Prologue

Berlin, January 2022. The final run of performances of Stefan Herheim's new production of The Ring of the Nibelung for the Deutsche Oper has coincided with the peak in cases of Omicron, the latest variant of COVID-19. The new government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz has tightened the restrictions on theatres, as on everything else. In order to gain admission to the building, audience members must produce four separate documents: proof of double vaccination, evidence of a negative test taken within the last twenty-four hours, a passport or other proof of identity, and finally the ticket. All these documents are checked with admirable efficiency and the daily routine of taking COVID tests, checking the results, gaining entry to the theatre, depositing coats and buying a programme quickly becomes familiar. The FFP2 masks mandatory throughout the evening have an angular profile that gives audience members a curiously bird-like appearance, as though we are white-beaked versions of Wotan's ravens.

Despite the obstacles placed in the way of taking a seat, barely any are empty: indeed, the difficulty of gaining admission has if anything heightened the occasion's intensity, creating a sense of pilgrimage. Quiet camaraderie develops between audience members, born of shared appreciation of the Deutsche Oper's colossal achievement in mounting a production of this complexity during a pandemic. Born, too, of the long periods of time we spend in close proximity to one another, very unusual at the moment: we are in our seats for two and a half hours for Das Rheingold, and in the theatre for well over six hours for Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. The orchestral players feel like old friends by the fourth night, particularly the chatty double-bass section ranged across the middle of the pit.

One spectator in the front row of the stalls has a teddy bear discreetly placed as a mascot, while another enters the auditorium in a horned helmet and brightly coloured trousers, and banters with the players in the intervals. Such exuberance, however, is the exception. Most audience members spend the intervals chatting quietly or studying programmes, libretti or musical guides, and dress in subdued colours that tone well with the dark wood and the black and beige fabrics of the Deutsche Oper's elegantly minimalist foyers. In a stunning coup de théâtre, the curtain opens at the start of Götterdämmerung to an exact replica of one of those areas, complete with the familiar paper lanterns and Wagner-inspired wall sculpture, as if to implicate the audience in the horrific events that are about to unfold.

The cast is an intriguing mix of seasoned Wagnerians and newcomers. Clay Hilley, a physically imposing Heldentenor from Athens, Georgia, who has not quite turned forty, is playing his first Siegfried: there are approving murmurs in the intervals that he may become the Siegfried of his generation, such is his command of the role. At the other end of the spectrum, Brünnhilde is played by Nina Stemme, a fifty-eight-year-old Swedish soprano who has performed this part all around the world for the last decade and a half. If there are occasional hints that her voice has lost some of its bloom, then such concerns pale into insignificance in the face of her evident command of every bar of the score, her superb acting and the profound humanity she brings to her interpretation. The conducting is in the safe hands of Sir Donald Runnicles, the Deutsche Oper's Scottish music director and a veteran of several Rings both here and in San Francisco. The orchestra sounds magnificent, the brass section resplendent.

A few critics have objected to the production's repeated reminders that we are in a theatre watching a drama, to the presence on stage of invented characters or those who are not supposed to be in the scene concerned, and in particular to the frequent appearance of a crowd of extras, with a propensity to strip to their underwear at the slightest provocation. To my mind - and it seems that I am among an overwhelming majority, judging from the rapturous reception at the curtain calls for Götterdämmerung, during which the hundred and more orchestral players join the cast and Runnicles on stage to accept the applause - these supposedly controversial interventions are justified interpretive decisions within an utterly compelling production. The motivations and movements of every character - not just principals, but non-singing supernumeraries too - are realised with great detail, while each drama's big moments are clearly articulated with dazzling visual effects, giving the staging a multi-layered richness comparable to that found in Wagner's score.

The production is full of incidents that draw attention to its own theatricality. Alberich paints his face at the start of Rhein gold with a crudely drawn clown's mask; Hagen is portrayed in Götterdämmerung as a theatre director who adjusts the movements of the other characters - at one point he joins the audience to watch, replacing a COVID-masked Waltraute in the front row of the stalls. On the night I see Rheingold, the singer due to play Loge is indisposed, so an understudy sings from the wings while a female stage manager acts the part - or rather dances it, such are the energy and ebullience she brings to the fire-god's pantomimic gestures. There are welcome touches of humour, even at some of the darkest moments of the story. The hunting party who join Hagen as he prepares to kill Siegfried in the final act of Götterdämmerung dine on pretzels, the main form of sustenance available in this as in other German theatres; I get through quite a few myself over the course of the week, even if I can't afford the house champagne with which the hunters wash them down.

The production was conceived long before COVID, but some of its themes have particular resonance at the moment. At the centre of the stage is a grand piano, used not only as a setting for significant moments in the action (Brünnhilde is placed inside it by Wotan at the end of Die Walküre, and turns it into her own funeral pyre at the end of Götterdämmerung), but also as an instrument on which different characters mime a keyboard reduction of the music played by the orchestra. Musical objects appear frequently as props: the gold is revealed to Alberich at the start of Das Rheingold in the form of a Wagner tuba; the dragon in Siegfried speaks through the bell of a vast brass instrument; the printed scores of the dramas feature prominently on stage. To spectators who have been deprived of live performance for much of the last two years, these reminders that The Ring is, among other things, a musical performance feel heartening rather than gimmicky. Another prominent visual theme of the production - the battered suitcases brought on to the stage by a group of travellers at the start of Das Rheingold and subsequently used to represent everything from Valhalla to the huge dragon killed by Siegfried - also feels particularly relevant right now. The suitcases remind us not only of the barriers to travel that COVID has imposed, but also - this was Herheim's original intention - of the increasing numbers of people seeking refuge from political conflict and environmental catastrophe.

This feels like a peculiar time to be experiencing The Ring - but then, perhaps any occasion on which The Ring is performed is by definition peculiar, since everything the work demands is anti-thetical to the routine and everyday.

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The Ring is many things: the practical realisation of a revolutionary theory of how musical theatre should be constructed; a compendium of brilliant orchestral sounds; a monumental physical and psychological challenge for singers; for some, a philosophical meditation or a political tract. But it is also, perhaps above all, a supreme piece of storytelling, created by a man who was, alongside Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy, one of the nineteenth century's greatest storytellers. Like Bleak House, Les Misérables and War and Peace, The Ring is a story not only from the nineteenth century, but also about it. Despite the non-naturalistic setting, Wagner's gods and giants, heroes and dwarves, Valkyries and Rhinemaidens play out the ambitions and insecurities of the nineteenth century - just as clearly as the soldiers and businessmen, working girls and wives of Wagner's novelist contemporaries.

But the theatrical nature of The Ring - the fact that it only truly exists when played out in a real theatre with live audiences - means that it is also, inescapably, a story of the time in which it is performed, absorbing and reflecting the preoccupations of its directors and audiences. In 'Gilded Age' New York, The Ring's spectacular US premiere at the city's newly founded Metropolitan Opera was a story of American cultural bravado. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Gustav Mahler and the Secessionist painter Alfred Roller conceived a startling production that told of the era's overturning of old certainties. In 1950s Bayreuth,...