Opera North’s Götterdämerung is astounding (nearly)

It seems a very short time since I interviewed Richard Farnes about Opera North’s planned Ring cycle, the dramas to be done one a year, semi-staged in an idiosyncratic way. In fact, it is four years, and now the complete cycle has been performed to universal acclaim, with the loudest cheers going to the conducting and the stupendous playing by the orchestra of Opera North, with some reinforcements — all six harps, and so on.

Farnes explained to me in the interview that he was studying the Ring, with which he had previously had no professional connection. I jumped up and down with envy and excitement, but it was clear that Farnes had no idea of becoming ‘a Wagner conductor’, in the way that some great figures of the past were, and that, say, Christian Thielemann is now. But actually many of Wagner’s greatest interpreters, including Wilhelm Furtwängler himself, were not specialists except in the sense that their performances remain among the most powerful ever given.