THE VALKYRIE • OPERA BASTILLE PARIS
★★★★★☆
Photo: Herwig Prammer
REVIEW THE VALKYRIE PARIS: CRAZY ABOUT CALIXTO BIETO’S TECNO WAGNER
The Valkyrie as a trashy tech-action thriller in Calixto Bieto’s intense production at the Bastille Opera in Paris gets off to a magnificent start with Wagner’s thrilling, ominous escape theme as the wounded Siegmund moves through a dystopian stage design wearing a heavy protective coat and oxygen tank as protection against acid rain and toxic fumes.
Photo: Herwig Prammer
All of this is observed by countless surveillance cameras, whose sparkling images flash in a wild mosaic across a mega-construction of high-tech steel panels that form the facade of a kind of giant computer, which turns out to be a property complex where the hard-hitting Hunding resides on the second floor with his wife Sieglinde.
The stage is thus set for an overwhelming piece of regietheater led by a first-class cast of singers and a convincingly beautiful and competent orchestra under the baton of Pablo Heras-Casado (Conductor of the Year 2024 Opernwelt).
French tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac delivers Sigmund’s part with impressive power and dramatic flair. As Hunding, Austrian bass Günther Groissböck impresses with his brutal expression of inner psychology towards the end of the first act, when Siegmund bangs his newly found sister Sieglinde (Hunding’s wife) on the front stage while Hunding himself skins and carves up a large red deer in the apartment on the second floor, blood spurting everywhere. Let’s just say that the audience is well warmed up for the continuation after the first intermission!
Photo: Herwig Prammer
The production’s captivating mix of visual/emotional impact grows in strength and intensity after the intermission, when a sadistic, borderline sexual atmosphere begins to take hold.
Frika, who, in addition to being the guardian of marriage and the wife of the supreme god Wotan, takes the stage as an ice-cold, well-dressed dominatrix, forcing her husband to stop the incestuous relationship between the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde.
A sexualized twist that develops further when Wotan informs his favorite daughter Brünnhilde of the revocation of Sigmund’s divine protection and the prospect of the young hero’s imminent death.
Photo: Herwig Prammer
The complicated relationship between father and daughter sparkles with flashes of incestuous violence, accompanied by more and more spectacular video effects of digital noise and techno interference, which from time to time shoot across the gigantic backdrop to visualize the characters’ inner struggles.
It all culminates quite surprisingly in Brunhilde kicking Siegmund’s ass before Wotan himself stabs the boy before Hunding can!
Photo: Herwig Prammer
In the controversial Spanish director’s interpretation, Valhalla has become a gigantic four-story serverpark with protruding, loose cables—a bizarre steel structure with a multitude of sliding doors, gates, and internal staircases in clever exterior and interior lighting.
Before the iconic Valkyrie ride, a robot dog runs onto the stage and stares down at the audience with its eerie, dead, green robot eyes. Now the perspective shifts, so that a corresponding audience of avatars looks out into the hall from a giant projection on the backstage.
So we are looking at ourselves as the swirling chaos of the Ride of the Valkyries begins – a Ride of the Valkyries presented as a breathless digital news feed of violent war scenes, bombers, razed cities and despairing misery mixed with cat videos, TikTok dancers, cartoon characters, and hopeless trivialities – all projected onto the giant computer while the Valkyries, like robot ninjas with glowing robot eyes, fire themselves over the set in black catsuits.
This Valkyrie is quite simply a stunningly beautiful production, and I can actually live with Bieto taking such violent liberties with Wagner’s original.
Conversely, I recognize Wagner traditionalists’ full right to be shocked by the director’s almost infantile provocative improvisation, which I myself find fascinating.
The Rhine gold is essentially a philosophical abstraction that covers power and world domination. Bieto has translated the abstraction/gold into artificial intelligence (AI), which has quickly become a decisive factor in the game of power. Honestly: it’s an update that can do something.
Photo: Herwig Prammer
Brünnhilde ends up more or less ‘correctly’ imprisoned on top of the computer, while Wotan, who seems to have lost his mind, closes the ballet solo on stage as a joker-like madman in an eerie danse macabre.
International critics are, to say the least, divided in their assessment of this unusual staging. Sitting next to me was a well-known German critic who shook his head and, apart from the singers and the conductor, described the production as yet another of Calixto Beito’s usual disasters. Ein disaster!
I’ll take the liberty of offering a more open-minded perspective and give five stars to this spectacular, crazy, and thought-provoking Valkyrie in Paris.
The third part of the Ring, Siegfried, will premiere at the Bastille Opera in mid-January 2026. I can hardly wait. Read more here at GOT TO SEE THIS.
