Opera North's Ring Cycle was a breath of fresh air

For many people, including seasoned opera fans, the works of Richard Wagner can be off-putting. None more so that his Ring Cycle, spread over four operas and 15 hours of music. It doesn’t help that some Wagner fans rather enjoy the idea of the Ring as accessible only to those who, like the Cycle’s hero Siegfried, must force their way up a daunting pinnacle.

So it was a pleasure last week to experience Opera North’s stripped-down, unpretentious Ring Cycle at London’s Southbank. Semi-staged by Peter Mumford, and conducted by Richard Farnes, the performance zoomed in the music and the story. No elaborate concepts or interpretation here: just a desire to bring clarity to work that has enough complexity to be getting on with. Above the stage three screens illuminated the action with pictures of rolling waves or the symbols being sung about (sword, spear, rope etc). During the musical interludes, we were told what was happening while we listened to Wagner’s orchestration of it, adding to the richness of the experience. These narrative gobbets were written in the past tense, as though we were hearing the pre-history of our own world.

In the same spirit of openness, Southbank Centre had the excellent idea of turning the Clore ballroom into an astro-turfed forest, where anyone could watch the performance for free. As the critic Tom Service pointed out in the informal Q&A sessions during the intervals, Wagner originally wanted the Ring Cycle to be free—more akin to a communal religious experience than a few evenings’ entertainment. This quality of sacredness is identified by philosopher Roger Scruton as a vital component of the work (read his piece from this month’s Prospect here). But there was also a spirit of playfulness, with schoolchildren dressed up as horned Valkyries and talks that linked the cycle with current economic and political events. It made the efforts by regular opera houses look stuffy and unimaginative by comparison.

What of the actual performance? Of the singers the star was undoubtedly Kelly Cae Hogan, who played Brünnhilde. From the moment she came on stage at the start of act two of Die Walküre, Cae Hogan brought her charismatic personality and powerful voice to the role. She kept up the standard across the three operas, and her immolation scene at the end of Götterdämmerung was breathtaking. She was helped by not being burdened with much movement or an elaborate costume. In fact, the performers were more focused on acting in the absence of outward garments that would otherwise define their character. Jo Polheim invested Alberich with real humanity (or whatever the dwarf-equivalent is), and his final scene with his son Hagen (the excellent Mats Almgren) was genuinely chilling. As for the Siegfrieds (Lars Cleveman and Mati Turi), they struggled—Cleveman more than Turi—to make this unappealing hunk of pure manhood any more engaging than he usually is.

Some critics found Richard Farnes’s conducting too underpowered. But given how he needed to balance the sound of the orchestra on stage with the singers, you can see why he didn’t go hell-for-leather. And besides, the slow accumulation of musical detail is how the Ring works. Farnes carefully embeds the main motifs in our mind in Das Rheingold so that when, later in the cycle, Wagner throws away the rulebook, diminishing and enlarging the motifs which run into each other like waves on the Rhine, they are more clearly identifiable.

Speaking of motifs, one of the cleverest aspects of the performance was the way the onscreen images and words fitted these musical calling cards. At the end of Das Rheingold, when the uplifting sword motif was heard, a sword appeared on screen. A bit obvious, perhaps, but I found it helpful. The wondrous motif that is sometimes called Redemption through Love is heard only twice in the opera, where Siegfried’s birth is foretold and right at the end when Valhalla goes up in flames. There is much debate over whether this final motif is a reassuring benediction or a last gasp before the rest is silence. For my money, when we first hear it, the tune is hopeful; and when we hear it again, we remember that moment of hope wistfully having realised that Siegfried has not been the grand hero we had been told to expect. The end titles captured it well: it “seemed as though” all was redeemed, it read. Like the maid at the end of Flaubert’s story A Simple Heart, who in her final moments “thought she saw” her parrot hover like the holy spirit, we in the audience, in a half-dreaming state induced by 15 hours of Wagner’s entrancing melodies, can feel redeemed by the music even as our rational mind knows that all will probably not be well. It is a supreme moment of artistic ambiguity, akin to the exaltation and realism of the genuine mystical experience.

At times like this, the Ring Cycle doesn’t feel like a marathon; in fact, you wish it would never end.