The cheers should have been for Daniel Barenboim. Berlin’s new Ring was to be a celebratory cycle conducted by him to mark his forthcoming 80th birthday, and completed, unusually, in a single week instead of across several seasons. The cast of world-class Wagnerian singers, along with the Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov, are artists Barenboim has nurtured over many years.
Wagner has been central to Barenboim’s repertoire at Berlin’s Staatsoper, where he is music director; at the composer’s festival town of Bayreuth and elsewhere. Who can forget his Ring cycle at the Proms in 2013, or his appearances with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he co-founded with Edward Said to bring musicians from Middle Eastern countries together – an act of imaginative political philanthropy.
Instead, Barenboim was too sick to attend last week. Six weeks ago he pulled out of the Wagner epic, passing the baton, literally and perhaps, as many speculate, definitively, to Christian Thielemann. The 63-year-old Berliner was once Barenboim’s assistant at Bayreuth, where both conductors have reigned supreme over the years. No one regards the pair as intimates – on the contrary – but Thielemann, seen as an old-school conservative figure but undeniably brilliant, stepped in at his colleague’s personal request.
With astute timing, between the first operas in the cycle, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, and the second two, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, Barenboim was honoured with Gramophone magazine’s lifetime achievement award. On the same day he announced that he would, for now – note these open-ended words – withdraw from public performance, owing to a serious neurological condition. The predicted news still came as a blow. Inspirational, impatient, a visionary musician, a fearless and often crabby ambassador for peace, Barenboim would rather be listened to than loved. Yet against the odds, for six decades or more, he has managed both.
Thielemann brings his own distinctive approach to Wagner: detailed and expansive, yet analytical. With only brief lapses, when the players may have been surprised by unfamiliarity with this conductor, he drew terrific playing from the orchestra. The lower strings, especially, achieved a velvety sound of unmatched beauty, while brass was snarling and heroic. Thielemann’s name is never mentioned without reference to the slow tempos he prefers: challenging for singers, but the expectation that fast is better has become a tyranny. When dealing with a 17-hour marathon, what difference does an extra 10 minutes make if, as with Thielemann, the tempo convinces.
Barenboim may have missed the cheers but he also escaped the thunder of boos, which were saved up for the end of Götterdämmerung, when the production team took their curtain call. Tcherniakov and his designers have created an elaborate, many-roomed set – a single building that spins and shifts horizontally, and rises and descends through different floors, the lowest a grotesque Nibelheim: dozens of cages with pairs of live rabbits in each, bobbing distractingly on top of each other under bright, invasive lights (which naturally provoked animal rights activists).
If the execution is complex, the idea is straightforward and hardly novel: Wotan’s universe is a research laboratory with human behaviour as its focus. Think deep brain stimulation, electrodes, white coats, clip boards. Its name, ESCHE, stands for Experimental Scientific Centre for Human Evolution, as well as being a play on the world ash tree of Teutonic mythology, central to the Ring. Brünnhilde’s rock is a couch in a glass-sided sleep laboratory. The Valkyrie sisters gather in a lecture room with stackable plastic chairs. In this mundane existence we see a lot of men – Hunding, Alberich, Siegfried – in their underpants, snapping open cans of beer or reaching for the fridge. Side-stripe joggers are de rigueur for Wotan and his various offspring.
Characters are visually paired, so Gutrune looks like a more glamorous version of the betrayed Brünnhilde. The Norns, demented crones, bash each other with their handbags. The Earth goddess, Erda (Anna Kissjudit), bears an uncanny likeness to Ann Widdecombe, who was probably not at the forefront of Tcherniakov’s mind when he shaped the role.
In this march through the decades, Das Rheingold starts in the 1960s, a cross between Mad Men and Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann’s study of a family in decline. By Die Walküre, the siblings Siegmund (Robert Watson) and Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė) retreat from their Ikea-style apartment to hide under the desks at Nibelheim. In the third opera, the child of their illicit union – the hero Siegfried – cowers in a soft-play area. The climactic moment of his death, in Götterdämmerung, occurs in a basketball game in which Hunding’s vassals are company employees in need of some team bonding.
All this is saved by outstanding singing from the entire cast, from the tender strength of Anja Kampe as Brünnhilde (making her role debut in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung), to the experienced, lyrical emotion of Michael Volle’s Wotan/Wanderer, and, above all, to the gleaming agility of Andreas Schager’s lolling, skipping, feckless Siegfried. Neither Rolando Villazón as a lounge-lizard Loge or Watson deserved their boos. If the booers hoped to see a look of winded devastation on Watson’s face, they achieved their lowly aim.
Tcherniakov has done away with fire, water, magic helmet, dragon, kiss, gold. The most serious misjudgment was in the cycle’s climactic, world-ending closing bars. Here, words flashed up – Wagner’s own Schopenhauer-inspired text, not set to music – precisely when all you wanted to do was listen to the orchestra. This Ring has been seriously conceived, but in its rebuttal of so many key elements, Wagner’s poetry has turned to prose.
In a night off from Wagner there was a chance to hear the Berlin Philharmonic, with one of its regular guest conductors, Iván Fischer. After a first half of Richard Strauss, which showcased (in the Duet-Concertino) two of the orchestra’s players, clarinettist Wenzel Fuchs and bassoonist Stefan Schweigert, they played Mahler’s Symphony No 1. Fischer, too, has his idiosyncratic tempi, but this was a towering performance. The stars were the horns, all seven standing at the end, bells united in perfect, understated choreography, the sound heaven sent.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Ring of the Nibelung ★★★★
Berlin Philharmonic ★★★★
• The Ring Cycle continues at the Staatsoper, Unter den Linden, Berlin until 6 November, and 4-10 April 2023
• This article was amended on 15 October 2022. Daniel Barenboim conducted the Staatskapelle Berlin, not the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, in the Ring cycle at the Proms in 2013.
