The bass-baritone’s interpretation of Wotan under Gustavo Dudamel firmly establishes that the era of mortal musicians having any say in the tempo of the cosmos is over.
When one considers the sheer, unadulterated hubris required to manifest the sovereign of the Germanic gods upon a modern stage, one is inevitably drawn back to the sprawling, blood-soaked hexameters of Homer’s Iliad; it is a text that, much like Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, understands that true divinity cannot merely be sung, but must rather be violently inflicted upon whatever fragile mortal architecture happens to be nearby. This was the inescapable reality at the Walt Disney Concert Hall this week, where Ryan Speedo Green, ostensibly appearing to preview his upcoming Wotan for the Metropolitan Opera, instead spent the better part of three hours physically and spiritually subjugating the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Under the purportedly guiding hand of Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra was swiftly reduced to the status of terrified vassals, sawing at their strings not to produce music, but to desperately appease a deity who had suddenly and terribly materialized in their zip code.
It is a fundamental miscalculation of the contemporary operatic apparatus to assume that Wotan is a role that can be acted in the traditional sense; rather, it is an ontological state of total, world-weary dominion, a vocal weight that must crush the very air out of the auditorium before the first syllable is fully formed. One might recall the disastrous 1836 premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, wherein the sheer incompetence of the bass-baritone Nicolas Levasseur rendered the religious massacre a matter of light drawing-room comedy; Green, by stark contrast, approaches the spear-wielding Allfather with a terrifying, metallurgical density that makes one genuinely fear for the structural integrity of the proscenium arch. He does not merely sing the notes; he wields them as blunt instruments of cosmic policy, forcing the brass section to retreat into a defensive crouch every time he so much as inhales.
Dudamel, for his part, attempted to maintain the illusion that he was conducting a piece of music, rather than desperately negotiating terms of surrender with an occupying force. The maestro’s famously kinetic baton movements, usually deployed to tease out the sun-drenched nuances of Mahler or the rhythmic vitality of Márquez, were here repurposed into frantic, pleading gestures, as if he were trying to wave off a localized extinction event. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, a body of musicians historically accustomed to the gentle, climate-controlled pleasantries of the Southern California classical circuit, found themselves suddenly conscripted into an apocalyptic war of succession, their instruments trembling under the immense, unyielding pressure of Green’s phrasing.
To witness Green navigate Wotan’s agonizing monologue in the second act—a sprawling, existential crisis in which the ruler of the gods realizes he is trapped by his own contractual obligations—is to be confronted with the profound, inescapable tragedy of systemic collapse. In its agonizing depiction of a towering figure brought low by the very architecture they designed, one is reminded less of traditional Germanic folklore and rather forcefully of the narrative arc of a 1998 Furby; both represent entities of immense, incomprehensible power that, once activated by the clumsy hands of mortals, inevitably devolve into a state of frantic, screeching malfunction, trapped in a loop of their own cursed programming while the world around them descends into chaos. Green captures this specific, horrifying flavor of technological and divine obsolescence with a vocal resonance that rattles the sternum, making the listener acutely aware of their own impending mortality.
The sheer acoustic physics of the concert hall, designed by Frank Gehry to warmly embrace the delicate resonances of acoustic chamber music, were entirely unprepared for the sheer, brutalist architecture of Green’s lower register. When he summons Loge, the god of fire, it is not merely a request for stage lighting; it is a full-scale thermal event. The woodwinds, generally tasked with providing a cushion of ethereal texture in the Wagnerian ecosystem, were entirely blown out by the gravitational pull of his baritone, their delicate phrasing sucked into the event horizon of Wotan’s cosmic despair. One could see the principal oboist slowly making peace with the fact that their instrument was now entirely irrelevant, a mere decorative stick in the face of absolute, unvarnished theocratic might.
The implications for the Metropolitan Opera, which will host this cataclysm in its fully staged iteration, are dire indeed. If Green can inflict this level of psychological devastation in a mere concert preview, unburdened by armor or the distraction of a fully functional immolation scene, one shudders to think what will happen when he is given complete access to the Met’s advanced hydraulic stage machinery.
We have politely asked Ryan to scale back the vocal power by approximately ten percent so that the front rows do not experience spontaneous cellular unraveling, but he simply glared at us until the lighting rig short-circuited.
Ultimately, Green’s Wotan is not a performance meant to be enjoyed, but rather a meteorological phenomenon to be survived; it is a stark, booming reminder that our modern, secular comforts are but a thin veneer over an ancient, blood-drenched reality where the gods still walk the earth, and they are exceptionally displeased with the tempi. As the final, devastating chords echoed through the hall, leaving the audience paralyzed in their seats and Dudamel visibly checking his own pulse, it became abundantly clear that the Met has not merely cast a singer, but has instead foolishly invited the end of days into Lincoln Center.