Wagner - Siegfried, at the Paris Opera Bastille

ONP Bastille, Wednesday January 28 2026

Conductor: Pablo Heras-Casado. Production: Calixto Bieito. Sets: Rebecca Ringst. Costumes: Ingo Krügler. Lighting: Michael Bauer. Video: Sarah Derendinger. Siegfried: Andreas Schager. Mime: Gerhard Siegel. Der Wanderer: Derek Welton. Alberich: Brian Mulligan. Fafner: Mika Kares. Erda: Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Brünnhilde: Tamara Wilson. Waldvogel: Ilanah Lobel-Torres.

Photos: Herwig Prammer/ONP

 

With only one more instalment to go, Calixto Bieito’s overall plan for his Ring is becoming clearer, as it ought to be by this stage. I’m going to begin my post with a substantial (though abbreviated) quotation from the Paris Opera’s website, because it sums up the story so far. We...

 

‘... began in Das Rheingold with big data (...) total information and total surveillance of private life, and continued in the militarized cosmos of Die Walküre, where the digital world collapses at every level as a result of war - an apocalypse in which love nonetheless blossomed amid destruction (...) “At the end of Die Walküre, the world is contaminated,” Bieito explains. “A toxic orange smoke spreads everywhere, the computer of Valhalla is blown apart, Wotan, the artist of destruction, disappears into chemical poison, and Brünnhilde is frozen in time. The poison has contaminated the forest. It has not destroyed it, but mutated it (...) Nature has lost its code. The forest (...) has not been cleared, burned, or felled. It has been reprogrammed. The trees fall with their crowns downward, piercing space horizontally like lances; they (...) move as if they were the joints of a machine, an organism whose most fundamental structure has been altered (...) Gravity no longer works. Verticality no longer exists. Symmetry disappears. Ecological logic is broken. Nature no longer responds to itself.”’

 

Siegfried seems to have gone down better than the two previous episodes in the press and online - in what in France is called the ‘blogosphere.’ I can think of three reasons for that. The first is the forest setting. I don’t think there’s been any change of tack in the overall concept or from the design team; there is still, as in the previous two episodes, a huge set, filling the stage and dwarfing the action that takes place in front of it. But a forest, with big, realistic trees, even mutated and uprooted, is superficially more conventional-looking than steel cages, cables and flickering servers, thus satisfying, to some extent, those who forever bang on about being confronted with ‘ugliness’ in modern productions.

 

Photos: Herwig Prammer/ONP

Second, there’s more actual directing in Siegfried. After Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, I complained that Bieito seemed to have told his design team to get on with it, and given up, leaving the singers to themselves, in stark contrast with his virtuoso directing of The Exterminating Angel not so long ago. Perhaps he was fazed, and his work undermined, by the constant changes of cast that hit Das Rheingold and Die Walküre but seem, now, to be over. Here, we had some precision directing again. Siegfried and Mime’s perpetual bickering, for example, was very neatly managed and entertaining. I should, however, say that eventually, the régie flagged: at the very end, Siegfried and Brünnhilde just faced the audience, one at each end of the sword, and sang.

 

The third factor was, I think, a perceived (I might say ‘imagined,’ but that’s just me) improvement in the conducting, and of course the strength and consistency of the cast. Concerning the production…

 

The deep, dark forest is present throughout. In the first act, you can just about make out, in the gloom, the skeletal structure of the exploded Valhalla in the background. In Act Two, the forest is less dense and the skeleton has moved a little closer. In the last act it’s prominent. The trees - big and realistic, as I said, are suspended, tops pointing down, and there’s a horizontal fir thrusting in on each side. Though mutants, or perhaps because of it, these trees are lush with rustling greenery, and have a life of their own, moving up and down, or in and out, and often overlayed with flickering video, to beautiful effect. But in the poisoned atmosphere, even the cyborgs or androids staggering through the forest are sick.

 

In Act One, there’s no cave and we don’t see Siegfried’s bear. Instead, he drags in a car door and toys with it: it becomes his surfboard, teddy bear, mirror… Bumbling Mime, in a brown suit and specs, lives out of a fat suitcase, apparently medicated up to the eyeballs: he shoots up, pops pills, and tries to feed them to the lad, who spits them out.

 

While trading riddles with Mime, the Wanderer slowly patches together the sections of his broken spear with duct tape. As there’s no forge, there’s no forging as such: Siegfried rubs sections of the sword together, as if to kindle fire, and eventually fishes the finished sword out of the grass - if I’m not mistaken, from exactly the same spot where Siegmund found it in Die Walküre. And instead of splitting an anvil before skipping off, he gaily chops the top off one of the firs.

 

It may seem from this and what’s coming that Bieito treats the Ring’s legendary paraphernalia lightly. But I suspect he may have in mind the Wanderer’s line in the second act, ‘Alles ist nach seiner Art: an ihr wirst du nichts ändern,’ - things move in their own mysterious ways, and we are powerless to alter that. The legendary accessories are, in this vision, accessory: ‘things happen,’ as the saying goes, with or without them.

 

Act Two is visually the most impressive of the three, and includes one of Bieito’s most striking, indeed moving, ideas. Alberich arrives pulling a cart, bearing an ailing female cyborg. While he confronts Wotan with his fears for the future, forceps in hand, he helps her give birth, under a blanket, to a baby. And just as he asks, menacingly, who will inherit the baleful hoard, Alberich clutches the new-born child tightly to his chest. The Wanderer, before leaving, covers the now dead robot; and as he wonders about his parents, Siegfried cradles her lifeless head in his arms.

 

The dragon-slaying scene is suitably spectacular. The beast is represented by a giant mask wielded, shield-like, by a kind of spider-lift or crane behind. Beside it is Fafner, himself masked and festtoned with giant beads like a Shaman. In clouds of stage mist, white backlighting beams out of the dark depths of the woods through the dragon’s eyes and mouth and into the house, obliterating any ‘fourth wall’ and drawing the audience into the heart of the action, immersively. I’m coming to hate the word ‘immersive’ (along with ‘curated,’) but this time it was le mot juste. When he finally wrests the ring from the dragon’s lair (the mouth of the mask), Siegfried is drenched in blood, and will remain so to the end of the opera. The bird puts in a brief, cheeky, appearance, suspended on wires; its bright-yellow ‘feathers’ wryly recall Post-it stickers.

 

In Act Three, the Wanderer meets Erda at a picnic table in the woods. She carries in a saucepan of soup, and they sit for their meal. Or they would have, only on Wednesday, in a gesture of anger, Wotan accidentally broke the leg of one of the chairs, forcing the singers to improvise new actions: Erda passed him her own chair, and perched awkwardly on the edge of the table with her plate and spoon. Instead of sinking into the earth, she stays (on the one remaining chair) to laugh at Siegfried’s disrespect, defiance and teasing of Wotan: the ‘floppy hat’ mocked by Siegfried is the saucepan he’s plonked lopsidedly on the god’s head, after bedecking Erda with the blood-stained ring around her neck and the tablecloth over her head.

 

By now, as I mentioned earlier, Valhalla’s skeletal structures are more visible. We last saw Brünnhilde, at the end of Die Walküre, high up in a tower. The tower is now back, and advances slowly as Siegfried draws near. Brünnhilde, says Bieito in the quotation above, is ‘frozen in time.’ We realise, as Siegfried symbolically hacks apart a block of ice, that her sleep has indeed been cryogenic in kind. Having broken the ice, he runs up the iron stairs to pierce (equally symbolically) with his sword and tear away the tower-room’s polythene cladding, which falls back and hangs down like icicles. Brünnhilde has frost in her hair; he rubs her arms to warm her back to life: ‘Heil dir, Sonne! Heil dir, Licht!’

 

They descend to the stage for their final duet, one at each end of the sword, as I also noted above, he still in his bloodstained tee-shirt, she still in her black top, cargo pants and boots - but without her leather wristbands, unbuckled and removed in a gesture of submission, I guess. They run off together: curtain.

 

Curtain and loud applause, I should say - loudest of all for Tamara Wilson’s Brünnhilde and Andreas Schager’s Siegfried. It hardly seems worthwhile to describe Schager’s performance in detail, as anyone who’s heard him live can easily conjure it up mentally. He’s a Duracell-bunny sort of tenor, fearlessly and unflaggingly energetic, both vocally and physically, short on melting lyricism (he does what he can, only his voice isn’t cut out for it) but full of oomph. Time and again you think he might tire and crack, but in the end you just marvel at his stamina. He seems to prefer taking risks to playing safe; sometimes he just hurls the high notes into the air, and occasionally they miss the net. His voice let him down severely on one top note in the final duet, but by that stage he had the audience eating out of his hand. He also makes his acting look easily natural: we very nearly believe he really is an insolently happy-go-lucky youth having the time of his life.

 

Of course, Tamara Wilson is neither Flagstad nor Jones nor Voigt - though something in her timbre at the top recalls the last. Her voice is smaller. But either something about the Bastille’s acoustic suits her (some people say the house is kind to sopranos), or she’s mastered whatever tricks are needed to sing Brünnhilde as subtly as she likes yet still be heard in its gaping auditorium. My neighbour, in seventh heaven, claimed he was hearing details he’d never noticed in the score before, all sung crisply and clearly. And her top notes, when she chooses to let rip, do ring out. She’s on top of the role and surely must be one of the best Brünnhildes around at present. And when properly directed, she can act, as I mentioned in my Walküre post. One poster on France’s ODB opera forum claimed her awakening was ‘calamitous,’ but unlike the easy-going and easily-pleased bunch on the more famous Parterre, ODB contributors tend to be outrageously picky and prickly. I can't imagine anyone present and rising to their feet to applaud on Wednesday would agree.

 

Derek Welton was one of the many Wotans brought in to replace Iain Paterson earlier in the cycle, but I didn’t catch him at the time. He’s definitely a bass-baritone: his voice very satisfactorily combines a grainy baritone bronze with firm, bible-black bass undertones. At times, to me, it’s a gorgeous sound, but his voice can let him down by shedding volume at the top just when you’d expect to be blasted out of your seat. Still, many very fine moments - and, in his fur-collared great coat, he has powerful stage presence, radiating charisma.

 

Already, writing about Das Rheingold just under a year ago, I noted that Gerhard Siegel was ‘an idiomatic, multi-hued, subtle character-tenor, whose experience shone as Mime.’ That' s still true, and as he’s also an excellent actor, his bickering scenes with Siegfried were, as I mentioned above, vividly entertaining. Brian Mulligan’s voice is - so it occurred to me sitting there on Wednesday - as much a ‘tenorial’ baritone as Kaufmann’s is said to be a ‘baritonal’ tenor. He lacks the insinuating, evil darkness others may bring to the role, but that isn’t a particular liability with regard to Bieito’s more feverish, jittery characterisation of Alberich, bespectacled brother to the nervy, bespectacled Mime.

 

Some people have come down like a ton of bricks on Marie-Nicole Lemieux as Erda. It’s true she hasn’t a deep, dark-chocolate contralto sound, but otherwise she seems fine to me, singing with intelligence and subtlety rather than sounding, as some do, as if her mouth is full of the earth she’s supposed to have emerged from and return to. Mika Kares is a suitably dark-sounding Fafner, even from the wings, and Ilanah Lobel-Torres is a suitably sweet-singing Waldvogel, ditto.

 

 

Though some critics have written that Pablo Heras-Casado is improving, learning as he goes as it were, I’m still finding his Wagner stiff and dry - see, if need be, what I wrote about the first two instalments - and this time the orchestra wasn’t at its most fluent and accurate, either, the brass in particular.

 

But still… Bieito seems to have bucked up a bit in the Personenregie department now the cast has settled down, though his conceptual narrative remains fragmented, the fuzzy-edged dabs of ideas dwarfed by the sets, lighting and effects. I must admit that I’m now, as not so much before, interested to see where he finally takes Götterdämmerung.