Overall I rate this cycle very highly. Andreas Homoki’s production is unusual in that it’s really not conceptual and is often very literal. That’s rare in Wagner productions in major European houses. But it’s also not cluttered up with superfluous 19th century “stuff”. When a thing is essential, it’s there as described. If it’s not essential more often than not it’s omitted.
And so to the final instalment… We open with the Rock but now the background room; while still the same 18th/19th century mansion, looks a bit the worse for wear with peeling and cracked paint. The Norns, predictably, are all in white. It’s all pretty conventional but done well.
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.
Continuing on from Das Rheingold we come to Die Walküre. There’s a lot of continuity with the earlier work. It’s basically the same rotating set though in some scenes one of the “rooms” becomes a forest. Another thing we see is characters who aren’t canonically “there” appearing in scenes. So right at the beginning, when Siegmund and Sieglinde meet, Wotan is lurking and doing things like handing drinks to Sieglinde. We’ll see more of this with Hunding’s henchmen appearing in various places, Wotan and the henchmen appearing when Sieglinde is describing her wedding and the Valkyries showing up at the start of Act 2.
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.
operaramblings 