A full staging of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen – colloquially the Ring Cycle – is a big deal everywhere: a running time of 15 hours, split into four separate shows.
But it’s particularly momentous that Brisbane lands an international draw like this, and here the city gets something of a coup: a three-week series of groundbreaking production design, billed by Opera Australia as the world’s first Ring Cycle with all-digital backgrounds and landscapes.
The production – the first of three full cycles of which kicked off last weekend – includes 834 LED screens and 1.4 TB of video content, some of which is activated by thousands of sensors on the performers’ costumes; The sets, staging, costumes and technology required 27 semi-trailer loads to get into town.
That this is a big Ring Cycle says something for a show often compared to feats of human strength and endurance: it’s the Olympics or the Everest of opera, or, more simply, a marathon. And in Western performances there is no greater challenge for performers: the shortest of the four movements is two hours and 35 minutes and the longest just under five hours. The singers are a special breed, who can be heard over large orchestras for a long time without fatigue; With 2,000 pages of music to get through, the musicians also need stamina.
You could say that the audience also has a tough job: to sit in one place and watch without distraction. That’s a feat usually left to the “Ring nuts,” as they are called: completionists who travel to productions all over the world. According to Opera Australia, only a third of this production’s audience will be from Brisbane, while 9% will be from overseas – some from as far away as the US and Europe.
And because I normally don’t want to spend more than three hours, my assignment was daunting: to attend all four final dress rehearsals of the full suite and watch more than fifteen hours of live opera in six days.
But with tickets for each event costing between $165 and $625, it was also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the first fully staged Ring Cycle to come to my hometown in its 147-year history. (It has never been done in Sydney; the 83 musicians do not fit in the orchestra pit of the Opera House.)
The production is directed and designed by Chen Shi-Zheng, who has a film background and whose digital staging is more than a gimmick. The intention is to take on the challenge of an audience that is receiving less and less attention; to attract and maintain their interest, and create a work that is thematically – and literally – universal in scope.
It’s immersive from the start, with digital displays spanning the width and height of the stage. Generated by content designer Leigh Sachwitz and flora&faunavisions, images of nature – including the sun, moon, eclipses and the elemental – place the action in a world we all share, adding a layer of existential contemplation; in the prologue, Das Rheingold, we are immersed in a glorious green wall of water, while dancing northern lights and mists draw us into the heavenly realm of the gods.
And so to the plot. Drawn from Scandinavian and German mythology, The Ring Cycle features gods, mortals, giants, dwarves and water maidens, and follows the search for a ring empowered to rule the world, which is stolen – and then cursed. This story is set against several generations of sagas that largely revolve around the lord of the gods, Wotan, husband of the goddess of marriage, Fricka, but who fathered children with two others: the goddess of the earth, Erda (the nine Valkyries , led by his favorite, Brünnhilde), and a mortal (twins Siegmund and Sieglinde).
You don’t have to be a fan to appreciate the descriptive clarity of Wagner’s leitmotifs and innovative orchestration, which here includes new instruments and even tuned anvils for the Nibelungen. The elite singers make awesome use of their voices; international performers Lise Lindstrom and Stefan Vinke are rightly celebrated for their signature roles as Brünnhilde and Siegfried, but they don’t outshine the Australian talent. Many are curious about rising star Anna-Louise Cole’s transition from Sieglinde to Brünnhilde in the final cycle, which premieres on Friday, December 13.
Inspired set pieces provide pure theatrical spectacle. In part two, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, who guides slain warriors to Wotan’s Valhalla), the arrival of Brünnhilde’s eight sisters in a steel phoenix plane, descending from the sky to Ride of the Valkyries, deserves applause. Another eye-catcher is the enormous metal dragon, with a backbone of real flames.
Choreographed by Akasia Ruth Inchaustegui, aerial sequences provide the captivating illusion of Rhinemaidens diving, twisting and somersaulting beneath the river’s surface in Das Rheingold; and the interactive digital tracking of a fluttering forest bird in the third part, Siegfried. Played against an exquisite backdrop of opalesque greens and blues illuminating a nighttime forest, the mesmerizing beauty of the scene made it my favorite.
Anita Yavich’s imaginative costumes provide a fragrant framework for the characters, such as the beetle-like Nibelung dwarfs Alberich (Warwick Fyfe) and Mime (Andreas Conrad), and the fate-weaving Norns of the final section, whose skirts of coiled hair resemble beehives illuminated. from the inside.
There are wonderfully tongue-in-cheek jokes and physical comedy sprinkled throughout the drama. Cole and Rosario La Spina make sympathetic characters out of the incestuous twins Sieglinde and Siegmund; and as their son Siegfried, German tenor Vinke brings youthful charisma and humor to an imperfect hero. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the strength and complexity of the female leads Fricka (Deborah Humble) and Brünnhilde (Lindstrom).
After the gentle 155 minutes of Das Rheingold, the next three shows are much longer, but they each have two welcome (and necessary) breaks. And yet my alertness rarely dropped during the fifteen hours of the show; the scale of the production and its sensory impact keep it engaging, and the performances and pacing maintain the momentum. As the Cycle reached an apocalyptic end in Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), I felt exhilarated – not only by Brünnhilde’s courage and wisdom to do what the power-hungry men could not, but also by the endorphin rush that came with achieving the finish. . (I even went back for the first two premieres, bringing my total Ring Cycle viewing time to almost 22 hours in nine days.)
Seeing all four shows is a significant investment that few can afford – but with two more cycles in two weeks, audiences can still test the waters first with a single ticket. For those wary of opera as a genre, perhaps think of this as the musical drama Wagner intended: you’ll find parallels with epics like The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Vikings, and you may conclude that you – as I did – under his spell.
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Wagner’s Ring Cycle will be performed at the Queensland Performing Arts Center until December, with the second cycle starting on December 8 and the third on December 15.