Der Ring des Nibelungen (Opera)

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    Review: This London ‘Ring’ Is on the Met Opera’s Radar

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    It’s not stage-filling spectacle, but Barrie Kosky’s version of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” the start of a four-opera epic, is eerie, vivid and intense.Two years ago, the Metropolitan Opera went shopping for a new “Ring” in London and came home empty-handed.English National Opera’s first installment of Wagner’s four-part epic of gods and humans, lust and power, was judged a bit too scrappy and bare to transfer to the grand Met. And anyway, the English company was soon reeling from cuts to its government funding, putting the completion of the cycle in jeopardy.The Met would like to bring a “Ring” to New York in four seasons — a blink of an eye given opera’s glacial planning cycles and Wagner’s technical and casting complexities. So its leadership has another London option under consideration: a production directed by Barrie Kosky that opened on Monday at the Royal Opera, the city’s bigger and older company.Eerie, vivid and intense, Kosky’s version of “Das Rheingold,” the first “Ring” opera, is a show that an opera house on either side of the Atlantic could be proud of, accessible and stimulating for Wagner newcomers and connoisseurs alike. The story is crystal clear, and its emotional and political stakes are taken seriously, without oversimplification or overstatement.It would also finally bring to the Met one of opera’s finest, most rangy and resourceful directors. (A collaboration on Prokofiev’s “Fiery Angel” was spiked during the pandemic.) Kosky, who was born in Australia, was celebrated during his recently ended tenure at the helm of the Komische Oper in Berlin, for his revivals of long-forgotten operettas and his giddy disregard for distinctions between high and low art, between “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Moses und Aron.”His signature style is zany, high-spirited and high-kicking, but he can do sober and austere when the piece calls for it, like a starkly savage “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival last year. His Royal Opera “Rheingold,” though not without shots of bitter humor, is in this vein.The work’s single, two-and-a-half hour act is all played atop, around and inside a huge hollow tree trunk, collapsed on its side. This is a dying world, Kosky suggests — and to that end he puts Erda, the earth goddess who intones a climactic warning, onstage almost throughout, in the form of a silent actress: elderly, naked, frail, vulnerable. (For that climactic monologue, the singer is hidden from the audience.)Katharina Konradi with the magic gold, whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion.Monika RittershausThe gold whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion, and from which the central ring of power is forged, is here a shiny, syrupy fluid that flows from the tree. It evokes, appropriately, a union of metal and river, as well as the fossil fuels on which the global economy is disastrously based. Its associations range bodily and geologic — lava, milk, semen, blood, honey — and characters lick it greedily from their hands.Kosky and his set designer, Rufus Didwiszus, have imagined Nibelheim, the inferno in which the stolen gold is worked on, as a steampunkish industrial monstrosity, with clamps gripping the tree. Erda, her torso popping out of a knot in the trunk, is connected to tubes that pump the iridescent batter from her body and drain it into pails. This society is built from — and rotted by — the devaluation of women (particularly the old) and environmental exploitation.Victoria Behr’s costumes are contemporary, and there are hints of British flavor: These wealthy, self-serving gods have a taste for nostalgic old-money activities like polo. But this is a basically placeless, timeless production; its primary location, the theater. Kosky emphasizes this by having the audience enter, curtain up, to see the unadorned expanses around the stage. Stagehands do their work visibly, and Alessandro Carletti’s lighting draws attention to its equipment.Kosky uses steam, lights, loudspeakers and knobby holes in the tree to conjure, in charmingly old-fashioned ways, the magic effects and transformations of Wagner’s libretto. But this staging mostly lacks proscenium-filling spectacle — and it was a similar lack that made English National Opera’s “Ring” a no-go for the Met.The transitions between the scenes in “Das Rheingold,” from the heights of mountains to the bowels of the earth and back again, are played at the Royal Opera with the curtain closed, as if Kosky is thumbing his nose at expectations that he is supposed to provide more of a scenic extravaganza. Instead, those interludes are simply showcases for Antonio Pappano, starting his swan-song season as the company’s music director, and the orchestra.You could call this meager. But on Monday, it felt more like focused modesty.Christopher Purves, center, as Alberich transforms the tree into an industrial monstrosity pumping golden fluid from Rose Knox-Peebles, left, as Erda.Monika RittershausWork that’s powerful in the 2,200-seat Royal Opera House won’t necessarily make the same impact in the Met, nearly double that size. But the last New York production of the cycle, directed by Robert Lepage on a preposterously expensive, 45-ton high-tech set, was, when it opened in 2010, an artistic embarrassment for the company as well as a depressing example of empty-headed excess at a time of financial crisis.The “Ring,” given its size and prominence, is a symbol of an opera house’s values, and the lean vitality of Kosky’s vision, which will unfold in London over the coming years, seems right for an era of budget and programming cuts.At the Royal Opera, Pappano and the orchestra match Kosky with fiery but never overblown playing, especially from the lush yet biting strings, their intimacy startling. This is a “Rheingold” that, first and foremost, supports its singers.Wotan, the king of the gods, and Alberich, the dwarf who steals the gold from the Rhine, are here almost brotherly figures, both with bald heads and sturdy bodies, and they share certain qualities, too. Christopher Purves’s Alberich has aristocratic reserve, while Christopher Maltman’s booming, tight-smiling Wotan is capable of feverish aggression; it is shocking but not surprising when he cuts off Alberich’s finger to take the ring.Yet the tenderness with which Maltman embraces the fragile Erda, as the voice of the goddess is heard warning him to give up the ring, is just as indelible, and feels just as true. As Fricka, Wotan’s wife, Marina Prudenskaya sings with slicing anxiety; Sean Panikkar is a charismatically grinning, cackling playboy as Loge, the anarchic fire god; Insung Sim is unusually agonized as the giant Fasolt.This is not an ostentatious production. But the finale, which shouldn’t be given away, is proscenium-filling spectacle, and vintage Kosky, in that it uses one of theater’s simplest, most traditional devices with unforgettable showman flair, conveying all the glittering glamour and fundamental emptiness of the gods’ ascent to their new home — a triumph as hollow as the giant tree.Das RheingoldThrough Sept. 29 at the Royal Opera House, London; roh.co.uk. More

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      At Bayreuth, the Work on Wagner’s Operas Is Never Done

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      At the festival that Wagner founded, a new “Parsifal” looks different depending on how you see it, and a workshop model refreshes revivals.After the enormous risk of its beginning, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany was for a long time a place where the stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas were encased in amber.When his four-opera “Ring,” which inaugurated the festival in 1876, was brought back for the first time 20 years later, Wagner’s widow, Cosima, stuck with a vision essentially identical to the one her husband had overseen. “Parsifal” was even more static: After premiering at Bayreuth in 1882, it returned there as an unchanging ritual until 1934.But in Bayreuth’s modern era, perpetual workshopping prevails. New productions usually play for five summers before cycling out, and the expectation is that directors will keep futzing through that time. Sets change; sequences are adjusted and eliminated; details are added and subtracted.Now, it’s Valentin Schwarz’s turn to tinker.His “Ring” opened last summer. It was a caustic, contemporary-dress interpretation that compressed the work’s sprawling settings to a single estate and eliminated the mythological magic, the dragons, potions and instant transformations. The “Ride of the Valkyries” was a waiting room of wealthy women strutting in cosmetic surgery bandages. The world-ending conflagration Wagner intended for the ending was a fire-free anticlimax at the bottom of an empty pool.On Monday, though, as the sweeping music of that ending played, a backdrop lowered to reveal the theatrical lighting behind, and the body of Wotan, the king of the gods, was seen hanging from the grid, dripping wet — the death of divinity, “Sunset Boulevard”-style. It was a fresh addition to the staging, if still something of a letdown, a mild finale after 15 keyed-up hours.There were more tweaks to this “Ring.” The kidnapping and hoarding of children — an obsession with youthfulness; a sense of violence passed through generations — is one of Schwarz’s themes. So it makes sense for girls we saw drawing in “Das Rheingold” to now return to pay their respects at a coffin in “Die Walküre.” The hard-partying decadence of the characters in “Götterdämmerung” is even harsher this year, and the suicide of a goddess earlier in the “Ring” is more strongly telegraphed in the final moments of “Rheingold.” The child of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, not in Wagner’s libretto, died in last year’s version but now escapes the apocalyptic finale.You can tell Schwarz intended these revisions to heighten certain aspects of his interpretation. But their impact is generally minor. And the most important change from last summer isn’t onstage — it’s in the pit.Last year, Cornelius Meister conducted the premiere because Pietari Inkinen had to drop out with a case of Covid late in the rehearsal process. Meister’s work ended up being blandly neutral, not quite compatible with Schwarz’s vivid, provocative staging.Newly volatile and fierce under Inkinen, the orchestra now matches, and feeds, the curdled, unsettled mood of this “Ring”; the sound is often forceful, but it’s stubbornly anti-grandeur. Sometimes that means brash playing that even verges on unbeautiful. The winds were almost wild in a grinding, grim account of the introduction to “Siegfried” on Saturday, and gawkily reedy — at once sinister and whimsical — as Hagen and Gutrune plotted in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday.The pacing is tauter this year, and more tense. Inkinen propelled scenes forward, giving and receiving from the singers during long narratives. The “Todesverkündigung,” the dreamlike scene in “Die Walküre” in which Brünnhilde appears to Siegmund in a vision, was steadily, hauntingly built. All in all, the orchestra was, as Wagner intended, a character in its own right, one as anxious, unstable and fascinating as Schwarz’s conception at its best.As Hagen, the production’s linchpin, the bass Mika Kares, a newcomer to the cast, was most memorable: aggressive and doleful, stony and agonized, shambling around the set like the overgrown child he is.Another newcomer, the soprano Catherine Foster, an alert actress and proud presence, sang with clean tone and slicing high notes as Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung.” Sounding gruff as Wotan — a role he shared last year with another singer — and acting with overkill, even by this staging’s standards, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny settled in as a meditative, wry Wanderer in “Siegfried.”Tobias Kratzer’s 2019 staging of “Tannhäuser,” revived this year, features a performance within a performance of the opera.Enrico NawrathOver a week at the festival, the quality of the singing was consistently high. And pre-opening cancellations provided the opportunity for some heroics.The uncannily pure-toned tenor Klaus Florian Vogt and the sensitive, easily vulnerable soprano Elisabeth Teige sang in “Die Walküre” one day, and “Tannhäuser” the next. Even more remarkable, the tenor Andreas Schager sang the title roles in “Siegfried” on Saturday and “Parsifal” on Sunday, and then Siegfried in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday — all with clarion enthusiasm. This is the kind of Wagnerian Everest-climbing you get only at Bayreuth.In Tobias Kratzer’s crowd-pleasing 2019 production of “Tannhäuser,” the title character abandons the bohemian high life of Venus and her road-tripping pals for a sober, rule-based order: a performance at Bayreuth of, yes, “Tannhäuser.” (Referencing Bayreuth and its past productions in new stagings is almost de rigueur at the festival.)Metatheatrical collisions ensue — Ekaterina Gubanova is laugh-out-loud funny as Venus infiltrates the “Tannhäuser” within the “Tannhäuser” — before a tragic final act strains to tie up a lot of thematic loose ends.But the production is an endearing party, one that extends outside during the first intermission to a pond near the festival theater, for a gleefully messy, proudly queer, highly eclectic performance ranging among the likes of “I Am What I Am,” “Part of Your World” and “Ol’ Man River.” Back inside, Nathalie Stutzmann conducted a warmly effusive performance, with just a slightly chaotic ending to Act II.It was a superb vehicle for the festival’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich — but quite possibly outdone by the group’s powerful, elegant work in “Parsifal,” from ethereal to mighty to ferocious and back again.Georg Zeppenfeld, left, and Andreas Schager in Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which is designed to be seen in augmented reality but which can also be viewed as a more straightforward staging without the technology.Enrico NawrathPablo Heras-Casado led that opera with a calm confidence that never felt rigid. The selling point of this “Parsifal” — new this year and directed by Jay Scheib — is the incorporation of augmented reality, or AR. But because of internal conflicts over funding, less than a fifth of the audience is provided with the glasses that superimpose over the live action a panoply of floating, moving digital images.On opening night, I and other critics saw the staging with the AR glasses. But then I returned to see the show as the vast majority of visitors will: without them.Some things about the inoffensive, unilluminating, unmoving live staging are clearer without the busy AR imagery. I now caught that desert mining seems to be going on in Act III, and that, at the end, Gurnemanz and a female lover, who embraced guiltily at the opera’s start, are happily reunited.But the use of live video onstage — highly effective in an unsparing perspective on Amfortas’s bloody wound being probed and dressed — elsewhere just shows us close-ups of what we can already see, as at a stadium concert. The fallen sorcerer Klingsor wears high heels, a nod toward gender blurring that goes otherwise unexplored.As a traditional production, this “Parsifal” was nothing special; it felt palpable that most of the staging’s resources were going into developing the AR. But even if the results of that venture weren’t satisfying artistically or emotionally, the technology worked. And its ambition was true to the spirit of experimentation — and, these days, revision — that has coexisted with reverent tradition at Bayreuth for almost 150 years. More

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      Review: Berlin Takes Wagner’s Approach to Staging the ‘Ring’

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      All four parts of Wagner’s epic were presented within a week, in a new production by Dmitri Tcherniakov inspired by the work’s experimental roots.BERLIN — Lately, the German capital has been looking more like a city to the south: Bayreuth.At least in one respect. The Berlin State Opera, in mounting Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” has taken Bayreuth’s approach — begun by the composer himself — of presenting it all within a week. Most houses build to that marathon slowly, sometimes over the course of several years, but Berlin has unveiled an entire production at once, with the first cycle ending Sunday night.It’s an enormous undertaking — 15 hours of music to be staged and rehearsed by a couple of hundred performers — especially for a busy repertory house like the State Opera. But this new production, a myth-busting and subtly provocative take by Dmitri Tcherniakov, was designed for a special occasion: the 80th birthday of Daniel Barenboim, the company’s long-reigning music director and a titan of Berlin culture.Barenboim’s health, though, has deteriorated in recent months, and he withdrew from the premiere. In his stead came Christian Thielemann, one of very few conductors to have led all 10 of Wagner’s mature operas at Bayreuth. He hasn’t much experience with the State Opera’s orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, but after his first “Ring” with them, he suddenly seems like a worthy contender for its podium when Barenboim eventually steps down.The Staatskapelle executed Thielemann’s vision for the “Ring” — a long crescendo built over the four operas — with sensitivity and skill. His tempos, slower than usual, tested the stamina of singers, but he also had a keen sense of balance, scaling his sound to match theirs onstage. This was an often quiet ring, a near opposite of Georg Solti’s famous (and ever-elevated) studio recording from the mid-20th century with the Vienna Philharmonic. It did, though, reward patient listeners, with Thielemann simultaneously shaping the score on the level of scenes and the immense entirety.Robert Watson as Siegmund and Vida Mikneviciute as Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.”Monika RittershausHe also had a gift for illustrating the representative moments in Wagner’s score: sheets of rain in the opening of “Die Walküre,” or the idyllic forest murmurs at the heart of “Siegfried.” Those, as it happened, were about the only glimpses of nature in Tcherniakov’s “Ring,” which not only demythologizes the work — like the contemporary-dress family drama presented at Bayreuth last summer — but also isolates its characters in a world so human, it’s constructed by their hands and cut off from the outside world.Talk to anyone who saw this “Ring,” and you’re unlikely to hear the same response twice. It’s telling, and satisfying, that the State Opera auditorium was divided in boos and cheers for Tcherniakov during the curtain call for “Götterdämmerung” on Sunday. There didn’t seem to be a passive listener in the house.Wagner’s sprawling, dramaturgically imperfect work — a multigenerational power struggle among gods, creatures and men — has been interpretive fodder for nearly 150 years. In his book “The Perfect Wagnerite,” George Bernard Shaw argued that the “Ring” was a Marxist epic; so did the director Patrice Chéreau in his benchmark centennial staging at Bayreuth.Tcherniakov offers an original reading on the “Ring,” one that departs severely from Wagner but with a story just as rich — unfurling in a challenging, at times obtuse production that defies quick judgment and demands curiosity. The plot doesn’t map onto the libretto, yet like the text, it is many things at once: commentaries on the dangers of playing god; the limits of knowledge and science; the evolution of sexual politics; generational conflict; even the ways in which a renovation can ruin historical architecture. Funny and aching, ironic and horrifying, it is, however irreverent, loyal to the “Ring” as a work of novelistic complexity.Michael Volle as Wotan with Anja Kampe as Brünnhilde in the final scene of “Die Walküre.”Monika RittershausHere, the four operas unfold within the walls of a Cold War-era research center called E.S.C.H.E. (Esche is the German word for ash tree, which in Wagner’s text is mutilated in the name of power, and withers in parallel to the fall of the gods.) It’s a vast facility; the curtain is a blueprint of the third floor, which alone contains 185 rooms. The production’s program refers to Wagner’s lifetime as a golden age of experimentation — sometimes world changing, sometimes perverse. So were the post-World War II years of arms races and scientific pipe dreams, when the story of this “Das Rheingold” begins.The kind of experimentation that takes place at E.S.C.H.E. becomes clear within the opening minutes, in which people gather in a lecture hall to watch a video (by Alexey Poluboyarinov) of a liquid being injected into a brain, stunting neural pathways as they’re being formed. That’s the least of the unnatural acts to come.Wotan, the ruler of the gods — Michael Volle, the production’s high point as a commanding baritone and actor of remarkable range — oversees a kingdom of inquiry into the human mind. Subjects undergo stress tests or are manipulated into love and violence for the sake of observation. In a world where everything is an experiment, nothing emerges as reliably real.The characters visibly age over the four operas. By “Siegfried,” Stephan Rügamer, left, as Mime, and Volle appear decades older than in “Das Rheingold.”Monika RittershausThe ring is not a physical object so much as the idea of knowledge as power. Scenes that would typically be highlights of stage magic — the crossing of the Rainbow Bridge, the blaze that surrounds a sleeping Brünnhilde, the flooding of the Rhine — don’t exist as such in Tcherniakov’s staging, except with unnecessarily winking substitutes. And there isn’t such a high body count; most characters make it to the end of this “Ring” alive.Tcherniakov, as usual, manages details on a level rarely seen in opera. Most impressively, his characters perform to each other rather than at the audience; with no sound, the action could still communicate its essentials. The soprano Vida Mikneviciute, mighty yet fragile as Freia in “Das Rheingold” then Sieglinde in “Die Walküre,” wears years of emotional and physical abuse in her facial expressions and wincing reflexes; Lauri Vasar’s Günther, a boss made into a cuckold in front of his colleagues in “Götterdämmerung,” looks back at one of them with an uncomfortable, sympathetic smile; Claudia Mahnke’s Fricka is a desperate wife who, resigned to a bitter relationship with Wotan, gestures cruelly for him to keep the pen she lends him to sign away Siegmund’s fate.Elsewhere, the cast performs with laugh-out-loud physical comedy, especially Rolando Villazón, however effortful in the unlikely role of Loge. This “Ring” would be an office sitcom if its subtext weren’t so appalling. Tcherniakov traces E.S.C.H.E.’s existence over a half-century or so, beginning in the 1970s and reflected in Elena Zaytseva’s grounding costumes. The place is rotten from the start, seemingly built with dirty money by Fasolt (Mika Kares, who returns in “Götterdämmerung” as a wickedly resonant Hagen) and Fafner (Peter Rose, who comes back in “Siegfried” not as a dragon, but as a psych patient in a straight jacket).Andreas Schager as Siegfried, the ultimate test subject, with Victoria Randem as the forest bird.Monika RittershausThat original sin serves the plot less than it normally would; more important is Alberich’s theft of “gold.” Later scenes suggest that he is an employee at the center, but one who submits to a stress test and breaks under pressure, violently removing the sensors from his head and running out of the lab with as much data as he can carry. He — Johannes Martin Kränzle, a characterful foil to Volle’s Wotan — forms his own dominion of research in the subbasement.Wotan turns out to be the supreme schemer, though, rather than on an equal level with his rival as written: his “Light-Alberich” to the dwarf’s “Black-Alberich.” By “Götterdämmerung,” Alberich — aging throughout the cycle like everyone else — seems to have died, existing only in the mind of Hagen, whereas Wotan appears in all four operas, instead of the usual first three. His cameo at the end, during Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, is where Tcherniakov’s production snaps into focus; much of her monologue, delivered by the soprano Anja Kampe with equal parts anguish and revelation, is an indictment of Wotan sung directly at him, in a reversal of the final scene of “Die Walküre.”It’s almost as though, like Wagner, Tcherniakov started there, with Siegfried’s death, and worked backward. If you follow that thread, you see his “Ring” as a series of missteps and misplaced priorities. The first two operas exist to set up Wotan’s ultimate test subject: Siegfried, born in the center and raised under constant surveillance. And throughout, Erda (Anna Kissjudit, as assertive as Volle) appears at pivotal moments, along with her three Norns, dispassionate witnesses to Wotan’s folly.Not everything adds up. As is often the case with Tcherniakov, you get the feeling that he ran out of time. He introduces an actual ring in “Götterdämmerung,” but because it serves a traditional purpose as a symbol of fidelity, it doesn’t make sense as an object of everyone’s obsession; also made literal are the sword Nothung and Wotan’s spear, their powers mysterious and irrelevant in a world without magic.Kampe with Schager and Volle. During Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, she delivers the monologue to Wotan as an indictment.Monika RittershausBut where successful, Tcherniakov’s approach is thoughtful, if rending. He shows how, from the 1970s to the present, women have risen from casual workplace cruelty to precarious power; but also how abusive relationships will always take form in ways like Brünnhilde’s neglect by Siegfried (a tireless, crowd-pleasing Andreas Schager), which drives her to depressive behavior and possibly alcoholism. And Tcherniakov demonstrates, through his own scenic design and lighting by Gleb Filshtinsky, how easily history can be taken for granted or erased, whether Wotan’s legacy or the architecture of E.S.C.H.E.Because so few characters die, they are left to live with their mistakes, and perhaps to perpetuate them for as long as the center remains open. But all “Ring” productions should have an element of renewal, and here that is granted to Brünnhilde, sung by Kampe with a heroic but smaller sound than other sopranos in the role. Instead of greeting the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre, she walks out of the facility with a bag in hand. On the empty stage’s back wall, Tcherniakov projects Wagner’s Schopenhauer-influenced version of the Immolation Scene that he never set, in which Brünnhilde describes fleeing from the world of delusion, enlightened and having seen “the world end.”She’s tempted by Erda, who flaps the wings of a toy bird in her hand. But Brünnhilde won’t be fooled. She leaves it all behind, pulling the curtain down behind her — without the knowledge her colleagues so carelessly pursue, perhaps, but with wisdom.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Nov. 6, then again in April, at the Berlin State Opera; staatsoper-berlin.de. More

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      Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic

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      Valentin Schwarz’s production of the four-opera epic presents human characters with relations even more tangled than usual.BAYREUTH, Germany — About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.Schwarz’s acidic, passionately performed, contemporary-dress version is a “Ring” without magic or nature, in which all the characters are human, their relations even more tangled than usual, and all the events take place on a single estate.While in the libretto, the dwarf Alberich briefly turns himself into a lowly toad, that is here just a metaphor; it’s mentioned in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyries don’t fly through the sky, but bray around a waiting room in spike heels, flame-colored nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried, the flawed hero, is given a sword — or at least a shard that resembles one — but it does nothing supernatural. (The weapons here are mostly handguns.)In Valentin Schwarz’s staging of “Die Walküre,” the mythic Valkyries are instead women in spike heels, nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages.Enrico NawrathThis is all of a piece with the demythologizing trend in Wagner stagings over the past 50 years, especially in Europe. The most influential ones over that period have been made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the “Ring” as an allegory of anticapitalism, with the action set more or less in the present and the gods depicted as members of the modern upper classes, the characters’ nobility and valor as mostly sham.That was also the case with the last Bayreuth “Ring,” by Frank Castorf, which ran from 2013 to 2017. But compared with Castorf’s gleefully baffling staging, which often abandoned coherent storytelling altogether, Schwarz’s is fairly straightforward in its account of the codependence and acrimony running through a family. There are whiffs of daytime soaps in the harsh vividness of the visuals and acting, and a bit of “Succession,” too.If the “Ring” is an allegory — a reach for some conservative operagoers, but a given for many directors — the conceptual anchor of a production is the nature of the gold, the theft of which from the Rhine, in the opening minutes, is the sin that sets the epic plot in motion.The gold — and the powerful, toxic ring it’s molded into — symbolizes the commodity that the onstage world values most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated through the globalized economy. For Schwarz, picking up on the magic apples the libretto says the gods require to retain their freshness, it is youth, innocence, children.His “Ring” is full of adults obsessed with appearing younger — through exercise, plastic surgery, absurd attempts at hip clothing — even as, more than in most stagings, they visibly age over the cycle.In Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the stolen gold is a young boy (Erik Scheele) whose abduction by Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.Enrico NawrathThis obsession tips over into ominous hints of child trafficking and abuse; the slaves of Nibelheim are here a roomful of identically dressed blonde girls drawing at tables. (The girls aren’t overtly hurt, but they’re clearly being hoarded.) The dwarf Mime’s workshop is a creepy tea party and puppet theater for raggedy homemade dolls. And in Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the gold is not a bit of metal, but an actual young boy whose abduction embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.The life cycle is the focus from the beginning. The libretto sets the start of the “Ring” beneath the flowing waters of the Rhine, but Schwarz instead shows us an animated projection of a womb, in which twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and combat.That image of a family’s foundational claustrophobia is a key to all that follows, as the action plays out in and around the gods’ home, Valhalla. (The forbiddingly sleek, spare sets are by Andrea Cozzi, the evocatively changing light by Reinhard Traub, and the fiercely trashy costumes by Andy Besuch.) The giants who, in the libretto, have been conned into constructing the lair are here chic architects of a glassy expansion. Alberich now isn’t of a different race than Wotan, the king of the gods, but is his less successful brother.Michael Kupfer-Radecky, left, and Stephen Gould (who was replaced last week by Clay Hilley) in “Götterdämmerung,” in which the family property is now inhabited by even more depraved people.Enrico NawrathThe all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are part of the estate’s omnipresent, watchful servant underclass, which shines the silver as the main characters suffer. Later, Mime and the dissipated Gibichungs, Gutrune and Gunther, are ever more depraved inhabitants of parts of the property, long after the gods have passed on.The role of Wotan, his hands ever pawing at women at their most vulnerable, is shared by the sturdy Egils Silins (in “Das Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Die Walküre” and “Siegfried”). In the second act of “Walküre” last week, Konieczny had an appropriately bourgeois accident — the back of his Eames lounge chair broke off, and he tumbled to the floor — so he sat out the third act, giving Michael Kupfer-Radecky the opportunity to jump in, superbly, a few nights before his manic turn as Gunther.In “Siegfried,” the title character was sung by the tirelessly secure Andreas Schager, subtly unfolding the lovable side of a drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilley was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and he would have been impressive even under less dramatic circumstances.“Die Walküre” was notable for Klaus Florian Vogt’s pure, rapt Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s tender, surging Sieglinde, by far the most vocally resplendent performance of the week. Daniela Köhler sang brightly in the short but daunting Brünnhilde part in “Siegfried”; in the much longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” Iréne Theorin acted with intense commitment to the staging, but her sizable voice wobbled under pressure.Lise Davidsen, left, gave the most vocally resplendent performance of the week alongside Klaus Florian Vogt in “Die Walküre.”Enrico NawrathStepping into the production just a few weeks ago to replace a sick colleague, the conductor Cornelius Meister led a solid, sensibly paced, somewhat faceless reading of the sprawling score.For all that is clear, even blatant, about Schwarz’s staging, there is much that is memorably, lyrically ambiguous. Appearing periodically throughout his “Ring” is a small, glowing white pyramid in a glass cube. Characters occasionally carry it, and it sometimes sits next to furniture or in the corner, but it’s never explained or dwelled on. It is whatever you think it is: a model of the pyramidal addition to Valhalla; a stylized sword or spear tip; purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and beyond the complications of reality. It is, in essence, a line of poetry, enigmatic and evocative.Similarly, drawings of stereotypically Wagnerian faces with winged helmets keep popping up — they’re what the girls are making in Nibelheim — before taking form as the red masks carried by the sinister crowd of vassals in “Götterdämmerung.” Do they represent the stultifying weight of tradition in presenting the “Ring”? The dark side of German nationalism?Thankfully, it’s not specified — nor is the meaning of the omnipresent horse figurines and toys. The most important horse in the cycle, Brünnhilde’s Grane, is, like the gold, here a real person: a tall, dependable, silent aide with an equine mane and beard.Enigmatic images abound in the staging, including red masks with stereotypically Wagnerian faces.Enrico NawrathThere were indelible images throughout the week: the giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) moldering at home on his deathbed; Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and Hagen (Albert Dohmen) confronting each other on a palely lit stage, empty but for a punching bag that Hagen attacks, then forlornly embraces; Hagen’s slow, mournful dance as he leaves, waving Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.And at the end of “Die Walküre,” we don’t see Brünnhilde asleep in a ring of fire, but rather the final attempt of Fricka (Christa Mayer) to reconcile with Wotan, her husband. He walks away, leaving a single candle burning as the curtain closes, a nod toward the libretto’s fire that captures the emotions of the music and the moment in a fresh light.But while the abandonment of enchantment is often illuminating, occasionally it ties Schwarz in knots. Since there is no potion to cause Siegfried to forget — and cruelly betray — his love for Brünnhilde, their ecstatic duet earlier in “Götterdämmerung” needs to be staged, unconvincingly, as a fight to give motivation for his bitterness. And both Theorin and the staging run a bit out of steam in the closing, apocalyptic Immolation Scene, with Brünnhilde wandering aimlessly, then cradling Grane’s decapitated head as she lies down next to the murdered Siegfried at the bottom of the estate’s drained, dirty pool.Instead, the real coup of “Götterdämmerung” is the realization, earlier on, that the kidnapped Rheingold-boy has grown up to become the embittered, ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, in Schwarz’s staging, we see him treat Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the libretto) as callously as he was — the wheel of fear and abuse continuing to turn.And the production’s final image is a reprise of its first: again, twin fetuses, but this time in seemingly peaceful embrace. Is that peace lasting? Or will birth inevitably bring about a renewal of resentment, betrayal and violence? With admirable restraint, Schwarz doesn’t define whether he thinks a sick world is capable of change.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Aug. 30 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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      ‘A Stone in the Mosaic’: A Director Enters the House of Wagner

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      At 33, Valentin Schwarz is taking on the monumental “Ring” cycle at the theater Wagner built for it in Bayreuth, Germany.New productions of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, a 16-hour epic taking place over four evenings, are always a highly anticipated event, and even more so when they take place at the annual Bayreuth Festival.Opera houses most often roll out stagings of the four “Ring” works — “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre,” “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” — over multiple years. But Bayreuth, which is still managed by the descendants of the composer himself, presents the entire cycle all at once. And its newest production, by the Austrian director Valentin Schwarz, opens July 31.Since World War II, there have only been nine Bayreuth productions of the “Ring” — among them Patrice Chéreau’s storied 1976 staging, which introduced critical, political dramaturgy to the piece, and the most recent one, a divisive 2013 interpretation by the Marxist firebrand Frank Castorf.A new “Ring” had been scheduled to premiere there in 2020, taken on by a team of surprisingly fresh faces: Schwarz, 33, and the Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, 42. The pandemic delayed the project, and last week, Inkinen fell ill with Covid-19 and had to miss crucial rehearsals. He was replaced by Cornelius Meister, who had originally been engaged to lead “Tristan und Isolde.”In between recent rehearsals, Schwarz discussed his vision for the “Ring” in a video interview. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How are you holding up in the heat?Well, the coolest place in Bayreuth is on the stage. The audience generates the heat.And the building sort of cooks all afternoon, right, when people are about to take their uncomfortable seats?Yes, and I think this kind of torture has to have its reward — especially a “Ring,” which is basically one week of torture. You should get one big plot, one tale, one big story that you enjoy each evening and have the feeling that you want to know how it’s going to turn out in the next piece.What is your approach to the cycle?It’s long and there’s an Everest-like quality to it, but, in fact, it’s not so many characters for these 15 hours of music. It’s 30 or 40 people. It reminds me very much of the typical stories of today — TV series, big novels — where you can dive in and experience getting to know the characters in a way that is not only one-dimensional.We follow Wotan, we follow Brünnhilde, we follow Siegfried, and never get just one impression that one is a hero and the other is purely evil. Instead, we get to know the scratching, the deep dive into unconscious motivations. The “Ring” is mainly about one big family. We take this tale through different generations, through children and grandchildren, and this long stretch of history within the people and this family.There are guests — wanted and unwanted — who interfere in this family story. The basic conflicts are Greek conflicts. Motivations of anger, of hatred, of love, the will to power. This stays within this family, and that informs my, you could say, Nietzschean approach. What is the thing that motivates every person in the piece? It’s knowing the end: that they will die, that it will end, that time ends. All of them are trying to find a solution for this.This summer’s production will have many singers switch roles between productions instead of, for example, casting one single Wotan and Brünnhilde throughout the entire cycle. Is this related to that generational approach, or is it a more prosaic choice?Like most things in a theater, there’s the basic mundane thing, which is that we have not so many Wagner singers, and they are reducing in number every year. There’s maybe five people in the world who can sing Wotan. Bayreuth gives those singers a chance for singers to evolve within the pieces. Over time, someone can sing Fasolt and go on and sing Wotan afterward, for example.For the casting, I was of course very involved with Katharina Wagner. In many cases, it’s interesting to show how the role, the character changes between pieces. Irene Theorin, for example, sings Brünnhilde in “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” and in between, in “Siegfried,” it’s Daniela Köhler. To make this big transition, it was great to see — at the end of Walküre, Irene Theorin is trapped on the cliffs by Wotan behind the magic fire, but this person is changing.When you talk about approaching the work as a TV series or film, is this something that at least partly comes from the filmic quality of Wagner’s music?Most modern medieval movies and TV series are unthinkable without that Wagnerian aspect. Even in “Game of Thrones,” as soon as it’s medieval, it has to sound like Wagner. What you describe as filmic is for me more about Wagner being a very practical man of theater. He knew about filmic effects long before movies existed. He built the Festspielhaus here at Bayreuth precisely for this work. It’s democratic. You can see the same stage from every seat. The invisible orchestra. He wanted to have this approach — you could call if filmic — from a visual perspective as well.From the structural side, it’s even more interesting, because of the leitmotifs. He figured out how to construct this piece as a collage. I’ll take this idea from the Eddas, I’ll take this from the “Nibelungenlied,” I’ll invent something there. It’s not a myth; it’s a myth of other myths. And to make it not just a car crash but something which fits together well, also musically, over a 30-year creation time with a long break from composing, there’s this narrative structure in which the orchestra, through its use of the different musical motives, is an all-knowing storyteller. It’s not a logical thing about knowing all the motives before you enter but something that comes from an unconscious layer of enormous emotionality, which makes it approachable for everybody.That all-knowing storyteller quality might clash with the immediacy of storytelling in a TV series, no? So much of the piece isn’t action but people describing things that have happened or will happen.Of course it has to be psychologically gripping. I have to know why this person is telling us the thing that happened half an hour ago. Wagner didn’t think we were so stupid we would forget. In most cases, the interest is that it’s not a monologue where someone stands onstage and sings into a mirror, but someone who is communicating to someone else. Psychologically speaking, this act of speaking is the first step in therapy. In many of these monologues, the characters give their own approach to the thing that has happened, and their position changes within the monologue.The second thing is that it has to do with the relationship of the characters to the myth. Everyone in the piece knows about the ring, has their imagination of what it does. But knowledge of different things in the piece moves like a telescope; it shifts position and zooms out and in. We explore this three-dimensional sphere of the myth and the story. It grips me that these moments, when they tell us things that have happened, are creating the past itself.You’re directing this work in the house that was built for it. What is that like?You arrive, and you are baffled. You sit down in the audience for the beginning of “Rheingold,” and the sound comes out of nowhere. This experience is singular. To come to this place is also to come to the history of this place. We know that there were very dark hours in the history of the festival. They have done a good job in the last years of reflecting on these: to hire Jewish directors like Barrie Kosky, to process the past and try to create something new.It’s enormous, in this place, how the common knowledge of Wagner still exists, in every orchestral musician, in every stage technician. They remember that this is where Wolfgang Wagner wanted the curtain to rise or fall. And the audience, which is the most advanced Wagner audience in the world — they know everything about the reception history of this repertoire. So it’s not my job to tell them the story that Wagner has written, but instead it forces us to have a new vision and approach every time.In the last few years, I realized that the intrinsic feature at Bayreuth — where the works cycle and nothing lasts forever — means I don’t have to make the “Ring” production for all time. I am making something for this moment, not something that lasts. A stone in the mosaic of the big picture of the history of Wagner. This makes me humble, feel down to earth, reminds me of what small insignificant pieces of stardust we all are in the end. More

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      One Opera, Three Acts, Three Different Stagings

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      In Stuttgart, Wagner’s “Die Walküre” is being divided among a trio of creative teams with divergent visions.STUTTGART, Germany — In the late 1990s, the Stuttgart State Opera in Germany raised some eyebrows and hackles when it divided the four operas in Richard Wagner’s epic “Der Ring des Nibelungen” among four directors, one installment each.That was a major break with tradition: “Ring” cycles had traditionally been the work of a single directorial vision since Wagner himself supervised the first complete staging in 1876. It even became common to refer to a given production as “Patrice Chéreau’s ‘Ring’” — or Harry Kupfer’s, or Robert Lepage’s.But Stuttgart’s experiment was a critical and popular success, and the company is now taking that venture one step further. Each of the three acts in its new production of “Die Walküre,” the second opera in Wagner’s tetralogy, which opens on Sunday, has a highly different staging, each devised by a different creative team.Three unrelated interpretations, overseen by three groups of directors and designers, performed by one cast and one orchestra, for a single audience. Cornelius Meister, the company’s music director, said the term used in-house to describe the situation is “multi-perspectival.” But it’s also been a grand juggling act, with overlapping rehearsals, many rounds of costume fittings and a mounting air of suspense, with the company only getting a clear sense of how — or if — the acts might coalesce at the first full dress rehearsal, two weeks before the premiere.The company’s general director, Viktor Schoner — who arrived in 2018 and brought in Meister and the dramaturg Ingo Gerlach — said that the approach was “no big deal,” citing the longstanding practice in the dance world of combining a cluster of unrelated ballets into one evening.“Diversity is a topic of our time,” he said. “So we decided to ask different people.”“Walküre,” perhaps alone among the “Ring” operas, is well-suited to the approach, Schoner said. Each act tells a distinct (if connected) story, typically featuring scenes for two singers — allowing ample room for interpretive imagination.In Act I, directed by Pauline Kalker of Hotel Modern, the characters are recast as rats that have survived a calamity.Martin SigmundAct I is being staged by Hotel Modern, a Dutch theater company known for productions featuring scale models and animation sequences. The group is projecting live film — of a tiny, destroyed world — onto a rear-stage screen, as a way to dramatize the story of Sieglinde and Siegmund, passionate lovers as well as (initially unbeknown to them) fraternal twins, whose child, Siegfried, the title hero of the cycle’s third opera.Pauline Kalker, the member of the group’s artistic trio who has taken on directing duties for the act, said she saw the towering filmic set as “moving paintings.” The self-conscious, high-concept design intermingles grip-like technicians onstage among the singers. Hotel Modern recasts the characters as rats that have survived a calamity, and the singers occasionally wear and carry rat masks, while the film sequences recount scenes of devastation and brutality. Gerlach, the dramaturg, who acted as a liaison between the company and the three creative teams, said that the film was intended as the visual equivalent of “backup vocals.”The German lighting designer Urs Schönebaum, a frequent collaborator with Robert Wilson, is responsible for Act II. Here, Schönebaum uses lighting effects and a dark palette to dramatize the conflicts between Wotan, the chief of the gods; his outraged wife, Fricka; and his beloved but defiant daughter Brünnhilde. Schönebaum said that “lighting is part of the set,” and has come up with what Gerlach called “a refined visual approach” that is realistic compared with the other two contributions.The German artist Ulla von Brandenburg, who is based in Paris, is the creative force behind Act III, in which Brünnhilde’s Valkyrie sisters try to protect her from Wotan’s wrath. Von Brandenburg, known for using bright textiles in her videos and installations, has created multicolored, ever-shifting sets fashioned out of the same painted cotton that she has used for the costumes.Stuttgart has a huge off-site rehearsal facility, equipped with two halls the same scale as its theater’s main stage. Schönebaum, whose act requires exceptionally precise lighting, had to divide up crucial access to the real stage with the other teams, leading to a schedule that he called “extremely tight.”Brian Mulligan, the American baritone singing Wotan, appears in two of the three acts, and consequently had around 15 shoe, wig and costume fittings. (He said a fraction of that would be closer to the norm.) Even Schoner, who settled on dividing up “Walküre” in fall 2020, admitted it was a challenge choreographing a curtain call that would accommodate the three teams.Goran Juric, the Croatian bass who sings Hunding, Sieglinde’s brutish husband, worried that the evening might be “kind of schizophrenic for the audience.” That concern also arose among the company’s management. Siegmund’s sword is an important prop in all three acts, and early in the planning, Gerlach suggested that the same sword remain as a kind of Wagnerian leitmotif through the evening; that idea was rejected. Nevertheless, he said in an interview not long after the first dress rehearsal, continuities have emerged “without being planned by us.”Hotel Modern’s Act I film, for example, has a post-apocalyptic feel, including scenes of toylike cities apparently destroyed by war — images that echo in Schönebaum’s Act II, which ends with a dimly lit battle and a stage littered with corpses.The German designer Urs Schönebaum is responsible for Act II, marked by lighting effects and a dark palette.Martin SigmundThe opera itself ends with the disobedient Brünnhilde put to sleep by Wotan in a circle of fire, which von Brandenburg and her co-director, the French actor Benoȋt Résillot, render with a ring of LED lights that encases a body double floating above the rear of the stage. Using an elegant lighting effect, recalling the style of Act II, in the same spot and on the same scale as the film of Act I, the image serves — if coincidentally — to unify the production.The singers have also done their part to make connections. Though the opera has been reconceived, in effect, as three one-acts, Mulligan said he was making an effort to create a unified character.“I do similar gestures to remind the audience who I am,” he says, including holding his spear in Act II and Act III in a similar way.In keeping with what now amounts to a Stuttgart tradition, the other three “Ring” operas in this new cycle will each have different directors. “Die Walküre” arrives some five months after the company’s “Das Rheingold,” which got a circus-trash staging directed by Stephan Kimmig, starring Juric as a glam-rock Wotan. The new “Siegfried” is borrowed from the old cycle and directed by Jossi Wieler, while “Götterdämmerung,” directed by Marco Storman, will premiere in January 2023. Then, over the course of five days that April, audiences will be able to put all the pieces together.Meister said that Stuttgart is ready for the task. The 42-year-old conductor — who said he actually appreciated the convenience of simultaneous rehearsals in the off-site space, allowing him to dip in and out of different acts — has been jostling “Die Walküre” duties with Zoom meetings about the new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” that he is leading this summer at the Bayreuth Festival.Jostling of a different sort is to come at the “Walküre” premiere, when he will be joined onstage by a dozen or so members of the three creative teams for a communal curtain call set to number about 50. More