BRATTLEBORO — Hugh Keelan isn't daunted by the herculean task of bringing not one but two of Richard Wagner's most famous operas to the Latchis. He's done it before - twice.
Tundi Productions' Wagner in Vermont 2023, the festival's third visit to the Latchis Theatre, will assemble more than 70 performers from near and far from Friday, Aug. 18, to Thursday, Aug. 24.
Keelan, the music director and the festival's orchestra conductor, and his wife, General Director Jenna Rae, co-founded Tundi, which will bring as main stage events two gritty, solemn, and notable works: Die Walküre and Siegfried, which are in the middle of the epic Ring Cycle. They will stage two performances of both works.
Keelan explains that Tundi's mission is "to perform music that summons the deepest emotions and the most burning issues of being human, so people can experience transcendence, interact with the music and artists, and engage in their own creativity."
This festival, which began in 2019 and skipped two years due to Covid, also includes a week of concerts, lectures, panel discussions, and interactive activities, including a Valkyrie flash mob, which stopped traffic outside BMAC a year ago during last year's festival.
Keelan sat down with The Commons to talk about these two upcoming performances and the enduring impact of Wagner, and he made some promises for the Brattleboro audiences.
In 2022, the festival drew record crowds of local and international attendees to the Latchis.
"We were overwhelmed by the quality of experience that people reported," Keelan says. "Apparently, we provided a transcendent and, for some people, healing experience for our audience members."
One audience member, he reports, told him that those performances offered "a blueprint for living out [their] remaining years."
The large-scale productions get backing from a few big private donors.
Tundi is approved by the IRS as a tax-deductible, tax-exempt arts charitable organization, but it doesn't yet receive any grant funding, and its public filings available report an operation with an annual budget less than $50,000.
"Money is not the primary incentive," he says, noting that the performers are compensated with "a base pay with profit-sharing model."
"It is not the pay that draws the people," Keelan says.
Two epic operas
In Die Walküre, Wotan, the battle-lord of the gods, has a favored daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde. After some serious infractions and disloyalties inside the god-family, Wotan is compelled to punish her, from a context that might in today's language be called "toxically masculine."
At great cost to herself, Brünnhilde asserts her values of love, freedom, and emancipation.
This most serious work of the Ring Cycle starts in rough woodland homesteads, and ascends to epic, cosmological heights.
Performances take place on Friday, Aug. 18 and on Tuesday, Aug. 22 starting at 4 p.m. There will be breaks for dining and refreshments: 90 minutes between acts 1 and 2, and 25 minutes between acts 2 and 3.
In Siegfried, the title character is an orphaned boy, brought up deep in the forest, who asks uncomfortable questions as he starts to seek independence from his foster parent, Mime.
Siegfried will fully emancipate himself, slay a dragon, learn the speech of a spirit bird to guide him, and unwittingly enter the cosmic struggle between immortals for a magic ring.
Performances of Siegfried take place on Sunday, Aug. 20 and on Thursday, Aug. 24 starting at 4 p.m. As with Die Walküre, the audience will get two breaks for dining and refreshments of 90 minutes and 25 minutes, respectively.
'A world unto themselves'
To stage the two operas and the rest of the festival, Tundi has assembled 80 individuals, 70 of whom are performers, vocalists, and instrumentalists. The remaining 10 are technical and theater staff. The festival orchestra includes 40 members, some of whom are local.
The vocalists and performers come from all over the United States - including Brattleboro and Windham County, such as Rae, who plays Brünnhilde in Siegfried - as well as Canada, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.
These operas are written in German and performed in German, so Tundi offers audience members "integrated supertitling," which displays English translations unobtrusively.
Keelan says reassuringly that the supertitling will allow everyone to appreciate the performances without having have to learn or understand the operas' native language.
He also praised the venue.
"It's inspiring for us to be [at the Latchis] for many practical reasons: balconies, catwalks, etc. Wagner's operas are powerfully voiced, so that they carry some sort of stentorian and heroic quality, emotionally overwhelming at times. None of our performers use microphones," Keelan said.
"We find the Latchis beyond favorable. A very rich and enhancing place. And the acoustics are such that if you are sitting in the very last row, you can hear our unamplified singers with full force."
Jon Potter, executive director of LatchisArts, the nonprofit that owns the theater and hotel, calls the Wagner in Vermont festival "a special experience for the Latchis."
"We feel more intimately connected with these performances than others, and they are designed very much with the Latchis in mind," he says.
"Because Tundi spends so much time here preparing these operas, we have a rare opportunity to become close to the people who make this happen," Potter observes.
"Wagner's operas are a world unto themselves, and the Latchis was designed to be a world unto itself, so we're ideal companions on this Wagner journey," he adds.
Music that endures
The classic operas are works of Richard Wagner, a German composer, theater director, polemicist, and conductor, who lived from 1813 to 1883.
He avoided the term "opera," which even during his time conveyed overtones of privilege and pomposity; instead, he used a term, "gesamtkunstwerk," which means an all-encompassing artwork - one that uses action and evokes emotion by melding and unifying poetry, scenic design, and music on an epic scale.
Wagner infused his operas with drama and is known for his complex textures, rich harmonies, interesting orchestration, quickly shifting tones, and unusual musical phrases (leitmotifs).
"Der Ring des Nibelungen" ("The Ring Cycle") - Wagner's most ambitious work, of which this year's performances are part - shares mythological and plot points with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and took over 25 years to complete. It comprises four major works, each demanding a long evening.
The influence of these works remains incalculable and has permeated popular culture. Wagner's motifs are vividly heard in the film scores of John Williams and in soundtracks of certain styles of video games.
And in 1957, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd starred in What's Opera, Doc?, in which director Chuck Jones distilled the Ring Cycle into one of the most highly acclaimed animated cartoons in history and introduced generations - many unwittingly - to the phrase "kill the wabbit," sung to "Ride of the Valkyries."
Relevant - and problematic
Wagner remains a controversial and problematic artist who, as a young political firebrand, wrote anti-Jewish pamphlets. Long after his death, his works became favored by Adolf Hitler and aspects were appropriated by the Third Reich in the rise of Nazi nationalism.
"There are many things to really dislike Wagner for," Keelan acknowledges. Among them, "Number 1 is racism in the form of anti-Semitism." He also acknowledges Wagner's "misogyny, his relationships to women."
In Keelan's view, these qualities should actually pique audiences' interests in these works.
"All of those things are there, and the works that he produced are a perfect crucible for us addressing those characteristics and issues that remain in us," he says. "That is the source of his genius: his capacity to confront us with ourselves."
Wagner's music is still so relevant today, over 140 years after his death, Keelan says.
The four operas in the Ring Cycle follow one character - Brünnhilde - "finding and re-finding herself in greatly reduced circumstances, finally, to be a savior of the world," he says.
The operas "deal with real issues like parenting, foster parenting, and the handling or mishandling of basic family relationships," he says - in particular, the father/daughter relationship: "A daughter who couldn't possibly say she's disempowered, but she has to deal with a toxically furious father figure."
"And finally, there is an act of forgiveness towards her father. It is by no means the most noticeable moment of the incredibly rich story," Keelan points out. "But it is a moment in which she decides, enough of grudge-holding and vengeance."
He says that Wagner's work deserves to be criticized - and acknowledged, studied, and performed.
"You could say that, at a certain point of the 19th century, different European nations started being really interested in developing a national music and national style, which arguably, they hadn't before," Keelan says.
He describes Wagner as "one of the primary German examples."
"He's the one who started using certain fairy tale and folk themes in his operas," says Keelan.
Making Wagner for the masses
Keelan hopes that audience members will experience the performances with "fresh ears" and "fresh eyes," rather than "'Oh, opera, I don't like opera.' Or, 'Oh, opera. I'm an opera fanatic.' We're creating another world that is, in a sense, not polarized."
"I tell the audience to try not to come with their biases or hate or distaste for the genre. People often have a negative connotation to it. They think 'I don't like opera. I don't understand it. I can't speak the language.' So people can be afraid of it, I think," Keelan adds.
Wagner's works are often the most polarizing of opera, he says, and they can be "intimidating for people new to his music."
Keelan says that Tundi's performances are designed to "lay the doors to Wagner wide open."
This is achieved, Jon Potter says, by something elusive.
"It's hard to describe the power and the artistry of these performances," he says. "It's also hard to put into words what it takes for Tundi to present these works, which are normally offered in very few cities and venues around the world, in our town of Brattleboro."
He calls the festival "a wonderful demonstration of courageous commitment to a collective artistry."
"Something quite wonderful is happening at the Latchis with Wagner in Vermont, and we want the world to know about it," Potter says.
For more information on Wagner in Vermont Festival 2023 and to buy tickets, visit Tundiproductions.org or latchis.com.
This The Arts item by Victoria Chertok was written for The Commons.