Tale of the Met’s 45-Ton Diva

“When you look at this,” Georges Nicholson, identified as a Wagner historian, said, watching an early stage of the machine’s construction, “you feel like this is finally the ‘Ring’ that Wagner would have wanted all along.”

“We are actually having the vision that Wagner had when he was composing,” Mr. Nicholson added.

“Wagner’s Dream,” directed by Ms. Froemke and edited by Bob Eisenhardt, had its premiere last month in the Tribeca Film Festival. It was shown on Monday evening in theaters around New York and throughout the United States and Canada as a prelude to screenings of the original HD presentations of each of the individual operas: with, that is, James Levine conducting “Rheingold” and “Die Walküre” from the 2010-11 season, and Fabio Luisi the rest from this season. Then, on Saturday, it will be shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The film, though a bit long at 1 hour 52 minutes (would Wagnerites have it any other way?), is beautifully made. There is — like the production or not — quite a tale to tell, full of its own drama, including serious mishaps in performances as well as in rehearsals, all accounted for here.

But the tone is basically adulatory, apart from a few skeptical notes sounded by ticket buyers and audience members. Mr. Lepage and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, cut heroic figures in an epic adventure.

Mr. Gelb, having collaborated with Ms. Froemke in the making of earlier films, clearly trusted her and granted extraordinary access behind the scenes. There were “no limits,” Ms. Froemke said in introducing the premiere.

Seen up close, the 45-ton machine and its workings look terrifying, and it is fascinating to see some of the singers work out their panic (or not). “It’s not a dangerous set,” Mr. Lepage says at one point. “It’s a very, very kooky, articulate set.”

The leading soprano Deborah Voigt, for one, was not buying euphemisms. Having fallen off the machine in her entrance in the first “Walküre” in 2011, she refused to climb aboard in later presentations. (It was noted in a panel discussion among the principals after the film’s premiere that Mr. Lepage had coaxed her back onto the machine for the performances this spring.) By the time of rehearsals for “Götterdämmerung,” Ms. Voigt was described as desperate, and she looked it.

The soundtrack revels, of course, in Wagner’s music. It provides an amusing moment when the production moves from its origins in Canada (the Ex Machina studios in Quebec and elsewhere) to New York, overlaying the clanking “Rheingold” music for the descent to Nibelheim.

All in all, the film is an entertaining and informative watch even for this unbelieving critic, who would prefer that it had ended with a line of the text it started with: “The quest to produce a perfect ‘Ring’ remains opera’s greatest challenge.”