Siegfried turns Russian

Michael Tanner looks forward to the Mariinsky Theatre’s Ring cycle in Cardiff

A complete production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is always a major cultural event, especially if it is done on four consecutive evenings, so that the great vision of the work takes possession of the spectators’ consciousness as well as of their waking time — though even the slowest performances of it only last for 15 hours, and not the 19 which is being put about as its length by the propaganda of the Wales Millennium Centre. For it is there that the Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg will be performing the Ring, one cycle only, on the last day of November and the first three of December. In recent decades Wales has had a great tradition of Wagner performance, with the arch-Wagnerian Reginald Goodall undertaking Tristan und Isolde and Die Walküre with sublime results, and Richard Armstrong conducting the complete Ring there.

What about Russia, though? As one of the countries where opera has long been a central cultural force, one would expect that there would be a tradition of grand Wagnerian conductors and singers, even producers. But even the most experienced Wagnerian will be hard-pressed to mention many, perhaps any, names of great Russian performers who specialised in Wagner, to the extent, say, of recording some of the most famous selections from the operas. I can think of only one fine recording of a complete Wagner opera from Russia, and in Russian: Lohengrin, with the great and weird tenor Ivan Kozlovsky in the title role — but then Lohengrin has a long history of being treated as an honorary Italian opera. There was a lot of Wagner performed in Russia, as there was everywhere in Europe, during the last decades of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries, but that was by Germans on tour, the decisive event being the appearance of Angelo Neumann’s travelling company in St Petersburg in 1889.