The little man has his day: a nasty and brutish Die Walküre opens at The Royal Opera

With The Ring, Wagner may have conceived one overarching drama of folly and redemption, but he wrote it in four instalments sufficient unto themselves. You would not need to have seen Das Rheingold, or perhaps even any Wagner at all, to be caught in the grip of Die Walküre as it was staged last night at The Royal Opera.

Yes, the curtain comes up as it did before on the earth mother Erda, played with grave reproachful dignity by Illona Linthwaite, and the stage is later dominated by the World Ash Tree, or bits of it, from which Wotan tore his spear. Return visitors to Wagner’s world will recognise such fundamental elements here and there in the simple, monumental set designs by Rufus Didwiszus.

But Wagner allowed himself the luxury of two beginnings to The Ring, casting Rheingold as a “preliminary evening” and, when the storm breaks at the opening of Walküre, it crashes out of the orchestra and over an entirely bare stage. The scene is set, literally so, for a story to be shaped by the director Barrie Kosky in entirely modern naturalistic terms, largely following the now-established precepts of the Dogme 95 film-makers such as Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.

And so each picture and movement and gesture on stage takes its form from the music. There is no sense of one serving or merely illustrating the other; rather the kind of fusion one imagines Wagner had in mind when idealising the “total work of art”. For this to work, Sir Antonio Pappano’s conducting is now less concerned with the long line than with sudden contrasts and heightened tensions. Act 1 is full of long pauses and not-yet-pregnant silences, filled here with meaning. For tautly controlled violence as well as volume, the Second Act prelude almost steals its thunder from The Ride of the Valkyries to open Act 3.

Further fuelling the nature of a drama unfolding in the here and now is the lack of ego from the cast on stage. Perhaps it helps that several of them are new to their roles. At any rate, Siegmund (Stanislas de Barbeyrac) opened in almost toneless gasps – as a man on the run would. Likewise the Sieglinde of Natalya Romaniw barely reached over the pit at first. And yet when it counted, both of them cut through or sailed over the orchestra (Pappano did not spare the horses), aided in Romaniw’s case by exceptional diction.

Through the slow but unstoppable momentum of their mutual recognition, Act 1 burnt on a steady white filament. By the time Siegmund wielded Nothung aloft, I thought I would pop. Act 2 began by promising more of the same, not least thanks to a magnificently imperious Fricka from Marina Prudenskaya. Like Soloman Howard’s thuggish cop of a Hunding, she made the most of limited stage-time by pouring maximal vocal and physical energy into each phrase.

Thereafter, the temperature drops, notwithstanding a Magic Fire apotheosis which may leave the front rows of the stalls mopping their brows. It’s not that, on the first night at least, either Christopher Maltman’s Wotan or Elisabet Strid’s Brünnhilde lacked for clarity or commitment, so much as heft. Prudenskaya and one or two of the excellent team of Valkyries tower over the tight-suited Maltman, and Kosky has him play the king of the gods as a brutish little man, accustomed to getting his way through force and intimidation above all.

Goodness knows he is relatable enough, but the long monologue at the heart of the opera – of the whole Ring cycle – wants more reflective, less stop-go pacing. Maltman’s Wotan arrived at the prospect of “Das Ende!” in a spirit of petty nihilism – I can’t have what I want, so the rest of the world can go to hell – and perhaps it is to his credit that the Farewell unfolded not as the evening’s inevitable and glorious culmination but a concession wrested from him, almost inch by inch, by Brünnhilde. Meanwhile Strid, in tune with the overall casting policy, drew us in with warm and rounded tone rather than traditionally “Wagnerian” metal. To see how she negotiates Brünnhilde blossoming into womanhood is an exciting prospect, one of many in what for now remains a work in progress in the best sense of the term. If this Ring were an HBO series, the Emmy awards would be in the can.

Peter Quantrill | 02 Mai 2025