Why Barenboim is the Ring master of our age

There was a time when it was unusual for a season to pass in a British opera house without the complete Ring being performed. The first Ring cycle to be mounted in postwar Britain was premiered in 1949 at Covent Garden. Thereafter (with the sole exception of 1952), the Ring, or parts of it, was an annual fixture at the Royal Opera House for two decades. Finally there was a fallow year in 1969. By this time, however, Sadler’s Wells Opera (later English National Opera) was building its own cycle, sung in English. The Ring – or parts thereof – continued to be performed most seasons into the 1980s at both houses, with Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera also mounting Rings and - just as significantly - touring them around Britain.

Little of this period of plenty remains today. This is not to downplay some important recent Ring cycles, such as those put on by Opera North and Longborough festival, or the concert performances at the Proms and elsewhere, let alone the cycle directed by Keith Warner for Covent Garden in 2007 and revived in 2012 and 2018. But the gaps are increasingly large and obvious. Though there are many different causes for this change, the steady decline in Britain’s public subsidy to the opera sector is certainly one of the most decisive in making Wagner’s opera cycle an increasing and sometimes very expensive rarity on our stages. The result is that younger newcomers to the Ring are no longer able to get access to this most important and ambitious of 19th century European musical art works.

Today, if you are British and want to see a Ring cycle, you must travel abroad. This might be far from easy and certainly far from cheap, but just as sports fans now routinely head overseas to watch their favourites, so an admittedly smaller number of Wagner lovers now make the journey to overseas Rings too. British visitors were much in evidence at in Berlin this autumn. It is likely that numbers will also be travelling to Paris’s Opéra-Bastille and Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 2020, where new Ring cycles are scheduled.

The chief attraction of this autumn’s Berlin Ring was the chance to hear the finest Wagner conductor of the modern era performing the work in his company’s renovated theatre for the first time. Daniel Barenboim has been conducting the Ring half a lifetime. His Bayreuth festival cycle of 1988, directed by Harry Kupfer, established him as the Ring master of his generation. Several notable conductors honed their trade as his assistants, including Christian Thielemann, Antonio Pappano and Philippe Jordan. Now 76, Barenboim has been conducting Guy Cassiers’ production since 2010, both in Berlin and Milan (several in those casts there took part in Barenboim’s 2013 Proms cycle). Until now, however, he has not performed it as a cycle at the historic Berlin State Opera theatre on Unter den Linden, which reopened after an eight-year renovation in late 2017, and of which he is music director.

Barenboim remains invisible, Bayreuth-style, in the Staatsoper pit throughout the four parts of the Ring. He takes his bow democratically surrounded by the entire Berlin Staatskapelle orchestra on the stage. But there is never any doubting his commanding grasp and leadership. Where other conductors maybe allow the dynamics to soar too loudly or the musical line to descend into generalities, Barenboim’s control is tight but flexible, and consistently full of contrast, while never losing the musical flow or drawing attention to itself. It is like hearing the work afresh.

The result is a rich illumination of orchestral detail and layering that is too often blurred in other performances, and is particularly successful in Das Rheingold. Under Barenboim, scenes which in less skilful hands can be formulaic, like the opening scene of Rheingold or the closing duet in Siegfried, acquire new dramatic clarity, meaning the big moments in Götterdämmerung are reached with a sense of inevitability.

The conductor’s art achieved its profoundest climax at the end of Die Walküre, where Barenboim masterly observed Wagner’s often ignored pianissimo markings in the orchestra as Wotan leaves Brünnhilde for the last time. The effect was to express Wotan’s despair, defeat and eclipse in passages of revelatory orchestral restraint, a lesson to all Wagner conductors.

Cassiers’s production does not come close to matching Barenboim’s achievement. It is contemporary but also conservative. There is no old-school naturalism, but the treatment also eschews the radical conceptualising that is meat and drink to many European Ring cycles. There are no crashed aeroplanes or biting crocodiles, both of which have featured in recent Rings. The use of dancers intermittently seems to underline important cruxes in the narrative and can broaden the expressive scope, but it is often merely distracting and ultimately lacks conviction. The production represents a dimly lit reversion to the decluttered postwar “new Bayreuth” aesthetic, and at times this Ring is more like a semi-staged concert performance. This can, though, have advantages, since it keeps the focus on the musical drama. It is hard to remember a Ring that so effectively centres on the transition from Wotan’s corrupted world to Brünnhilde’s role as the world’s redeemer.

The Berlin cast, a mix of newer and fresher voices with some Barenboim veterans, is close to being as good as you will hear these days. Michael Volle’s Wotan, in particular, is a commanding interpretation, beautifully sung in full voice and articulated without the slightest bark. Iréne Theorin’s Brünnhilde is tireless, accurate and thoroughly up to the job, though the vocal vibrato gets in the way sometimes and she is the chief sufferer from the hampering that is inflicted by Tim van Steenbergen’s costumes. Andreas Schager is the best Siegfried of the current era. Strength in depth is underlined by redoubtable Wagnerians such as Jochen Schmeckenbecher as Alberich, Anja Kampe as Sieglinde, Ekaterina Gubanova as Fricka and Anna Larsson as Erda. The lovelorn giant Fasolt is even sung by 74-year-old Matti Salminen, who sang the role for Colin Davis at Covent Garden 45 years ago and was part of the Patrice Chéreau Ring at Bayreuth in 1976. But it is Barenboim’s show. He can’t go on conducting the Ring forever. But is he does so again, I’ll be there.