Wagner - Das Rheingold (L'Or du Rhin), at the Paris Opera.

ONP Bastille, Paris, Tuesday February 11 2025

Conductor: Pablo Heras-Casado. Production: Calixto Bieito. Sets: Rebecca Ringst. Costumes: Ingo Krügler. Lighting: Michael Bauer. Video: Sarah Derendinger. Wotan: Iain Paterson. Donner: Florent Mbia. Froh: Matthew Cairns. Loge: Simon O'Neill. Fasolt: Kwangchul Youn. Fafner: Mika Kares. Alberich: Brian Mulligan. Mime: Gerhard Siegel. Fricka: Eve-Maud Hubeaux. Freia: Eliza Boom. Erda: Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Woglinde: Margarita Polonskaya. Wellgunde: Isabel Signoret. Flosshilde: Katharina Magiera. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Herwig Prammer/ONP

These are head-spinning times for Ring cycles, at least as far as I’m concerned. The Paris Opera originally scheduled Bieito’s five years ago. Covid intervened, and it was postponed. In the meantime, at the end of 2023, Brussels launched its own cycle, directed by Romeo Castellucci. His Rheingold and Walküre were among the most enthralling productions I’ve ever seen of anything. But La Monnaie couldn't afford to pursue Castellucci’s spellbinding vision, and brought in Pierre Audi, from Amsterdam, to complete the project instead. While Audi’s Götterdämmerung awaits me next weekend, Bieito’s Rheingold has now appeared in Paris.

Ludovic Tézier, billed as Wotan when we paid for our tickets, dropped out, ostensibly on health grounds. He was replaced by Iain Paterson, whom I saw quite recently as Nick Shadow at Garnier. But early in the run, with viruses prowling around like the troops of Midian, Paterson too fell ill and, as the Paris Opera had nobody waiting to jump in, ended up ‘sprechstimming’ through one evening until, in a feat reminiscent of Dame Gwyneth Jones’ singing the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife gleichzeitig, Alberich (Brian Mulligan), with nothing more to do, was able to take over from the wings. (I’m not making this up, you know.) Paterson was replaced on February 5th by Nicholas Brownlee - mistakenly first-named ‘Lawrence’ on the hastily-updated Paris Opera website, causing some chuckles till the blooper was corrected. But he was back on Tuesday night, more of which later.

The new production, while not the best ever, turned out to be better than I feared, having read some negative reviews. The new production so far, I should perhaps say, as it isn’t easy to appraise a Rheingold, 'mere' prelude to a much longer construction. (This was also the reason Calixto Bieito gave for not appearing at the end of the first night: he will, he says, take his bow after Götterdämmerung.) The contrast between Castellucci’s approach and Bieito’s could scarcely be greater. Castellucci is allusive, thoughtful, erudite, artistic, poetic, oneiric, to some extent abstract… and with him you escape, as you pick apart myriad references to global cultures and their myths, into an inner, intellectual world. Bieito, on the other hand, plunges you mercilessly into a trashy, cartoon vision of the nightmare reality taking shape around us right now. In it, the mastery of data and new technologies bestow wealth, power, and the promise of eternal, post-human life on a rogues’ gallery of archetypal characters who, when they appeared in Dallas or Dynasty, we thought were comically fictional, but are now in charge of the world’s superpowers, busily ushering in a new (but far from improved) world order.

The staging is fairly simple. It centres on Valhalla, a giant cube of fretted metal through which we glimpse a labyrinth of stairways, landings, corridors and rooms and some as-yet-unlit light fittings. There are projections - of underground vaults stacked with ingots, of Wotan’s eyes (one blank), bodies on drips, nervous systems, eyeballs and so on - but they’re hard to parse alongside the live action on stage. (They’re more legible in the production photos.) Underneath, once the whole stage has risen using the Bastille’s powerful, but seldom exploited, machinery, we encounter another labyrinth: laboratories cluttered with work benches, wiring, plastic body parts, masks, servers twinkling in cages and monitors ablaze with DayGlo colours. Here, Alberich and Mime mine data, perhaps also Bitcoin, and work on developing a humanoid - beguilingly played by a dancer in a second skin - in slender, female form, a partner, we guess, for loveless Alberich. He tugs at her wiring as he cradles her.

It all starts, of course, with the Rhinemaidens, in electric blue wetsuits with a yellow stripe down the side, and matching flippers, with oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. They emerge, like Bond girls, from the Rhine, represented - not for the first time - by a billowing curtain, iridescent and translucent. Weighed down by a tangled mass of thick, black cables trailing from the back of a waistcoat, Alberich, pathologically sex-obsessed, soon has one hand in his unzipped flies. The Rhinemaidens’ teasing ends in blood, a band of it carved with a blade on Alberich’s forehead. In a rage, he tears down the curtain in a vivid flourish of fluorescent orange.

And so we meet our rogues’ gallery. Wotan and Fricka, asleep at first on an endlessly long, button-backed sofa, might be a power-couple from anywhere: Russia, Latin America, Asia, Europe, the US… Wotan wears black and carries a bucket of apples (these end up all over the stage till Freia, a boho environmentalist in green wellies, gathers them up). Fricka has a sharply-tailored, full-length leopard-print coat and, sometimes, sunglasses. Fasolt and Fafner probably represent finance and energy; the former wears a suit, the latter a stetson, a fringed suède jacket, and cowboy boots. Loge to me suggested organised crime, Erda, in a green mac, perhaps journalism or academia. Froh is a kind of Hare Krishna adept, beaming inanely, in reddish robes, Donner I don’t really know what, except that he has a blue baseball cap and a sledgehammer.

If you’re OK with the ideas that big data are the new gold, transhumanist, post-body immortality is the new eternal youth, and the twilight of post-enlightenment values and the world order we believed in, is rapidly drawing in, then the overall concept is workable and painfully, tragically topical. Also, while the director's soap-opera archetypes may not develop far as characters, the acting is good: it’s detailed and looks natural. Bieto’s a pro; sometimes (I think of last season’s The Exterminating Angel) a near-genius. But in the realisation, this production (so far) seems marked by a number of weaknesses. For example… 

That huge Valhalla-cum-data-centre is on stage throughout, but while you keep expecting it to do something: open up, light up, pivot… nothing happens until, at the end, in an orgy of stage smoke and spotlight beams, the façade lowers like a drawbridge, and Wotan and Fricka clamber up a staircase littered with tangled cables. As the static cube fills much of the space, the action, such as it is, is confined to a broad strip across the apron. The vast underground laboratories, cluttered with equipment, are manned only by Mime. Shouldn’t there be young engineers beavering away in front of all those monitors and lugging artificial limbs around?

Highlights such as Alberich’s transformations are managed bathetically: to turn into a snake, he resorts to the train of cables we saw at the start; to shrink to a toad, he pulls on a rubber frog’s mask, eliciting a ripple of giggles from the audience. Erda, who just saunters in, in her mac, round a corner of the building, has no aura. Freia barely exists, though among the riddles of the production, at the end, she smears herself in oil as Loge approaches her with a flame. Does this signal the death, under the new order, of the environmentalist dream, its ideals and projects up in smoke?

An AI image of a baby crowned with electrodes is projected at the rear, and the curtain falls. It will be interesting to see how all this is developed, how well it can be sustained, and whether the riddles are solved, over the next three instalments.

The casting was to some extent puzzling too: good singers, not all in the right roles. First among the exceptions was Gerhard Siegel (unless I missed something, the only German in the cast), an idiomatic, multi-hued, subtle character-tenor, whose experience shone as Mime. Equally experienced and convincing was bass Kwangchul Youn, a familiar (and always welcome) face in Paris. His dark, rounded, mature Fasolt contrasted well (vocally and physically) with the younger, less familiar and perhaps a touch more cavernous Mika Kares. Simon O'Neill is a convincingly on-the-ball Loge, his bright, metallic timbre unchanging from bottom to top, so perhaps a touch short on variety and nuance.

Brian Mulligan has such an elegant, clear baritone voice I’m surprised to read what roles he’s known for. You imagine him singing Wolfram’s Abendstern, or Lieder for that matter. It’s harder to think of him as a baddie, in blacker roles. Perhaps singing Alberich and Wotan on a single evening took its toll, as last Tuesday he was audibly too tired, by the time he reached the curse, to carry it off with due impact.

Eve-Maud Hubeaux played Fricka with her usual imperious presence and charisma, but I still think (having also witnessed her Gertrude and Grande Vestale in the same house) that the Bastille doesn’t suit her voice. It reduces her impact and authority in these roles that need it so much. The usually excellent Marie-Nicole Lemieux, who sang Fricka in Castellucci’s version (‘stunning… vehement, buxom and juicy,’ I wrote at the time) seemed miscast as Erda, and the almost incidental way her intervention was directed (who’s this? you wondered) drained it of mystery and resonance.

In this production, Freia, too, is almost an afterthought, though the poor singer does get dragged in and out unceremoniously on a plastic tarpaulin, and plays an enigmatic part, as mentioned above, at the end. Eliza Boom made little vocal impact in the vast house. The Rhinemaidens were, on the other hand, unusually radiant and seductive, physically and vocally.

Iain Paterson has had a rough time with this Rheingold. It has now, on and off, had four different Wotans: Paterson himself, Nicholas Brownlee, John Lundgren and Derek Welton. On February 11, Paterson sang, but was obviously still not in peak form. However, he’s a mature, experienced singer and a good actor. He soldiered on and mobilised these combined skills to make a virtue of necessity. His voice sounded tired, old and worn, even fleshless and threadbare. At times he relied on a surprisingly tenor-ish timbre, rather than any vocal body underneath, to carry over the pit. But he turned all this to his advantage and played Wotan as a weary, very human sort of god, already facing the twilight. It worked. Or at any rate, it worked for me and my companions on row 7 of the stalls. Whether it worked right up to the top and rear of the gaping auditorium and its cantilevered balconies is another question.

Pablo Heras-Casado is tipped, rightly or wrongly, to be the Paris Opera’s next music director. If it turns out to be true, then based on this Rheingold, the contrast with Dudamel or Jordan will be sharp. His Wagner, pitched modestly somewhere between Mendelssohn and Schumann in weight, is transparent and analytical, almost matter-of-fact - not to say prosaic and dry. The orchestra was big: you could see six harps in the pit, though, as the playing was reined in, I can’t say we actually heard them (though we heard fluffed horn notes well enough). Lushness is avoided, and highlights in the score that would typically be pointed up as especially significant to the plot seem deliberately demystified, treated as unemphatically in the pit as on stage. When the gods go up into Valhalla (in this case leaving Freia behind with Loge and his flame), in our ignorance perhaps, we expect a wall of sound, a blaze of brass, to blast us out of our seats. Well no. We remain seated. So if the rumours turn out to be true, I’m not sure I’ll be glad about it.

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.