Bayreuth Festival (4) - Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, 28 and 30 July, 1 August 2026

Festspielhaus

Siegmund, Siegfried – Klaus Florian Vogt
Sieglinde – Elza van den Heever
Hunding, Hagen – Mika Kares
Wotan – Michael Volle
Fricka, First Norn – Anna Kissjudit
Brünnhilde – Camilla Nylund
Siegrune, Second Norn, Gutrune – Alexandra Ionis
Rossweiße, Wellgunde – Natalia Skrycka
Grimgerde, Floßhilde – Marie Henriette Reinhold
Helmwige, Third Norn – Magdalena Hinterdobler
Gerhilde – Martina Weischenbach
Ortlinde – Brit-Tone Müllertz
Waltraute – Karis Tucker (Walküre), Anna Kissjudit (Götterdämmerung)
Schwertleite – Freya Apffelstaedt
Mime – Gerhard Siegel
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Fafner – Peter Rose
Woodbird – Victoria Randem
Erda – Christa Mayer
Gunther – Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Woglinde – Katherina Konradi

Curator – Marcus Lobbes
Artistic and technical conception – Marcus Lobbes, Nils Corte
Dramaturgy – Andri Hardmeier
Digital- and AI-storytelling – Roman Senkl
Creative code, visual art – Nils Corte, Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger
Set design – Wolf Gutjahr
Costumes – Pia Maria Mackert

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra 

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images: Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

‘Auf geb’ich mein Werk: nur Eines will ich noch: das Ende – das Ende!‘ When, in bitter disillusionment, in his great monologue from the second act of Die Walküre, Wotan offers Alberich – absent from the stage, yet present in words, orchestra, and our thoughts – the world he had once striven so hard to retain, now desiring one thing alone, the end, he spoke for all of us. Michael Volle delivered the line with characteristic intelligence and artistry. The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra ‘spoke’ with equivalent excellence as Wagner’s Attic chorus. Goodness knows what happened or did not onstage. I cannot recall and I doubt anyone else can; the likelihood of anyone having cared is still lower. Maybe it happened at one of the times I experimented by closing my eyes or wearing a newly acquired sleeping mask from a Bayreuth branch of Rossmann. (Tentative conclusion: may help relieve symptoms for a short period, but consult a musicodramatic physician should symptoms persist, as alas they did.) The truth, alas, is that most of us had willed that end far sooner, from about a minute or two into the first Rheingold screen-saver foisted on us by ‘curator’ Marcus Lobbes. His recorded utterances suggest barely the slightest acquaintance with the Ring, let alone what it might mean, but such knowledge is doubtless to be disdained in a braver new world than Aldous Huxley might ever have imagined. 

In a sense, there is little else to write, yet somehow, like the pilgrims who returned night after night, more in expectation than in hope, I should make the attempt. What did we learn? That the ‘machine’, the ‘intelligence’, the ‘prompter’ – whatever we wish to call it/him/whatever – was never happier than when covering singers with red, which contrasted with brown, to merge in a sickly terracotta, only to be eclipsed by yellow? That the bizarre ‘historical’ pictures could indeed get worse? The Prologue and first Act of Götterdämmerung took us not very far, from Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan to Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, the latter understandably covering his face. That whoever/whatever was signally incapable of aligning past production images, all still in terrible resolution, with what was going on, so that Frank Castorf’s legendary alternative Mount Rushmore appeared only when it should not in Siegfried, and that, staggeringly, Patrice Chéreau’s still more legendary Immolation Scene, Dame Gwyneth and all, appeared first in the wrong scene with Brünnhilde? What on earth the advent of the euro was doing there, I refuse even to speculate. We cannot or, better, should not be expected to do the work for these machines. We are not Alberich’s enslaved Nibelungs; or rather, we are, but must free ourselves. Not that we saw them anyway—and the chorus, when it appeared, was denied costumes and indeed visibility. An unfortunate moment of mislighting, were that a word, nonetheless revealed the arrival of its female contingent. The ‘cage’ of screens, front and back, could not function on its own terms, let alone ours.

Occasionally what we saw just about aspired to the level of a mid-price greeting card image; near-aspiration consistently failed to elevate itself into achievement. The obscenity of randomly posting a picture of what appeared to be starving Africans, presumably as a result of a colonial atrocity, as something to gaze at for a few seconds, then having it ‘transform’ into some meaningless shapes, whilst Siegmund and Sieglinde voice their increasing love – and lust – for one another should in itself have been enough to take this idiocy off the stage. That Walküre ‘moment’ fell, if I remember correctly, somewhere between sightings of Thomas Mann (at the right time for Wälsungenblut, though apparently not intended as such) and a pair of keyholes; Lenin and Hitler remained some way off. Who knows? Who cares? Actually, many might care about suddenly being presented with an unmotivated, uncalled-for giant image of Hitler impressed upon them in the Festspielhaus. Where is the obligation to them? A concert performance would have been infinitely preferable; so too would even the worst of stagings.

Someone should have pulled the plug, literally, before this debacle had begun, leaving us with what would doubtless have been a fine concert performance. It might well have been a disappointment, but it would not have been a catastrophe. It would have spared some of the ‘AI’ environmental footprint too, as our own World-Ashes not only wither but blaze across the world. Home to Wagner’s endearing encounter with Jessie Laussot, Bordeaux has endured more temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius this unfinished year alone than it has over the preceding century-and-a-bit during which records were kept. Soon not only revolutionary composers will be expelled; not only the vines whose fruits Jessie’s husband traded on will wither; the city itself may fall.  The end approaches and it does not look pretty; nor does it seem likely to cleanse us and the world Musk, Trump, Lobbes, and others have despoiled. Mention of sustainable theatre, sustainable anything else, or indeed any sort of theatre, let alone drama, now raises little more than a shrug. We are all apparently just to destroy our eyes, ears, minds, and souls sitting in front of screens waiting like the gods in Waltraute’s heartrending plea to Brünnhilde—or what would have been, had it not similarly been obliterated by further image-bombardment. Say what you like about the US occupation forces when they turned the Festspielhaus into a venue for musicals and other entertainments; they never conceived of such an indignity on Wagner’s house, work, performers, and audience, let alone put it into practice.

Again, I shall need to be brief about the performances, since I found it well-nigh impossible to concentrate upon them. Bar a very few inevitable slips, the orchestra continued to play brilliantly for Thielemann, despite its relegation to soundtrack for whatever it was we were compelled to view. Silken strings that darkened on demand; sensuous yet spirited woodwind; brass that rang with the hallowed tones, yet none of the complacency, of altdeutsch tradition: from this palette our necromancer-in-chief painted a series of epics to my ears closer to Strauss (and even at times Debussy) than the Bayreuth Wagner of old, yet certainly with tales to tell. These were aesthetic decisions rather than omissions; this was made clear at points of the highest dramatic tension in Act I of Die Walküre, when suddenly Thielemann shifted to an almost Klemperer- or Barenboim-like focus on growling, foundational harmony, the parallel gear-shift in tempo audible yet convincing. There was often a chamber-music line less in the line of Karajan than beyond him; at least, I discerned it from time to time when the images would permit me to listen.

 

The singers were, of course, still more poorly served—some might say unforgivably so. This may seem an absurdly first-level question for a production, but did our ‘curators’ for one minute consider the implications for the outstanding, hard-working vocal artists placed at their disposal? Either they did and utterly failed in another basic task, or they did not and were thereby negligent. Volle’s class shone through nevertheless, if only sporadically, as did that of everyone else. Perhaps I might have been more critical in other circumstances, but Klaus Florian Vogt’s follow-ups to his excellent Loge, taking in both Siegmund and Siegfried – surely a record? – offered insight throughout and only occasional tiring. He acted too, bringing far more to the stage than a thousand screen-savers might ever: not only in his own dramatic presence, but in engagement with others. If Mika Kares did not quite manage such a feat, our Daland and Fasolt excelled also as Hunding and Hagen. Here is a first-rate artist, readily adaptable, without threat to lyricism, verbal meaning, or their musicodramatic union. Anna Kissjudit stood out to me similarly as Fricka and the First Norn. Her sister Norns, their sister Rhinemaindens, and indeed their sister Valkyries were all excellent as individual voice and ensemble. Camilla Nylund emerged as first among equals, in fiercely committed performances as Brünnhilde in all three of these operas. Far too often, though, these were fleeting rather than sustained impressions, and all on account of the ‘curation’. 

This ‘production’, ‘curation’, or whatever one wants to call it is not about ‘AI’; it is not ‘about’ the Culture Industry or capitalism. It denotes and indeed forms part of their logical, lowest-common-denominator, catastrophic conclusion. Of course the Ring, like anything else, cannot preserve itself from the structures of our current existence; nor should it, even if that were possible. By the same token, it should not – must not – merely surrender to them. The Bayreuth Festival was, for sound reasons, founded as a joint stock company. That was not an endorsement of later-nineteenth-century capitalism; it was a decision necessitated by economic furchtbare Not. To complain about that is to plummet to the inanity level of ‘you have an iPhone, so how can you criticise capitalism?’ There was neither call nor need for this aesthetic disaster, surely the worst in the history of the Festival. If any of us hears again of Lobbes in the opera house, it will be too soon, but this is not the fault of a single person, however culpable he and his ‘team’ may be. We are not all guilty, as the cliché has it; guilty indeed, though, are obsession with technology – as ‘bros’ call it, ‘tech’ – and an economic system so ruinous Alberich might have led the revolution against it. 

The optimistic view would be that, once this is all done, there will be a chance to start again, echoing Harry Kupfer’s vision of a Ring post-nuclear-apocalypse. That now seems merely utopian, however welcome it was to find occasional relief in Siegfried from poor-quality reproductions of Kupfer’s lasers. Wagner situates hope, at the close of Götterdämmerung, in the survivors, the men and women ‘moved to the very depths of their being’ by what they have witnessed. If we have witnessed nothing and merely been numbed to the ever-narrowing shallows of what remains of our being, will not the fires continue to rage until we are all incinerated? Make a Ring about that and just maybe we can still talk, create, and crucially listen. Otherwise, as a composer-conductor in Wagner’s line, soon to work on the twentieth century’s defining production of the Ring here at Bayreuth, once put it: ‘The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution?’

Or, as Wagner, already at work on the Ring project, noted in his diary from revolutionary Dresden almost 120 years earlier: ‘8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.)’ If we do not stop ‘AI’ and the forces behind it, such will soon be all our lot, minus Wagner’s strange feeling and certainly minus redemption, ‘through love’ or anything else. Booing with a fury and unanimity I have never previously encountered ensued: which already returns us, once again, to Wagner and the Dresden uprising. Let us consider this, then, a warning on multiple levels, in the unlikely event it is not too late already.

Bayreuth Festival (2) – Das Rheingold, 27 July 2026

Festspielhaus

Wotan – Michael Volle
Donner – Alexander Grassauer
Froh – Siyabonga Maqungo
Loge – Klaus Florian Vogt
Fricka – Anna Kissjudit
Freia – Evelyn Novak
Erda – Christa Mayer
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Mime – Gerhard Siegel
Fasolt – Mika Kares
Fafner – Peter Rose
Woglinde – Katharina Konradi
Wellgunde – Natalia Skrycka
Flosshilde – Marie Henriette Reinhold

Curator – Marcus Lobbes
Artistic and technical conception – Marcus Lobbes, Nils Corte
Dramaturgy – Andri Hardmeier
Digital- and AI-storytelling – Roman Senkl
Creative code, visual art – Nils Corte, Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger
Set design – Wolf Gutjahr

Costumes – Pia Maria Mackert  

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images (c): Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

The Bayreuth Festival has had a chequered history over its (almost) 150 years to date. It nonetheless remains, or has until now remained, in many ways an object lesson to the rest of the operatic world in how to take art seriously, how to create conditions in which it might be produced and experienced, and much else—not least with respect to the Festspielhaus amphitheatre and covered pit. That the rest of the world has failed almost entirely to heed its example may sadden us, but reflects on that world and us, not on Bayreuth, nor indeed on Wagner. As Pierre Boulez observed, whilst at work here half a century ago on the now legendary ‘Centenary Ring’ with Patrice Chéreau, perhaps with a little exaggeration, if understandably so, Wagner’s ‘diatribes’, written in turn:

… more than a century ago, are still completely relevant, for nothing has changed—the laziness of the repertory theatre, its failings, its precarious functioning, the blind choice of works, the fortuitous casting of singers and players, the lack of rehearsal, the sauve-qui-peut routine. Architecturally speaking, the Bayreuth model has remained a dead letter and we still have Italian-style theatres. … Both visually and acoustically, we continue to witness this permanent defeat of what is truly theatrical, Bayreuth having effected not the slightest improvement.

To strike a slightly less pessimistic note than Boulez, I think Bayreuth has played a notable role in effecting certain theatrical improvements, if more related to staging than stages. That 1976-80 production and numerous others – Ring stagings from Harry Kupfer and Frank Castorf, Tristan from Heiner Müller, Parsifal from Stefan Herheim, Hans Neuenfels’s Lohengrin, Tobias Kratzer’s Tannhäuser, and so on – set standards for and posed challenges to the rest of the world, just as Wagner did, and occasionally, sometimes more than that, they have been taken up, run with, even surpassed. Bayreuth as ‘workshop’ (Werkstatt), the greatest legacy of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, created the conditions for such innovation, building on the vision and achievements of Richard himself, as well as (whisper it) the best of the Winifred era, brought such artists of vision, Boulez included, to the Green Hill, showing not only the necessary courage to fail but the equally necessary courage to rethink, to revise, to rejuvenate: Wagner’s own celebrated ‘Kinder, macht Neues!’ following that very first festival in 1876.

If,  gentle reader, you sensed a less-than-gentle ‘but’ approaching, I fear you would be anything other than mistaken. Perhaps nothing, especially in the theatre of Tannhäuser and Parsifal, is truly irredeemable; perhaps something can be salvaged from this. Imagining how lies quite beyond my little mind, though perhaps some machine will tell us. For what the Festival, incomprehensibly, has come up with to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the first Ring must be the greatest travesty ever to have been visited on it anywhere at any time, an experience so unbearable five (out of five) people I spoke to afterwards described it independently as the worst thing they had ever seen, one (Stefan Mauß, whom I have permission to quote) adding the unforgettable and entirely accurate phrase ‘visual waterboarding’, and a rebuke not only to Wagner, not only to Bayreuth, but to any conception of art that tiny, human mind of mine will ever be able to entertain. Enter the ‘AI’-Ring, mysteriously and with insufferable pretention subtitled ‘‘Ring 10010110 – vom Mythos zum Code’, seemingly undirected, and yet ‘curated’ by one Marcus Lobbes.

What we saw can be dealt with briefly. (If only one might say the same of experiencing it.) Following a mercifully image-free Prelude, beautifully and imaginatively led by Christian Thielemann, near-peerlessly performed by the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, any sense of drama, opera, or basic humanity deserts us for a parade of banal screensaver images shown upon a curtain in front of the singers, thus largely obscured and left to fend for themselves, wearing identical, indistinguishable, weirdly yet unrevealingly hideous costumes. (Final applause, for those who could bring themselves to engage, proved something of a game in trying to identify who was presenting him-/herself at any point At least it offered the first and only prospect of entertainment in the entire sorry evening.) Sometimes there was a clear reference to the Ring at Bayreuth, the first image being the celebrated representation of the Rhinemaidens in 1876, amidst genuine theatrical wizardry that enabled them to appear as if  swimming in the Rhine. (Yes, as Anna Russell told us, in the Rhine: now on the curtain.) I almost wept upon a brief appearance, in bizarrely low resolution such as would be refused by the least assiduous reviews editor, of Castorf’s Golden Motel, not out of the nostalgia I feel for that production, but because it was vaguely discernible. We did, to be fair, see a few large rings, on apparently female fingers, when the ring should first have been seen on stage with Alberich. Otherwise, endlessly, pointlessly transforming shapes came and went, sometimes returning, few with any relation to what we heard, culminating in an anonymous man and woman who turned into street (or perhaps theatre?) lights, quickly to turn back again. Some more recognisable, if irrelevant images were suggestive of  Ludwig II put in a very brief guest appearance during the descent to Nibelheim, as did very occasional glimpses of other Rheingold productions, but that was it.

The ultimately unforgivable thing was the way this abject, wasteful nonsense distracted from whatever might have remained of the drama. With that going on before our eyes, our ears (at least my ears) struggled for more than a minute or so to keep track of what was probably a very good musical performance. Not only was this entirely at odds with any idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk – in many ways, a problematical idea that will benefit from deconstruction – but with art and even humanity themselves. I managed to hear flashes of an intriguingly mobile, flowing orchestral conception shaped by Thielemann—rather along the analytical lines suggested by Wagner in an 1871 report to German Wagner societies, tracing an entire corpus of interrelated themes from the individualisation of ‘a few malleable Nature motifs’. If I sensed that most vividly in the Prelude, its low E-flat foundational in every sense and exquisitely decorated by some of the fruitiest, bubbliest woodwind I can recall hearing here, that is a comment related in no sense to the performance itself.

Vocal contributions seemed to be of a very high standard too. Not having had chance to remind myself of the cast beforehand, I had a very pleasant surprise in hearing Klaus Florian Vogt, no less, as Loge, the ringing clarity and sincerity of his tone both in consonance with the demi-god’s revelation of uncomfortable truths and in productive contrast with his wheedling strategizing. Michael Volle’s performance, lighter than one often hears from him and in keeping with the specific demands of the Rheingold Wotan, would doubtless have graced any stage, had I been able to follow it adequately; likewise Jochen Schmeckenbecher’s darker hued Alberich, Mika Kares’s evidently lovelorn Fasolt, Christa Mayer’s chalumeau-like Erda, and much else besides, Evelyn Novak's golden Freia and a fine trio of Rhinemaidens included. To claim that I properly heard any of these performance, though, would be entirely misleading, so I shall leave it there. 

According to Tina Lorenz, writing in the programme, ‘Ring 10010110 tells a radically contemporary story about how we are currently witnessing the beginnings of a transformation in the global order’. It may be a ‘contemporary’ story, but its only ‘radicalism’ lies in turning Das Rheingold and presumably the rest into an immersive Fidelio in which we as prisoners finally experience light and fresh air upon its close. The stampede for the doors was unlike any I have seen—or participated in. Some brave souls managed to agitate for opening of the theatre doors during its course and escaped, to the intense envy and admiration of the rest of us. A period of lengthy reflection, absention, and apology would be in order from all involved. Wagner deserves better, as do the musicians and audience. So too does a world, like that of the Ring, on fire thanks to wasteful, ‘technological’ domination.

Arabella, Vienna State Opera, 22 April 2025

Images © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Zdenka (Sabine Deveilhe), Arabella (Camilla Nylund)

Count Waldner – Wolfgang Bankl
Adelaide – Margaret Plummer
Arabella – Camilla Nylund
Zdenka – Sabine Deveilhe
Mandryka – Michael Volle
Matteo – Michael Laurenz
Count Elemer – Norbert Ernst
Count Dominik – Martin Hässler
Count Lamoral – Clemens Unterreiner
Fiakermilli – Ilia Staple
Fortune Teller – Juliette Mars
Welko – Michael Wilder
Djura – Jin Hun Lee
Jankel – Thomas Köber
Room Waiter – Wolfram Igor Derntl
Gamblers – Oleg Savran, Aljandro Pizarro-Enríquez, Jens Musger

Director – Sven-Eric Bechtolf
Set designs – Rolf Glittenberg
Costumes – Marianne Glittenberg

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Martin Schebesta)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Matteo (Michael Laurenz)

Arabella is a difficult work to bring off. It requires performances and a staging of such quality that it can only really work at a certain level of house or festival. With Mozart, there is of course similarly nowhere to hide, yet his operas can work very well – often better – with young performers in smaller houses. This, if not more difficult, is at least differently difficult, perhaps akin to Mozart heard not only via Wagner but also via the golden age of Viennese operetta, less musically than verbally and dramatically—and with the particular sophistication not only of Strauss but of Hofmannsthal to reckon with too. All of that is whisked together in a confection that must retain its lightness of touch, not at the expense of depth yet so as to reveal it, and with the unavoidable knowledge and difficulty that Hofmannsthal’s work was incomplete, incompletable here, if only because Strauss, that most demanding of dramaturges (as director Sven-Erik Bechtolf observes in an interesting programme interview), would not, from respect for his deceased colleague, permit otherwise. It is not, thank God, a ‘vehicle’ in the sense of a work of few intrinsic merits, which gets trotted out to appease the vanity of a certain star singer and her – almost always her – fans. It can sometimes feel, even be treated, as though it were, though—not least since it seems to be a work in which there is little for the director to ‘say’ other than to let it play. Letting that happen is no easy thing, of course, but it rarely seems to call for, or indeed benefit from, overt interventionism or deconstruction. Tobias Kratzer, in what is probably the most illuminating staging I have seen, for Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, did permit himself a telling, timely twist, but his is probably the exception that proves the rule. 

Bechtolf has only one major intervention, one so commonplace now that it barely registers as such, save when one reflects why it might have been done and what it might have accomplished. That is, he and his designers Rolf and Marianne Glittenberg update the action to the time of composition, around 1930. I may have been sceptical about this beforehand—and to an extent still am: not because I object in principle, but rather because the work’s particular literary and dramaturgical fragility seems to militate against it, not entirely unlike updating, say, Nestroy, a Hofmannsthal play, or, for that matter, Sheridan. There are losses, I think, for such a comedy of manners. Seeing it as a companion piece, say, to Dostoevsky’s – or even Prokofiev’s – Gambler would doubtless offer illumination. What one gains, though, is first not being lost in nostalgia for a ‘beautiful nineteenth century’. Whatever nostalgia one might feel – do we not all? – for the time of updating, finely accomplished, it is already necessarily tempered by consciousness of that updating, of complication and even disjuncture. We all enjoy looking at ‘Weimar culture’, broadly understood, anyway, do we not? That permits some light-worn allusions to a gender fluidity crucial to the opera, as well as to opera more generally, without making them the point. Goodness knows, we need humanity in that respect right now, and perhaps they tell more clearly or at least differently than was ‘originally’ the intention, whether of Strauss, Hofmannsthal, or Bechtolf. 

Fiakermilli (Ilia Staple) and friends

Second and perhaps more important, one senses, inevitably with a hindsight that can seem written in, a foreboding, a fear of the future that distinguishes it from, say, operetta or indeed Der Rosenkavalier. Whether one entirely buys the argument or not does not really matter. It forms the basis for a largely convincing home, doing what Bechtolf sets out to do: perform rather than deconstruct the work, drawing out characters in whom he evidently believes. If it occasionally feels a touch tired around the edges, a little too reliant on the performers to bring it to life, then that is only to be expected of a production first seen in 2006. It is indeed the lot of any repertory system, one that has permitted this to be the fifty-sixth performance of this staging to date, as indeed has the staging itself. (Imagine that for Arabella in an Anglophone house!) Not every night can or should be a premiere. That provokes its own confrontation with memory, nostalgia even. The world was far from perfect then, yet compared to 2025, one can be forgiven a slightly fond backward glance, all the more to remind one of the present. Q.E.D., one might say. 

It never gets in the way of ‘the music’ either; indeed, it seems to permit it largely to speak as anyone with genuine interest in the work would probably wish. Christian Thielemann has lived with it some time, as of course has the Vienna State Opera. I was about to say that it showed, and it arguably did, but not in the sense of Mahlerian Schlamperei, of routine, but rather in a similar respect that freed rather than constricted. Rarely if ever with Thielemann does one sense resting on laurels. Occasionally, if more in Wagner than in Strauss, I have wondered whether he might actually have benefited from making less of an attempt to do things differently, though the urge to rethink and recreate can only be lauded. Here, however, there was approach neither to Scylla nor to Charybdis. The legendary golden warmth of the Vienna strings was to be enjoyed, not narcissistically but for its musicodramatic import, yet there was also a heightened sense, perhaps especially from the woodwind, that this was a work ‘of its time’, partaking in its own way of a neoclassicism that after all Strauss had presaged in Ariadne auf Naxos, arguably in Rosenkavlier too. Line was beyond reproach, again not in a marmoreal sense, but as part of a living performance that engaged with the past without being consumed by it. Meistersinger-ish counterpoint in lighter, Viennese hue created and played with memory before our ears. 

Arabella, Mandryka (Michael Volle)

Much the same should be said of a fine cast. Camilla Nylund offered every virtue, musically and dramatically, in a performance of the title role rooted in a a complexity not always present in even the most finely sung performances. That is not to say it was a reassessment as such, but rather one, as with the performances around her, that acknowledged the instability of Arabella’s upbringing, rendering the ultimate, rich beauty of her response all the more moving. If Michael Volle has given a mediocre performance, I have not been present; it was certainly not to be witnessed on this occasion. Mandryka’s pride, even vanity, as well as his more admirable qualities were the hallmark of what was again an uncommonly rounded portrayal. Sabine Deveilhe presented a Zdenka both likeable and troubled, completed by and also completing (at least for now) Michael Laurenz’s excellent Matteo, sung in a ringing tenor unfazed by Strauss’s demands. Wolfgang Bankl and Margaret Plummer conveyed, in tandem with the production, a couple who want the best, not only for themselves, yet seem incapable of acting to achieve that—at least without external guidance. Hofmannsthal’s text was used to the full here, as it was by all. Ilia Staple’s Fiakermilli was faultless vocally and as cabaret. The smaller parts were all vividly characterised, Juliette Mars’s Fortune Teller included. She did, after all, foretell what came to pass, a lightly fatalistic point made by her reappearance at the close, descending the staircase which Arabella and Mandryka had just ascended. Once more, Q.E.D.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Der fliegende Holländer, 1 August 2024

Festspielhaus

Images copyright: Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

Daland – Georg Zeppenfeld
Senta – Elisabeth Teige
Erik – Eric Cutler
Mary – Nadine Weissmann
Steersman – Matthew Newlin
The Dutchman – Michael Volle

Director, set designs – Dmitri Tcherniakov
Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filshtinsky
Dramaturgy – Tatiana Werestchagina

  
Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Eberhard Friedrich)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

The Dutchman sets sail every seven years, though more often at the Bayreuth Fetival. Like all of Wagner’s operas and dramas staged there, The Flying Dutchman will run for several years, then take a few years off prior to a new staging. I first saw Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production here last year and welcomed it with enthusiasm: a return to form for a director who had seemed in danger of falling into a therapeutic rut. Despite a few, largely unvoiced misgivings over Oksana Lyniv’s conducting, I put them to one side, knowing what a challenge it can be to conduct in the covered pit and trying to remain open to approaches that would not necessarily be mine. This year, Tcherniakov’s staging continued to impress, though I could not help but feel a little had been lost in tightness of presentation (or lack of Werkstatt development in the meantime). The major problem, though, was Lyniv’s direction of the score, loudly acclaimed by the audience, yet which for me fell seriously short, resulting in the strange, unwelcome achievement of making Wagner’s score sound incoherent, arbitrary, and for long stretches – which, sadly, seemed even longer – simply dull, mostly excellent vocal performances notwithstanding. 

Back to Tcherniakov first, though. Here ‘H’ – presumably ‘Holländer’, someone to whom even hardline Line of Duty fans seem not to have given due consideration – returns to his home town, as usual with Tcherniakov, brilliantly evoked scenically through his own set designs. The horrific deeds he recalls from his childhood are played out during the Overture, a small town closing ranks against his mother, perhaps a prostitute or at least in receipt of financial aid from Daland, leading to her death by hanging from a window. This is something, understandably, of which he can never let go; traumatised, he is clearly bent on vengeance against Daland and family (which now includes Mary as his wife), and more broadly against the entire community. Whether his feelings for Senta are ‘real’, whatever that might mean, or not, seems beside the point. He clearly has his own trajectory and she has hers, determined (as in so many stagings, as in Wagner) to escape a world of stifling conformity—and, in a sense, does so. 

Yet at what cost? When the inevitable conflagration occurs, perhaps hinted at earlier by Mary’s placing of candles at the impeccably bourgeois dinner table that proves only a source of misery and misunderstanding, the Dutchman, having shot others, is himself shot by Mary (as you will have gathered by now, a considerably extended part) to whom a now clearly traumatised Senta turns for comfort. The surplus wealth our ever-venal Daland has achieved in the meantime has gone up literally in flames, leaving the women once again both to suffer the consequences and to attempt to pick up the pieces. Dreams can readily turn into nightmares—although someone seated near me appeared, unaccountably as well as distractingly, to find the whole thing a comedy, merrily chortling throughout. 

Michael Volle gave another fine performance as the Dutchman. Every word counted, at least as much as, arguably still more so than, every note. Though this was undoubtedly an opera performance, it drew on his deep experience of Lieder and other concert singing. Moreover, he dealt extremely well with what I assume was a serious injury, appearing with a crutch, though wielding it so well in the course of his portrayal that I initially thought it must be a new feature of the production. Only when he retained it for curtain calls, was I reasonably sure this was not the case (though I shall happily be corrected.) Elisabeth Teige’s vocal strength, accuracy, and dramatic commitment were second to none throughout. Hers was a haunted, haunting portrayal that drew on a wide-ranging palette of vocal colour whilst remaining absolutely centred throughout. Nadine Weissmann as Mary once again impressed as a fine singing actor, whilst Georg Zeppenfeld showed for the nth time that he can apparently do no wrong in any role, including one that requires unattractive traits of personal weakness. This was mostly the same cast as in 2023, the exceptions being Eric Cutler’s Erik and Matthew Newlin’s Steersman. Cutler truly made Erik into a character of his own; what a luxury it was to hear a Heldentenor hold his imploring own in this role. Newlin likewise impressed greatly in his smaller role, clearly relishing the Festspielhaus acoustic and what he could accomplish, verbally and musically, within it. 

Lyniv’s conducting had its moments. It retained a sense of urgency to begin with, from last year, though all too often that dissipated into a strangely meandering tour through the music. A tendency, already pronounced in 2023, to overemphasise the number-opera aspects to the score, as if ashamed of the seeds of something more ‘progressive’, had now become an apparent determination to make it sound as if it were little more than Das Liebesverbot. Yes, of course one can hear varied roots in the score; of course, highlighting them on occasion can be revealing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Erik benefited most from such emphasis, though it is worth recalling that the opera does not fall so neatly into ‘backward-looking’ Erik and Daland, and ‘forward-looking’ Dutchman and Senta. Indeed, the way in which Cutler brought that to the fore through gesture as well as voice was not the least of his achievements. 

Yet so heterogeneous an approach required some sense of direction, whereas what we heard, especially in the second act, promised less redemption than interminable day-to-day tedium. I can only wish I believed that to have been evidence of a musicodramaturgical point of view. The third act fared better, not least since problems with the chorus, or rather with coordination between it and the orchestra, which Lyniv failed for too long to address, had now been fully resolved. Even here, though, an apparent determination to rob the orchestra of its depth and, more seriously still, Wagner of harmonic meaning suggested more an abdication of musical dramaturgy than an alternative. I can only assume the production’s use of Wagner’s post-Tristan ‘redemptive’ revisions to the score was intended to evoke irony; to an extent it did, more at the close than in the revised Overture. Yet it made little sense given such an approach to the score, other than to suggest it was a bit of a mess. My sentiments, however, seemed to place me in a minority; I do not think I have heard a more enthusiastic reaction to any performance at Bayreuth.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Der fliegende Holländer, 14 August 2023

Festspielhaus

Daland – Georg Zeppenfeld

Senta – Elisabeth Teige

Erik – Tomislav Mužek

Mary – Nadine Weissmann 

Steersman – Tansel Akzeybek

Dutchman – Michael Volle

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, designs)

Elena Zaytseva (costumes)

Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)

Tatiana Werestchagina (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

It had been six, not seven, years since I last saw The Flying Dutchman, but it was time. So it was for ‘H’: Holländer, rather than a friend from Line of Duty, though there was certainly something of the allied Nordic Noir genre to Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging, first seen in 2021. The Dutchman revisits his home town following an horrific crime, resulting in a woman, perhaps a prostitute, left hanging from a window, seen (or dreamed) during the Overture. He plays his cards close to his chest, but is bent ultimately on justice, revenge, or both, insofar as they may be separated. Is that what he achieves? He seems to think so, maniacal in a burning triumph to match Götterdämmerung, windows of Tcherniakov’s own small-town, Norwegian set, its church a focal yet distant point of alternative judgement; or, for Nietzscheans, alternative death, ablaze. Until, that is, Mary, the ‘normal’ yet apparently decent animating future of community singing (rather than spinning), desperate to escape from that world, shockingly shoots him dead at the close, the ironic strains of Wagner’s 1859 ‘redemptive’ ending telling their own tale from the pit. 

Mary, it seems in this retelling, is Senta’s mother or stepmother. She is certainly resented earlier by Senta, who in crazed fashion – is she high, a not uncommon reaction to smalltown life? – supplants her in front of the choir, waving her arms around to little apparent musical effect. The Dutchman’s picture, however, still causes a stir. To have Nadine Weissmann, Frank Castorf’s unforgettable Erda, in this newly important, and sympathetic role, added intriguing, intertextual possibilities to this mind, although that is perhaps for the most part a private matter. Weissmann’s performance was as musically endearing as it was dramatically powerful, its silences and quiet looks as potent as the final shot.

This is, among other things, a tale of storytelling. The Steersman, Daland, the Dutchman, Senta, most likely everyone has a story to tell. The past, especially as understood by the present, is like that. For the woman hanged was the Dutchman’s mother, and it would seem, Daland’s lover. (I think it was a little more than a transactional arrangement, though I am not entirely sure. Perhaps they were not either.) The town bar is a dangerous, masculine place of storytelling; the Dutchman has money, and thus can buy men and time. The choir is most probably the bar’s feminine equivalent. At any rate stories are told and heard, decisions are made, and steps are taken towards the final tragedy.

For Senta, it has been a tale cleverly poised between Nordics Noir and Beige (the latter literally in Elena Zaytseva’s costumes for her and the womenfolk). And it is emblematic of the success of the whole, almost whatever one may think of parts of it, that this is seen and heard at all levels. When Tansel Akzeybek’s Steersman sang his song, eliciting derisory laughter, the number of different tones and expressions used, without sacrifice to the whole, transformed it into a mini-cantata or indeed an encapsulation or anticipation, of the whole drama. The tragedy of having to live in the circumstances given and which cannot be altered is not of course, uncommon. It seems, however, unusually apparent and immediate on this occasion. That thought may be politicised; it may be internalised; it may even be transmuted into geography. What is this Norway, we might ask, for Wagner, for Tcherniakov, for the performers, for us? To say it is, the imagination is too easy, although there is surely an element of that. We all create it before our eyes and ears, although certainly not with free will. Always the grey, the beige, the community, and likewise our dreams, fantasies, and plans to escape beckon, thwart and are thwarted, impart life and death. 

Michael Volle’s complete portrayal, as visceral as it was detailed, as rooted in Schubert ballads and even Bach as it was echt-Wagnerian, was a rare prize, fundamental to our experience, as was Georg Zeppenfeld’s luxury casting as Daland. I say ‘luxury’, but in fact a signal virtue of this performance and this production was to have one realise quite how important and complex the role should be. Elisabeth Teige’s Senta was fully the equal of the portrayals of her illustrious peers. A fittingly Nordic heroine, as steely as Nilsson when required, yet probably more variegated in response to very particular stage requirements, she understandably received thunderous applause. Erik is a difficult role; one cannot (usually) be unduly heroic or assertive. Tomislav Mužek nevertheless impressed in another excellent performance.

Eberhard Friedrich’s Bayreuth Festival Chorus was likewise on first-rate form, as it must be. A rooted community that can yet be swayed, it offered an almost Bach Passion-like combination of participation and observation. That goes for Tcherniakov as well as Wagner. Much the same may be said of what Wagner would soon designate his Greek chorus, the orchestra. If Oksana Lyniv drove hard times, not least during the Overture, and sometimes seemed more inclined to look back toward the number-opera past than forward to the music-drama future, hers was always a musically and dramatically motivated reading, strongly in sympathy with the production. The orchestra itself was incisive, decisive and full of telling colour, such as Wagner had learned in Paris. My ears may still tend, say, towards Wolfgang Sawallisch in 1959, but this was – and is – a Dutchman for here and now. After all, the past, constantly retold and reinvented, is always with us, terrifyingly so as the house from which that terrible deed was done burns. 

Berlin Festtage (4) - Siegfried, 8 April 2023

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Siegfried – Andreas Schager
Mime – Stephan Rügamer
The Wanderer – Michael Volle
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Fafner – Peter Rose
Erda – Anna Kissjudit
Brünnhilde – Anja Kampe
Woodbird – Victoria Randem

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, designs)
Elena Zaytseva (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Alexey Polubpoyarinov (video)

Tatiana Werestchagina, Christoph Lang (dramaturgy)  

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Mime (Stephan Rügamer), Siegfried (Andreas Schager)

Experiments resume, continue—and, in several respects, come into sharper focus. Film footage of a miserable, traumatised child whose play has gone wrong accompanies the first Prelude to Siegfried. Siegfried, his emotional growth stunted at least in part deliberately by Mime, presents himself. He is still a child, really, as the toys in the corner of Mime’s house suggest. He does not know his parents, fear, and quite a few other things; the research centre, which is at least in part to say Wagner, will later put him through a series of experiments in order to teach him fear: a dubious project, one might say, as celebrated scientists – Darwin, Humboldt, Mendel, et al. – look down or gaze impassively. Nothing or everything to do with them? The choice may be yours. 

A Woodbird in lab coat, paper-bird experimental aid to hand, forms part of Siegfried’s education and further exploitation. Wotan sporadically watches; such, after all, is the Wanderer’s way, though he has been doing this, courtesy of one-way mirrors, since the first scene of Die Walküre. Brünnhilde and Siegfried disconcertingly laugh at their task, yet when we consider how emotionally – and physically – abused both of them have been, is their infantilism remotely surprising? Whatever future awaits them in Götterdämmerung, it is unlikely to be bright. Norns, typically unflustered, continue to do their business, whatever it may be. Maybe we shall find out next time.

Siegfried, Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe)

At least until the third act, Dmitri Tcherniakov and/or his cast’s commitment to detailed characterisation continues to impress. The third act, not entirely unlike the final scene of Die Walküre, flickers more intermittently with scenic inspiration; exploration-cum-confrontations such as those of Brünnhilde with Wotan and Siegfried respectively, seem not entirely to be Tcherniakov’s thing. By the same token, the reunion of Wotan and Alberich, like cantankerous foes in an old people’s home, is richly observed and increasingly sharply differentiated. There is more than a hint of Beckett, though that may come – it hardly matters – directly from Michael Volle and Jochen Schmeckenbecher, the former expanding on his unforgettable Bayreuth interactions with Johannes Martin Kränzle as Hans Sachs and Beckmesser. Both artists here stand at the very top of their game, words, music, and gesture combining to offer a masterclass in what Wagner demands theoretically in Opera and Drama and practically as both a man of the theatre and a supreme musical dramatist. 

Alberich (Jochen Schmeckenbecher), The Wanderer (Michael Volle)

Andreas Schager’s Siegfried, by now quite a well-known quantity, remains an astonishing, tireless tour de force. It is easy to forget how, not so many years ago, we despaired of ever hearing someone capable of singing roles such as Siegfried and Tristan. A series of catastrophes at Covent Garden, for instance, all but derailed performances; Bayreuth seemed little better. Not only can Schager sing the role, he can act too—and did, entering with enthusiasm into Tcherniakov’s world, just as he had as Parsifal in the director’s production for this same house. Boundless energy is, of course, just the thing for the young Siegfried in particular; that and more are what he received. Anja Kampe’s Brünnhilde picked up where she left off last time and duly impressed. Coming cold to that final scene is a difficult thing to ask, yet one would never have known. I hope Tcherniakov will give them both more to attend to dramatically next time. 

Siegfried, The Woodbird (Victoria Randem)

The rest of the cast was excellent too. Stephan Rügamer’s Mime led us skilfully through the misery of what it is to be Mime, yet also the malice and misery that cannot only be attributed to external misfortune. Peter Rose made a stronger impression as Fafner than he perhaps had in Das Rheingold. Anna Kissjudit’s Erda, though not given much to do in terms of theatre – perhaps I am still hankering after Frank Castorf’s unforgettable portrayal of her (Al)exanderplatz farewell – was beautifully sung once more. Victoria Randem gave a lively, ideally projected performance of the Woodbird, highly convincing in the unusual requests made of her by this particular production. 

Perhaps the greatest star of all remains the astonishing Staatskapelle Berlin. The orchestra never put a foot wrong, responding with just as much skill and enthusiasm for Thomas Guggeis as they would have done for Daniel Barenboim. (I know I should stop mentioning him, but…) It leads and comments on the action as few can, and frankly cannot be bettered by any orchestra in this repertoire today. Guggeis’s work is similarly astonishing, when one considers it. For one so young, with so little rehearsal time, to take over a Ring and get through it in one piece would be no mean achievement. Yet he has done far more than that, bringing much that is different from either Barenboim or Christian Thielemann (earlier this season) without ever imposing himself upon the score or the action. The musical action flows as if it were the most natural thing in the world; maybe it is, but it does not just ‘happen’. And there are intriguing signs of how Guggeis’s interpretation may develop: a steely, wind-led harshness that at times recalls the Wagner (and Beethoven) of Karajan, especially apt in this ‘scherzo’ of the Ring, will balance heady, Romantic, yet always firmly directed outpourings of great emotional intelligence. Wagner, one might say, continues to provoke and experiment upon us all.

Berlin Festtage (2) - Die Walküre, 5 April 2023

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Siegmund – Robert Watson
Sieglinde – Vida Miknevičiūté
Hunding – Mika Kares
Wotan – Michael Volle
Brünnhilde – Anja Kampe
Fricka – Claudia Mahnke
Gerhilde – Clara Nadeshdin
Helmwige – Christiane Kohl
Waltraute – Michael Doron
Schwetleite – Alexandra Ionis
Ortlinde – Anett Frisch
Siegrune – Natalia Skrycka
Grimgerde – Anna Lapkovskaja
Rossweisse – Kristina Stanek

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, designs)
Elena Zaytseva (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Alexey Polubpoyarinov (video)

Tatiana Werestchagina, Christoph Lang (dramaturgy)  

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe)

A prisoner has escaped in transit. Unpredictable and aggressive, as the video report informs us during the Act I Prelude, he is sought by police to return him to his institution. Someone knows what he is doing, though, and has maybe even had a hand in his escape: Wotan watching Hunding’s hut/apartment through a one-way window. If the glint and polish of the Research Institute’s wood panelling have previously suggested something with roots in the German Democratic Republic, yet a little too nouveau simply to be that, here we come a little closer to source (though it may still, of course, be a similarity rather than a straightforward portrayal). 

Take the U-Bahn further east from Unter den Linden, to Lichtenberg’s Magdalenenstrasse, and you will alight on a platform whose walls display twenty murals by Wolfgang Frankenstein and Hartmut Hornung, depicting the history of the German workers’ movement from 1848 to the founding of the GDR. Exit the station, and you will soon find your way to Normannenstraße 22, whose ‘Haus 1’ contains the offices of Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi. The wood panelling uncannily resembles the distinctive design of those offices, whose conference room contains the only artwork – as opposed to a documentary depiction – I can think of celebrating the construction of the Berlin Wall, another piece by Frankenstein, an emigrant from the West. This may or may not have been Tcherniakov’s intention in his own designs. I still suspect, partly on the basis of other productions, that the look of both sets and costumes may represent to him something more post-Soviet and avowedly psychiatric-therapeutic, not of course that the continuation of such activities post-1989 has been unknown, whether in Russia, whose NKVD was the avowed inspiration for the Stasi, or elsewhere. Yet it surely has resonances here in Berlin, in a production concerned with scientific or pseudo-scientific experimental psychology, observation, and discipline. 

The way the gods pass in and out of an apparently human dwelling, or site for observation, has obvious parallels, whilst remaining true to exploration of what form the gods might take in the world of heroes and humans. Hunding, a police officer, doubtless thinks himself well provided for—and in many ways is. It comes, however, at a price, as does everything, and Wotan-Mielke’s price will ultimately be death. (Mielke admitted that extra-judicial execution was an ultimate tool at his disposal.) Police Valkyries, learning their trade from their father, certainly entertain doubts, Brünnhilde’s of course the longest-lasting, yet all but her fall in ultimately. What else could they do? Siegmund faces a similar fate, more brutal, at the hand of other Wotan underlings; he puts up a fight, yet diagnosed psychologically disturbed, the end is always in sight. All the while on another floor of the research centre, though only occasionally visible to us, the Norns continue their work of classification, of filing, of recording.

Wotan (Michael Volle) and Brünnhilde

There are oddities, or at least details for which I cannot account. There remains a problem with objects that do not appear even in substitute form: not necessarily their lack of appearance, though that may present a problem in itself, but at least a lack of clarity as to why they are absent. I can speculate as to why Wotan brings a hooded Sieglinde back with him, so that she witnesses what becomes of Brünnhilde. There is no escape, after all, and this may be part of her treatment; she is clearly, unsurprisingly, traumatised by it all. I am nevertheless not sure, ultimately, what it added. More puzzling was Wotan’s clearly seeing Brünnhilde, and she him, on storming in to the panelled Valkyrie lecture theatre, only for him to ask ‘Wo ist Brünnhild?’ It did not seem to be ironic and, if it were, the end of that irony remained obscure. 

Scenically, much of that act was somewhat on the uneventful side, although to be fair, it often is. There is, though, a discernible transformation to be tracked in Brünnhilde, culminating intriguingly in what seems to be a reversion to childhood as she uses her crayons to create her own fire on the chairs. And I could forgive a great deal for the awe-inspiring denouement, in which Wotan’s world recedes into the background, a chasm opening up between them, stage machinery revealed and distance attained. What that will signify for the drama to come remains to be seen, but it is full of promise as well as having provided a moment of aesthetic wonder in itself.

Siegmund (Robert Watson), Hunding (Mika Kares), Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūté)

Thomas Guggeis’s work with the Staatskapelle Berlin (and singers) continues to be excellent. The orchestra was largely kept on a tight leash, making the most of highly emotional outpourings (not entirely unlike Boulez in this opera). Yet listen more closely and it bubbled away throughout, as much a witch’s cauldron as Wagner’s Greek chorus. I was struck more than once by the dark malignity of much of the sound, both drawing out the best from this particular orchestra and commenting on and contributing to Wagner and Tcherniakov alike. This may not be Daniel Barenboim’s Ring; it remains his orchestra.

 

Michael Volle’s command of his role as Wotan proved exceptional throughout. In marriage of close attention to text (which, one still finds oneself continually having to point out, includes words and music) to utterly convincing external manifestation of character, he must have few if any equals today. His is certainly a modern Wotan, not only in keenness of response to strong direction, but also in strong rooting in Lied performance. The saga-like epiphanies of a Hans Hotter or even a John Tomlinson may not be for our age, which is not to say that equivalent interpretative depth is lacking; it certainly is not. But we think of Wotan differently, as we shall think of him differently in another decade or two. For now, Volle reigns pretty much supreme, a privilege to see and hear.

 

The Valkyries

A further revelation was Vida Miknevičiūté’s Sieglinde, an outstanding singing actress, in which the accent on singing and acting was equally powerful, both enhancing the other. Her farewell in the third act was so earth-shattering that it threatened to overshadow, yet did not, what was to come, whilst her stupefied vulnerability at the end of the previous act engendered feelings both of sympathy and of critical, almost Brechtian, distance. Robert Watson’s Siegmund was largely well sung and similarly sympathetic; one rooted for his attempt to escape, even as one knew it bound to fail. Mika Kares, Fasolt in Das Rheingold, offered us a similarly considered portrayal of Sergeant Hunding. Claudia Mahnke was able to bring her Fricka more strongly into the foreground than had been permitted (perhaps by the production) in the previous instalment. She led us through the twists and turns of her dialectical argument, devastatingly victorious over Wotan—without suggesting the strange understanding voiced by some recently that somehow Fricka is in the right. Hers is the language of an old world—and here there is no doubt that that old world needs transforming, which does not of course guarantee that transformation taking place.

Anja Kampe’s Brünnhilde will surely be key to the success or otherwise of that attempt. On this basis, we can conclude that she will give it her best shot, however high the stakes, and that her performance will enable considerable feeling of affinity. Her Valkyrie sisters offered a fine ensemble of soloists too. What next? More will be revealed; yet tragedy seems to be colouring and forming the musical as well as the scenic air.