Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, a mythical tetralogy with an ambition to relate nothing less than the creation and destruction of the world, will turn 150 next year. Numerous productions young and old will mark the sesquicentennial. Some theatrical capitals will revive standing productions. Many others—including London, Paris, Milan, Monte Carlo, and, indeed, Munich—are developing new Ring cycles. New York is lagging behind but plans to present a full new production in 2030.
In Munich, the new Ring has been entrusted to the accomplished Tobias Kratzer, arguably one of the two or three most exciting directors today working in Europe, where opera productions often invite critical derision for bizarre extrapolations and provocative license. Krazter studied art history and philosophy as well as theater, and his productions feature intelligible themes that draw cleverly from the material at hand. They are modern in idiom but often make powerful points about the nature of man and society.
It only makes sense, then, that Alberich, the primeval villain of Wagner’s tetralogy—and the only principal character who never changes as it unfolds—should be just that, a villain whose romantic rejection by the Rhine Maidens provokes him to renounce love and seek maniacal mastery of the world. Today these are fantasies shared by a certain set of internet-addled and attention-starved young men, who call themselves “involuntary celibates,” or “incels” for short—and that is what Kratzer’s version of the Nibelung dwarf in fact is. Suffering rejection from the Rhine Maidens, who are costumed as average-looking girls in basic streetwear, he forswears love and retreats to his lair. Usually that is Nibelheim, a cavernous underground of darkness, but here it is a detached garage, where Alberich stockpiles automatic weapons, monitors his Nibelung thralls on a set of computer screens, and amasses treasure not in gold but in briefcases stuffed with paper currency.
Wotan, the king of the gods, needs Alberich’s treasure to pay off the giants Fasolt and Fafner, who have labored to build his majestic fortress of Valhalla. Kratzer’s Valhalla is not the usual castle but a Gothic cathedral—a center of worship from which Wotan’s power radiates to the masses of modern humanity who enter awestruck to behold it at the finale. The giants are not lumbering construction workers but a duo of Catholic priests whose vows do not prevent them from coveting the youth goddess Freia—whom Wotan originally pledged to them as payment, and whose magic apples sustain the gods’ youth.
The changed locales do not conflict with the literal objects and accoutrements that many avant-garde directors choose to discard in less-adept productions. Alberich’s ring really is a ring, and Wotan severs the dwarf’s finger with a pocketknife to get it. Wotan retains his winged helmet and spear—accessories that cause hilarious confusion when he must descend to Alberich’s lair. Departing from its traditional portrayal as a journey down a sulfurous cliff, Kratzer casts that musical interlude as a voyage from the sanctity of Valhalla to the modern world of mankind, where Wotan and Loge, the god of fire and trickery who accompanies and counsels him, suffer all manner of indignities—from strange stares to economy-class middle seats—in a video montage of their journey. When they fool Alberich by challenging him to change his form into a fearsome serpent and then a small toad, the dwarf obliges them. The serpent dominates the garage, taking a bite out of the pet dog kept by Alberich’s hapless brother Mime, here played as a classic tech nerd. In toad form, Alberich is easily apprehended and stuffed into a Tupperware container that Wotan had previously used to carry slices of Freia’s apples for nourishment during his journey.
After Alberich’s humiliation, which leads him to place a ferocious curse on the ring when forced by Wotan to give it up for his freedom, he is restored to human (or dwarf) form in a condition of full nudity, though deft direction prevents most of it from being completely frontal. On his way back to the world, the embittered dwarf stops to urinate on one of the cathedral columns. This spiteful act of sacrilege highlights one of the production’s virtues: by building a cathedral, Wotan is seeking to restore debased faith. The aforementioned video montage features burning churches and a statue of Wotan vandalized with “Fuck your god” in red spray paint, a stark reminder of recent events across the West. This is nothing new in Kratzer’s oeuvre. His Paris Opera production of Gounod’s Faust sets its dances as a wild ride through the modern French capital, including a scene in which Faust and Mephistopheles touch off the fire that devastated Notre-Dame cathedral in 2019.
Order and therefore power, at least in this director’s Das Rheingold, rest on veneration. Accordingly, the unveiled cathedral is dominated by a massive reredos with niches large enough to allow the living gods to take assigned places during the opera’s percussive finale, the music of which accompanies their entrance into Valhalla. Iconography suggests the world ash tree, from which Wotan fashioned his spear; the brace of rams that will draw his wife Fricka’s chariot in the next Ring opera, Die Walküre; and the tree on which Freia’s apples grow. We cannot yet know where Kratzer will take his concept in the three remaining operas, but anyone with even a passing interest in Wagner should endeavor to travel to Munich to find out.
Superbly, if rather swiftly, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the Bavarian State Opera’s music director, the production tended toward casting younger singers, some of whom have only been professionally active for a few years, but virtually all of whom were in splendid form. The more-veteran baritone Martin Winkler gave perhaps the most incisively nasty interpretation of Alberich in living memory, reminding us that the character is no victim, as some directors have preferred to portray him, but the archetypal perpetrator—a figure we would identify as a loser lashing out from his inability to deal with the world.
Nicholas Brownlee’s baritone resonated with a superb legato to deliver Wotan’s music, the tessitura of which sits rather higher in Rheingold than the more mature character’s later incarnations. The panoply of gods was admirably staffed by the experienced mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke, who stood in on short notice for Ekaterina Gubanova as Fricka; the Estonian soprano Mirjam Mesak as Freia; and the impressive Swiss baritone Milan Siljanov as Donner, the god of thunder. The tenor Ian Koziara’s Froh, the god of springtime, sounded a bit throaty, but the young American mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis, a recent Juilliard graduate, gave a sultry performance as the earth goddess Fricka, who tempts Wotan with existential knowledge that perpetuates the story of the Ring. The American tenor Sean Panikkar won rousing applause for his clever and articulately voiced Loge, whose elemental affiliation with fire was suggested by his chain-smoking. Matthias Klink was a suitably pathetic Mime. Matthew Rose and Timo Riihonen growled menacingly as the giants in one of opera’s memorable bass duos. Of all the new Rings out there, this is certainly one to observe closely as it unfolds.
