After seemingly endless drumrolls and fanfares, with the conductor Antonio Pappano and the director Keith Warner giving countless interviews on the radio and in the papers, the Royal Opera’s new cycle of Wagner’s Ring, incomparably the most ambitious thing an opera company can undertake, has finally got under way. And hardly surprisingly, a widespread sense of anti-climax has been registered. Seeing it on the second night, I felt that there were a lot of good things about it and quite an assortment of bad ones. Many of the things that were good could easily get a lot better, while some of the bad things just have to go, and others might be merely modified.
Contemporary directors who are still fairly young, as Warner is, have seen hardly any productions of the Ring to react against, because ever since Patrice Chéreau’s devastatingly successful Bayreuth Ring of 1976, his kind of eclectic post-modern idiom has become the only acceptable one for a self-respecting avant-gardist to follow.
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