Siegfried has been described as the scherzo of the Ring cycle and Andreas Homoki seems to have at least partly run with that. There are quite a few places, including some less obvious ones, where he seems to be going for laughs. The obvious ones are obvious enough. You can’t really have a bear in the first scene without it being comic but there were also times when Wanderer was camping it up a bit. We’ll come back to that.
A new production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is always a bit of an event and all the more so when it’s in the city where the work was composed. Andreas Homoki’s production premiered and was recorded for video at Opernhaus Zürich in 2024. I’ll be working my way through the whole cycle but here are my initial thoughts based on Das Rheingold.
Richard Strauss’ Die Liebe der Danae is one of his least performed operas so it’s not very familiar to most opera goers. I wrote about its performance history and provided a plot summary in my review of a 2011 recording at the Deutsche Oper, which is the only video recording besides the 2016 Salzburg one which forms the subject of this post.
Wozzeck is a tricky piece for a director. There seem to be two possible approaches. One can find a character for Wozzeck himself that resonates with contemporary audiences and treat the piece more or less realistically. That’s the approach taken by both Bieito and Tcherniakov. Alternatively one can run with the overtly expressionist aspects of the piece and present it in a more abstract way as Peter Mussbach did. Andreas Homoki’s 2015 Zürich production takes the second route. The piece is presented as if the characters are puppets in a puppet theatre in a sort of ultra-grim version of Punch and Judy. It’s visually quite arresting and there are some very well composed scenes. To give just one example, immediately after Wozzeck has decapitated Marie the chorus appear as nightmarish Maries while Wozzeck sits nursing the severed head. That said, the concept does pall and maybe hasn’t really got the legs, absent any other real directorial ideas, to carry the piece for two hours.
operaramblings 