Over the past two seasons, Opernhaus Zürich has unrolled its new production of Wagner’s epic tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung, helmed by the outgoing intendant, Andreas Homoki. In May, the company is presenting two full cycles under its music director, Gianandrea Noseda.
Zürich played an important role in Wagner’s life and in the genesis of the Ring. He arrived here in 1849 as a political refugee from Dresden, where he had participated in revolutionary events despite holding a plum post as Kapellmeister (conductor) of Saxony’s royal theater (“Quelle ingratitude!” the Italian composer Gaspare Spontini reportedly said when he heard of Wagner’s sedition). Banned from the lands of the German Confederation for the next eleven years, Wagner spent much of his time in and around Switzerland’s largest city. He wrote most of the Ring in Zürich and offered the first public reading of its libretto (or “poem,” as he called it) at the town’s chic Baur au Lac hotel.
Zürich was also the site of Wagner’s disastrous stay with his patron Otto Wesendonck, a prosperous silk merchant who put up the composer and his first wife in a guest cottage on his sprawling estate (today home to the Rietberg Museum of Asian Art), only to have Wagner’s wife share with him a love letter from her husband to his own wife, Mathilde. We do not know whether the affair was consummated, but Wagner quickly fled to Venice, where he continued work on Tristan und Isolde, a tale of adulterous love. Mathilde also authored five rapturous poems that Wagner set to music as the Wesendonck Lieder, a foretaste to Tristan.
Earlier in Wagner’s stay in Zürich, he wrote his seminal theoretical works “Art and Revolution,” Opera and Drama, and, infamously but pseudonymously, “Judaism in Music.” All of them prepared the way for the Ring, a harmonization of Norse mythology, Germanic folklore, and Wagner’s own inventions that occupied the composer’s attention off and on for twenty-eight years. Wagner initially planned one opera on the life of Siegfried, the doomed hero of the anonymous medieval epic The Nibelungenlied, but worked backward to include three additional operas on Siegfried’s parentage, the struggle of the deities behind it, and ultimately the world’s creation.
Much philosophical ink has been spilled over the Ring, which has been explored onstage in a greater variety of styles than probably any other operatic work. Homoki, a director often identified with radical proclivities, has conceived a production that leaves interpretation up to the audience. Refreshingly, the first two installments—Das Rheingold and Die Walküre—offer a fairly standard narrative approach that resists abstraction and ideology. On stage we see an actual ring, spear, sword, and dragon. The characters are clad in costumes that look to be from Wagner’s time. The direction leans toward traditional operatic gestures and poses.
The backdrop, however, is a white-walled, modern-looking house of four identical rooms. It rotates on the stage at varying speeds to give the action some dynamism while suggesting that the work is really the story of a dysfunctional family. The concept is not particularly original: the Austrian director Valentin Schwarz relied on the same idea in his 2022 Bayreuth Festival production of the tetralogy; the late British director Sir Graham Vick used it for his Deutsche Oper Tristan in 2011. Scene changes allow for plot devices to appear and disappear from Homoki’s sets. We see piles of gold cover the goddess Freia from the view of the giants Fasolt and Fafner, whom the chief god Wotan commissioned to build his fortress Valhalla. The evil dwarf Alberich makes use of a large Biedermeier armoire to demonstrate the power of the Tarnhelm, a magic helmet, transforming himself into a fearsome dragon who can terrify his enemies and later into a small toad who he hopes (misguidedly, it turns out) can evade them. Siegmund, Wotan’s son by a mortal woman, draws the sword Nothung from a live tree in a room that somehow comes to be occupied by the unsympathetic Hunding, who is married to Siegmund’s twin sister and fast love, Sieglinde. Wotan’s divine daughter, Brünnhilde, who defies Wotan’s orders to allow Siegmund to be killed and saves Sieglinde from his wrath, is sentenced to a magic slumber atop a large rock that has likewise infiltrated the house. Hours of looking at its bare walls render the effect rather claustrophobic.
The greatest joy of this Ring is Noseda’s impassioned conducting, which combines the drive of Arturo Toscanini with the elegance of Herbert von Karajan. In his first complete cycle, Noseda leads a riveting performance. Wagner once said that he would be happy if he could only compose for the horn, and the conducting here channels that sentiment, leaning effectively on the brass section to produce Wagner’s epic moments. Hearing the score played in Zürich’s 1,100-seat jewel box of a theater delivers an intimacy often lost in larger venues.
The orchestral playing under Noseda’s direction will long be remembered, but the casts are also most impressive. As the chief of the gods, the Polish bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny proved a thunderous force beyond equal to the role’s challenges. Playful in Rheingold, he brought the character more nuance in Walküre. Not merely contemplative, Konieczny’s Wotan also plunges jarringly into bitter cynicism and mountainous waves of self-pity. In Rheingold he confronts Alberich, menacingly sung by Christopher Purves. Wotan must also manage domestic relations with his wife, Fricka, portrayed in both operas with manipulative finesse by the superb mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke.
Wotan’s son Siegmund was sung with lyrical brilliance by the fine American tenor Eric Cutler, who was paired with the strong soprano Daniela Köhler as Sieglinde. Köhler stole the show from Camilla Nylund’s softer-voiced Brünnhilde, the singer’s first foray into the part, which requires greater heft than the lighter Wagner parts she has built a career performing. One wonders if Köhler, who regularly sings Brünnhilde in Siegfried, the third installment of the tetralogy, at Bayreuth, might have been a better choice for the role.
A roster of younger Wagner singers filled out the casts of the first two evenings. The basses David Soar and Brent Michael Smith sang the giants Fasolt and Fafner with authority. Omer Kobiljak, Xiaomeng Zhang, and Kiandra Howarth were an inventive trio as the gods Froh, Donner, and Freia. The tenor Matthias Klink’s Loge was amusingly devious. The contralto Anna Danik inspired woe in her brief scene as the earth goddess Erda. The veteran bass Christoph Fischesser hit all the lumbering low notes for a frightful Hunding.
