This is my third entry in the Ring des Nibelungen cycle series in Berlin, May 2026, as continuation from Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.
Two nights in, I had watched a world created from a single E-flat, watched it populated with refugees and piano keys and a god slowly learning to lose. By the time the lights went up for Siegfried — “Zweiter Tag,” the Second Day — my threshold for surprise had been sandpapered raw. I thought I was ready. I was not.
Siegfried is the opera that Wagner himself called the “heiteres Drama” — the cheerful drama — and then, more candidly, the “heroisches Lustspiel,” the heroic comedy. He wrote it in instalments across twelve years (1851–1871), setting it aside for twelve more while he composed Tristan and Die Meistersinger, returning to it as if to a son left at boarding school. His own son, also named Siegfried, was born in 1869, right in the middle of the third act’s composition — an accident of biography so loaded Herheim could hardly ignore it. Here, the cycle’s third evening runs approximately five hours and twenty minutes including intervals, which is long even by Ring standards, and yet the house was rapt from the moment the curtain revealed the familiar mountain of suitcases, half-collapsed, and a piano half-buried beneath them.
The production belongs to the 2021 Deutsche Oper Ring that Stefan Herheim unveiled — pandemic-battered, in pieces — and which Naxos subsequently released on DVD and Blu-ray. This 2026 revival carries the same cast anchors: Clay Hilley as Siegfried, Ya-Chung Huang as Mime, Iain Paterson as the Wanderer, Michael Sumuel as Alberich, Tobias Kehrer’s Fafner, Lauren Decker’s Erda, and Elisabeth Teige graduating triumphantly from Walküre’s Sieglinde to this evening’s Brünnhilde.
Sir Donald Runnicles, in the pit for what amounts to his operatic farewell to Berlin, conducts as if he has been thinking about nothing else for sixteen years. He probably hasn’t.
The Boy Who Forgot to Be Afraid
Siegfried begins not in a forest but in the wreckage. The dwarf Mime — again unmistakably made up as Wagner himself, complete with beret and an expression of wounded narcissism — has raised the young Siegfried in isolation, feeding him on deliberate ignorance, with one goal: to forge the shattered sword Nothung, kill the dragon Fafner, seize the ring, and deliver it to Mime. The boy, however, is congenitally immune to fear, resentment, or manipulation. He torments Mime with the ferocious ease of someone who has not yet learned that cruelty requires intention.
Act One is essentially a two-hander — Mime scheming, Siegfried hammering — broken by the extraordinary entrance of Wotan as a grey-coated, wide-brimmed Wanderer. The riddle contest between Mime and the Wanderer is one of Wagner’s most compressed dramatic structures: three questions each, heads wagered, the stakes existential. By the scene’s end, the Wanderer has revealed that only someone who has never known fear can reforge Nothung — and only such a person will inherit Mime’s head. Siegfried, whistling, files the sword to splinters and re-smelts it himself.
Act Two brings us to Fafner’s cave. Alberich keeps watch. The Wanderer arrives, warns Fafner (who is unimpressed), and departs, laughing. Siegfried kills the dragon; a drop of Fafner’s blood on his lips suddenly allows him to understand the Wood Bird, who guides him to ring and tarnhelm, then warns him of Mime’s treachery. Siegfried kills Mime. Alone, directed by the Wood Bird’s song, he sets off toward the fire-encircled rock where Brünnhilde sleeps.
Act Three is the cycle’s emotional and philosophical pivot. Wotan wakes the earth-goddess Erda one last time, wrests from her the futility of his own plans, and lets her return to sleep. He confronts Siegfried — his own grandson — who shatters the Spear of Treaties with Nothung: in one blow, the old world’s legal order ends. Siegfried passes through the fire, removes Brünnhilde’s armour, discovers for the first time in his life that a woman exists — and is terrified. The curtain of fire has done what Mime could not: taught him to fear. He kisses Brünnhilde awake. The opera ends in an ecstatic duet of “Leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!” — radiant love, laughing death — a cry of erotic triumph that simultaneously announces its own transience. As the program note by dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach points out, Wagner began composing the Ring with precisely this duet scene in 1850. The nucleus was always here, at the moment love and death first kiss.
From b-Minor Darkness to Blazing C Major
Wagner composed the Siegfried score in three separate campaigns: Acts One and Two in 1856–57, then a twelve-year gap, then Act Three in 1869–71. You can hear the seam if you know where to listen. The prelude opens in b-minor — a dark, grumbling Nibelung world of Mime’s obsessive “toiling” motif, augmented by the brass Ring curse and the Sword theme hovering just out of reach. This is some distance from Rheingold’s transcendent E-flat dawn.
The score is also, structurally, the most radically anti-operatic of the four: Act One contains no female voice at all, Act Two no love duet, and the whole work withholds Brünnhilde until the final forty minutes — making her entrance one of the most extravagantly earned in all opera. The famous “Forging Scene,” in which Siegfried literally hammers the sword into being, is a showcase of rhythmic invention, Nothung’s motif stamped out in increasingly confident brass as the metal takes shape. The “Forest Murmurs” of Act Two — shimmering strings and woodwind, the Wood Bird’s sinuous tune — are among the most immediately beautiful pages in the cycle and have a quality more pastoral, more Schubert than Wagner, which makes their context of dragonslaughter quietly surreal.
Act Three is where the score achieves its transformation. The Erda scene carries some of the Ring’s most complex leitmotif weaving: her ancient earth-wisdom, Brünnhilde’s sleep, the Rhine Maidens’ theme — all folding into one another like geological strata. Then the climax: the final duet modulates from terror to tenderness to full-throated C-major jubilation, the key of triumph and light, a whole step up from where the opera began. It is one of those moments where you understand, viscerally, what music is for.
Under Runnicles, the Deutsche Oper orchestra plays with the same lucid transparency critics praised in the earlier evenings — less a Wagnerian juggernaut than a thinking, breathing chamber ensemble that lets every word land. His “Forest Murmurs” were, for my money, the most quietly ravishing fifteen minutes of the entire cycle. When Brünnhilde finally sang, the orchestra dropped instinctively, leaving space for Teige’s voice to rise like light.
Laughter as the Key to Everything
Herheim’s programme essay and his interview with dramaturg Jörg Königsdorf make the conceptual spine explicit: laughter is the score’s Leitmotiv. It appears over a hundred times in the Ring’s text and stage directions — over three dozen in Siegfried alone. And Herheim takes this seriously as a theatrical principle, not a critical footnote. Siegfried enters the world laughing and ends it laughing; the final duet itself is a laugh at death.
The production’s visual grammar remains that of Rheingold and Walküre: the mountain of suitcases (here partially collapsed after Walküre’s birth scene), the black grand piano as both object and oracle, the refugee collective who witness and occasionally conjure the action. But Siegfried adds something distinctly new: a playfulness that borders on deliberate anarchism. When Mime attempts — yet again — to teach Siegfried fear, Herheim has the dwarf deploy theatrical tricks in increasingly desperate succession, turning Act One’s frustrated pedagogy into something close to slapstick. The opera’s Märchen-like quality, its folk-tale skeleton, is here fully embraced.
The dragon Fafner is, historically, every production’s technical headache. At the 1876 Bayreuth premiere, the mechanical beast provoked unintended laughter and had to be concealed in profile. Herheim solves the problem with surreal ingenuity: Fafner emerges from — and is constituted by — a cluster of Wagner tubas, the instrument Wagner himself invented for the Ring. The cave becomes a gramophone bell of brass mouths. It is both visually striking and conceptually apt: the monster as the very instrument of Wagner’s voice.
Mime, dressed as Wagner, moves through the production as a figure simultaneously comic and appalling. The stereotyping historically associated with the role is not avoided but confronted: Herheim gives Mime Wagner’s face and, at moments, his gestures, so that the cruelty encoded in the character is reflected back at its author. As Herheim told Jörg Königsdorf, the result is “a grotesque mixture of Jewish caricature and composer self-portrait” — uncomfortable, deliberately so. The forging scene turns into a kind of mad composing session, with sheets of music flying out of the piano’s burning interior. Pages of the Ring itself become the fire that reforges Nothung. It is Herheim at his most self-referentially wild — and, in fairness, at his most coherent. The medium is the weapon.
For Act Three’s awakening, Herheim places Brünnhilde on the lid of the grand piano — atop the instrument, as if the entire evening has been building toward this altar. When Siegfried opens the score and reads his own part while singing, the theatre-within-theatre device circles back: the characters know they are in Wagner’s opera, know they are refugees enacting a myth to find a home, and they choose — joyfully, catastrophically — to enact it anyway. The final “Leuchtende Liebe” is accompanied by a jubilant eruption of the refugee collective, the whole stage filling with people. It is utopian and pre-emptively tragic in the same breath, which is precisely what the opera demands.
Critical Reception: The Scherzo Earns Its Place
The critical conversation around this production’s Siegfried has been notably warmer than its assessments of Walküre — and that trajectory feels earned. Bachtrack called it a “full-blooded heroic epic” with laughter as its structural key, praising Clay Hilley’s “wide-ranging characterisation and near-continuously powerful tenor” as a genuinely convincing Siegfried. The wagneropera.net review was unambiguous: Hilley’s voice “may have made his the most beautiful sounding Siegfried I have heard live,” bright and clear at the top, tender and controlled in softer passages.
OperaWire offered the most detailed technical account of the staging, acknowledging that Herheim’s “theatre-within-theatre reality” is at its most coherent here precisely because the opera is already self-consciously theatrical — the riddle games, the dragon, the bird that speaks only to the initiated. Where the reviewer found the extended pantomime prelude to Act Two five minutes too long, and some gestural repetition wearing thin, the Erda scene and the final awakening were praised as among the Ring’s most fully realised.
Seen and Heard International declared that “the play’s the thing” — a headline that captures both Herheim’s Shakespearean method and the production’s genuine exuberance. The British Theatre Guide’s review of the Naxos DVD release praised the “intense collaboration between Herheim and Runnicles, with the tiniest movements co-ordinated exactly with the music” across more than fifteen hours, calling Hilley “an outstanding Siegfried… singing with intelligence, resilience, and a luminous sound clear at the top.” Even the German-language press, often harder to please on Regietheater excess, was largely positive: the Berliner Zeitung noted the production was “conducted and staged with joy of playing.”
The 2026 revival cast consolidates this reputation. Elisabeth Teige, already the cycle’s Sieglinde, carries her voice into Brünnhilde with a luminosity that makes the transition feel organic, not effortful. Ya-Chung Huang’s Mime is a marvel of controlled grotesquerie. And Runnicles — in what the house has confirmed is his final Ring — conducts Siegfried’s final duet as if releasing something he has held in trust for a long time.
The Bottom Line
Of the three evenings so far, Siegfried is the one that reconciles Herheim’s method with its material most completely. The opera is already about play — about a boy who learns the world through games, who defeats the dragon not through wisdom but through cheerful instinct, who wakes the woman through a kiss he doesn’t plan. Herheim’s theatrical arsenal of meta-references, refugee witnesses, and self-consuming piano score finds its proper home in an opera that is, at bottom, a fairy tale that knows it’s a fairy tale. The laughter here is not evasion. It is the point.
Wagner described the Ring as beginning with Siegfried’s death and working backward toward his birth. Standing on the other side of that compositional arc — having now watched the birth, the childhood, the forging, the awakening — the tragedy coiled inside “lachender Tod” becomes unbearable in the best way. One more evening remains. I already dread it. I cannot wait.
Götterdämmerung follows. Pack the suitcases again.