FROM AROUND THE WORLD: ZURICH.(Review)

Approaching his sixties, Robert Wilson has set out to climb the Himalayas of opera, Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen, thus topping even the twelve-hour endurance test of his The CIVIL WarS. Reaching his first station at the Zurich opera house on October 8 with Rheingold, he made the horizons of his mammoth project brilliantly clear.

Gone are Teutonic mystification, nineteenth-century historical references and post-Hiroshima topicality; abandoned are all political, social critical or psychological interpretations, let alone any attempt at realism. Contrary to all the trends of recent decades, Wilson re-mythologizes the Ring, and if we are occasionally reminded of former productions, they are Wieland Wagner's from fifty years ago -- if not Adolphe Appia's utopian theater visions late in the nineteenth century.

For Wilson, the myth is born in the music, emanating from the E-flat of the double basses as the overture begins. The world is created out of rising vapors; the stage grows brighter and more colorful as the music swells, until the Rhinemaidens appear, one at a time, like silhouettes in slow-motion, each in a different, angular pose, arms and hands stretched in wide arcs. As costumed by Frida Parmeggiani and as choreographed by Wilson himself, almost all the performers look like sculptures onstage.

Apart from a huge geometrical form like the hand of a dock moving across the floor, and a dense forest of Japanese-influenced latticework to suggest Nibelheim, Wilson as designer abhors all concrete settings and most props (Wotan carries a slim pointer as his spear). The whole production proceeds like a ritual, with the story elements so completely stylized that in some cases (Freia's ransom, Alberich's transformation and his dalliance with the Rhinemaidens) they are hardly recognizable. Wilson has produced Rheingold as a fairy-tale poem, with figures we have never heard of. Only Loge appears in human garb; one wonders how Parmeggiani will dress the human characters in this Ring.

All the characters ...