The latest Wagner Ring has one director for each act

Stuttgart Opera has reached Walküre. It is desperate to be different from all the other Rings.

Here’s the line:

The Staatsoper Stuttgart continues its new production of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung with the premiere of Die Walküre on April 10, 2022. In keeping with the concept of a multi-perspective Ring, three different directing teams will each bring one act to the stage: the Dutch theatre collective Hotel Modern (1. Act), light designer Urs Schönebaum (2. Act) and visual artist Ulla von Brandenburg (3. Act). Okka von der Damerau makes her debut as Brünnhilde and Brian Mulligan debuts as Wotan. Simone Schneider and Michael König embody the Wälsungen couple Siegmund/Sieglinde and Goran Jurić is Hunding. The musical direction of the entire Stuttgart Ring des Nibelungen is taken on by General Music Director Cornelius Meister.

The new production aims to highlight the complexity of the “Gesamtkunstwerk” Der Ring des Nibelungen by emphasizing its individual acts. The human world of the dramatic events surrounding Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act is staged by the Dutch theatre collective Hotel Modern as a live animation film. The collective works with figures in miniature landscapes which are then projected live onto a large screen, thus making the inner world of the characters visible, who are embodied by the singers acting in front. The second act is created by light designer Urs Schönebaum: In the dialogue between light and stage space, Wotan’s entanglement between Fricka and Brünnhilde, the striving for power and individual freedom, and the final failure of Wotan’s plans are thus vividly told. In the third act, Ulla von Brandenburg stages Wotan’s inner drama as a “tableau vivant” as an interaction of colours, shapes and changing axes.