It’s nearly 3am and they are still dancing in the staff canteen of Berlin’s state opera. The Dirty Dancing theme, Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Know — anything but Richard Wagner.
The people here have spent the last weeks and months living, breathing and listening to little else than the 19th century German composer.
Five hours earlier, the curtain came down on the opera world’s equivalent of an iron man competition: a five-hour premiere of Götterdämmerung, ending a week-long premiere run of Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle.
With 16 hours of music based on Nordic legends and the Nibelungen saga, watching — or indeed staging — the entire Ring tetralogy in a few days is not for the meek.
As for anyone courageous enough to premiere a new Ring cycle at once: they will either end in a straitjacket or atop a musical Mount Olympus.
The buzz is so joyous at the canteen disco because Berlin’s State Opera — its singers, musicians, technicians and creative team (including Irish opera director Caroline Staunton) — pulled off a miracle against the odds after many messy years.
First came a years-long renovation — effectively a rebuild — of the historic opera house; then came the open-closed-open pandemic uncertainty.
Finally, weeks before the Ring premiere, state opera musical director Daniel Barenboim pulled out due to ill health.
This Ring cycle was an 80th birthday present to Barenboim, for many an artistic deity. In a plot twist worthy of Succession, the ailing conductor handed the baton to Christian Thielemann, a controversial figure who once had his eye on Barenboim’s job. Even before the curtain went up, this Ring was the talk of the town.
Wagner premiered his revolutionary opera cycle in 1876 in a custom-built house in Bayreuth but didn’t live to see its music, myths and traditional forest aesthetic captured and exploited by the Nazis. Postwar German Ring cycles have distanced themselves from the work’s rustic origins. Following that tradition, Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov dispenses with verdant magic to set his Ring in a neon-lit experimental facility where minds are made and remade.
His modular sets — think mid-century modern Cold War bunker — are a technical wonder that can be clicked and stacked together to revolve, or slide past horizontally like a comic book.
With an eye for detail the Russian director probes the work’s timeless themes of fate, salvation and the temptations and costs of power. But his staging strains, fights, and often ignores the source material, earning him loud boos from many. As the audience filed out, fatigued but happy, all agreed that this is the best-sung and best-played Ring in memory.
As our dim-witted hero, Andreas Schager dances and sings up a storm as Siegfried; Anja Kampe brings a compelling human frailty to his bride, Brünnhilde; baritone Michael Volle and bass Mika Kares each knock it out of the park with their devious takes on God king Wotan and his revenge-seeking rival, Hagen.
Packing a psychological punch, out of sight in the pit, is the Staatskappelle, the opera house orchestra at the top of its game.
Anyone who thinks of the Ring’s music as heavy, hangover-inducing merlot will not recognise the light, transparent Riesling on offer here, with Wagner’s melodies bent into daring new shapes by conductor Christian Thielemann.
Formerly music director at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Berlin-born Thielemann is a polarising figure in Germany. As the interval lights dimmed, a woman next to me said of the conductor: “I don’t like him but I like his results.” An EU commissioner once said something similar about women’s workplace quotas.
At the premiere party speech, Thielemann reminded his audience of how he saved the day: “We basically had five days’ rehearsals.”
That isn’t true, muttered orchestra members later in the canteen, who reserved their praise for Barenboim assistant Thomas Guggeis.
Before Thielemann parachuted in it was Guggeis — a 29 year-old rising star — who rehearsed the entire Ring, three times, with the orchestra and cast.
Guggeis says he benefited from Barenboim’s three decades of work with the orchestra on the Wagner repertoire. He is full of praise, too, for Thielemann’s “amazingly quiet, soft sound. He has a technical mastery few have.”
But Guggeishas his own musical ideas for when he conducts the second run of the new Ring cycle from Saturday, stepping onto the podium — and into his master’s shoes — with mixed feelings.
“Barenboim is one of the last universal geniuses, whether it’s music, humanistic, philosophy, politics,” said Gugeis. “This is difficult because, in a way, it is the twilight of a god.”
— From October 29th, arte.tv will broadcast and stream the entire new Ring.
