Die Walküre, Royal Opera review - total music drama

Wagner’s universe, in the second of his Ring operas which brings semi-humans on board to challenge the gods, matches exaltation and misery, terror and tragedy – and throws down a gauntlet to singers, orchestra and director capable of going to extremes with due discipline.

They did so masterfully last night, thanks above all to Royal Opera Conductor Laureate Antonio Pappano’s close relationship with four remarkable Wagnerian principals and Barrie Kosky’s dark, spare but always perceptive production, offering the revelation that any new Ring cycle has to provide.

"It's that woman again," declared a colleague sitting in front of me at the Royal Opera's new Carmen last season: I laughed, because director Damiano Michieletto wields Don José's mother as a figure of fate way too often and unvaryingly. I wouldn't have been so happy with said colleague here, because Kosky's insistence on using a naked octagenarian, last night Illona Linthwaite, as Erda, Mother Earth, is not only unsensational but poetic and often deeply moving in some of her significant appearances. Her compassionate or distressed reactions are as important as anything in this production. The first of the scenes in each of the acts that brought tears to my eyes was when she appears as spring, bearing flowers for the enraptured Siegmund and Sieglinde (Linthwaite pictured below by Monika Rittershaus with Natalya Romaniw and Stanislas de Barbeyrac).  She also reminds us that while those incestuous twins are her nephew and niece, sired by Wotan on a mortal woman, she is the mother of Brünnnhilde, Wotan's favourite daughter and one of the Valkyries or warrior maidens whose duty is to bring the bodies of dead heroes to the stronghold of Valhalla (the others presumably aren't her daughters, though it's a good idea to have them dance in a ring around her before going about their bloody business in Act Three). Her appearance in Brunnhilde's "annunciation of death" to Siegmund, the crucial scene where love of power yields to the power of love (the theme of the Ring as a whole), is a masterstroke.

Musically and dramatically everything else gets off to a stunning start. In Romaniw and de Barbeyrac we have two intense singing actors who not only look plausibly youthful but seem to have all the colours in their vocal armoury for what's necessary. De Barbeyrac sounds like a natural successor to the great Alberto Remedios, Siegmund and Siegfried in ENO's legendary Ring thankfully preserved on CD, who called himself a lyric Heldentenor, with a stress on the lyric. Occasionally de Barbeyrac bottles the top, but not when it matters: we're surprised to hear the full-throttle plea to the father whose true identity he doesn't know in Act One. Because Kosky allows so much co-ordination between Pappano and his principals by bringing them downstage - most of the first act takes place in front of a giant wooden screen with glimmers of gold and silver, almost Klimtian - the meaning becomes clear and the projection infallible. De Barbeyrac brought on the second bout of tears in his infinite tenderness towards his sleeping sister before he goes off to face her brutal husband Hunding (Soloman Howard, imposing) in what will turn out to be a fatal combat (pictured below by Bill Knight: Howard, de Barbeyrac and Romaniw in Act One). Romaniw is infallible in upper-register lustre, committed and poignant in her later distress. No-one should be disappointed that Lise Davidsen had to pull out of the role of Sieglinde due to pregnancy; we really need to honour this Welsh-born singer. It's a disgrace that the Royal Opera has gone for strong box office star pull in active former Putin and separatist supporter Anna Netrebko for the new Tosca which is to launch Jakub Hrůša's first season as Music Director; Romaniw is a proven first-rate diva, and if her vocal security continues, will eventually be an ideal Brünnnhilde too.

The vocal contrast between the two heroines of Die Walküre is telling. Elisabet Strid has less youthful steel than Romaniw, but plenty of warmth and vitality, no barking hoyden but a vivacious young woman whose passion, airborne and joyous at first, carries her through the Act Three anguish of father Wotan's punishment for disobeying his orders and trying to save Siegmund. The payoff comes in the great final scene where Wotan's innermost voice and beloved daughter saves herself from being a brute's chattle, like Sieglinde, by suggesting the fire which should surround the rock (here blasted tree) on which he puts her to sleep. The soft singing of her first plea, "War est so schmahlich?" ("Was it so shameful"), comes as she masters her rage - typically perceptive direction from Kosky- then carries through to the declaration of love ("Der diese Liebe") and the inspired idea which Wotan grants before the ever-moving reunion (Strid and Maltman pictured below by Bill Knight). The towering final scene wouldn't work so well if Christopher Maltman weren't a match for her in belated tenderness. His vocal strength for every part of this massively taxing role is never in doubt, but in Act Two, he comes across as a very cross bank manager (fortunately it wasn't until near the end of the opera that an image of J D Vance came to mind, though that was bad enough, if no-one's fault). We don't see as well as hear what he describes as "the anger...that could lay waste to all of a world". It's also hard for him to match the charisma of Bryn Terfel and John Tomlinson as chief god.

It doesn't help that he is worsted by a very tall Mrs Fricka Wotan (as Anna Russell once called her) in the shape of Marina Prudenskaya, a Fricka who's forever flicking her beautiful long hair. Kosky doesn't quite evoke the pain of a dysfunctional marriage here as other directors have done (pictured below by Bill Knight: Maltman, Prudenskaya and Linthwaite, Erda taking up a role as a servant, here a chauffeur, as she had done in Rheingold. Note that Fricka arrives in what I presume is a Bentley rather than a chariot drawn by rams, excised from the supertitle description). Yet the father-daughter relationship is beautifully charted. Wotan's farewell is the tenderest of lullabies; Pappano is able to work with a born Lieder singer on nuance and glow before launching into the purely orchestral reiteration at a slow tempo that nevertheless works beautifully. While getitng the full thrust from the magnificent Royal Opera brass in the more momentum-filled passages, he's always open to expansion of the lyrical moments; he succeeds every time in an interpretation that's grown so much since he first took on the challenge with the much less successful, over-cluttered Keith Warner production.

A little too much smoke and fog apart, the stage pictures nearly all work in Rufus Didziwus's spare but bold designs. The ravaged world ash tree, oozing gold in Das Rheingold and here blood after Siegmund's brutal slaying, plays a crucial role in the denouement(s) of Act Two; another blasted tree, within which Erda goes to sit and into which Brünnhilde vanishes, dominates the stage in Act Three, variously captured in Alessandro Carletti's phenomenal lighting (scene from the opening pictured below with rather shrieky Valkyries, multiple Elektra-maenads by Bill Knight). Visually, the best is last, as Wagner always anticipated, but not quite like this. After the khybosh on fire in Richard Jones's disappointing ENO Valkyrie (vocally miscast in two crucial cases, unlike his superb Rhinegold), it's here in full awesomeness. The Royal Opera hasn't allowed any images to be given, which in a way is throwing away its best visual publicity. But I'm glad those who weren't there last night will come to it fresh, whether in the next five performances live or on the big screen. Even those who baulk at the notion of length will be surprised how gripped they should be by every moment. 

• Die Walküre at the Royal Opera until 17 May; details of live screenings here
• David Nice has just begun a 10-week Zoom course on Die Walküre: videos as well as live available. Details here
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk