When walking into the Deutsche Oper Berlin on a mild May evening, I was not really expecting Rhinemaidens, river-bottoms and a bearded god in a winged helmet. Still, I was surprised, though, that there wasn’t even a curtain. Instead, I found a bare stage, a black concert grand piano. Rheingold started with a straggling line of people dragging battered suitcases across the boards like the last train out of somewhere. No river. No rock. Just a single low E-flat plucked out on a piano keyboard — and then Wagner’s universe begins to breathe. If you’ve ever wondered whether a 150-year-old operatic creation-myth can still feel like breaking news, here is your answer.
This is the “Vorabend” – the “Evening Prior” – of Stefan Herheim’s complete Ring des Nibelungen, first unveiled in pandemic-scrambled fashion in 2021 and now revived in May 2026 across two full cycles. And this run carries an extra freight of emotion: it marks the farewell of Sir Donald Runnicles after sixteen years as the house’s General Music Director. There’s a beautiful symmetry to a man saying goodbye with the very work about gods who must, eventually, let go.
And to me personally, Sir Donald Runnicles is a favorite as he still ranks with his BBC Mozart Requiem in the top three live performances I have seen throughout my theater and concert passionate life. He is joined by Herbert van Karajan’s Beethoven’s 5th at the Berlin Philarmonie in 1981 and MTT’s Beethoven’s 9th in San Francisco. So when I heard about his good bye to my hometown Berlin, I was first in the digital line to get tickets last year.
This week, what Herheim and his dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach gave us is not a fairy tale but a meditation on freedom, flight and the act of theatre itself. It’s playful, it’s overstuffed, it’s occasionally maddening – and I couldn’t look away.
Let me walk you through it.
The Story: A Sin, a Curse, and a Castle Built on a Lie
For the uninitiated, Das Rheingold is the cornerstone on which seventeen hours of music-drama are stacked. The plot is deceptively simple and morally bottomless. Three Rhinemaidens guard a lump of gold at the bottom of their river; whoever forswears love can forge it into a ring of limitless power. The dwarf Alberich, humiliated by the maidens’ teasing, does exactly that – renouncing love, stealing the gold, and committing what the production frames as the first “Sündenfall,” the Fall.
Meanwhile, up among the gods, Wotan has his own original sin brewing. He’s commissioned the giants Fasolt and Fafner to build him a fortress, Valhalla, promising them the love-goddess Freia as payment – a debt he never intends to honour. The fire-demigod Loge (a slippery, mercurial schemer whose name fuses Lohe, “flame,” and Lüge, “lie”) – and seems to be from the same source as the Marvel Universe’s Loki, Mr. Mischief, points him toward Alberich’s hoard as a way out. Wotan descends to Nibelheim, tricks Alberich, seizes the gold and tears the ring from his finger. Alberich’s response is the curse that will poison everything to come.
The gods pay off the giants with the loot; Fafner promptly murders Fasolt over the ring, proving the curse’s first victim within minutes. Then, to glittering music, the gods stride across a rainbow bridge into Valhalla – while Loge mutters that they’re hurrying toward their own ruin and the Rhinemaidens wail below for their lost gold. As Herheim’s dramaturg notes, “Götterdämmerung has already begun in Rheingold” – the gods just can’t read the signs yet. It’s not a tale of good versus evil. It’s a tale of how power and love can never quite be reconciled, and how everyone pays.
The Music: Born From a Single Throbbing E-flat
Wagner composed Das Rheingold in 1853–54, but he wrote the Ring poem backwards, beginning with Siegfried’s death and working toward this prologue – which is why the cycle’s “beginning” was actually conceived last. The famous Prelude is the stuff of legend: a low E-flat hums up from the double basses as an organ point, bassoons add a fifth, and only gradually does the major triad bloom, sustaining a single E-flat-major tonality for 136 bars – roughly four and a half minutes of pure, flowing harmony often called a “lullaby of the world.” It is, quite literally, the world being born out of music.
During the break I overheard a Wagner purist complaining that the house light was not off during the opening and he felt distracted. I had simply closed my eyes and enjoyed it 😉
Wagner mythologised it as a half-asleep “Vision of La Spezia” in 1853, claiming the chord came to him as he sank into rushing water. The sketches tell a less romantic story – it was the most heavily revised passage in the whole score, hard-won blacksmith’s labour dressed up as natural inspiration.
From that primal Es, Wagner’s leitmotif system unfurls: the Rhinemaidens’ shimmering “Rheingold! Rheingold!” in radiant C major; the broken arpeggios of the Ring motif hardening into the majestic Valhalla theme in the interlude; Loge’s flickering fire-music; Donner’s hammer-blow summoning the storm; and the Sword motif’s bright trumpet call, planted here to bear fruit four operas later.
Under Runnicles, the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper plays with chamber-like transparency rather than brute Wagnerian heft – critics have clocked his swift, lucid tempi as among the nimblest since Böhm and Boulez. It’s a reading that keeps the word-setting front and centre, letting the text breathe like spoken theatre. For a conductor’s valediction, it’s a generous, unshowy farewell – the music allowed simply to be itself.
The Staging: The Whole World on a Rehearsal Piano
Here’s where Herheim earns both his bouquets and his brickbats. The single governing image is that black grand piano – not a prop but the conceptual engine of the entire cycle. It’s the instrument on which Wagner actually composed the Ring and played it for friends and patrons; it remains the rehearsal-room workhorse of every opera house alive. From inside it and around it, characters and objects materialise: Mime rises from the piano’s body; Nothung the sword is pulled from its frame; billowing white silk sheets become the Rhine, then Valhalla, then the World-Ash tree.
The framing device is the procession of refugees – some forty “wanderers” in modern dress and battered suitcases who drift onstage, strike that first note, and conjure the drama as a collective act of escape. “We are all in a situation like Wagner,” Herheim has said, “all somehow refugees.” The suitcases pile into the caves of Nibelheim; the giants loom as enormous puppet-faces built from luggage.
There are deliberate jolts into 20th-century German history – a Stahlhelm, Loge as a Gründgens-style Mephisto, the slave-Nibelungs marching as helmeted soldiers – that Herheim defends as refusing to pretend the Deutsche Oper performs Wagner in a “historical vacuum.” My personal favorite symbolism is Mime, dressed as Wagner, complete with beret. Wotan dons a winged helmet and discards it with theatrical boredom – a wink at Wagner-reception itself. It’s dazzlingly clever and, by Herheim’s own design, too much: child-like invention spilling everywhere.
Critical Reception: Brilliant, Bonkers, or Both?
Few recent Ring cycles have so cleanly split the room – which, frankly, is half the fun. Bachtrack hailed an “insightful and excitingly told Rheingold” bursting with ideas, while Seen and Heard International called it “unusually thoughtful,” praising the “brazenly theatrical magic” of theatre reflecting on itself.
The skeptics were just as vocal. Deutschlandfunk’s Uwe Friedrich found the staging unfocused — “a bit of capitalism critique, a bit of jealousy drama, a bit of self-referential theatre with a piano reduction and a winged helmet.” BR Klassik’s Peter Jungblut went further: “lots of confusion, but little sense.” OperaWire’s Vincent Lombardo admired the “lively-paced, imaginative kermesse” but warned that the relentless mimetic busyness makes us “lose contact with the structure of the tightly knit drama,” even arguing that the perpetually onstage crowd in their underwear sometimes “smashes the music into shards.”
Personally, I loved it! This is my fifth full Ring Cycle and seating second row behind Runnicles I went back and forth between his mastery of conducting the music and the events on stage. As one fellow audience member observed in relief break – “it is called Musiktheater for a reason”. Hear, hear.
On the singing, near-unanimity. Iain Paterson’s Wotan — back for 2026 — is a god under constant pressure, shifty and Don-Giovanni-ish, exploring the full range of the role’s expressiveness; Thomas Blondelle’s Loge is repeatedly singled out as the production’s pyromaniac MVP, his honeyed tone belying the character pulling every string, combines with superb acting; Annika Schlicht’s Fricka wields “sheer power used with subtlety” and clearly wears the trousers Wotan never quite manages; and Michael Sumuel brings a stinging, wounded humanity to Alberich, making the audience feel the indignity of the ring being severed from his finger. The consensus, even among doubters: musically superb, theatrically inexhaustible, and never, ever boring. Whatever you decide about the suitcases and the piano tricks, you’ll be talking about them at the interval — and that, in an art form too often accused of embalming itself, count for a great deal.
The Bottom Line
So: is Herheim’s Rheingold the Ring prologue for the ages? Maybe not – it’s too restless, too in love with its own cleverness to achieve serene inevitability, and the wandering chorus can crowd out Wagner’s tightly wound drama. But it’s something arguably rarer. It takes Wagner’s 1876 monument and makes it twitch with the anxieties of now – migration, belonging, the seductive lie of power, and theatre’s stubborn power to imagine something better. Replacing Götz Friedrich’s beloved “Time Tunnel” Ring (Herheim was Friedrich’s student, a lovely full circle), it stakes its own bold claim on the house. Paired with Runnicles’s luminous, valedictory conducting, this is a Rheingold that sends you out into the Berlin night arguing – which is exactly what Wagner, eternal revolutionary, would have wanted. Catch it while the cycles last. Go. Pack light. Bring opinions.