Bryn Terfel and Piggy Heroic: Catty Opera Reviewers, Costumes, and the Met

I'm taking a break from watching the 2010 production of Das Rhinegold at the Met, and I had to say this.

First off, I'm deeply enjoying this opera. So I don't want to detract from that.

But every time Wotan turned towards the camera, I couldn't help but notice his golden Batman ab armor stretched across a stomach which has definitely not seen ab lines in many years. In noticing this, I accidentally stumbled across a HILARIOUS element of the critical response to this production in 2010.

The costumes.

Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that Bryn Terfel looked like "a seventies stadium rocker cast in ‘Clash of the Titans,’" blaming the gold breastplate, spear, and hair. 

Opera blogger Zerbinetta called the gods’ costumes "heinous plastic-looking armor and 1980’s hair band coiffure," adding that it took an enormous amount of money to look so cheap.

John Yohalem described Terfel’s appearance with the delightful, chuckle-snort inspiring phrase "piggy heroic."

I laughed so hard reading these reviews. I was also reminded of sitting in Dr. Gary Schmidgall's Walt Whitman class at Hunter College in 2014. Schmidgall, who wrote Shakespeare in Opera, was a longtime opera critic from his early days at Stanford. His acerbic and sarcastic comments on my papers gave me an early taste of the New York opera-critical tradition. His critiques could be quite savage!

Works Cited:

Baranello, Micaela. “Das Rheingold at the Met: Verflucht sei dieser Ring.” Likely Impossibilities, 27 Apr. 2012, https://likelyimpossibilities.com/2012/04/das-rheingold-at-met-verflucht-sei.html.

Ross, Alex. “The Depths.” The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/18/the-depths.

Yohalem, John. “Das Rheingold, Metropolitan Opera.” Opera Today, 8 Oct. 2010, https://operatoday.com/2010/10/das_rheingold_metropolitan_opera/.