With Die Walküre, the central themes of Barrie Kosky’s Ring cycle for the Royal Opera are starting to emerge, and one of them seems to be wood. Not trees, so much; at least not as a symbol of life. After the rapid assembly of a world from theatrical nothingness (a bare stage), Hunding’s forest hall is simply a wall of blackened planks, with no World Ash Tree in sight. Then you notice the protruding hilt of the sword Nothung: no, that is the World Ash Tree, and Hunding has recycled it into building material. We knew he was a wrong ’un, but really: this is Sycamore Gap-level wickedness.
Various ex-trees recur in Rufus Didwiszus’s designs. The huge, maimed log from Das Rheingold reappears during Siegmund and Hunding’s duel, spewing blood as the betrayed hero falls and dies. The Valkyries gather not on a mountain peak but at a blasted, leafless tree beneath apocalyptic grey skies, and Wotan (Christopher Maltman) abandons Brünnhilde (Elisabet Strid) inside its hollow trunk. Branches aflame, it makes for a stupendous final image, and the surtitles even substitute ‘tree’ for ‘rock’, which is not what Wagner meant at all. Won’t the flames simply consume the tree? Ah, but it’s magic fire, remember.
Certainly, the despoliation of nature is a central theme of the Ring, and Kosky’s imagery offers a mycelium-like network of resonances and subtexts, all fructifying vigorously in the dark imaginative peat of German romanticism. The final image evokes Caspar David Friedrich’s gnarled oaks, while Hunding’s tarred wall of wood is more like Anselm Kiefer – that supremely Wagnerian poet of the forest as repository for the bloodiest and most intimate secrets of the German psyche.
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