Staatsoper Berlin’s Der Ring des Nibelungen will go down in history

This should have been Daniel Barenboim’s Ring, his 80th birthday present to himself. That he is not on the podium is an indication of just how unwell he is; and halfway through the cycle, he announced to the press that he was retiring from conducting, having been diagnosed with “a serious neurological condition”. It is the end of an era.

Instead, we got Christian Thielemann, known for his Wagner, Strauss, Pfitzner and vocal support for rightwing political groups — an indication of just how grave Barenboim’s illness must be. In better circumstances, it is hard to imagine him selecting such a clear rival for the task.

If this Ring were a job interview for Barenboim’s position, Thielemann would be well on his way. The Staatskapelle was on its (considerable) best form for him, and the audience hailed him like the second coming. Regardless of what happened on stage, this will go down in history as Thielemann’s Berlin Ring, for his absolute control over every note, his lush, full-cream sound, his vivisection of the score, laying bare all the details, even when doing so meant choosing painfully slow tempi.

Of course, it is also director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Ring. In accordance with Barenboim’s wishes, the entire cycle was unveiled at once; it is far more common for a Ring to be built up gradually, with each of the four evenings given a separate premiere and months in between to make the next one. To make a complete Ring is a huge task. Tcherniakov’s approach has been to build a Herculean set, and treat the whole thing as a social experiment.

That set is the ESCHE laboratory (a pun on the Welt-Esche, or ash tree, from which Wotan carves his spear), where Wotan and his staff are running a series of elaborate experiments on human behaviour. There is a “Stresslabor” and a “Schlaflabor” (sleep lab), and an entire floor filled with caged rabbits (approved by animal welfare organisations). The set looks like a million euros, which is what it is rumoured to have cost. Room after room is exposed as the set slides, rotates and rises or sinks. All of the renovated Staatsoper’s state-of-the-art stage machinery is tested to its limits. The outcome is breathtaking.

And Tcherniakov is right — the story of the Ring is also the story of one gigantic and doomed social experiment. Do you really need the magic elements to tell the tale? Tcherniakov does away with almost all of them. Wotan has no spear; Siegfried neither horn nor sword; Froh’s rainbow bridge is a magic trick with handkerchiefs; there is no Rheingold. Brünnhilde draws her own fire with chalk on the backs of chairs from the conference room before dozing off in the sleep lab. Her horse, Grane, is a plastic My Little Pony with a red mane; the Waldvogel (wood-bird) seems to have come from the same branch of Toys “R” Us, and is wielded by one of Wotan’s many white-coated underlings. There is neither love potion nor truth serum to account for Siegfried’s infidelity and confession.

However, there are murders. Wotan’s laboratory recalls Netflix’s Squid Game, an experiment in which the players are expendable. Siegfried, having destroyed the Lego sculptures of his childhood bedroom, dispatches first Mime, then Fafner, with no apparent repercussions. But Hunding, Hagen and Brünnhilde all survive.

Though Tcherniakov’s concept seems a little threadbare at times, his handiwork is unimpeachable; every person on stage is a fully rounded, complex character, and the social dynamics are directed with scrupulous attention to detail.

The cast is formidable. Michael Volle’s Wotan is strong-willed and nuanced, Vida Miknevičiūtė’s Sieglinde radiant and winning, Mika Kares makes a wonderfully brutish Hunding. Andreas Schager is a superlative Siegfried, still full-throated after hours, a heroic ne’er-do-well. Anja Kampe takes her voice to the far edges of its capabilities as Brünnhilde, and though it would probably not work in a larger house, here, with Thielemann carrying her on the palms of his hands, it is beautiful, intelligent, and profoundly moving.

Robert Watson’s Siegmund gets roundly booed, which seems almost as unjust as the storms of boos that greet Rolando Villazón for his Loge. Yes, Villazón’s voice is not what it once was, but the amount of work that has gone into this role is very apparent, and he manages almost all of it surprisingly well.

The real booing was reserved for Tcherniakov and his team, who took their bow after Götterdämmerung — it was vociferous and lasting. Clearly a good chunk of the audience was not convinced by the ESCHE laboratory.

Thielemann left Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in 2004 in a fit of pique, and few would suggest he is an easy man to work with. But he seems ready to return to the German capital. Will he succeed Barenboim as chief conductor of the Staatsoper? It is beginning to look likely.

★★★★☆

To April 2023, staatsoper-berlin.de