Realising Wagner’s power

There is no experience faintly comparable to sitting in an opera house at the opening of Wagner’s Ring cycle, knowing you will be watching and listening to the whole thing in the space of a week. The opening E flat, especially when it emerges as it does at the Royal Opera in total darkness, the pit as well as the auditorium, is thrilling beyond belief, and as the music slowly begins to move the sense of being in at the beginning and not knowing what will happen is overwhelming, however familiar you may be with the Ring. Wagner’s dynamic instructions are very specific — at no point in the prelude should the sound rise above piano, though that is a direction that no conductor, almost, obeys.

At Covent Garden we were treated to a torrent of sound before Woglinde sailed in with her ‘Weia! Waga!’ which consequently sounded a bit of a let-down. The sense of the primal is crucial here, and it wasn’t helped by having Flosshilde wearing a cheeky hat and Alberich arriving in a boat. It is, admittedly, a hard scene to bring off, because some of the music is quite sophisticatedly seductive, but however it is done it must, in characteristic Wagner mode, give the impression of being momentous — just as everything else should, too. In this production, or anyway with these performers, that didn’t happen, mainly because Wolfgang Koch as Alberich failed to combine the qualities of lechery, frustration, misery and impotence which dictate his crucial decision to renounce love and go for wealth and power. Koch has a rich voice, but as the biggest dwarf I have ever seen he doesn’t seem threatening, and the rape of the gold, with whooping winds, wasn’t as alarming as it has to be.

When we rise to the gods, who seem already to be living in Valhalla, though Wagner’s directions — but why bother about them? — state that it is an open space on a mountain, Wotan greets not a just-finished building but the kind that estate agents describe as ‘well lived-in’, with well-worn leather chaise-longue and plenty of silverware.