Bayreuth’s new Ring cycle promises Netflix-style drama — review

Although Bayreuth had experienced a brief golden age in the 18th century, it was a backwater when Richard Wagner started his opera festival there in 1876. Now it is annually in the headlines, not least as Angela Merkel was a regular visitor during her chancellorship (she attended the opening night again this year).

Wagner would have loved the attention and might even have approved of the climate protesters who turned up to demonstrate. He was deeply interested in politics and once fired off an article to Bismarck to interest the statesman in his festival plans. He was miffed there was no reply.

The operas themselves are deeply rooted in Wagner’s often controversial social and political beliefs. As George Bernard Shaw said, in a quote printed in this year’s programme, “The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarves . . . is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity.” The challenge for a director is how to put that on the stage.

This year’s new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner’s grandest work over four nights, is listed as the 16th in the festival’s history, recent years charting a distinct decline. Director Valentin Schwarz, still only 33, announced his intentions in advance: “Wagner is my Netflix,” he declared, and his Ring sets out to show us the boxed set of a dynastic saga involving a dysfunctional, modern family.

The idea is not at all implausible (Wagner’s own family and his warring descendants might not be a bad place to start). We enter a world of bling, where Valhalla is a gleaming, modern mansion and the Valkyries gather at a glitzy beauty salon. The head of the household is Wotan, an ageing playboy who keeps in trim doing his weights, but he has over-budgeted on a towering glass extension to his house. Self-satisfied family members sit around waiting for him to sort the problem out.

What a decadent family they are. Given a couple of minutes alone with Sieglinde, Wotan quickly has his hand up her dress. Siegfried similarly paws at the Woodbird, here a young girl, though he at least has the excuse that he has waited a lifetime so far to meet a woman (Mime has kept him amused with porn magazines).

There is a satisfyingly louche atmosphere to these family scenes, but not much logic. One features Freia’s funeral, but when did she die? Another shows the death of Fafner, one of the unpaid architects now languishing in end-of-life care in the living room, but why has the family taken him in? How can Sieglinde be eight months pregnant at curtain-up of Die Walküre when Siegmund has not met her yet? What is the point of Wotan not killing Hunding, when we never see him again? Some of these questions are answered in the director’s podcasts, but here is another one: why should we have to listen to those in order to understand his production?

There is also more to the Ring than the human story alone. Wagner’s libretto works on many levels and its mythological symbols are key elements that hold its wider meanings together. The challenge for a director who has chosen a TV soap setting is to get them to make sense.

Schwarz has weak solutions for some and flunks the rest. There is no rainbow bridge, no sword for Siegmund, no magic fire for Brünnhilde, no Tarnhelm (the scene in Nibelheim where Alberich undergoes transformations is painfully under-directed). The ring itself becomes a boy in a gold jersey, symbol of a new generation of hope, who is abducted by Alberich and turned to the dark side, growing up to be evil Hagen — again an interesting idea which never quite fulfils its potential. The grand final scene descends into a black hole of ideas.

How much easier it is to shut out these directorial puzzles and focus on the music. Even that, though, had its challenges, as rampant Covid and other problems resulted in multiple singers playing roles across the operas, including three Wotans, two Siegfrieds and two Brünnhildes.

The two central operas fared best. Die Walküre could hardly fail when the curtain rose on huge-voiced Lise Davidsen as Sieglinde and the boyishly fresh Siegmund of Klaus Florian Vogt, as fine a pair as Bayreuth can have seen. The two of them were pursued by Georg Zeppenfeld’s firm-voiced Hunding. Wotan in this opera was Tomasz Konieczny, whose muscular bass-baritone was doing well in Act Two until he fell through a chair and was replaced in Act Three by the expressive and tender Michael Kupfer-Radecky.

Siegfried was dominated by Andreas Schager in the title role, clarion-clear, never strained and almost as fresh at the end of this impossibly taxing role as he was the start. He is the Siegfried of his generation. His reward was the young, lyrical Brünnhilde of Daniela Köhler, a promising find. Konieczny returned, apparently recovered, as a punchy Wanderer, facing down the fearsomely aggressive Alberich of Olafur Sigurdarson, another of this cycle’s successes.

This was a musical performance that kept the audience gripped by the narrative, exactly what the production lacked

There were some bright spots elsewhere. Christa Mayer’s Fricka exuded relaxed authority. Arnold Bezuyen played Mime, bizarrely portrayed as a collector of toys, without exaggeration and Albert Dohmen sang an almost noble Hagen. Okka von der Damerau’s Erda, one of Wotan’s former lovers also installed in the family circle, brought gravity to her pronouncements. More disappointing was the Brünnhilde of Iréne Theorin in Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung, too shrill with a persistent fast vibrato. Of the others, Egils Silins, as Wotan in Das Rheingold, and Clay Hilley, as the last-minute Siegfried in Götterdämmerung, kept the show on the road.

Not the least of the cast replacements was conductor Cornelius Meister, who took over a couple of weeks before opening night. His is a broad-brush, forward-moving Wagner and it was possible to overlook what was missing in terms of insight and expression whenever the music’s blood was up, like the white-hot forging of Nothung or the passion of the dawn duet.

This was a musical performance that kept the audience gripped by the narrative, exactly what the production lacked. We were promised we would be hooked by up-to-the-minute, primetime-TV Wagner, but by the time Schwarz had finished tying the story in knots, we were left with a half-comprehensible muddle. Netflix might like to have a word with him before he makes any further comparisons.

★★★☆☆

Performances continue to August 30, bayreuther-festspiele.de