Meister’s direction was fluent and competent without coming close to the excellence of Christian Thielemann’s conducting of Lohengrin in the middle of the Ring week. Originally scheduled for 2020, it arrived two years late due to the pandemic with a new conductor, Meister, drafted in at short notice after Pietari Inkinen contracted Covid. You might even say, in true Wagnerian manner, that this was a cursed Ring Cycle.

Schwarz’s cycle was a further milestone in Bayreuth’s continuing loss of authority and direction. But the days when Bayreuth could claim to set the world’s standards in Wagner production – as it did in the late 19th century when the festival began, and then again after the second world war, when the composer’s grandson Wieland Wagner and successors Patrice Chéreau and Harry Kupfer reconceived the works afresh, have gone. Occasionally, everything comes together, as it did last in Barry Kosky’s 2017 Die Meistersinger, conducted by Philippe Jordan, and before that in Stefan Herheim’s brilliant Parsifal in 2008, conducted by Daniele Gatti. As the curtain fell, it triggered a fusillade of booing - along with cheering too.Īudiences journey from around the world to Bayreuth to watch the Ring Cycle whenever it is staged Wagner’s purpose-built theatre still has tremendous allure and mystique. The music, in short, was saying everything, but the staging, an empty pool full of junk, nothing.

But if the climax of this Ring contained any suggestion that a new order of things had somehow been made possible, it was hard to see where it was. It had not helped that Theorin had just delivered an undistinguished account of the final scene of Götterdämmerung, one of the cycle’s great vocal set pieces. Subversive: Die Walküre at Bayreuth festival Photograph: Enrico Nawrath

Sf opera ring cycle