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When Nothung became Nothing! Bayreuth
07/28/2026
07/28/2026 - Richard Wagner: Die Walküre
Richard Wagner: Die Walküre
Michael Volle (Wotan), Elza van den Heever (Sieglinde), Klaus Florian Vogt (Siegmund), Anna Kissjudit (Fricka), Mika Kares (Hunding), Camilla Nylund (Brünnhilde), Karis Tucker (Waltraute), Martina Welschenbach (Gerhilde), Magdalena Hinterdobler (Helmwige), Brit‑Tone Müllertz (Ortlinde), Alexandra Ionis (Siegrune), Marie Henriette Reinhold (Grimgerde), Natalia Skrycka (Rossweisse), Freya Apffelstaedt (Schwertleite)
Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele, Christian Thielemann (conductor)
Marcus Lobbes (AI curator), Wolf Gutjahr (Sets), Pia Maria Mackert (Costumes), Andri Hardmeter (Dramaturgy)
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)
Among the four evenings of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, Die Walküre has always occupied a unique position. If Das Rheingold erected the philosophical edifice of the tetralogy, Die Walküre endowed it with flesh, blood and tragic humanity. Nowhere did Wagner more perfectly unite metaphysical speculation with overwhelming emotional immediacy. It was therefore particularly dispiriting to witness this inexhaustibly rich drama once again subordinated to Bayreuth’s misguided AI experiment.
Marcus Lobbes, grandly styling himself an “AI curator” rather than a stage director, once more abdicated theatrical responsibility in favour of continuously morphing artificial-intelligence projections. If the torrent of images had attracted widespread ridicule after Das Rheingold, the algorithm had evidently been instructed to moderate its excesses. The projections unfolded at a slower pace and, on rare occasions, brushed against dramatic relevance. Such fleeting successes, however, merely served to highlight the production’s fundamental bankruptcy.
For most of the evening the audience remained trapped beneath an hallucinatory deluge of visual non sequiturs. Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, Thomas Mann, Lenin, abstract painters and even Olympic rings drifted across the gauze in an endless stream of free association. There were even colonial officials in tropical attire and emaciated African figures possibly evoking Germany’s forgotten first genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people in Namibia (1904‑1908). Thomas Mann’s appearance briefly suggested a reference to Wälsungenblut (1906), only for the illusion of intellectual coherence to disappear beneath yet another avalanche of random images.
The failure lay not in the inability of the projections to illustrate the drama—Wagner hardly required illustration—but in their inability to establish the slightest dialogue with either text or music. Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk demands the fusion of the arts into an indivisible dramatic organism. Here, image and music merely coexisted in mutual indifference. Artificial intelligence did not become a creative partner; it became an exceptionally industrious manufacturer of animated wallpaper.
The staging itself proved scarcely less vacuous. Wolf Gutjahr confined the singers to a narrow strip behind a translucent gauze that functioned as both projection screen and physical barrier. Bereft of meaningful direction, the cast spent much of the evening standing motionless while scenes demanding explosive dramatic energy unfolded with astonishing inertia. The confrontation between Siegmund and Hunding scarcely resembled combat, and Wotan’s annihilating command to Hunding elicited little more than the latter politely turning his back. Even more damaging, Wagner’s defining theatrical moments—Siegmund drawing Nothung from the ash tree, Wotan shattering the sword, Brünnhilde’s enchanted sleep and Loge’s encircling fire—never acquired visible stage reality. The audience was expected to conjure these iconic images through its own imagination while the AI remained preoccupied with generating an endless succession of arbitrary visual distractions. Bayreuth had effectively exchanged theatre for a malfunctioning digital screensaver.
Pia Maria Mackert’s costumes deepened rather than alleviated the confusion. Most characters appeared in virtually identical ragged black and grey garments adorned with vaguely wing-like appendages, frequently dissolving into the projections themselves. Only the Valkyries, transformed into oversized crows, introduced a welcome touch of visual differentiation. What had appeared in the dimly lit Das Rheingold to resemble grotesque Papageno-inspired costumes assumed a rather different aspect under the brighter lighting of Die Walküre. The hideous black‑and‑grey creations looked less avian than entomological, suggesting, perhaps inadvertently, an homage to Yuval Sharon’s Lohengrin for Bayreuth—the ugliest production of the opera I have ever encountered—in which Elsa and the people of Brabant were transformed from human beings into giant moths.
If the eye was repeatedly disappointed, the ear encountered an evening of the highest distinction. Christian Thielemann once again reaffirmed his unique authority in this repertoire. His mastery of Wagner’s vast architecture remained nothing short of sovereign. The opening storm unfolded not merely as orchestral description but as an elemental force of nature, every phrase meticulously weighted, every crescendo patiently prepared, every climax earned through long spans of inexorable accumulation. One admired above all his supreme control of dynamics. Fortissimi never became mere noise, while the quietest passages retained extraordinary intensity. Time itself appeared infinitely elastic beneath his baton. Bar lines dissolved into immense musical paragraphs whose breath seemed almost geological in scale.
The Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele responded magnificently. The cellos sang with unmistakably human warmth, the woodwind principals coloured Wagner’s immense orchestral tapestry with extraordinary refinement, while the brass—so often a source of anxiety in Bayreuth—combined brilliance with admirable security. It was conducting that reminded one how profoundly Wagner’s music continues to surpass every attempt at technological embellishment. No algorithm has yet learnt how to shape a crescendo.
Michael Volle, La Scala’s outstanding Wotan and the pre‑eminent interpreter of the Dutchman of our day, as amply demonstrated in Düsseldorf and Dresden, dominated the evening with a Wotan of overwhelming authority. Vocally, the years appeared to have passed him by entirely. The bass‑baritone retained astonishing amplitude, warmth and flexibility, while his impeccable diction transformed every phrase into living drama. Even the dreaded narration of Act II emerged with compelling inevitability rather than discursiveness. His farewell to Brünnhilde achieved genuine greatness, finding emotional truth despite everything unfolding around it. A slight quiver in his final notes in that farewell was the only blemish in his performance, perhaps the emotion of the moment or the distress of taking part in this atrocious staging.
Klaus Florian Vogt, La Scala’s and last year’s Bayreuth Siegfried of astonishing stature, undertaking the formidable task of singing all four tenor roles across the cycle, offered a Siegmund of rare intelligence and refinement. With his uniquely distinct timbre and his exemplary diction, Vogt once again demonstrated how eloquently Wagner could speak when every consonant reached the listener. His portrayal evolved from restrained introspection towards mounting ecstasy with admirable naturalness.
If Vogt had the best diction in the cast, South Africa’s Elza van den Heever has the least idiomatic German. Nonetheless, she brought considerable dramatic commitment to Sieglinde, although the voice occasionally lacked both warmth and ideal projection in the Festspielhaus.
The revelation of the evening was unquestionably Hungary’s Anna Kissjudit, who delivered a magnificent Fricka of commanding authority and vocal splendour. Her sumptuous mezzo‑soprano, remarkable even throughout its extensive range, combined regal majesty with incisive textual delivery, making Fricka not merely the guardian of divine law but an irresistible dramatic force.
I first encountered Kissjudit as Jezibaba in Berlin’s Rusalka, where I was immediately captivated by the opulence of her voice, her commanding stage presence and her complete theatrical assurance. I subsequently admired her Erda in Das Rheingoldin Vienna and Bayreuth, and in Siegfried in Vienna, Bayreuth and at La Scala. Remarkably, at barely thirty years of age, she had already eclipsed the countless Erdas I had heard over several decades of opera‑going.
Her assumption of Fricka represented an even greater triumph. The extended confrontation between Fricka and Wotan in the second act—traditionally one of the Ring’s most prolix stretches, a veritable mauvais quart d’heure that lasts considerably longer than a quarter of an hour and often feels longer still—became one of the evening’s most enthralling episodes. I cannot recall another performance in which this scene generated such sustained dramatic tension or proved so utterly gripping. Kissjudit matched Michael Volle phrase for phrase, transforming what is too often perceived as an obstacle to the drama into one of its undisputed emotional and theatrical climaxes.
Camilla Nylund has long been, and remains, the pre-eminent Brünnhilde of our day, as she so memorably demonstrated in her magnificent portrayals of the Valkyrie throughout Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung at La Scala. Here, however, the Finnish soprano did not seem entirely at ease at the outset. Her Brünnhilde initially betrayed an unusual vocal tension, with occasional instability in the upper register that momentarily clouded the lustre of an otherwise distinguished assumption. It may well be a singer’s discomfort at being in such an inane production with reduced mobility; horrid mise en scène oblige! As the evening progressed, however, she steadily grew into the role, imbuing the Todesverkündigung with increasing emotional depth before culminating in a deeply moving final confrontation with Wotan, in which her innate nobility and profound understanding of the character once again asserted themselves.
Finland’s Mika Kares delivered an outstanding Hunding, wisely eschewing the barking caricature that too often passes for characterisation in this role. Instead, his menace arose from sheer vocal authority, tonal opulence and penetrating musical intelligence. Regrettably, the production’s near‑total absence of stage direction, coupled with the enforced immobility imposed upon the cast, deprived his confrontation with Siegmund—and their climactic combat—of the elemental ferocity upon which the drama depends.
I had previously admired Kares as a deeply moving Fafner inParis’s Siegfried, where the nobility of his singing elevated a role that can easily descend into mere monster‑making. Now, at the very temple of Wagnerian opera, he confirmed himself as an artist of exceptional distinction. One cannot help but suspect that he is destined before long to rank among the foremost Wagnerian basses of his generation.
The eight Valkyries—Martina Welschenbach, Brit‑Tone Müllertz, Karis Tucker, Freya Apffelstaedt, Magdalena Hinterdobler, Alexandra Ionis, Marie Henriette Reinhold and Natalia Skrycka—formed an exhilarating ensemble fully worthy of Bayreuth’s traditions.
The audience’s verdict could scarcely have been more eloquent. Predictably, the initial reaction was met with a chorus of emphatic boos, while the singers received the warm ovation they so richly deserved. Marcus Lobbes—rather grandiloquently, or perhaps merely par politesse, styled the production’s “AI curator”—prudently declined to appear before the curtain, as he had done after Das Rheingold, no doubt judging discretion the better part of valour. Christian Thielemann, by contrast, was accorded the evening’s longest and most fervent ovation, an entirely fitting tribute to the one artist who had unequivocally vindicated Bayreuth’s musical traditions.
Artificial intelligence has become the latest object of quasi‑religious faith in Silicon Valley, where its evangelists promise nothing less than a new creative consciousness. Die Walküre offered rather sobering evidence that such promises remain premature. The machine undoubtedly generated thousands of images; what it never generated was meaning. Art is not an accumulation of associations, however rapid or visually seductive. It is the disciplined ordering of ideas into expressive form. Wagner understood that. Thomas Mann understood it. Christian Thielemann certainly understood it. The algorithm, for all its restless industry, appeared not yet to have learnt the lesson.
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