Wagner - Die Walküre (La Valkyrie) at the ONP Bastille in Paris

ONP Bastille, Paris, Monday November 24 2025

Conductor: Pablo Heras-Casado. Production: Calixto Bieito. Sets: Rebecca Ringst. Costumes: Ingo Krügler. Lighting: Michael Bauer. Video: Sarah Derendinger. Siegmund: Stanislas de Barbeyrac. Wotan: James Rutherford. Hunding: Günther Groissböck. Sieglinde: Elza van den Heever. Brünnhilde: Tamara Wilson. Fricka: Eve-Maud Hubeaux. Gerhilde: Louise Foor. Ortlinde: Laura Wilde. Waltraute: Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur. Schwertleite: Katharina Magiera. Helmwige: Jessica Faselt. Siegrune: Ida Aldrian. Grimgerde: Marvic Monreal. Rossweisse: Marie-Luise Dreßen. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris. E-doggy robot dog by Evotech.

Photos: ONP/Herwig Prammer

 

What is it Anna Russell says, in her famous analysis of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs? ‘So Wotan knows the curse is working.’ It certainly seems to be working on Calixto Bieito’s Ring in Paris. Das Rheingold, earlier this year, fielded four-and-a-half to five different Wotans: Iain Paterson (replacing Ludovic Tézier, who pulled out well in advance), Brian Mulligan (from the wings, once he was no longer needed as Alberich), Nicholas (not Lawrence, as the Opéra’s site claimed till corrected) Brownlee, John Lundgren and Derek Welton. In the present Die Walküre, Paterson was first replaced by Christopher Maltman, then James Rutherford, then Maltman again to finish the run. Though he’s still slated to appear in next year’s complete cycle, not once did Paterson show up and sing. All this chopping and changing - and the rowdy reception the production initially got - must have shaken the performers up a bit, yet the success of this Vache-qui-rit was firmly on the musical side.

We’re getting used, these days, to a lighter, more lyrical approach to Wagner’s cycle. You might say, with the vocal types available today, this is making a virtue of necessity. But in Brussels last year, it was a deliberate move, by Romeo Castellucci and Alain Altinoglu in tandem, to ‘desacralise’ or ‘de-monumentalise’ the Ring, if you see what I mean, and present it on a deeply human scale. If we look at his catalogue, we see Pablo Heras-Casado has recorded a lot of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann; as it happens, without having consulted that list, in my post about February’s Das Rheingold I wrote that his Wagner seemed ‘pitched modestly somewhere between Mendelssohn and Schumann in weight.’ Stanislas de Barbeyrac, meanwhile, comes to Siegmund via Gluck, Mozart and Weber, a logical enough progression. And though Tamara Wilson has certainly sung ‘heavy’ roles, the only time I’ve personally seen her before (not having seen her Turandot here) was in Bellini, as Beatrice di Tenda, in Peter Sellars’ flaccid production of the opera of that name.

Well, neither Barbeyrac, Elza van den Heever (Sieglinde) nor Tamara Wilson (Brünnhilde) showed much sign of being shaken by the ruckus described at the start of this post. They were the stars of the evening.

 

Barbeyrac has already recorded Schubert Lieder accompanied by an orchestra. His performance on Monday night was a lesson in masterful but measured Lieder-singing: vocally young and fresh, with a warm, grainy timbre, attention to the text, near-infinite nuance… none of which stopped him acting his socks off, or galvanising what had till then been a slightly dozy first act with an impressively long and resounding ‘Wälse! Wälse!’ His performance was, in sum, scrumptious. My neighbour was entranced. 

I suppose it’s understandable if singers pace themselves cautiously in a work of this size, but from that ‘Wälse! Wälse’ onwards, the evening got better and better. I could perhaps see for the first time, as I hadn’t before, why some people are doubtful about Elza van den Heever. Bieito has Sieglinde cowed and bruised and, once pregnant, forever doubled-up on the floor with cramps (Brünnhilde’s third-act revelation of her sister’s condition is surely superfluous); so she often sang with what was perhaps too thin and raspy a thread of voice. But in the last act, when, I guess, they all felt they could finally let rip, she came into her own with a magnificent ‘O hehrstes Wunder! Herrlichste Maid!’ - showing perhaps that she’s better singing high and loud than low and soft.

Regarding Tamara Wilson, I can simply copy and paste what I wrote after Beatrice di Tenda: ‘It's rare to hear a voice that, without any sense of being a 'sledgehammer', (...) quietly but firmly fills the Bastille with beautiful, silvery sound, both rhythmically precise and perfectly tuned.’ What I learned in addition this Monday was that she has firmly sustained medium and lower ranges, put to good use when announcing defeat to Siegmund and, later, pleading with her dad; and that she is a lively actress. Here, Brünnhilde is at first played girlishly and submissively, so Wilson - again, no doubt, saving herself for later - was initially a bit frugal with the ‘money notes’. But by the last act (having, in the second, swapped her skittishness for butchness, and her blue crinoline for black cargo pants and tee-shirt, leather wristbands and army boots) she is another, self-assertive Brünnhilde, stomping around and even pummelling Wotan’s back as he cowers on the ground. On Monday, towards the end Wilson was very nearly, I thought, in what people call ‘a zone’, a phenomenon I hadn’t come across in an opera house (or anywhere else) for quite a while. Her long crescendo on ‘Liebe’ in ‘Der diese Liebe mir in's Herz gehaucht’ was one of the highlights of the evening.

After Das Rheingold, I wrote: ‘Eve-Maud Hubeaux played Fricka with her usual imperious presence and charisma, but I still think (...) that the Bastille (...) reduces her impact and authority…’ Now, in Die Walküre, her vocal impact and authority matched her presence and charisma, so perhaps in February I was wrong. Already, as La Grande Vestale last year, she’d been costumed more or less as Disney’s Queen Grimhilde, the evil stepmother in Snow White. Here, an icy platinum blonde with plasters still stuck on her newly-remodelled cheeks, she stormed in to browbeat Wotan in much the same bitch-cape, only now dyed turquoise, with matching elbow-length gloves.

 

In the circumstances (how much rehearsal time did any of these revolving Wotans get?) while James Rutherford was a solid enough - and musical - Wotan, his soft-timbred voice was short on projection and percussiveness at the top. Anyway, the blue velvet dressing-gown and rubber boots he wore all evening stripped him of any real authority or dignity: this was a fretful, dithering Wotan, pushed around by his wife and increasingly independent and rebellious daughter.

Günther Groissböck‘s voice, as Hunding, to me sounded fleshless and dry, and his characterisation was (literally and figuratively) distant. I can’t say I heard the ‘straightforward vocal health’ of his 2018 Gurnemanz in the same house, but then it wasn’t fair of Bieto, acoustically speaking, to position Hunding’s tatty flat high up on the right in a letter-box (more of which in a moment), and keep him there. 

The Valkyries - the eight of them, that is, not abseiling down the façade of the Valhalla data-centre - were, singing through openings at various levels of the set, though physically apart, unusually together. And there were clearly some interesting individual voices among them, only I don’t know which is which well enough to say who was who.

Pablo Heras‑Casado’s conducting hasn’t changed much since I wrote it was ‘transparent and analytical, almost matter-of-fact - not to say prosaic and dry.’ The opening storm, for example, was just that: fast but flat-footed, short of colour and contrasts, ebb-and-flow; and when the brass came in, they lacked fire-power. (As usual with French brass, I might have added, had I been in a particularly prickly mood. Later, we would hear the usual cracked notes.) The quiet, lyrical, contemplative passages were more successful - thanks partly to some memorable oboe-playing - than the more grandiloquent outbursts in the score. One sharp critic (on ConcertoNet) summed things up catchily: Heras‑Casado ‘n’a pas la tête épique’ - isn’t epic-minded (it sounds catchier in French). ‘Nothing stands out (...) and above all the drama disappears.’ You aren’t swept off your seat when you most want to be: in the rolling orchestral flourishes and surging chords leading up to Wotan’s ‘Leb’ wohl, du kühnes, herrliches Kind!’ for example. The conductor refuses to sink to ‘milking’ these moments, and we’re left frustrated. The reviewer in French daily Le Figaro let slip that Heras‑Casado now knows he will not be the Paris Opera’s next music director. Perhaps that’s as well.

Bieito’s production is disappointing. The expectations raised in Das Rheingold, of a spectacular focus on the impact of ‘post-body’ or ‘post-human’ developments and the like seem to have fizzled out and reverted to that Regie classic, the post-nuclear surveillance state. But perhaps they’re meant to have. In the Ring prologue, Alberich and Mime mined their data in an underground lab ‘cluttered with work benches, wiring, plastic body parts, masks, servers twinkling in cages and monitors ablaze with DayGlo colours…’ (my quotes) and fashioned ‘a humanoid - played mesmerisingly by a dancer in a second skin - in slender, female form, a partner, we guess, for loveless Alberich.’ Now, in Die Walküre, Wotan’s spartan meeting room is lined with tall cabinets connected to great, vertical swatches of red and black cables that, in his frustration, he tears down in a splutter of sparks. But when he slides the cabinets open, instead of humming servers they contain only rows of distinctly old-school, analog box-files: an archive of all his children, or all his heroes? And instead of more of those startlingly lifelike humanoids, all he has now is a robot dog, an expensive toy, chasing juvenile Brünnhilde round on her hobby-horse. Has his dream of big-data dominion already come to this?

 

But by jumping to act two, I’ve jumped the gun. The production overall relies so much on the set (huge and immobile), videos and lighting that the directing as such, not Bieito at his best, comes across as almost incidental, as if he’d said to his production team, ‘I’ve had it, you deal with it.’ The single set is a steel mesh cage so big it fills the Bastille’s stage from side to side and top to bottom, leaving a relatively narrow strip for acting and singing on the stage apron - not such a bad thing at the Bastille. Through the mesh we can sometimes make out steel stairs rising through several floors, and the odd light fitting, never switched on, familiar from February. Like the Valhalla cube in Das Rheingold, you expect this giant contraption to do more than it actually does until the end.

During the storm, security-camera images projected all over the metal facade catch Siegmund battling in terror up the bare stairwells in a gas-mask, with an oxygen-tank on his back. A wide window opens up in the wall, on the right, revealing Hunding’s tatty flat, with its war-torn curtains and sickly-looking potted tree. (The ash Nothung is wrenched from must be the wooden floor of the stage, as that’s where the sword, shortly after, magically appears. Unless it springs from Siegfried’s belly, where he displays a big, red birthmark, implying perhaps that he and his sister had been conjoined twins.) As Siegmund tumbles in, Sieglinde grabs a machine-gun and trains it on him. All the action is captured live by cameras in the corners and blown up into shadowy, expressionistic projections on the steel mesh. Hunding arrives, dragging a slaughtered ram. Instead of sleeping, he undresses, changes into uniform, and, seated on a chair, power naps, - dreaming, perhaps, of being a Führer - while the twins bed down in an unsettlingly grubby sleeping-bag below. There’s little sign of spring, on stage or in the pit. In fury, Hunding guts the ram.

Act two’s opening projections are rainbow-hued thermal camera images, in slow motion, of long-fanged hounds at the chase. The letter-box opening in the mesh façade is now bottom left: Wotan’s office-cum-meeting room, as shabby as Hunding’s flat, similary fitted with security cameras. Brünnhilde capers in girlishly astride her hobby-horse and is pursued by the robot dog, egged on by Wotan. Fricka strides in, tall, straight as a die, and forces Wotan to snap his lance into sections. Wotan’s eventual orders spark off Brünnhilde’s rapid change in attitude, marked by her change of clothes. Having determined to save Siegmund, she plants a smacker on his mouth: the ambiguity of her relationship with her father also extends to her dealings with the young man. In this production, Wotan himself steps in to kill Siegmund - with the sword.

The final act opens with a dazzling, rapid-fire, kaleidoscopic mosaic, on the façade, of images alluding to future technologies, but as portrayed in old newsreels, press photos, and war and and science-fiction films, including Apocalypse Now (the helicopters: fancy that!) and Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The Walkyries wear vaguely futuristic black jumpsuits, somewhere between riot gear and frogmen’s suits. Like the gimmicky robot dog (booed loudly when it returned: ‘à la poubelle’ - bin it! - someone shouted from upstairs) the noisy girls have glowing green eyes that Wotan, when they hide Brünnhilde, plucks out. Brünnhilde emits her magnificent crescendo seated on a ledge. As, having pummelled his back, she pleads with Wotan, he pretends not to listen, instead fishing gas masks out of large, plastic bin-liners, and lines them up meticulously, at the edge of the stage.

 

Now, those, if any, who pay attention may remember that in February I wrote: ‘Nothing happens’ (with the giant Valhalla cube, I meant) ‘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.’ Guess what. In Die Walküre, at the end, the set finally budges: the whole gigantic construction slowly separates into tall, iron towers that glide into a half-circle at the rear, and some of the uprights settle at an angle, as if Wotan’s vision is falling apart. There’s no fire, real or on video. But in an orgy of stage smoke and orange spotlight beams (Is it a ring of toxic gas? Would that explain the masks? But with a mask, you think, puzzled, any cowardly pleb could forge through…), Brünnhilde climbs up to a neon-lit eyrie at the top of the central tower and, leaning on the window-ledge, waits for sleep (and of course, in due time, a hero) to come.

Though it leans so heavily on the set, video, lighting (excellent), and gadgetry, there are ideas in this production. But they come in dribs and drabs and remain largely undeveloped, the exception being Brünnhilde’s transformation from obedient child to rebellious warrior. They don’t emerge organically from the story or score, or knit into a coherent whole to form something more satisfying than the sum of the parts. Not an absolute stinker, but a disappointing production that could do with more work - and may get it, as it will be back next year in a ‘festival’ (drinks and snacks included in the price) of the complete Ring - with or without Iain Paterson. 

 

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

Bonus: Maestro Wenarto's vision: