If you read my Rheingold piece earlier this week, you know the drill by now: bare stage, a black concert grand, a crowd of refugees with battered suitcases, and Wagner’s universe conjured out of a single struck note. The morning after, I was back in my second-row seat behind Sir Donald Runnicles for “Erster Tag” – the First Day proper – of Stefan Herheim’s Ring, and I’ll be honest: this is the installment where the cycle stops being a clever game and starts breaking your heart.
It’s also the one that historically splits audiences hardest. Where Rheingold charms with its fairy-tale invention, Die Walküre is the most human, most directly tragic of the four – a chamber drama about forbidden love, a marriage in ruins, and a god forced to destroy the child he loves most. Herheim leans all the way in, and adds one genuinely shocking new idea I’m still chewing on.
A scheduling note worth flagging: the printed Wotan for our 27 May performance was replaced at short notice by the Hawaiian baritone Jordan Shanahan, and Nicole Piccolomini stepped in as Grimgerde. Cast slips are part of Ring life – across the 2024 run, Iain Paterson once took over Wotan with only a few hours’ notice. Wagner, the eternal logistician, would have understood.
The Story: Love Against the Law
Die Walküre narrows the cosmic scope of Rheingold down to a handful of people and one impossible family. Act One drops us in the forest hut of Hunding, where his unhappy wife Sieglinde shelters a wounded fugitive, Siegmund. Over the course of one storm-lashed night they fall in love, discover they are long-lost twins – both children of Wotan in his mortal “Wälse” guise – and Siegmund pulls the sword Nothung from the tree where his father left it. They flee together into the spring night. Read on below for the part that Herheim adds that confused and a little shocked me and made me question as there seemed more people than there were supposed to be on stage 😉
Act Two is the cycle’s great hinge. Wotan wants Siegmund to win the coming duel and reclaim the cursed ring for the gods. But his wife Fricka, guardian of marriage, is appalled by the incestuous adultery and forces Wotan to abandon his own son. Crushed, the god orders his favourite daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, to let Siegmund die. When she meets Siegmund and witnesses his refusal to enter Valhalla without Sieglinde, she’s so moved she defies Wotan – who eventually intervenes himself, shatters Nothung, and lets Hunding kill Siegmund.
Act Three is the reckoning. Brünnhilde rescues the pregnant Sieglinde (telling her she carries “the noblest hero of the world,” Siegfried), then faces her father’s fury. Wotan strips her godhood and condemns her to sleep on a rock, ringed by fire, prey to whatever man wakes her. In the shattering final scene, she persuades him to let only a fearless hero pass the flames – and Wotan kisses his daughter goodbye. As the Deutsche Oper frames it, this is the opera where the gods begin, irreversibly, to fall.
The Music: Where the Leitmotifs Start to Bleed
If Rheingold is born from one chord, Die Walküre is where Wagner’s leitmotif system reaches full emotional flood. He composed it in 1854–56, and it received its premiere – against his wishes – in Munich on 26 June 1870. Tellingly, the only Ring excerpt Wagner ever sanctioned before the 1876 Bayreuth premiere was Act One of Walküre, given in 1856 at Zürich’s Hotel Baur au Lac with Franz Liszt at the piano – which makes Herheim’s rehearsal-piano conceit feel less like a gimmick and more like documentary history.
The hits come thick and fast. Act One climaxes in “Winterstürme,” Siegmund’s rapturous spring song, and the surging duet “Du bist der Lenz.” Act Two carries Wotan’s vast, desolate monologue – an epic soliloquy that, as OperaWire’s Vincent Lombardo notes, “needs little stage direction” because the text and orchestra do the work, in the manner of Greek tragedy. Act Three opens with the most famous eight bars in opera, the Ride of the Valkyries, all stabbing dotted rhythms and “Hojotoho!” battle-cries, before melting into the long father-daughter farewell and the Magic Fire Music, Loge’s flames shimmering up around the sleeping Brünnhilde.
Here’s the detail Herheim’s dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach wants you to catch: the soaring theme often called “Redemption through Love” – the one that crowns the entire cycle 15 hours later in Götterdämmerung – is actually born here, in Act Three, on Sieglinde’s cry of “O hehrstes Wunder!” when she learns she’s pregnant. It’s a melody of hope for new life, not redemption-by-death. Under Runnicles, the Deutsche Oper orchestra plays it with the same lucid warmth critics praised in Rheingold – the farewell of a conductor who clearly loves this score in his bones.
The Staging: The Same Toy-Box, Darker Now
Everything I described in Rheingold carries over – the suitcase-mountains, the omnipresent crowd of refugees, the white sheet that becomes river, rock, and shroud, the singers working from physical copies of the score. Hunding’s hut is built from luggage; the sword juts from the piano keyboard; the Valkyries surface out of the refugee throng in deliberately cartoonish winged helmets and breastplates, a wink to Bayreuth-1876 and Arthur Rackham at once. At the top of Act Two, Wotan clambers up out of the prompter’s box – half-naked, clutching the Walküre score – having descended to Erda and blowing her a kiss, who here presides as the souffleuse, the prompter who already knows how the story ends.
But the single most discussed choice is brand new to this Ring: Herheim and Meier-Dörzenbach give Sieglinde a silent child by Hunding (the boy “Hundingling,” played by Eric Naumann). That’s where I was so confused and found it slightly distracting as I couldn’t figure out the meaning. Should have done my homework reading, clearly. In catching up ai learned that Herheim found Sieglinde’s traditional self-blame – a woman forced into marriage berating herself as the sinner – “not defensible in our time.” So in his reading, Sieglinde, in a moment of terrible liberation, kills the child before fleeing with Siegmund, casting her as a kind of Medea. It’s a bold attempt to modernise her psychology – though, as several critics noted, it has the side effect of making the twins’ union far less easy to root for. The evening ends not with fire but with a coup de théâtre: the piano opens and Sieglinde gives birth to Siegfried, with Mime-as-Wagner acting as midwife. Assuming that he had to be there at the performance’s start, I am sure his email box is clean and empty from waiting 5 hours and 15 minutes to get on stage.
Critical Reception: The Cycle’s Lightning Rod
If Rheingold divided the room, Walküre set off the smoke alarms. Bachtrack dubbed it a “full-contact Walküre,” admiring the audacity but groaning that “everyone constantly repeats the same actions — everyone threatens everyone with knife, rifle and sword,” until the gestures stop meaning anything. OperaWire’s Vincent Lombardo was blunter still, calling it “the worst of the cycle” and confessing that the murdered-child conceit’s “psychological implications completely evade me.” Personally I am a bit with him on this, I found myself distracted from the music, trying to understand what was going on. Over at Seen and Heard International, Mark Berry took the opposite view — initially “less overwhelmed” than by Rheingold, he found this Walküre “grew on me and has continued to do so,” precisely because music drama “is not only theatre.”
I get it, Mark, but still there was so much going on that I am trying to digest 24 hours later, so I am unclear which side I will come down on. The cast “being surprised” by the curtain opening at the beginning of Act 3 and scrambling to get into position was a fun idea. Did the eight dead warriors which are to be brought to Valhalla by the Valkyries – an idea I found brilliant initially, like it’s Valcyrie-come-to-school day with subjects – really have to immediately strip into bloody tighty whities and playing scenes from Zombieland? I could have lived without them then attempting to do R-rates acts with the Valkyries. And no, seeing Hundlingling having post-death discussions with his Mom Sieglinde did’t help either.
The murder of Hundingling is the flashpoint. The critic at wagneropera.net read it as “an extreme form of liberation from the trauma of her forced marriage,” while conceding it makes Sieglinde “a less sympathetic character.” You’ll either find it a brave feminist re-reading or a violation of one of opera’s tenderest love stories.
Me? I admired the nerve even when I flinched.
On the voices, warmer consensus. Elisabeth Teige’s Sieglinde was the evening’s glory — radiant, intuitive, and (a lovely bit of Ring continuity) she graduates to Brünnhilde in Siegfried later this cycle. Matthew Newlin, a beloved former house ensemble member, gave a committed, ardent role-debut Siegmund; if there ever is Flash Gordon re-make, he’ll be my favorite. Tobias Kehrer’s Hunding was all menace; Annika Schlicht’s Fricka once again walked off with Act Two; and Trine Møller’s Reumert-Prize-winning Brünnhilde brought steel and vulnerability in equal measure.
The Bottom Line
Die Walküre is where Herheim’s “everyone’s-a-refugee” concept either pays its deepest dividend or overplays its hand – and on the evidence of 27 May, it does both, sometimes in the same five minutes. Yes, I am still digesting the zombie scene.
The relentless busyness can blunt Wagner’s most intimate scenes, and the Hundingling murder is a swing-for-the-fences gamble that won’t land for everyone. It made for good discussions at the intermission, though.
Yet when the crowd falls still and simply watches – Wotan’s monologue, the farewell, that incandescent spear-tip glowing red – the production finds a stillness more moving than anything in Rheingold.
And Runnicles, in his valedictory Berlin Ring, conducts the long goodbye as if he means every bar of it personally. He surely does. Two operas down, two to go – and I wouldn’t miss a minute of where this is heading.
