Die Walküre: A bleak but brilliant vision of damaged nature and toxic relationships
One major advantage of unveiling a production of Wagner's Ring cycle year by year over four years is that you don't need to decide at the beginning how it will end. The director of the Royal Opera's new year-by-year staging, Barrie Kosky, has said that he does not know how this story will turn out by 2027: in this second instalment, his vision is an unvaryingly bleak and tortured picture of damaged nature and toxic relationships.
As in the opening Das Rheingold, the scorched trees and gloomy landscapes of Rufus Didwiszus's sets create a compellingly bare, stripped-back scene of an earth destroyed. The wizened, aged, naked figure of Erda (Illona Linthwaite) observes continually: you feel she has seen it all before, covering her eyes in horror. She oversees interactions for both humans and gods in which we can believe: the awakening, forbidden love of Sieglinde and Siegmund; the fraught relationship between Wotan and his daughter Brünnhilde.
There is not much to be gleaned from the first act's dreary blank wall of Sieglinde and Hunding's house, until the moment when the buried sword that Siegmund extracts reveals one of the production's ingenious twists. Solomon Howard's Hunding is a commanding figure (until Wotan dismisses him later with a Tosca-like backward flip), Natalya Romaniw's brightly sung Sieglinde a wife who screams in fear until she realises that Stanislas De Barbeyrac's ardent, lyrical Siegmund is her twin and her love.
If this first act is slow to ignite, the second is totally compelling, starting from the crisp, strongly articulated Wotan of Christopher Maltman, whose argument with Marina Prudenskaya's imposing Fricka in purple, arriving in period limousine, is a power marriage all gone wrong. Elisabet Strid's youthful, tomboyish Brünnhilde starts as a rebellious child but quickly matures into an achingly independent adult in her heart-rending scene with her father in which their every fleeting emotion is captured in Kosky's direction.
It was always to be expected that Kosky would want to delve into the constant problem of Wagner's anti-Semitism, and here the appearance in Act II of a charred body that is then viciously destroyed prepares the way for a shocking rethinking of the Ride of the Valkyries at the start of Act III, as they collect incinerated bodies, a sensation rescued theatrically only by the individual characterisations of the coven-like Valkyries.
Vocally, this is a fascinating Walküre: all the singers, Maltman and Strid especially, but also Romaniw (who came in late to replace the more heavyweight talent Lise Davidsen), are comparatively youthful, fresh voices without a heavy inheritance of years of Wagner singing. The words are paramount, and their impulsiveness is matched by Antonio Pappano's conducting, which drives the music forward, sometimes feeling a little loose, but always effective in pushing the story forwards.
Pappano is now Conductor Laureate at the house whose music he directed so effectively for 22 years. Who knows, perhaps a more optimistic vision of the future of humanity may emerge in the remaining instalments of this impressive, stimulating Ring cycle.
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