Singing Wagner has been crucial: transgender tenor Holden Madagame on their journey towards singing Mime in Regents Opera's production of Siegfried

Holden Madagame as Mime in Wagner's Das Rheingold with Regents Opera in 2022

Regents Opera's production of Wagner's Siegfried as part of its ongoing Ring Cycle conducted by Ben Woodward and directed by Caroline Staunton opens at the Freemasons Hall, London, WC2B 5AZ on 4 February 2024 with further performances on 7 and 10 February. Here transgender tenor Holden Madagame talks about their transition from mezzo-soprano to tenor and the importance singing Wagner holds for them.

A few years after I came out as transgender, I sang for Ben Woodward, out of interest, in Regents Opera’s (then Fulham Opera’s) orchestral workshops. I had been on testosterone for about three years and was finally starting to come into my tenor voice after having trained as a mezzo-soprano at the University of Michigan. About seven years later, I continue to work with them and am debuting as Mime in their Ring Cycle.

Holden Madagame as Mime in Wagner's Das Rheingold
with Regents Opera in 2022

Transitioning from the gender of lyric mezzo to the gender of character tenor has been an interesting journey and has taught me a lot about the inherent stereotypes that our Fachs possess. I find that I’m often in a unique position to observe this, having seen multiple sides of this experience myself. At first I found this difficult, as I actually enjoyed singing as a mezzo-soprano, but over time I have come to deeply appreciate the nuance and skill of my Fach. Singing Wagner has been crucial to this. 

The parallels with who I am as a queer, transgender, indigenous [Native American, Odawa which is part of the Anishinaabe nation in the mid-west of the United States and Canada.] person and who I play on stage is not lost on me. My characters very often reflect the way that the world views me, which is as a character, a clown - strange, bewildering, entertaining, pitiable, cute, and/or fun. It has taken a lot of grace and self-awareness to retain my self-confidence while playing these types of roles.

Most roles that I sing are a maximum of about 25 minutes long. These are generally supporting roles that require precision, energy, excellent diction, and comedic timing. Although there is a long tradition of character tenor being a legitimate Fach, colleagues often describe them as ‘thankless’ and generally less respected. The roles themselves are also, I’m sad to say, often racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or ableist. The antisemitism baked into Mime should also be acknowledged, as this awareness can help us create modern interpretations of Wagner’s works without unintentionally perpetuating antisemitism. 

Mime from Siegfried is roughly five times larger than any role I have sung thus far, and absolutely the largest character role in all operatic repertoire. It is challenging, has a large vocal range both in tessitura and in the variety of colours that are written into the score, and emotionally much deeper than your average character role. Even in Rheingold we only get a glimpse of Mime’s complexity, and that is still considered a significant character role. Mime is an excellent example of a role that is neither easy nor meant for a singer without this specialism. Without the proper attention to the text, a sophisticated vocabulary of movement and acting choices, and the knowledge that it should not be sung ‘beautifully’, it has the potential to be the most boring role in the opera.

Something that significantly differentiates Regents Opera for me from other companies that I have worked with is the respect that all roles get. Each role is cast thoughtfully and each singer respected for the type of work they do. Working with director Caroline Staunton is an absolute pleasure, as she takes character roles very seriously and does not take any moment, piece of text, or opinions from her singers for granted. I have been able to use my natural impulses, which involve humour, surrealism, and grotesqueness, to create a well-rounded character that is not only psychologically troubling but in many ways relatable to the audience. 

On 4 February at the Freemason’s Temple in London, I will (to my knowledge) be the first transgender person to have sung Mime in Siegfried. This is a milestone not just for me, but for transgender opera singers around the world. My existence gives other trans singers hope in a very concrete way, and I’m thankful for the privilege and support to be able to exist this way in the world while making excellent music. 

Full details of Regent Opera's Ring Cycle from the company's website.

Tony Cooper relishes Sofia Opera's brand-new Ring which has been an all-round exercise in good artistic management coupled with cooperative staff teamwork.

Wagner: Die Walküre - Sofia Summer Wagner Festival - Sofia Opera

Wagner: The Ring of the Nibelungen; director: Professor Plamen Kartaloff, Orchestra of Sofia Opera, conductor: Constantin Trinks; Sofia Opera, Bulgaria.
Reviewed by Tony Cooper, 14 July 2023

I think Kartaloff's Ring would give as much pleasure to traditional Wagnerites as to those on the opposite benches! 

As part of this year's Sofia Summer Wagner Festival, under the artistic directorship of Professor Plamen Kartaloff, Generaldirektor of Sofia Opera and Ballet, a brand-new Ring cycle took pride of place sitting comfortably alongside past productions of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal while Der fliegende Holländer received an open-air performance on the Pancharevo Lake, an artificial lake about seven miles from Sofia, locally dubbed ‘Bulgaria's Bregenz'. Wagner's Ring Cycle was performed at Sofia Opera (8, 9, 11 and 13 July 2023) in a production by Plamen Kartaloff, conducted by Constantin Trinks.

The first fully staged Ring in Sofia directed by Plamen Kartaloff fell in 2010 and since that ground-breaking year he has been heavily engaged with Wagner producing seven of his works in the Bulgarian capital which be boldly defines as the 'Bayreuth of the Balkans'.  

To all intents and purposes, Kartaloff's productions remain as close as possible to the composer's strict instructions within the framework of 'Gesamtkunstwerk' ('total work of art') in which artwork, design and the creative process combine to create a single cohesive whole. Therefore, Wagner's ability to unite music and drama lies at the very heart and thinking of Kartaloff and his realization of the Ring, I feel, truly reflects the composer's edict. 

A little miracle: Grimeborn Festival opens with Wagner's Die Walküre at Hackney Empire

Wagner: Die Walküre - Finnur Bjarnason, Mark Stone
Arcola Theatre's Grimeborn Festival at Hackney Empire  (Photo Alex Brenner)

Wagner Die Walküre; Mark Stone, Laure Meloy, Natasha Jouhl, Finnur Bjarnason, Harriet Williams, Simon Wilding, Julia Burbach, Orpheus Sinfonia, Peter Selwyn; Grimeborn Festival at the Hackney Empire
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 4 August 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
Grimeborn returns to The Ring with superb panache in a deep exploration of a family in crisis

That Arcola Theatre's Grimeborn Festival has been able to open this year with the continuation of its Ring Cycle is nothing short of miraculous. On 4 August 2021, Julia Burbach [see my interview with Julia] returned to direct Wagner's Die Walküre for the Grimeborn Festival, not at the Arcola Theatre but in the grander (and larger) Hackney Empire, with Mark Stone as Wotan, Laure Meloy as Brünnhilde, Finnur Bjarnason as Siegmund, Natasha Jouhl as Sieglinde, Harriet Williams as Fricka, Simon Wilding as Hunding, and Elizabeth Karani, Bethan Langford and Katie Stevenson as the Valkyries. Peter Selwyn conducted the Orpheus Sinfonia. Designs were by Bettina John.

The opera was performed in the version by Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove which trims the piece down to 150 minutes of music and uses an orchestra of 18 (still large for a fringe enterprise). The cutting down is done expertly, and in many ways this is Wagner without Rossini's 'mauvais quart d'heures'. At the core of the piece is a series of tense dialogues through which Wagner unfolds the philosophical underpinning of the cycle, so that whilst there are grand moments it is these personal interactions which count.

Burbach's production focused on the people and their interactions, and the evening was articulated by a series of strong and involving performances. The great moments were there, the discovery of Nothung, 'Winterstürme', the Ride of Valkyries and so-on; for all the production's low budget, Burbach had her eye on Wagner's libretto and made sure everything needed was there (not a given in modern Wagner productions), but her interest wasn't theatrical dazzle for its own sake, but the deep exploration of a family crisis with a strong philosophical underpinning.

To focus on the journey, on the people and their stories: Julia Burbach directs Wagner's Die Walküre for the Grimeborn Festival

Wagner: Die Walküre - Evgeny Nikitin (Wotan) - Opéra National de Bordeaux (Photo Eric Bouloumie)

Opera director Julia Burbach has been spending quite a bit of time with Wagner recently, specifically his Ring Cycle. In 2019 she directed the Grimeborn Festival's production of Das Rheingold [see my review], the first in what was hoped/planned to be eventually a full cycle based around Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick's reduced version of The Ring originally made for Birmingham Opera Company. And in 2019, Julia also directed Die Walküre for Opéra National de Bordeaux in a production that was planned to transfer to Icelandic Opera in 2020 but which has now been re-scheduled for 2022. And now, having just directed Mascagni's L'amico Fritz for Opera Holland Park [see my review], Julia directs Die Walküre for the Grimeborn Festival at the Hackney Empire conducted by Peter Selwyn on 4, 6 and 7 August 2021.

 

Richard Wagner: Die Walküre - rehearsals for Grimeborn Festival's production at Hackney Empire, 2021 (Photo Alex Brenner)

Of course, Julia's familiarity with Wagner's operas goes back beyond this. As a staff director at Covent Garden she worked on Keith Warner's staging of The Ring, and she was the revival director for Christoph Loy's production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, so she was familiar with operas which last over three hours, and she talks about how fabulous it is to have a monologue which lasts 40 minutes. And being German, she can read the texts which also helps.

Bordeaux Opera already had Die Walküre in the calendar but was without a director when a contact from Covent Garden who was now working at Bordeaux suggested the opera to her. She likes the piece and felt she could embrace it, partly because she was interested in bringing out themes in the opera which she had not seen in productions where she was an audience member.

Wagner 22: Oper Leipzig says farewell to its music director with all 13 of Wagner's operas

Wagner: The Ring - Siegfried - Oper Leipzig in 2018 (photo Tom_Schulze)

In 2018, our correspondent Tony Cooper saw Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle at Oper Leipzig [see Tony's review], conducted by the company's music director and intendant, Prof. Ulf Schirmer. In 2022, Oper Leipzig will bid farewell to Prof. Schirmer with Wagner 22, a spectacular leaving present consisting of performances of all 13 of Richard Wagner's music dramas, with all the operas (except for the Ring Cycle) performed in chronological order, and the festival will include Wagner's three rarely performed early works, Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi. The Leipzig Gewandhausorchester will perform for all the events. 

To date, the list of confirmed guests includes Evelyn Herlitzius (Kundry), Jennifer Holloway, Lise Lindstrom, Daniela Sindram, Manuela Uhl, Markus Eiche, René Pape, Iain Paterson, Andreas Schager (Tristan), Stefan Vinke, Klaus Florian Vogt, and Michael Volle (Wotan in Das Rheingold).

The event will also be accompanied by a scholarly and artistic programme.

Wagner 22 is being dedicated to the memory of Gustav Brecher (1879-1940), who was music director and opera director from 1923 to 1933 and did much to put Oper Leipzig on the map, and Brecher is intimately linked with the idea of performing all of Wagner's operas, as Oper Leipzig's press release explains:

Gustav Brecher saw in Richard Wagner’s musical dramas the representation of the ideal union of music, text, and drama. That is why he wanted to present the composer’s complete works in Leipzig, the city of the composer's birth. Gustav Brecher’s dismissal and expulsion from Leipzig took place immediately after the premiere of Kurt Weill’s Silbersee in 1933. His vision of an artistic Wagner festival was ideologically seized upon by the Nazi’s unjust state, and five years later, the project was realized for the first and only time in the 20th century, in celebration of the composer’s 125th birthday. The antisemitic dismissal, the exile that followed, and fear cost Gustav Brecher his life: Brecher, along with his wife and mother-in-law, committed suicide while fleeing Germany in 1940.

Richard Wagner's heir, innovative festival director, opera composer, homosexual; the complex tale of Siegfried Wagner,

Siegfried Wagner

Siegfried Wagner was Richard Wagner's only son and heir. He never managed to escape the influence of his dominating mother; a successful opera composer himself, his operas were never performed at the Bayreuth Festival. As director of the Festival, he introduced important innovations, yet his use of the casting couch was notorious and his homosexuality was an open secret.

Siegfried Wagner was born in 1869 at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, where Richard Wagner's patron King Ludwig II had installed him after the scandal in Munich surrounding Richard's affair with Cosima von Bülow (wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, who had been conducting the premiere of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in Munich). Siegfried, the third of Richard and Cosima's children was born before they were able to marry in 1870. And in 1871, Richard Wagner moved to Bayreuth to pursue his dream of creating a festival to give the premiere of the Ring Cycle.

Siegfried Wagner

Life cannot have been easy for the young Siegfried, his father was 53 when he was born and Siegfried had to live in the shadow of his father's reputation and obsession with Bayreuth, and his mother's adoration of his father. That Siegfried might have a strange and unsatisfactory relationship with his parents is suggested by Cosima's diaries:

'At lunch a dismal occurrence; Fidi [Siegfried Wagner, then aged 9] behaves badly toward his father; the dreadful thought that he might prove unworthy of him takes possession of me, and this thought, instead of being turned against myself in resigned acknowledgement of original sin, turns inside me against my child, and I hit him, so violently that it causes bruises. No words, not even my sobs, can express the horror I feel about myself – oh, fortunate people who lived in times when one could atone! In this instance, as always, R. heavenly toward me.'
                            Cosima Wagner: Diaries. 22 July 1878

Siegfried was musical and some compositions of his have survived dating from when he was around 13. After he completed his secondary education in 1889, he studied with Wagner's pupil Engelbert Humperdinck in Frankfurt (during 1880 and 1881, Humperdinck assisted Wagner with the preparations for the premiere of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882, and he also acted as music tutor to young Siegfried). But Siegfried was more strongly drawn to a career as an architect and studied architecture in Berlin and Karlsruhe.

In 1892 he undertook a trip to Asia with a friend, the English composer Clement Harris (1871-1897), who had studied with Clara Schumann and whom Siegfried had met (and fallen in love with perhaps) in Frankfurt in 1889. Harris was something of a protege of Oscar Wilde; Harris would perform Wagner transcriptions for Wilde. The trip to Asia was Harris' idea, and it would last six months. Recent writers have suggested that Harris may well have been the love of Siegfried's life; he would die in the Greco-Turkish War.

Adventures on the Green Hill: Tony Cooper explores Richard Wagner's villa Wahnfried at Bayreuth

Engraving of Wagner's motto over the front portal to Wahnfried (Photo Wikipedia)

Richard Wagner’s beloved villa at Bayreuth, Wahnfried, provided the perfect home for him and his family as Wagner aficionado, Tony Cooper, found out

The Wagner Family and friends in front of Villa Wahnfried in 1881. Above, from left to right:
Blandine von Bülow, Heinrich von Stein (Siegfried's teacher), Cosima & Richard Wagner, Paul von Joukowsky (friend)
below, from l to r: Isolde, Daniela von Bülow, Eva and Siegfried (Photo Public Domain: Wikipedia)

I simply love Bayreuth and so did Richard Wagner, by all accounts, as he eventually made his home here while establishing the famous Bayreuth Festival in 1876. And by selecting Bayreuth, Wagner made it abundantly clear that his summer opera festival would be far removed from the routine and complacency of urban cultural life.

Wagner made his first visit to Bayreuth in April 1870 because he had read about the Margravial Opera House, an ornate and beautifully-designed baroque theatre which he thought would be ideal for hosting the Bayreuth Festival. But it was not to be. For a start the orchestra pit was inadequate and so, too, was the size of the stage while the auditorium was far too small with seating for only 500.

Always a thinker - and a free-thinker, too! - Wagner then toyed with the idea of building his own Festival Hall (Festspielhaus) in Bayreuth. This idea fitted perfectly the thinking of the town’s burgher-master who fully supported Wagner in his endeavours and set aside a piece of land for him to build his ‘dream’ theatre on the edge of the town but close to the railway-station on top of the Grüner Hügel (Green Hill).

An alternative to the theatres of Wagner’s day, the construction of the Festspielhaus began on the composer’s 59th birthday (22nd May 1872) - the same year in which he located to the picturesque town of Bayreuth in Upper Franconia now part of the Federal State of Bavaria. Planning and construction were in the capable hands of Leipzig architect, Otto Brückwald, who had already made a name for himself in building theatres in Leipzig and Altenburg.

Four years after the start of construction on 13th August 1876 the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was ready for performance officially hosting the first Bayreuth Festival. Sadly, it turned out to be a financial disaster thereby forcing a six-year closure of the theatre.

Adventures on the Green Hill: with no Bayreuth Festival this year, Tony Cooper looks back at previous festivals

The Festspielhaus at Bayreuth in 1900

With no Bayreuth Festival this year because of the Coronavirus outbreak - which has also put Valentin Schwarz’ new Ring cycle on hold to 2022 - Tony Cooper reflects on past adventures walking up the famous Grüner Hügel (Green Hill) in search of Wagner

The last leg of my journey to Bayreuth from the medieval city of Nürnberg, birthplace of the famed printmaker, Albrecht Dürer, is always by train, an idyllic 90-minute journey snaking through miles and miles of lovely and inviting Bavarian countryside. When you alight at Bayreuth, it’s then that you can catch your first glimpse of the famed Bayreuth Festspielhaus bursting through a densely-wooded area as if hovering in the clouds. With vivid imagination - and Wagner is quoted as saying that ‘imagination creates reality’ - the vision of Valhalla swirls in my mind!

My innermost thoughts, however, turn to previous visits to the Bayreuth Festival and the leisurely stroll that one has to take up the steeply-inclined Siegfried Wagner Allee - commonly known as the Grüner Hügel (Green Hill) - to reach Wagner’s ‘dream’ theatre, the grand and imposing Festspielhaus, personally designed by the composer just for the presentation of his Teutonic operas especially that momentous four-work cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and other works such as Parsifal, his final and ‘farewell’ work to the world completed on 26th July 1882.

Wagner described Parsifal not as an opera but as ‘Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel’ (A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage) and the work is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s13th-century epic poem, Parzival, surrounding the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his quest for the Holy Grail.

In composing Parsifal, Wagner took advantage of the particular acoustics of the Festspielhaus and conceived the work in April 1857 but, surprisingly, didn’t finish it until 25 years later. It was first performed at the second Bayreuth Festival conducted by the German-Jewish conductor, Hermann Levi.

However, Wagner worked on the Ring’s libretto and score practically over the same period of time from 1848 to 1874. He completed Das Rheingold in 1854 and Die Walküre two years later but, overall, found writing the cycle a bit hard-going and during the course of working on Siegfried decided to take a long break - seven years, in fact - to give himself a breather.

Wagner's Das Rheingold at Bayreuth in 1876

During this time he wrote Tristan und Isolde (completed in 1859 but not performed until 10th June 1865 in Munich) with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg following. What a breather! Completed in 1867 Meistersinger received its first performance the following year on 2nd November 1862, also in Munich. Wagner then dutifully returned to Siegfried completing the cycle with Götterdämmerung in 1874.

Modelled on Greek dramas that were presented as three tragedies and one satyr play, the works of the Ring are loosely based on characters from Norse sagas such as the Poetic Edda and the Völsunga as well as the German epic poem, The Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs) an anonymous poem written in Middle High German circa 1200 probably coming from the region of Passau.