And so everything is clear. Last season I reviewed the first two instalments of Bayreuth’s Der Ring des Nibelungen – directed by Valentin Schwarz – and this year, as promised, I took the opportunity to complete the work. It was a final farewell to the young Austrian’s controversial staging. For the 150th anniversary of the premiere of the tetralogy in 2026, the Bayreuther Festspiele has announced another experiment: Der Ring in Bewegung, or The Ring in Motion, prepared by a veritable army of creatives who will feed artificial intelligence with “memories” of past productions at the Green Hill and will allow it to “direct” new productions on their basis, productions that will be a little different each time: with sets designed by Wolf Gutjahr and with singers dressed in costumes by Pia Maria Mackert. No one even tries to guess what this will look like. I suppose the creative team are preparing for plenty of surprises. Many regulars, however, rejoice at the return of Christian Thielemann to the conductor’s podium, as well as some significant changes in the cast.
In the four years since its premiere Schwarz’s concept has undergone several modifications – those from the last season were apparently the most significant. Unfortunately, I cannot judge them objectively, because I have only seen each part of the Ring once. But even if some ideas have been honed and various scenes are now more coherent, the director’s childish tendency to take up striking narrative threads and abruptly abandon them has led him completely astray. To paraphrase Chekhov’s famous compositional principle, none of the dozens of dramatic guns from the prologue were fired in Götterdämmerung, and what was fired in the finale turned out to be blanks. The mass of superfluous symbols and the total absence of symbols that were relevant confounded not only the audience, but also the performers bustling around the stage. A year ago I wondered what or who the Rhinegold was. I came to the conclusion, consistent with the opinions of other members of the audience, that it was the awful brat kidnapped from the Rhinemaidens from the poolside in the first part of the Ring. And I was right or I was not, because the little Hagen cast by Schwarz in the role – and from the point of view of narrative logic he should not have appeared in Das Rheingold at all – ultimately fails as an instrument of the annihilation and rebirth of the world. Unless we were to conclude that the now quite grown-up Hagen has unexpectedly become a “treasure” of Brunhilde, who in the finale loses interest in the dead Siegfried and passionately bites into his murderer’s lips. This, however, would suggest that the universe has fallen into a spiral of violence and nothing will ever be fixed again. Yet into the ruins of Walhalla – in this case a drab puddle and barely creeping fires – enters a rejuvenated incarnation of a heavily pregnant Erda and the twins she carries (in the director’s version the quarrelling Alberich and Wotan are twin brothers) will be seen in a moment in a stage projection. This time embracing and smiling from ear to ear.
Schwarz manipulates human and inanimate props without rhyme or reason. The mysterious pyramid could be anything – Loge’s fire, a funeral pyre or the seat of the gods. However, I would not be surprised if it turned out to be nothing more than a bedside lamp in the director’s disjointed concept. The puzzling Rubik’s cube from the previous instalments has a purely ornamental function in Siegfried, dangling around the neck of the now-grown-up Hagen. Nothung is revealed only in the third part of the tetralogy, pulled by Siegfried from Mime’s crutch and clearly not in need of forging. Perhaps that is why the protagonist does his blacksmithing job way upstage, hidden from the audience’s view, with sparks flying from quite another direction.
Siegfried. Victoria Randem (Waldvogel), Klaus Florian Vogt (Siegfried), Ya-Chung Huang (Mime), and Branko Buchberger as Young Hagen. Photo: Enrico Nawrath
The absurdities of this staging pile up at such a rate that describing them in detail would make my review burst. Schwarz disregards not only Wagner’s text. He does not tell a different story either. He behaves like a fresh directing graduate who has watched many television series about sadistic children from dysfunctional wealthy families and decided to make a lavish theatrical production about this. After the reasonably promising Rheingold he gradually loses his inspiration. In addition to a dramaturgy that is bursting at the seams, there are also schoolboy errors – like in the scene from Act Two of Götterdämmerung, when Gunther looks inside a plastic bag handed to him by Hagen and gets a shock. He looks into it many more times and gets the same shock every time. In addition, the bag contains Grane’s head, although it is very much a human head, for Grane is not Brunhilde’s steed in Schwarz’s concept, but a faithful companion and guardian of the fallen Valkyrie. The idea would be interesting, if it were played out well and the audience were spared associations with The Godfather, made worse by the headless carcass of a horse brought on stage (another of Chekhov’s guns that fires blanks).
Out of this chaos there sometimes emerge harrowing and memorable episodes – in Siegfried it is the death of the helpless, infirm Fafner, in Götterdämmerung it is the chilling scene of the alleged Gunther raping Brunhilde. The vacuity of the directorial concept is sometimes made up for by the beauty of Andrea Cozzi’s set design. This is not enough to make the audience engage with the dramas and dilemmas of the repulsive characters created by Schwarz. There is nowhere to start to compare his Ring to the legendary staging by Chéreau, an iconoclast who deconstructed a myth deconstructed earlier by another iconoclast, Wagner himself. Deconstruction is a method of interpretation, and this skill was clearly what Schwarz was missing.
This is all the more regrettable as the young Austrian was expected to make a Ring “fit for our times”; yet what came out of it was a misguided product for zoomers, who mostly prefer to watch Netflix, and if they ever get interested in Wagner, it will certainly not be thanks to such an approach. The cognitive dissonance deepened last season, when Schwarz’s staging clashed with Simone Young’s subtle musical interpretation sparkling with colour. In this year’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung there was at times a lack of understanding between the singers and the conductor. Young does not push the tempo and likes to use a broad, pulsating phrase that several of the soloists clearly found difficult.
Klaus Florian Vogt as Siegfried fared the worst in this respect. He is an indefatigable singer with a tenor of surprisingly high volume, but nevertheless dull colour-wise and harmonically poor. Young’s concept mercilessly exposed all the shortcomings of his performance, including a persistent mannerism of singing evenly from bar to bar, without a trace of rubato, which often resulted in asynchrony with the orchestra and breathing wherever he felt like it. The much more musical but clearly tired Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde came up against similar problems. Tomasz Konieczny as the Wanderer, a part that is too high for him, made up for his shortcomings with excellent acting, having been cast by Schwarz in his favourite role of a shady character. I was pleasantly surprised by Ólafur Sigurdarson as Alberich: last year he really sounded like Wotan’s twin brother, and since then his baritone has acquired a noble depth and a beautiful golden tone. However, the most beautiful voice and the most cultured singing came from Mika Kares as Hagen – evil incarnate and, at the same time, irresistible thanks to a wonderfully soft phrasing produced by a bass as luscious as it was seductive in its sound.
Götterdämmerung. Klaus Florian Vogt. Photo: Enrico Nawrath
Also on the bright side were the phenomenal Mime of Ya-Chung Huang, one of the best character tenors of recent years; the moving, tragic Fafner as portrayed by Tobias Kehrer; and Christa Mayer, convincing in the role of Waltraute. Less stellar performances came ffrom Victoria Randem, whose soprano is far too heavy for Waldvogel; Michael Kupfer-Radecky (Gunther), who was a bit hysterical and struggling with the unbalanced timbre of his bass-baritone; and Gabriela Scherer (Gutrune), whose soprano already has too much vibrato, although she is excellent as acting-wise. On the other hand, I was very impressed by the Norns (Noa Beinart, Alexandra Ionis and Dorothea Herbert) and, especially, the Rhinemaidens (Katharina Konradi, Natalia Skrycka and Marie Henriette Reinhold), all of whom were perfectly in tune and well-matched sound-wise. The undoubted discovery of this year’s season for me was Anna Kissjudit, an Erda from the guts of the Earth, compelling thanks to both the beauty of her dark, dense contralto and her incredible musicianship.
All in all, I am not surprised by the joy of German music lovers at the fact that Der Ring des Nibelungen will return to Bayreuth next year in an entirely different, though hard to predict, version. Of the countless Rings I have encountered in my career as a reviewer Schwarz’s is the only one I found boring, which, in a way, can be considered a success for the director, for he has achieved the almost impossible. It was with all the more trepidation that I waited for the new production of Die Meistersinger, especially after my excellent experience with Kosky’s previous staging. To make matters worse, Georg Zeppenfeld – praised by critics after the premiere for his portrayal of Hans Sachs – fell ill, and the casting merry-go-round began.
Rarely does a series of unfortunate circumstances lead to such a happy resolution as in the case of the performance for which I was accredited. That evening Zeppenfeld was replaced by Michael Volle, who may be the best Sachs of the last decade. David’s role was taken over at the last minute by Ya-Chung Huang. Most importantly, however, in this one performance, Axel Kober, a natural-born Wagnerian whose inspired interpretation of Die Meistersinger I had the opportunity to hear a few months earlier in Copenhagen, was at the conductor’s desk.
This was great news for me, as I have never appreciated the bizarre ideas of Daniele Gatti, who is responsible for the musical side of the production – artificially contrasted tempi, unjustified rubato and preference given to melody over harmonic structures, which usually results in an imbalance of tonal proportions. Kober tidied things up already in the overture, which was clear from the evident but quickly controlled “parting of ways” with the orchestra. And from then on it went swimmingly.
Under such an tender and singer-friendly baton all members of the cast were able to show their best. Volle was in a class of his own, although, given the circumstances, he probably built the character of the Nuremberg cobbler a bit as he himself saw fit – as a man who knows how to put the interest of the community before his own well-being, as a great artist who can appreciate young talent and accept the inevitable aesthetic change. His velvety, yet mature and warm baritone corresponded perfectly with Wagner’s portrayal of Sachs: a man still young at heart and in spirit, facing the inevitable old age not without bitterness. In addition, we can hear in Volle’s singing many years of experience in the Straussian repertoire: his interpretation of the role is deep enough to make the audience aware how many of Sachs’ dilemmas are – paradoxically – to be found in the dilemmas of the Marschallin from Rosenkavalier.
Michael Spyres can notch up another successful debut at the Green Hill, this time in the role of Walther, in which he not only seduced me with his impeccable vocal technique, but also confirmed my belief that he is not a baritenor, but a real tenor, with a huge range, juicy at the bottom, luminous at the top, and in the middle – uncommonly resonant and very “conversational”, which he is able to underline with his phenomenal diction. “Baritenor” sounds great, but if I were one of the specialists taking care of singer’s image, I would rather emphasise that his art has marked a revival of an almost extinct type of voice, a voice that would certainly have been appreciated by most opera composers of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Spyres skilfully paced himself in this treacherous, only seemingly easy and graceful role. Compared to last year’s debut in Die Walküre, he may have been a bit less at ease, but the bar was also set higher. What happens next, we will see. Spyres’ voice grows increasingly manly every year and betrays not the slightest sign of fatigue. For the time being the American singer has formed a dream couple with Eva of Christina Nilsson – after admiring her Freya last year, I can confirm that the young Swedish singer’s voice is not only gorgeous, but also well-trained; and she plays with it with the joy of a teenage girl in love with a boy as radiant as she is. Unfortunately, for various reasons we will neither hear either of these two at next year’s festival, nor will we see a revival of Die Meistersinger in 2026.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Scene from the Act Three. Photo: Enrico Nawrath
This makes it all the more important to appreciate the efforts of all the soloists involved, as their voices – beautiful and fresh regardless of age – finally did not bring to mind associations with the Museum of Distinguished Wagnerian Artists, but with lively, audience-engaging theatre and storytelling unfolding on stage. Michael Nagy was excellent as a hilarious, though not grotesque Beckmesser. Christa Mayer, released from playing very important heroines of the Ring, built an exceedingly nice and completely unpretentious character of Magdalena. Ya-Chung Huang brilliantly coped with having to suddenly replace his colleague as David. With his cavernous bass Jongmin Park properly conveyed the authority and seriousness of Veit Pogner. In fact, each of the Nuremberg guild masters got his five minutes in this production and used them to the full.
It was not without reason that I began with a description of a performance that unexpectedly benefited from the staging. Unexpectedly, because before the season opened, many know-alls would not have given a brass farthing for the concept presented by Matthias Davids, an experienced director but almost exclusively in the musical repertoire. Meanwhile, the creative team – for the first time in decades – consciously steered clear of any attempt to highlight the supposed subtexts of Wagner’s masterpiece and presented it as a madcap comedy. Andrew D. Edwards proposed a different set design for each act; however, he placed the “imagined Nuremberg” somewhere between the reality of the free city of the Empire and its vision embodied in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The action is undoubtedly set in the present day, but the creative team, including the costume designer Susanne Hubrich, constantly play with references to the region’s history – not least because they want to make a clear distinction between the “guardians of tradition” and the rebels who want to overcome their diktat.
To put it in the shortest terms, the tournament featuring Walther and Beckmesser turns out to be part of a folk festival, a kind of German equivalent of the village fête. The organisers dress in pseudo-historical costumes, while enjoying coffee from the coffee machine, pickled cucumbers and a “meat hedgehog” made from raw pork. The brawl in the finale of Act Two takes the form of a neighbourhood fight that will be forgotten by everyone in the morning. In Act Three no one will be surprised by the straw bale decorations, the giant inflatable cow or the presence of the winners of regional beauty contests.
In the end, Eva will escape from this hole of a town with Walther, having swapped her traditional attire for plain jeans with a colourful blouse. We can be outraged and consider such an interpretation to be an oversimplification of Wagner’s message. We can also assume that Davids and his collaborators have left the work open, resisting anachronistic attempts to accuse the composer of the sins committed by the calculating “heirs” to his oeuvre.
Either way, time has come to depoliticise Wagner’s legacy. It is worth cultivating this trend for as long as possible, although we have to be aware of the risk that someone else might treat it like Schwarz – to the detriment of both the composer and the mindlessly lured young audience. It is time to think whether the first words of Walter’s tournament song are “Morgenlich leuchtend” or “Morgen ich leuchte”, and what this really means.
Translated by: Anna Kijak