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The Journey Begins
By Kasper Bech Holten
To stage The Ring is, I suppose, in many ways the ultimate challenge – a challenge for an opera house, for its audiences and for the director.
Starting work on The Ring is like setting out on a long journey. For us, it is a journey that has already begun. On the opening night of Die Walküre at the Old Stage we will invite our audience to accompany us on a journey which will, over the next four years, take us through the fantastic world of Wagner and over to the other side of Copenhagen harbour, to a new opera house and a new epoch in the history of Danish opera. The next four years will see us exploring Wagner’s universe together, hopefully exploring our own very being as we develop as individuals, not only because of the time that has elapsed, but also because the journey will have revealed new aspects of our existence.
  
There are many dimensions to The Ring, and it is vital that no attempt be made to reduce it to just one theme, one dimension of life The Ring is just as complex, confusing, full of puzzles and contradictions as was Wagner’s life – and the lives of most of us, I suppose. Life is no simple matter; and art attempts only too often to reduce life on the stage to something which is easily accessible. The strength of The Ring lies precisely in its very complexity.
The many thoughts and ideas contained in The Ring make it tempting to over-intellectualise the stage drama. The power of The Ring, however, lies in the interpretation of these thoughts and ideas into flesh and blood and in the dynamic juxtaposition of music and text. If this power is sacrificed on the altar of intellectual analysis, the work becomes meaningless, even tedious. Before all else, The Ring has to be good, powerful musical drama.
Our interpretation of The Ring is based on the idea of the story as a family saga. A story of the rise and fall of a family, spanning three generations as we know it from the Bible, from the great novels, and from the Godfather trilogy. Each and every one of us has a family with its own mythology, and each family’s history can be seen as a miniature version of world history: the world of the Individual.
Wagner’s writing of The Ring was precisely concurrent with the birth of many of the ideas that were to dominate the 20th century. In The Ring Wagner has foreseen, through the medium of a family’s history, many of the conflicts and problems that were to mark a century that became the most violent, cruel, and dramatic in the history of mankind. Our family saga thus also becomes, here at the onset of the 21st century, the history of the 20th century’s way of thinking and of the great ideologies and conflicts that tore it apart.
In this respect, the family saga addresses world history. The story of The Ring spans the greater part of a century, and we want to give a clear impression of the passing of time as we tell the tale. It is important that we give a clear sense of the time lapse between Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, and ultimately to Siegfried. This can be difficult if the action is set in an indefinable, mythological time-frame. This is why each of our operas will have a visual "taste" of part of the 20th century, from start to finish.
Our focus in this family tale will be on Brünnhilde, who develops in The Ring from being a weak-willed girl, almost a mirror image of her father, to a mindful woman with empathy and understanding, who confronts the men who have caused her so much pain and demanded so many sacrifices of her. At the end of The Ring, the feminine perception of the world transgresses the old masculine ideologies that seek world supremacy, and to attain salvation for the world. Might this be a viable path to follow in an individualised, globalised world?
This is the journey that we hope to undertake with you as our audience. A journey that will lead us towards an understanding of the essence of our being: How we become who we are, and why our lives are shaped as they are.
As early as in Die Walküre we see clear signs that it is Brünnhilde who undergoes the greatest transformation. In contrast to the common portrayal of her as a pitiable victim in the tradition of many other tragic operatic heroines, we want to stress how in the third act, almost without being aware of it herself, Brünnhilde grows in stature. Even then, before she has become aware of her own potential, she gathers together all the threads and formulates a new plan that will liberate Wotan, herself, and the whole world in one fell swoop: Her future union with the free hero Siegfried, whose appearance is imminent.
Wotan’s Gordian knot is severed not by any design of himself, but by Brünnhilde, whose infinite visionary powers enable her to liberate Wotan after so many years. The feminine vision prevails, but only at the cost of great personal sacrifice: she must relinquish the security that she seemed to find in the embrace of a father and a family.
The Ring takes place in a dream-world in which traces, reminiscences, motives, and memories overlap in a sort of gigantic neural network with associations criss-crossing in all directions. There are inferences of today’s globalised world and of communication as we know it from the Internet. But although our Ring will "taste" of the 20th century, it will not be a realistic or concrete tale. When we reach the end of our journey, The Copenhagen Ring will prove, above all, to be the dream of a woman – the tale of Brünnhilde.
It is the tale of a woman poised on the brink of disaster. A woman who has lost control but strives to understand her life through the memory of how she became the woman she is and why she got the life she has. In the final analysis, The Ring is the deeply personal account of a human being’s dreams and personal development, mirrored in the world that surrounds it.
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The four operas
Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
Götterdämmerung
Articles
Kasper Bech Holten:
The Journey Begins
Henrik Engelbrecht:
Vision and Reality
Kasper Bech Holten:
Thoughts about The Ring, 2001
Chronology:
Wagner, Die Walküre and Der Ring des Nibelungen
Gallery
See the photos from Die Walküre
Biographies
The Ring Team...
The Cast
See the cast
Biographies are available at www.kglteater.dk
Die Walküre is sponsored by the Bikuben Foundation
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