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A Walküre Worthy of Munich’s Wagner Legacy München
Nationaltheater
06/25/2026 - & June 28, July 1*, 4, 8, 2026
Richard Wagner : Die Walküre
Joachim Bäckström (Siegmund), Ain Anger (Hunding), Nicholas Brownlee (Wotan), Irene Roberts (Sieglinde), Miina‑Liisa Värelä (Brünnhilde), Ekaterina Gubanova (Fricka), Dorothea Herbert (Helmwige), Julie Adams (Gerhilde), Elene Gvritishvili (Ortlinde), Claudia Mahnke (Waltraute), Niina Keitel (Siegrune), Christina Bock (Rossweisse), Natalie Lewis (Grimgerde), Noa Beinart (Schwertleite)
Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
Tobias Kratzer (stage director), Matthias Piro (assistant stage director), Rainer Sellmaier (sets, costumes), Michael Bauer (lights), Manuel Braun, Jonas Dahl, Janic Bebi (videography), Bettina Bartz, Olaf Roth (dramaturgy)
A. Anger, I. Roberts, J. Baeckstroem, N. Brownlee
(© Monika Rittershaus)
Few opera houses could claim Munich’s Wagnerian authority. It was here that Das Rheingold and Die Walküre premiered, and any new Ring at the Bayerische Staatsoper inevitably had to contend with that legacy. Tobias Kratzer’s new Die Walküre succeeded because it pursued innovation through a profound reading of the text rather than gratuitous provocation. His imagery arose organically from the libretto’s psychological logic, so that every scenic gesture felt dramatically inevitable rather than symbolic for its own sake.
The first act was extraordinary in its intimacy. Hunding’s house became the physical embodiment of domestic tyranny, with every detail exposing a marriage hollowed out by ritualised violence. Sieglinde’s instinctive submission and anticipation of Hunding’s demands made her oppression painfully real. Kratzer’s direction of actors was exceptional. Siegmund and Sieglinde’s attraction unfolded gradually through glances, shared recognition and growing trust, making “Winterstürme” the inevitable flowering of newfound freedom. It was among the finest stagings of the first act I have seen.
Equally compelling was Kratzer’s juxtaposition of Norse gods and contemporary mortals. Hunding’s bourgeois home gave Sieglinde’s suffering a striking cinematic realism, while Marian shrines (to Fricka) connected the divine and human worlds. Clever video sequences recalled the twins’ childhood, including Siegmund first seeing Nothung, which he later retrieved not from an ash tree but from Hunding’s weapons cabinet.
The second act remained in Hunding’s house, as though Fricka and Wotan were inspecting the scene. Fricka’s butchering of Hunding’s sacrificial ram vividly underscored her authority and latent violence. Wotan emerged not as an omnipotent ruler but as a god crushed beneath the laws he had created. His confrontation with Fricka became a devastating constitutional crisis in which both were simultaneously justified and doomed. The siblings’ escape in a car bearing the number 1870 discreetly referenced the opera’s Munich premiere. Their abandoned childhood home, illuminated with haunting beauty by Michael Bauer, became the desolate forest where Siegfried’s fate was foreshadowed.
The third act was the least convincing dramatically. The Apocalypse Now-inspired helicopter video during the Ride of the Valkyries delighted the audience but felt imposed rather than integral. By contrast, relocating the act to a replica of the Nationaltheater proved inspired. The Walkyries became stagehands preparing fallen heroes for Valhalla, while Brünnhilde’s sleep inside the theatre itself provided an elegant and witty conclusion. Particularly striking was the meditation on immortality: Brünnhilde bled after becoming mortal, while Wotan’s futile attempts to draw his own blood suggested that mortality had become the one freedom forever denied to him.
Last summer, Vladimir Jurowski impressed in his conducting of Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte in Munich. With the present performance, he confirmed his stature among today’s finest Wagner conductors. Rejecting empty monumentality, he favoured continuous dramatic momentum, allowing Wagner’s endless melody to unfold with natural breath and inexorable harmonic motion. The Bavarian State Orchestra played magnificently, combining glowing brass, transparent woodwinds and supple strings with remarkable clarity. Leitmotifs emerged organically, the Todesverkündigung possessed breathtaking restraint, and the final farewell achieved overwhelming grandeur without sentimentality.
The cast displayed exceptional dramatic cohesion. Heard last summer as Donner in Bayreuth’s Das Rheingold, Nicholas Brownlee gave a magnificent Wotan, combining vocal authority, crystalline diction and remarkable psychological insight. He conveyed command in “Nun zäume dein Ross,” inspired terror in “Wo ist Brünnhild’?” and deeply moved in the farewell, presenting a ruler who had long recognised the failure of his own ambitions.
Heard three seasons ago as Leonore in Fidelio in Toronto and as Ortrud in Bayreuth’s production of Lohengrin last summer, Finnish soprano Miina‑Liisa Värelä was an excellent Brünnhilde, especially in the third act. A compelling actress, she charted the heroine’s moral awakening with great sensitivity, although her diction occasionally lacked clarity and she sounded somewhat tentative early on.
Irene Roberts was a revelatory Sieglinde. Her warmly coloured soprano, perhaps a legacy of her mezzo‑soprano past, combined radiant high notes with exceptional textual responsiveness, while her nuanced portrayal of an abused wife was heartbreaking. Joachim Bäckström offered an ardent, lyrical Siegmund with expressive phrasing and gleaming top notes. Together with Roberts, he achieved precisely the fusion of erotic passion and existential recognition Wagner envisioned.
Seen as Fafner in Das Rheingold and Siegfried in La Scala’s excellent Ring, Ain Anger was a chilling Hunding, whose menace stemmed from absolute conviction rather than overt brutality. Brangäne in Barcelona‘s and Bayreuth‘s most recent Tristan und Isolde, Ekaterina Gubanova’s Fricka was magnificent, sung with authority and dignity, presenting not a nagging wife but the lucid defender of a moral order collapsing under Wotan’s exceptions.
What ultimately distinguished this Walküre was its refusal to simplify Wagner’s moral universe. Kratzer neither judged nor celebrated his characters but revealed gods and mortals alike trapped within systems of law, history and belief. Combined with Jurowski’s masterly conducting and an outstanding cast, the result was an intellectually probing and emotionally overwhelming performance. As the second instalment of Kratzer’s Ring, it suggested that Munich may well be creating one of the defining Wagner cycles of our time.
Ossama el Naggar
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