Pyromaniacs won’t be disappointed by Barrie Kosky’s Die Walküre ...Middle East

Previously, on Wagner’s Ring Cycle… When we left Barrie Kosky’s brand-new Das Rheingold for the Royal Opera back in 2023, all was rainbows. Wotan and his dysfunctional family of gods had a new palace, Fafner the giant had the all-powerful ring, and – barring a small matter of a dead brother, an angry dwarf and the Rhinemaidens’ curse – things were about as rosy as they get in the Australian director’s charry apocalyptic landscape. But with Die Walküre – the cycle’s second instalment – the real trouble starts, and Kosky hits his stride.

There were grumbles in certain quarters about Rheingold’s restraint, its refusal to supply the wow Wagner’s epic implies. And as we get further and darker into a story that will end (in two further operas and some nine hours’ time) in fire and flood, the director seems to be heading not for a cataclysmic bang but a disturbing theatrical whimper. Have we written ourselves into a place beyond dragons and magic, arrived at a quieter kind of apocalypse: the creeping horror of ecological collapse?

That’s certainly what this Walküre suggests. Earth-goddess Erda (actress Illona Linthwaite) – our silent, ever-present guide, naked and frail – plunges us back into her dream-vision. Sets fly in and characters appear on an empty stage as she covers her eyes. But are these memories of a tragedy already fulfilled or visions of one still to come, that could yet be averted?

If Rheingold is all action, Walküre plays out in emotional encounters: a husband at war with his wife; brother and sister falling helplessly in love at first meeting; a father casting out his daughter. For big opera it’s startlingly intimate, and Kosky trusts that, letting Antonio Pappano’s living, breathing orchestra do the wide-shots while he zooms in close.

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It helps to have a cast who can act, and we get plenty of conflicting subtleties from Christopher Maltman’s fallible patriarch Wotan and his Jerry Hall-alike wife Fricka (Marina Prudenskaya – voice as glossy as her hair), whose marriage reveals plenty of open wounds. There’s touching fragility from Stanislas de Barbeyrac’s Siegmund, trauma-bonded to battered-wife Sieglinde – an exciting role debut from Natalya Romaniw. Only Elisabet Strid’s Brunnhilde – Wotan’s rebellious Valkyrie-daughter, restless and strident – lacks layers, letting Maltman carry the emotion of their final farewell.

But any Walküre really comes down to the last act: the Valkyries’ famous entrance and the magic fire that surrounds Brunnhilde – showstoppers both, potentially. There are no winged horses here, just frenzied, ash-and-blood covered Bacchantes who propel the drama with the collective power of some serious voices (Lee Bisset’s Gerhilde and Maida Hundeling’s Helmwige leading the pack). As for the fire, no spoilers, but pyromaniacs won’t be disappointed by designer Rufus Didwiszus’s memorable solution, which leaves the audience with a closing image resonant enough to carry us through to the next chapter in this sober, slow-burn Ring Cycle.

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