‘On Brünnhilde’s rock I drew the breath that called your name; so swift was my journey here.’ It’s Act Two of Götterdämmerung. Siegfried, entoiled in evil beyond his comprehension, has unwittingly committed the betrayal that will tip the whole vast drama into its final collapse, and at this point Covent Garden’s Ring cycle really does feel like it’s swept by in a breath. True, Keith Warner’s 2007 production is looking creaky. But there’s still no mightier assertion of an opera company’s ambition than to stage all four music-dramas of Der Ring des Nibelungen in the space of a week; and no artistic experience remotely comparable to witnessing it.
So, about that experience. First, there’s the sense of time simultaneously expanded and compressed; of epochs lived within the span of four short nights. I’ve heard Handel arias that felt longer than Wagner’s 16-hour saga. Second, and more prosaically, Network Rail caused me to miss Act One of Die Wälkure. Superficially, it’s almost a self-contained drama, and the missing narrative is easily supplied. Yet I kept on missing that act, and not merely because what I did see of Emily Magee’s Sieglinde and Stuart Skelton’s Siegmund was intensely touching, with Magee frantic and sweet-voiced and Skelton singing with warm, wounded nobility, eloquently supported by Antonio Pappano in the pit. Wagner crafts his drama so that not even a minute of the Ring is dispensable. The gap aches like Amfortas’s wound, and I’m planning to try to staunch it when Die Walküre is relayed to cinemas on 28 October.
As to specifics, well it’s old news that Warner and his designer Stefanos Lazaridis spray their ideas about like dragon’s blood. Hits: the Rhine is watery in a computer-game sort of way, there are properly grotesque monsters, and Siegfried forges his sword in a terrifying blaze of pyrotechnics.
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