Forget Bayreuth: Why Wagner fans absolutely have to go to Dortmund now

2024-05-13 09:52:30

Culture Forget Bayreuth

Why Wagner fans absolutely have to go to Dortmund now

Status: 13.05.2024 | Reading time: 4 minutes

Starts with paleontogy, but doesn’t stop there

Source: Thomas M. Jauk Ks. Morgan Moody, Irina Simmes, Sungho Kim, Tommi Hakala, Ursula Hesse von den Steinen, Ks. Matthias Wohl

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The veteran director Peter Konwitschny staged Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” at the Dortmund Opera. With “Rheingold”, the actual prelude to the four-part series, the major undertaking now came to an end. It really is Champions League.

There is magic inherent in every “Ring” beginning, as well as in every ending. But how can it be that with Wagner’s youngest major company? Dortmund After three years with “Rheingold”, the actual prelude, the wonderfully funny finale has been reached?

Quite simply, the director’s name is Peter Konwitschny and with him everything is usually different than expected anyway. And to be honest: Somehow he had already been written off: directing guru from the GDR, yes, but almost eighty, seemed pretty worn out and a supporter of an aesthetic that had long since become unfashionable, and there was also something about his aggression problem – in Nuremberg and elsewhere he had bumped into choristers and other theater employees, was no longer allowed to finish work and was suspended.

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In this respect, Heribert Germeshausen, the ambitious director, was brave Dortmund Opera, to invite Konwitschny into the pot for a whole “Ring of the Nibelung”. But Konwitschny, who staged such great Wagnerian feats as “Parsifal,” “Tristan and Isolde” and “The Flying Dutchman” in Munich or “Tannhäuser” in Dresden and who was somehow overlooked in Bayreuth, is part of the opera world still guilty of the tetralogy. So far he had only released “Twilight of the Gods” in 2000 at the end of the now glorified Stuttgart “Ring” of the four directors.

Washings in the kitchen-living room

The coming season will hopefully once again exude its intellectual magic and cheeky wit as a revival and final premiere in Dortmund. But the remaining three “Ring” parts were new, in an unorthodox order: “Die Walküre” came out in 2022, “Siegfried” in 2023, and now “Rheingold” followed. Always the general music director was a very good musical spirit Gabriel Feltz at the podium of the Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra, which is as powerful as it is colorfully beguiling and always dramatically gripping.

“The Rheingold” at the Theater Dortmund

Quelle: Thomas M. Jauk

And what’s more: Konwitschny illuminated everything with wisdom, composure and a lot of knowledge of his profession. All three premieres were and are a great success, also received with national acclaim. In a reduced stage set by different designers: First Frank Philipp Schlössmann, who put the Wälsungen in three increasingly chic kitchen-living rooms. Johannes Leiacker created “Siegfried” from the standardized, calm container. And now it’s Jens Kilian’s turn for “Rheingold”.

At first it doesn’t show anything: In the shaggy look of Anno 1876, Joachim Goltz, who is impressively improving, sits on the ramp as Alberich and fishes for one in the ditch, where the sound of the Rhine flow is still a little stagnant. The Rhinemaidens appear behind the red theater curtain, they too appear to be Stone Age craftswomen with fur aprons and green mermaid hair. You climb a mist-shrouded ladder as a substitute for the river, the hoard is a golden cloth with which Alberich is pulled into the stage sky: all the simplest means of illusion.

The Wolf of Valhalla

The following section goes from paleontology to the palliative care unit called Walhall. Wotan, who threatens with mammoth bones instead of a spear (nevertheless full of dignity: Tommi Hakala) and Fricka, who wears cute fur slippers (vocally steals the butter from Wotan’s wedding bread: Ursula Hesse von den Steinen) are a Stone Age couple who, with the rest of the gods’ baggage in jute like Tipi lives and toasts each other at the self-carved camping table with aurochs horns.

Alberich, who torments his robotic brother Mime (big name: Fritz Steinbacher), has become the Wolf of Valhalla in the executive chair between the Nibelheim skyscraper canyons thanks to gold and the ring. His invisibility helmet is a tablet with which he plays old-fashioned shadow games as a giant worm like a toad.

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Bayreuth’s virtual “Parsifal”

This is as old-fashioned as it is hilarious. Peter Konwitschny theatrically pokes fun at old Richard and at the same time takes him very seriously. The giants (dark and great: Denis Velev as Fasolt and Artyom Wasnetsov as Fafner) initially appear as monster legs in seven-league galoshes from the Schnürboden. The annoyingly warning Erda (named: Melissa Zgouridi) shuffles in as a homeless person with at least 20 Wotan bastards who have to test play with the ball of Norn wool or have to be wrapped under warnings.

The gods grow old

Freia (Irina Simmes) carries her childhood apples in the shopping net. The gold hoard has turned into a battery of atomic bombs. Valhalla is a black nothingness, the gods, now dressed in contemporary clothing, applaud their Rhinemaiden nurses as senile old men in wheelchairs (Freia, of all people, is already dead on the ground) as they demonstrate with rainbow posters (“Wrong and cowardly is what is happy up there!”). And so the “Rheingold” closes.

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In Dortmund, each tetralogy part is its own “ring” cosmos, embedded in symposiums and accompanying operas that match the time or content. A pleasantly separated, modestly concentrated narrative approach – especially after all the currently more or less helpless, confusing or under-complex interpretations of prestige from Berlin to Bayreuth, Brussels to London.

So you can already mark May 2025, when the 80-year-old Peter Konwitschny will revive his 25-year-old “Götterdämmerung” again and this pot “ring” will probably come to a famous end. For the fourth time.