Having set up his themes in the previous instalments of the Ring in the Royal Opera’s past two seasons, Barrie Kosky relaxes a little in Siegfried, the cycle’s third part, the ‘scherzo of the symphony’ as it is sometimes regarded. The now familiar leitmotivs of his interpretation as a parable about climate change and the despoliation of the earth are there – the personification of the latter (Erda) present almost throughout as an aged lady, reviewing the sorry tale of human history which has brought about nature’s devastation, also symbolised by a burnt, desiccated tree, harking backwards and forward to the ravaged world ash tree (Yggdrasil) from which Wotan’s spear was wrenched.
There is also a fair amount of Kosky’s usual theatricality, which is apt if this third section is to be treated as the Ring‘s scherzo, the director playing about with and taunting the work just as Siegfried infuriates Mime here like a wayward teenager. That sardonic humour alludes to an imbalance of power between the two characters and serves as an important reminder that there is wit and humour in Wagner’s doom-laden cycle. But the jests, sometimes merely facile, dissipate some of the tension at this point in the tetralogy where the coil of fate tightens its grip ever more firmly, particularly around Wotan (here in his earthly guise as the Wanderer) and Alberich, and their creatures. Having their confrontation in Act 2 introduced by the Wanderer’s sidling up to the dwarf on a bench and offering to share his packet of crisps appears glib to say the least.
Nonetheless, Kosky’s bringing Erda centre stage throughout the four-part drama as a universal mother focuses its strands more and more and intensify in Siegfried as she comes even further to the fore as the ground of all being – not Wotan and his waning power of legal, political authority symbolised in that spear. The principle of Mother Earth is particularly potent in this drama where issues of generation and genealogy become more prevalent and urgent and are increasingly interwoven in its narrative texture. Her (almost) continuous presence here underlines, deepens, or questions the relationships among the characters in general; specifically: Siegfried’s quest to understand where he comes from, not knowing who his biological parents are; the childless Mime’s self-interested adoption of Siegfried; the riddles which the Wanderer poses to Mime about the races who inhabit the different parts of the world; and Wotan’s dubious ploy to reclaim sovereign control through his own descendant, the supposedly free creature Siegfried (though the product of incest) and rescue the ring, to be followed by Alberich’s own, similar plot in the next drama to continue his vendetta against the god through his son, Hagen. Contrasting with those instances of fertility is the snowbound barrenness of Act 2 where Siegfried encounters Fafner the dragon, hinting at the final outcome of climate catastrophe, and the breakdown of the world’s ecosystem. Wotan’s own impotence – already symbolised by Wagner in his taking the form of the lonely, dishevelled Wanderer – is emphasised by apparently equating him with the narrator of Schubert’s Winterreise, hence the frozen landscape of the second Act.
The snowy world of that Act is the nadir at the centre of this drama, opposite to its flanking Acts which end, respectively, with the sparks of Siegfried’s sword-forging (here played up jovially on stage by pyrotechnics) and Siegfried’s penetrating the ring of fire around Brünnhilde. But that wintry dearth eventually gives way to the spring of Act 3’s last scene: an abundantly flowering meadow, miraculously consumed neither by the fire which had surrounded Brünnhilde (not shown here, but it’s a scene known well enough) nor by the desiccation seen throughout the three Ring dramas up to this point. It’s a new dawn of hope, a vision of spring and Earth’s renewal which Siegmund and Sieglinde had barely glimpsed, and only as a false dawn, with the brief sight of it through the door of Hunding’s hut in the Act 1 duet of Die Walküre, ‘Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond’.
By contrast, Erda’s own fertility appears to remain intact all along, as the old figure gives birth to her own avatar for her confrontation with Wotan earlier in Act 3, issuing from under the magnificent but sinister dress by which she is swaddled, resembling a snake’s head fritillary. Old Erda remains stranded within that dress in a state of some tragic torpor, somewhat like Miss Havisham – ironically perhaps given that, unlike Dickens’s figure, she has been ravished by Wotan and produced Brünnhilde; but enough alike in having been abandoned thereafter to decry her own denigration for evermore (she mimes the words which the younger Erda sings to Wotan). After drawing her younger self back inside her, it’s apt that she remain on stage nonetheless for the next scene, to witness the Oedipal moment of Siegfried’s destroying Wotan’s spear and his power – the god his own grandfather – just as he soon goes on to embrace Brünnhilde, technically his half-aunt, as she is also Wotan’s child. Such are the contortions of Wotan’s compromised attempts to maintain control of the world that it leads to irregularities within nature.
Almost as fundamental to Kosky’s vision is the recurring image of a tree – not only a nobly specific manifestation of nature, but taken to be versions of Yggdrasil that was the victim of Wotan’s destructive act of will when he cut off a branch to form his spear, the primordial, symbolic rape of nature that was the condition of worldly urban civilisation. Other decayed, ashen trees continue to dominate meaningfully each Act of Kosky’s Ring. Just as Sieglinde and Hunding’s house of Die Walküre was built around the tree in which Nothung was plunged, so Mime’s forge in which he attempts to reconstitute the sword is a ramshackle hut precariously placed among the upper branches of a tree. A smaller one stands outside Fafner’s abode, followed by a much more imposing example standing in the garden of Act 3.
In the Nordic myth, Yggdrasil is the centre of the cosmos, around which world history revolves. Upon it and its offshoots, Kosky seems to hang his own interpretation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, insofar as Wagner imported it into the tetralogy. Already in this Ring we have seen some of the most decisive actions taking place against people or things when physically involved or bound up with one tree or another, or with nature. It is as though the acts of individual, self-directed wilfulness in this narrative, which upset the equilibrium of the universal or general will in Schopenhauer’s ethical scheme are, instead, harmfully wielded against nature itself. So it is that in his fatal confrontation, Fafner is cornered up against the tree next to his hut and Siegfried impales both with his sword. Although Wotan is not set up against anything when Siegfried goes on to smash his spear, the fact that this is made from a branch of Yggdrasil surely speaks for itself as a sort of violation of nature.
On the one hand, then, is the hard material fact of the earth and nature, represented by Erda and the various trees here. On the other, is a metaphysical argument about striving for redemption and salvation in the Ring. If metaphysics – that is, philosophical idealism for short – are taken by Wagner’s lapsed devotee Nietzsche as an essentially fanciful or deluded project of manmade ideas and doctrines opposed to the unavoidable, irrefutable reality of nature, that is perhaps something of the sense in which Kosky also deals with such ideas here. However much his apparent allusions or references to religious systems as philosophical idealisms may enrich our understanding about the search for salvation in the Ring, they are also deployed with some intellectual, if not overtly comic, irony. Certainly an irony that serves as a subtler, more thoughtful reverse of the same coin as his cruder directorial jests elsewhere here, in response to the Ring’s metaphysics; but is less blunt than, say, the provocative and satirical interplay of irony in Frank Castorf’s almost infamous Ring for Bayreuth.
Furthermore, that dialectic between materialism (truthful physical fact) and idealism (apparently truthful but ultimately deceitful abstract notions) as a salient theme in this production also appears to revolve around a tree, or first to arise from it. When Fafner is killed on the tree outside his hut, one is perhaps inclined to think of an ironic inversion of the sinless Christ sacrificed on a tree (as the wooden cross is often described in Christian theology). For all that Fafner represents evil, his blood saves Siegfried by enabling him to understand Mime’s secret, treacherous thoughts, thereby avoiding his would-be assassination, and also to understand the Woodbird’s song. As a dragon – here encrusted with the glistening gold of his hoard – and therefore a sinister animal not so far removed from a serpent, the useful deed of Fafner’s sacrifice perhaps in some way reverses the crime brought into the world beside another tree through the snake’s temptation of Adam and Eve, with whom Siegfried and Brunnhilde will come to correspond. However, to complicate a simple, linear story of moral progress, in conflating the Woodbird with Erda here – the gravity-defying animal, potentially a symbol of idealism, but now tethered to earthly reality, as it were – Kosky raises an interesting question about the beneficence of all-knowing Mother Earth. As she mimes the bird’s advice not only to find Brünnhilde but also to take the ring, since she must remember the ring’s fatal curse she becomes a willing traitor to Siegfried the would-be saviour, like Judas Iscariot.
In the following scene, Siegfried and Brünnhilde inhabit a new Garden of Eden, the familiar ashen tree at its centre here also the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but too barren even to bear any new fruit of temptation, having been plundered by Wotan. But of course, the world of the ring is already morally and ecologically compromised. Nevertheless, we may wonder whether this is a Calvinist world predestined to damnation and obliteration on account of original sin and inherent depravity. Or is it a Catholic world which, although imperfect, does already contain within it the seeds of grace from which salvation may yet be wrought?
Like the multi-coloured flowers in the meadow, it’s surely a diverse, syncretic theological and philosophical world. A complicated world into which Siegfried strays, although not yet much enlightened, like Parsifal into the garden of Monsalvat which blooms again on Good Friday in the third Act of that drama. Just as Parsifal is an ingenious allegorical melding of religious traditions, superseded by a new ethical message, so Kosky seems to present here an amalgam. Apart from the religious systems already referred to and the Norse, pagan epic underlying the whole cycle, there’s a point of connection between Mother Earth in the midst of this Eden and Lilith in Jewish Kabbalism. But then, as she sits contemplatively in the hollow of the barren tree, she resembles Buddha. No doubt, Feuerbachian philosophy is also brought to bear. As we have seen both Erda and Wotan cede their divine personalities and sublime wisdom to their earthly representatives in the foregoing scene of Act 3, that enables Siegfried and Brünnhilde to step forwards and approach a new world of full humanity, seemingly untethered to existing moral parameters – Siegfried still more or less innocent, and Brünnhilde divested of her super-human Valkyrie status. To underline the point, she is literally deflowered by Siegfried as she awakes in the meadow, rather than stripped of her armour. Whether and how Kosky resolves this philosophical melee remains to be seen in Götterdämmerung. There is certainly much food for thought here, and Earth as a theological and philosophical principle, as much as an ecological one, will surely continue to play out, having proved to be such a fruitful idea so far.
Andreas Schager, the doyen of Wagnerian Heldentenors today, makes his Covent Garden debut in this run. Though he has sometimes sounded strained when I have heard him recently elsewhere, here he tempers his voice superbly to Siegfried’s softer, youthful ardour and callowness. He tires a little by the final scene of Act 3, but that is redeemed by the deft streak of incipient wisdom and maturity which enters at that point. Peter Hoare’s Mime oscillates compellingly between garrulous fluency and niggling, flustered ambition, but does Christopher Purves sound evil and scheming enough for Alberich? Christopher Maltman brings more rugged depth as a sonorous, inscrutable Wanderer. Soloman Howard’s Fafner sounds as darkly controlled and infernal, while Elisabet Strid projects a radiant stream of wonder and joy in the opera’s last segment with Siegfried, though there could be more sorrow and searching as she first gets to grips with her newly awakened life. Wiebke Lehmkuhl’s sung Erda and Sarah Dufresne’s Woodbird offer dusky almost seductive vocal contrast as the only other female voices in this work.
Antonio Pappano keeps the Royal Opera House orchestra on quite a tight leash, resulting in a somewhat subdued, contained reading of the opera’s score. There are brooding sonorities for the Preludes of the first two Acts for instance, and often a chamber-like intimacy for what are often very conversational stretches of this long work, with a particularly luscious, luminous depiction of the woodland setting for Act 2. The leanness in timbre fits the view of this instalment as being the Ring’s less weighty interlude. But the performance lacks the grandeur and heroism which the opera can still encompass in scenes pertaining to Siegfried, however brittle, temporary or superficial that heroism may be, before the tragic gloom of Götterdämmerung. Also missing are mysticism and breadth in the ascent of the mountain and awakening of Brünnhilde, and ecstasy in the final duet. Even so, if a good production of the Ring is one which isolates just a few pregnant ideas to make sense of the titanically complicated whole, illuminating its spectrum of colours in the concentration of a simple bright white light, then this is already up there with the best.
Curtis Rogers
Siegfried
Music and libretto: Richard Wagner
Cast and production staff:
Siegfried – Andreas Schager; Mime – Peter Hoare; Der Wanderer – Christopher Maltman; Brünnhilde – Elisabet Strid; Alberich – Christopher Purves; Fafner – Soloman Howard; Erda – Wiebke Lehmkuhl; Woodbird – Sarah Dufresne; Actor (Erda) – Marcella Riordan
Director – Barrie Kosky; Designer – Rufus Didwiszus; Costume Designer – Victoria Behr; Lighting Designer – Alessandro Carletti; Conductor – Antonio Pappano; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, 28 March 2026
Top image: Elisabet Strid as Brünnhilde
All photos © 2026 The Royal Opera, Monika Rittershaus