Farewell to the Time Tunnel

Götz Friedrich, who managed the Deutsche Oper Berlin during the final two decades of the twentieth century, is an era unto himself. Although the Deutsche Oper has been gradually phasing out his Wagner productions since his death in 2000, his Ring cycle, completed in 1985, has not only managed to hang onto its place, but has continued to grow in stature over the course of thirty years and as many complete performances. It may now be time for a new production and a fresh perspective, but the two sold-out – and rapturously received – cycles this month offered an affectionate farewell for a production which has been a part of Berlin’s cultural life for more than a generation. 

On the one hand, Mr Friedrich’s staging is unmistakably of its time. That time, the mid-eighties, was the age of Reagan and Gorbachev, of renewed nuclear fears and the…