When Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of the Ring first appeared at the beginning of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s 2022 season, it was every bit as confounding as everyone expected: rigorously intelligent and visually dazzling, it pushed Wagner’s story in all manner of unconventional directions, offering unexpected insights without abandoning the work’s core emotional pleasures. The first performances – conducted on short notice by Christian Thielemann, who had not yet taken over as musical director of the Staatsoper – succeeded as much on the strength of their extraordinary vocal performances as on the ingenuity of the staging, and by the end of the first cycle, the production already seemed destined to acquire the status of legend.
An additional three cycles were given in the same season, followed by another two a year later (under Philippe Jordan) as part of the Staatsoper’s annual easter festival. Now, almost exactly three years after its première, the Tcherniakov Ring returned to the stage to kick off the 2025 season. With Christian Thielemann back on the podium and something close to a modern-day dream cast, the first two evenings paired a thoroughly engaging Rheingold with arguably the finest performance of Die Walküre to appear on any Berlin stage in the last dozen years.
The Ring, which spans some fifteen hours of stage time over four nights, is very much a world unto itself. Although rooted in nordic myth and epic German poetry, its philosophical and theological concerns come very much from Wagner’s own time; and Wagner’s own improbable synthesis – at once highly personal and startlingly universal – continues to trouble and inspire critics, directors and audiences more than a century and a half after its first performances. If the cycle is too vast to be distilled to a single central theme, the problem of free will certainly appears with some frequency; and given that the question of whether or not a supreme deity can create a being with independent agency hangs heavy over Wotan for much of the story’s length, Mr Tcherniakov’s decision to set his staging in a research institute for behavioural psychology is nowhere nearly as far-fetched as it may initially have sounded.
The action of Das Rheingold thus opens in the fictional E.S.C.H.E. institute, a lovingly recreated slice of 1970s architecture and design from the far side of the iron curtain. (Although the meaning of the acronym is never made explicit in the course of the cycle, its similarities with a certain tree from norse mythology are obvious). The institute, with its wood-panelled lecture theatre, red-marbled meeting room, and clean laboratories filled with banks of pre-digital technology, is populated by an assortment of wise administrators (the Norns), studious research assistants (the Rhine Maidens), and well-dressed senior fellows (the Gods). At the head of it all is Wotan, the director of the institute, whose increasingly dangerous experiments set the story in motion.
In Rheingold, a botched sensory-deprivation experiment causes its subject – Alberich – to go insane; although Wotan is primarily concerned with finding the money necessary to pay off the corrupt gangsters (Fasolt and Fafner) who built the institute, the madness he has unwittingly unleashed begins to haunt him. However it is Wotan’s more ambitious experiment in Walküre – an attempt to foster free will in his subjects, even within tightly-controlled simulation conditions – that plants the seeds of his undoing: Fricka calls him out on his unscientific methods, his favoured subject is allowed to be killed in the simulation, and in the process he becomes alienated from Brünnhilde, somehow failing to realise that, within the hermetic confines of the institute, she alone possesses the free will that he has sought in vain.
Wagner, Das Rheingold. Christian Thielemann, conductor. Dmitri Tcherniakov, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, september 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus / Staatsoper Unter den Linden .
If the frame of Mr Tcherniakov’s retelling seems both overly conceptual and suspiciously far-removed from Wagner’s vision, it nonetheless mostly works. In visual terms alone, the E.S.C.H.E. institute is a marvel, a series of beautifully-observed, meticulously constructed spaces that can sustain the drama of even the Ring’s longest scenes (its nearest relative may be Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel). The discontinuity of the rooms – which, in Rheingold, scroll past from right to left, but never in the same order – only adds to the fascination: the fact that the rooms don’t quite correspond to the ground plan that appears on the curtain during the interval, and the fact that the staging is constantly hinting at the existence of other rooms we will never see, make the institute an endlessly compelling, occasionally disorienting place, but one in which we don’t mind spending time … or getting lost.
Of course no staging survives on sets alone, and if the operas succeeded on a dramatic level it was due largely to Mr Tcherniakov’s sense of when to have the E.S.C.H.E. institute intrude into the story, and when to allow individual scenes to play out in a more-or-less straightforward manner. After establishing that the first act of Walküre was taking place in a simulation environment observed by Wotan from the far side of a one-way mirror, the action followed the contours of the story quite closely, delineating the miseries and growing attraction of Siegmund and Sieglinde with a mixture of carefully-conceived details and brilliantly-realised interactions.
Admittedly Mr Tcherniakov’s departures from Wagner were never going to please traditionalists. During the première performances three years ago it almost seemed as though the staging’s conscious subversion of the Ring’s most celebrated moments – Alberich turning into a serpent, the appearance of the rainbow bridge, Brünnhilde’s rock engulfed in flame – were the work of a contrarian determined to deny his audience the work’s familiar pleasures. On recent viewing, however, Mr Tcherniakov’s omissions seemed more a direct riposte to anyone who comes to the Ring solely for spectacular effects. Donner and Froh performing a series of cheap, store-bought magic tricks during the rainbow bridge scene was almost comedically anticlimactic, as though Mr Tcherniakov were saying: ‘You want special effects? Alright, here you go!’ More often, however, his decision to forego stage magic made room for moments of genuine emotional involvement: the final scene of Walküre may have been notable for its lack of magic fire, but it would be difficult to imagine a more moving distillation of Wotan and Brünnhilde’s parting.
Wagner, Die Walküre. Christian Thielemann, conductor. Dmitri Tcherniakov, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, september 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus / Staatsoper Unter den Linden .
In addition to its visual and conceptual merits, Mr Tcherniakov’s staging also created an environment in which vocal performances could thrive. Although the cast of Rheingold was generally strong, it was Michael Volle who towered over the evening; in terms of nuanced delivery, stage charisma and raw vocal power he had no equal, and from his lofty opening lines in the second scene there could be no doubt that this was Wotan’s story. In his dealings with the giants and his fellow gods, in his cautious friendship with Loge, and even in his confrontation with Alberich he maintained an air of satisfied superiority; it was only with the appearance of Erda that his confidence gave way to the anxieties that would fuel his appearances in Die Walküre. Indeed, Anna Kissjudit’s Erda was one of the few performances that came close to matching the intensity of Mr Volle’s: dark in tone and full of portent, her brief appearance had the necessary weight to bring the squabbles of gods and giants to a standstill.
Mika Kares provided Rheingold with a superb Fasolt, lyrical, intelligent, and gently expressive; the expansive warmth of his tone filled the auditorium without ever sounding forced. Sebastian Kohlhepp was a reliable if somewhat understated Loge: although his phrasing was crisp and elegant, his cautious physical performance seemed reluctant to engage with the character’s mercurial spirit. This reserve was made especially apparent in his dialogue with Stephan Rügamer’s live-wire Mime in the third scene. As Alberich, Jochen Schmeckenbecher alternated between utterances of terrifying focus and moments that seemed in danger of going over the top. But after a third scene that often seemed over-emphatic, his curse on the ring in the fourth scene was all the more compelling for its relative restraint.
If Rheingold succeeded on the strength of its ensemble, Die Walküre was notable for the magnificence of its individual performances. Mr Volle’s Wotan was even more commanding than the previous evening: the exultant opening scene of the second act soon gave way to vexation and despair, culminating in an impassioned monologue that, in its emotional breadth and honesty of expression, seemed to stand as the centrepiece not merely of the opera, but the cycle as a whole. Nor was there any loss of vigour in the third act: the anger of his arrival among the Valkyries was terrifying and thrilling in equal measure, but just as impressive was the way that he allowed Wotan’s rage to be shaded by affection and regret as the act progressed. When the curtain had fallen on the evening, there could be no doubt that we had witnessed one of the great Wotan performances.
If Mr Volle didn’t dominate Walküre in quite the same way as Rheingold, it was only because he had such formidable competition from Vida Miknevičiūtė (and, in the third act, from Anja Kampe’s Brünnhilde). The gods and mortals share very little stage time in Walküre, and Ms Miknevičiūtė had little difficulty establishing Sieglinde as the centre of the opera’s ‘human’ side. If her early scenes were never less than compelling, her narration of the wedding feast – urged on by exceptional playing from the Staatskapelle brass – was positively electrifying, and her ‘naming’ of Siegmund brought the first act to a rapturous climax. Her scenes of madness in the second act were equally gripping and her plea to the Valkyries in the third was a marvel of terror and triumph. Yet even with Ms Miknevičiūtė at full strength, the first act might not have been quite as successful without Mika Kares, whose gruff, suave and thoroughly menacing Hunding suggested the high stakes of Sieglinde’s escape.
Wagner, Die Walküre. Christian Thielemann, conductor. Dmitri Tcherniakov, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, september 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus / Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
As Brünnhilde, Anja Kampe had a strong opening scene (and her ‘hojotoho’s were matched with orchestral playing of uncommon excitement). But it was in the third act, when the Valkyrie begins to confront and accept her new-found human emotions, that Ms Kampe’s performance came into its own. Her reactions to Wotan’s rage, sometimes humble, other times impassioned, all possessed a sense of quiet determination; indeed, it was the combination of her inner strength and Wotan’s implacability that transformed the latter half of the third act into Walküre’s dramatic high point.
Throughout both evenings the guidance of Christian Thielemann was a constant presence, even if he rarely drew attention to himself by means of wilful pacing or emphatic phrasing. Indeed the secret to his performance was its effortless justice: the appearance of sunlight on the gold in the first scene of Rheingold needed no extra sculpting to sound magical, and the ecstatic finale of Walküre’s first act seemed to emerge naturally from the passion of the characters rather than any obvious intervention from the orchestra. When Mr Thielemann did choose to underline a passage – the arrival of the giants, or the sudden appearance of Erda – the emphasis was invariably well-judged and well deserved. If his pacing of the drama was fairly brisk, there was also not a moment that felt rushed. The Nibelheim scene of Rheingold was played with a propulsive thrust that admitted no excess, and the long central act of Walküre – which, in some performances, can seem more like a collection of brilliant moments than a single unified structure – possessed a remarkable vision of the act’s dramatic architecture.
With opera in general – and Wagner in particular – there is often a sense that the performances of the present will inevitably fail to live up to the triumphs of the past; certainly it is easy enough to look through the cast-lists of Bayreuth performances from the 1950s and despair. There will always be good Ring cycles, but a great one requires an alignment of vocal, orchestral and directorial forces that might seem close to impossible. Yet the first two performances of the recent Staatsoper Ring – especially Walküre – came remarkably close. One could easily imagine someone fifty years from now looking at a programme booklet from these evenings with a mixture of awe and envy.
Desde 1996, informamos con independencia sobre música clásica en español.
La lectura es libre. Si quieres participar en los comentarios, crea una cuenta.
🙌 Registrarse ahora
Comentarios