excellent Gunther.