The Ring Cycle review – ideas-free patchwork staging signals Bayreuth’s fading authority

Bayreuth festival
Valentin Schwarz’s new staging of Wagner’s epic has some thought-provoking moments, but few were sustainable and most were just distracting

In the final pages of his Ring cycle, Wagner’s orchestral writing reaches extraordinary heights of grandeur and conviction, in music that depicts the destruction of an old corrupt world and the dawn of a new untainted one. It is the moment to which everything in the cycle has been leading, the moment when the tangled and dishonest world of the gods, in which the audience has been enmeshed across four operas and nearly 16 hours of music and drama, comes crashing down. It is by any standards climactic.

As these final pages were reached in Valentin Schwarz’s new Ring cycle at the Bayreuth festival, the conductor Cornelius Meister and the festival orchestra, in the concealed Bayreuth pit, were playing out of their skins as the score demanded. Above them on the stage, however, Iréne Theorin’s Brünnhilde, who is supposed to be the agent of destruction and rebirth, was settling herself on the bottom of an empty and dirty swimming pool next to the dead body of her husband Siegfried, the remains of her mutilated horse in a plastic bag, and with no suggestion at all in Schwarz’s staging that a moment of artistic significance had been reached.

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