Unlike all too many Ring cycles, Zürich Opera’s new staging will stay in the memory for lots of the right, not the wrong, reasons. This is a fresh and intelligent cycle that is full of interest and consistently musically distinguished.
The Zürich Ring’s principal achievement is musical and theatrical coherence. Andreas Homoki’s production and Christian Schmidt’s neoclassical sets provide a unified visual framework. They are centred on a rotating axis of interconnected rooms and settings. Homoki is explicit that his aim is to move “in the other direction” from what he dubs the “interpretational meta levels” of other Ring productions, especially of those that dominate German opera houses. That does not mean that this is a cycle without an interpretation. But it does mean Homoki trusts Wagner more than some modern directors do: he has staged a storyteller’s Ring.
It works brilliantly in Das Rheingold, where the action and settings, as well as the cast of characters, change more rapidly than in the rest of the tetralogy. The rotating set is revelatory here. It allows Rheingold’s endlessly allusive score and text, full of dark humour and pettiness as well as of larger themes of politics and power, to be deconstructed with unusual clarity. This preference for uncluttered encounters and the focus on individual dilemmas is sustained throughout the whole cycle.
A single example of Homoki’s care over detail will have to stand for many others over the four operas. Wotan’s spear is the embodiment of his rules-based authority. So it is conspicuously left behind when he descends into the netherworld to steal the ring of power in Das Rheingold, and for much of his journeying as the Wanderer in Siegfried. In Rheingold, the spear is then only reclaimed after Wotan keeps his word and passes the ring to the giant Fafner. But, as he does so, Wotan collapses, a reminder that he is not just keeping his promise by giving up the ring but at the same time is also fatally weakened. As a result, the entry into Valhalla that follows is a hollow and meaningless triumph.
Homoki is honest enough to accept that the sprawling storytelling of the Ring cannot all be tidily packaged within too tight a format. Wagner imposes too many radical demands for that. The trees, rocks and fire in Die Walküre and the sword forging, dragon and woodbird in Siegfried are all there, but they are rarely the only focus. This is a Ring where the words and the music matter most.
Sometimes the need to contain everything within the rotating set becomes dizzying, but Homoki’s direction of travel is never entirely lost. The deeper theme of authority draining away from Wotan and flowing instead towards the world of humans is there from first to last. The final flaming tableau at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung underlines and directly echoes Wotan’s doomed dream of undisturbed power in Das Rheingold.
Zürich’s music director, Gianandrea Noseda, conducts the cycle with energy and directness and has an admirable instinct to push ahead. Act one of Die Walküre exploded out of the blocks, as did the epic prelude to act three of Siegfried. The Philharmonia Zürich is not always quite up to his demands, but it provides a visceral orchestral experience, and the sense that this is a shared enterprise among the musicians is compelling. Part of the immediacy is explained by the intimacy of the Zürich opera house, whose 1,100 seat capacity is far less than Covent Garden’s 2,300 or the New York Met’s 3,800.
No wonder singers like performing in a house this size. This cycle drew a mix of Wagnerian vocal experience along with important singers of the day moving into new roles. Tomasz Konieczny is as good as it gets as Wotan these days. He acts marvellously – this is a production that demands a lot of stage nuance from its principals – and the bass-baritone voice is flexible and darkly incisive even in the most sustained passages. He was best of all as the Wanderer in Siegfried.
Camilla Nylund’s Brünnhilde, making her debut in a role which she may come to dominate in the coming years, was beautifully sung, but only intermittently successful. Her lyric soprano sometimes struggled to project through the orchestra or in ensemble, but her final scene in Götterdämmerung showed the quality and range at her disposal. Klaus Florian Vogt’s move into the role of Siegfried was similarly fine in parts but without quite conveying the heroic ring that the part demands at important moments. Christopher Purves was broodingly obsessive as Alberich, but without ever descending into hack villainy.
These are days of plenty for Wagner operas in Europe, and for the Ring in particular. In the 2024-25 season, important new cycles will get under way in Milan under Christian Thielemann, in Munich under Vladimir Jurowski, and in Paris under Pablo Heras-Casado. Next season, Covent Garden will add Die Walküre under Antonio Pappano to its Barrie Kosky-directed cycle, and in 2026, Bayreuth will unveil its 150th anniversary production in the house where Wagner presented the cycle for the first time in 1876. It is an extraordinary post-pandemic flowering. But the truth is that the Zürich Ring has already set the bar high for them all.
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