It had all the characteristics of a 19th-century mob attack on Jews: rape, torture, infanticide, indiscriminate murder, with the videos of the gleeful perpetrators going viral and whispered commentary across the internet to the effect that the victims “had it coming”. That was on September 29.Įight days later, I woke up to pictures of the Hamas terror attack on Israel, which prime minister Rishi Sunak rightly described as a pogrom. It worked, for me, and I came away from the Royal Opera House elated and inspired. Kosky turns the drama into a conversation piece where all the “races” of Norse mythology confront each other on the same, level, human playing field. He is a hapless artisan whose love of bright things transmutes into hatred and vengeance when confronted with injustice. How do you fit that into a production slated for the mid-2020s? Kosky, who is himself Jewish, does so by making Alberich simply human. Image: Getty Valhalla’s Downfall by Fritz Roeber (1851-1924), undated. Alberich seducing Queen Grimhilde, leading to the conception of Hagen, from Götterdämmerung. He embodies the commercialism that Wagner, and the left-wing intellectual circle he was part of in the 1840s, associated with “Jewishness”: the opposite of their ideal of “pure humanity”. In Wagner’s original, Alberich is unmistakeably an antisemitic caricature: greedy, lascivious, so ruthless in his desire to amass wealth and control the world that he renounces love. Which leaves only the problem of Alberich, the dwarf who steals it. The theme is the human despoliation of the planet: the gold stolen from the Rhine takes liquid form, and oozes like industrial sludge from the carcass of a dead tree. Kosky has chosen to stage The Ring as a human drama only, turning its giants into Japanese gangsters, its gods into polo-playing aristocrats and its Rhinemaidens into a Goth girl band. This is Erda, the earth mother of Norse mythology, and what’s about to happen is her dream. It opens in total silence, with a 92-year-old woman walking hunched and naked across the stage. Barrie Kosky’s new production of the The Ring of the Nibelung, whose first instalment The Rhinegold opened at Covent Garden in September, gives one answer.
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