Rules? What rules? Riga, cultured, energetic and young, is making them up as it goes along. Latvia is the poorest country in the European Union, but high-end Riga, its capital, is the most cosmopolitan city in the Baltics, with upscale shops, new museums, modern hotels and restaurants and only traces of what Latvia now calls the Soviet occupation (a term that’s created a certain chilliness in Latvian-Russian relations).
Entrepreneurs here are learning that new ideas can make money. Why, for example, shouldn’t a restaurant turn into a disco at night? Why should the city’s chefs remain constrained by fish, dark rye bread and boiled peas with bacon — traditional Latvian fare — when there are so many new “fusion” ingredients: litchi nuts and jalapeños, hoisin sauce and dim sum?
And why, say the city’s fathers and mothers (women play a huge role in this young society), should Riga’s cultural institutions remain bound by the past? Riga’s classical concert life, which was abruptly cut adrift from the Soviet system, is now in flux, about to spawn yet another orchestra; Riga’s curators are planning the construction of a contemporary art museum; and Riga’s opera company is widely acknowledged as one of the best in the former East Bloc.
The opera house is a fine metaphor for the new Riga: its cultivated facade masks an underlying exuberance. Pale and neo-Classical, it stands in the strip of parkland that divides the two halves of the city: the old-world Old Town and the newer section that grew up outside the walls of the old fortress in the 19th century and is now known, somewhat confusingly to visitors, as the Center.
The theater has been restored to its 1863 splendor, with gleaming wood floors, gilt trim and reliefs in hand-pressed plaster; modern additions have expanded rehearsal space and offices. The whole thing has been run for the last 10 years by a charismatic and unconventional general director named Andrejs Zagars, who presents cutting-edge young directors and singers from beyond Latvia’s borders. Mr. Zagars, who stands about six and a half feet tall, with the piercing gaze and square jaw of a movie star and the mien of a contented cat, brings to his job a blend of artistic and business backgrounds. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, he was a successful actor; after the breakup of the Soviet Union, he opened and operated a string of restaurants.
“I want to poison the Latvians with opera,” he says, speaking in his office before the company’s recent premiere of “Das Rheingold.” “I want to create an addiction.”
He has certainly created a lot of buzz, not least with this new production. Riga’s opera company has taken on Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle for the first time in more than 100 years, giving each of the operas to a different stage director and presenting one a year through 2009, in co-production with the Bergen International Festival in Norway. “Das Rheingold” is directed by a pleasantly controversial German-based wunderkind named Stefan Herheim: in his vision, the gods appear as German cultural icons like Nietzsche and Mozart and Bismarck; Wotan and Alberich are Richard Wagner; and the Rheingold and Valhalla are Wagner’s real-life Grail, the opera house in Bayreuth.
Although Wagner himself lived in Riga for two years, it’s open to question how many of Riga’s citizens, long deprived of the composer’s music, got all of Mr. Herheim’s clever German references, but productions like these, showcased in the annual opera festival in June, have certainly gotten their interest: ticket sales have soared from 67 percent to 85 percent, Mr. Zagars said. Mr. Zagars, continuing in the new Latvian tradition of making up one’s own rules, has even started directing opera himself. This season will see a new “Traviata.”
Culture is anything but tangential in a country seeking to create an identity. Latvia has been aware of this since the start of its first, short-lived spate of independence in 1919: it immediately created a system of state museums and an Academy of Fine Arts to foster the Latvian school of painting. (Yes, there is a Latvian school of painting. In the State Museum of Art, slightly surreal because the styles are familiar but all of the artists are Latvian, you can see striking works by Jazeps Grosvalds, who helped create the Riga Artists Group before his death at 29 in 1920, or Aleksandra Belcova, who blended the vocabularies of Cubism and Russian Constructivism in her portraits.)
