Wagner Der Ring des Nibelungen opera cycle directed by Stefan Herheim in 2021 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Sir Donald Runnicles directs the Orchestra and Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Set designs by Silke Bauer and Stefan Herheim; costumes by Uta Heiseke; lighting by Ulrich Niepel; video projections by Torge Moller, William Duke, and Dan Trenchard; dramaturgy by Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach and Jörg Königsdorf. Directed for TV by Götz Filenius. Sung in German. Released 2020, this is a box set of 4 Blu-ray discs with the entirety of the Ring and extras. Grade: D
See the artwork for the back of the box set above for some additional information about the cast. Many stars appear in all four operas. (This is a cropped image from the DVD box, but the information will be the same for the Blu-ray set).
Early reports about this project suggest that Deutsche Oper Berlin did not have the valkyriepower to pull this off. The marketing of this by Naxos and the vendors is as atrocious as anything I have seen in 14 years of writing this website. Peter Quantrill got the unenviable task at Gramophone reviewing this. I admit it would be about impossible to review a Ring cycle in, say, 900 words. And Peter’s attempt at this was about as ecliptic and inscrutable as any print review of opera I’ve ever tried to read. But Peter does clear up one thing for me when he writes:
“For the listener at home, one virtue of the staging with the singers front and center is that the aural perspective holds a steady focus; the Blu-ray disc offer an appreciable increase of definition in both sound and picture over the DVD, at least once the audio is routed through hi-fi speakers rather than the television.”
No kidding! This confirms what I always suspected. The print reviewers of classical music, chained to their LPs and CDs, live like creatures out of Dickens in unheated garrets, where, when forced to review a video, they rely on an ancient DVD player and a 15-year old standard-definition (480i) color television with TV speakers playing out the back of the set. If Gramophone were a charity, we could start a GoFundMe campaign to buy a OLED TV, up-to-date AVR, and some decent speakers for their reviewers to use.
Back to the Deutsche Oper Der Ring. Clive Paget did an extensive review of this set at pages 54-55 of the June 2023 Opera News. He makes it clear that this is a production only for Wagner experts who have a fighting chance to make something out of all of Herheim’s wild stagings. I give this a preliminary D grade, which I will change if anyone comes to its defense. This doesn’t mean the production is junk. It just means don’t buy this unless you know what you are doing. The Met box set of the Ring remains the best bet for most earthlings.
The following trailer may help you decide whether you want to investigate this title further:
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