How Wagner’s Das Rheingold projects old mythology and wistful drama to the modern day

Starting 28th October until 10th November, Wagner’s dramatic staging of Das Rheingold opens a new set of performances ten years after its previous round. Directed by David McVicar, the first three performances are under Simone Young’s sharp baton. 

DAS RHEINGOLD, the first performance of the new Ring des Nibelungen, will be staged at Milan’s La Scala for six dates continuing in 2025 with Die Walküre (from the 5th to 23rd of February) and Siegfried (from the 6th to the 21st of June) and in 2026 with Götterdämmerung and two complete cycles.

Photograph: Brescia e Amisano ©

Simone Young is one of the most authoritative batons of this repertoire: she conducted her first Tetralogy at the Vienna State Opera in 1999, leading her to continued success in Berlin, Hamburg and this summer in Bayreuth. “Wagner had a clear idea of sound, which is sustained and transparent, rich yet so intense and the current cast interprets it ever so brilliantly,” she opines at the opera’s press briefing. 

Photograph: Brescia e Amisano ©

Photograph: Brescia e Amisano ©

The direction is by David McVicar, who after his triumphant debut at La Scala with Berlioz’s Les Troyens (2014), is back with new productions of Verdi’s Masnadieri in 2019 and Cavalli’s Callisto in 2021. This Ring, McVicar reflects in the interview in the issue of the Theatre Review, is an arc stretched to its conclusion. “It’s an opera that changes meanings according to the situations and circumstances, and we can only pull out the aspects one at a time, leaning on the power of myth,” he says.

“It’s a story that resembles a web of complexity and contradiction, a comedy that kicks in deeply”. Wagner changes profoundly throughout the opera: at first a revolutionary anarchist and socialist, then a disillusioned man who has accepted the failure of his youthful ideals. 

Photograph: Brescia e Amisano ©

Fundamentally, however, the Ring is a unified opera. It is a great representation of the world and humanity. The opera is also a great experience of love in all its forms, from the primal sexual impulse to the highest form of love, which is selfless compassion for other human beings and nature.

La Scala, during the 19th century, received Wagner’s operas with diffidence and repulse (the first one, which was badly received, was Lohengrin in 1973, two years after Bologna). In the 20th century, it became a musical and scenic reference point for this repertoire thanks to Arturo Toscanini’s Wagnerian fervour. 

Photograph: Brescia e Amisano ©

If there is a watershed work in modern music, it is Richard Wagner’s Tetralogy (case in point: The Ring of the Nibelung), of which The Rhine Gold is, as we all know, the first of the four panels. Driven by a veritable anxiety of re-foundation, the composer conceived these musical dramas as a totally new structure, free of the ties and constraints of patronage and performance context.

Wagner took to the extreme consequences a process of dramatisation and broadening of the boundaries of tonality already taking place, especially in post-Beethovenian German music. Through the mists of mythical distance, references to historical modernity also clearly transpire.

by Chidozie Obasi

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