A great ‘Ring’ in the making at the Royal Opera

Wagner’s Ring, of which Rheingold is the prologue, is always a sell-out. An exception was this summer’s Bayreuth Festival, where tickets went begging for the previous year’s egregiously awful production. Bayreuth hosts the acoustically superb opera house that Wagner built specially for the Ring, where the audience cannot see the orchestra, and when the lights go out it’s pitch black. It was once the acme of perfection, but those days are long past, and companies such as the Royal Opera can proudly stake a claim to Wagnerian excellence.

Staging these operas is not easy, and to its first audiences in 1869 Rheingold must have seemed very odd. It was strikingly different from the usual recitative and set piece arias of conventional opera. That goes for the whole of the Ring, and the mistake some directors make is to try, in the words of Wagner himself, to schaff’ etwas neues (“do something new”).Υet lacking the genius of the composer himself, they make a mess of it.

Barrie Kosky, who is directing this new Ring at Covent Garden, also admits to severe mistakes in the past and describes his earlier production with the Staatsoper Hanover as a “train wreck”. Directors do not normally get a second crack at the Ring, but Kosky is lucky, and this time he has succeeded brilliantly.

From his earlier attempt Kosky retained one unusual aspect, casting a seemingly naked old woman to act the part of the earth goddess Erda. She enters before the music starts, walking silently across the stage. “She’s dreaming our story — in fragments … She will survive. We won’t. And so, we will see the Ring retrospectively from the dreamings of a destroyed world,” he explains, and goes on to say he wants “to deal with something that is epic, and mythological and unexplained”.

Wagner was keen on ancient Greek drama, which deals with quintessential archetypes, and saw himself as recreating it in music. Of course there is no chorus in the Ring, except in the final opera Götterdämmerung, “but the Wagner orchestra becomes the reworking of the Greek chorus; they comment, they underline, they contradict and sometimes they provide a completely independent commentary on the narrative”.

Like a Greek drama the Ring deals with a single family, but to portray it that way, as they did in the recent production at Bayreuth, is to drastically limit its scope. Kosky is trying to find a way, as he always does in his productions, to present the cycle so that the audience forgets they are watching opera. “I’m stripping it back to the quintessential human condition”, he says and here he does so brilliantly.

In the first act the World Ash Tree stands broken and almost dead on the stage; in a later act it is strapped down and mechanised to produce molten gold, and from its depths the characters enter and exit. The on-stage Nibelungs are played by children with huge heads. The hiding of Freia by gold, demanded by the giants if they are to release her, is done by pouring the golden glutinous stuff all over her while she is placed in a bath, and the rainbow at the end is a feat of lighting on a cascade of twinkling paper fragments.

Among the huge cast the singing was universally excellent, and Sean Panikker was the finest Loge I have ever heard. His vocal and physical stage presence was hugely engaging. Opera director Oliver Mears has presented Kosky with a wonderful cast, in which Christopher Purves and Christopher Maltman were outstanding as Alberich and Wotan, with Marina Prudenskaya and Kiandra Howarth very strong as Fricka and Freia. I loved the representation of Fasolt, the giant who adores Freia, by Insung Sim, looking like a member of the Rolling Stones, with the bass Solomon Howard as a suitably humourless Fafner.

Holding this firmly together in beautifully lyrical fashion was Sir Antonio Pappano, conducting a superb ROH orchestra. If the rest of Kosky’s new Covent Garden production is anything like as good as this prologue, it may go down as one of the finest Rings of modern times.

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