Rhinemaidens, Das Rheingold, Proms 2013. — The Rhinemaidens - (l to r) Aga Mikolaj, Anna Lapkovskaja and Maria Gortsevskaya. Photograph: Chris Christodoulou/BBC.

The Ring cycle - one down, three to go

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I'm not convinced Rheingold makes a good stand-alone opera, but a couple of moments in particular might help convert me to Wagner, writes Sara Mohr-Pietsch, in the second of her dispatches from the Albert Hall

Last night I began my personal odyssey, a journey into Wagner's Ring cycle from which I fear I may never return. I'm not a convert – in fact, I had some serious reservations about this pinnacle of operatic ambition – but there was much to suggest I might become one before the week is out.

Das Rheingold (the one about the gold) is the prelude to the whole four-opera cycle. It's the back-story to what's going to come in the other three operas: Die Walküre (the one about incest and the flying women in horned helmets), Siegfried (the one about the hero) and Götterdämmerung (the one where the hero dies, the flying woman in the horned helmet self-immolates, and the Gods meet their twilit end). Incidentally, anyone wanting to get to grips with the plot could do worse than watch this, (suggested by several Ring enthusiasts and which had me crying with laughter). As Anna Russell says, "the Ring is a magnificent work supposing you can make any sense out of it."

Actually, it turns out to be rather easy to make sense of, thanks to Wagner's tendency to bang on about stuff. Every bit of plot is painstakingly explained - backed up by orchestral leitmotifs just in case you didn't catch the words - so I needn't have worried. There were moments in Das Rheingold where I found all that exposition a bit wearing, but the performance at last night's Proms was of such earth-shattering excellence that it hardly mattered.

This was a world-class cast of Wagnerians, led by Iain Paterson as strong-but-vulnerable Wotan, the conflicted leader of the Gods. Ekaterina Gubanova's Fricka (his long-suffering wife) was also fantastic, and there wasn't a single singer on stage who failed to convince me of the depth of their character – even the lumbering giants Fasolt and Fafner, played as EastEnders thugs-with-heart. But I'm still not all that interested in dwarves and giants, so of them all, Wotan's the only one whose story I left wanting to follow. I love a good love story, me, and there wasn't much of that here. I'm hoping Brünnhilde and Siegfried will grab me more as the cycle continues.

The standing ovation, went of course to the heroic Daniel Barenboim, who conducted for two hours 40 minutes without a bar's rest or a sip of water. Wagner's orchestra is your trusted guide: it tells you everything you need to know, navigating the three worlds the work inhabits: the depths of Nibelheim where the dwarf Alberich and his brother Mime live; the earthly realms of the Rhine and mountain-tops; and the lofty heights of the gods' new-build, Valhalla, as yet uninhabited until the final bars. There are some glorious moments of orchestral colour that emerge out of a sea of diminished sevenths, such as a solo cor anglais picking out a melody, or some exquisite brass writing in the Valhalla motif. And for anyone missing the Gesamtkunstwerk and the visual spectacle of the theatre, the Staatskapelle Berlin compensated with a puddle of burnished gold onstage: six harps, timpani, and an indecently swollen brass section including 12 horns which glittered in the light.

That said, the staging is integral to the Ring's score. Wagner's prescriptively detailed directions are printed in the libretto, and they're either the ravings of a brilliant, hallucinatory Disney-like mind on speed, or else a blueprint for an am-dram dry-ice disaster. Sulphurous mists morph into rocky chasms, rainbow bridges shoot up out of thunderclouds, and dwarves disappear in puffs of smoke and re-emerge as toads. It's all completely bonkers, and I'm not sure whether having it staged in all its ludicrousness might not be better than letting the imagination run wild – I kept having to wrest mine back from a laughable 3D IMAX reverie.

I'm also not convinced Das Rheingold makes a good stand-alone opera. My guest experts on BBC Radio 3 reckon it is, but if that was all I was getting, I'd feel short-changed. It ends on a cliffhanger – Alberich (who's had the gold stolen from him by the gods) vowing revenge, Loge (Wotan's side-kick) unsure whether to follow the gods home or sit back and watch them self-destruct, and the all-powerful Ring in the hands of an angry giant who's just killed his brother. That is not a good place to leave a drama.

But the seed of my conversion has been sown by two moments of perfectly wonderful operatic drama. The first was when Erda (goddess of the earth) appeared in the organ loft above the bust of Henry Wood to warn Wotan of the Ring's curse, accompanied by a return of the primordial music of the prelude; and the second was the final denouement, when Donner (god of thunder) whips out a thunderbolt, parts the clouds, and fashions a rainbow into a bridge to take the family safely home.

In fact, Donner did his job so well that as I cycled home across Hyde Park, the heavens opened, and I got soaked as the night gave way to a thunderstorm. Powerful stuff, this. Bring on part two...