Fourth and final entry in the Ring des Nibelungen cycle series — continues from Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with sitting down for Götterdämmerung. Not the grief inside the opera — the treachery, the murder, the burning of the gods — but the grief of knowing it will soon be over. Anyone who has attended a Ring cycle in the theatre will recognise it. You have spent the better part of a week with these people, these musicians, this stage. A world has been built in front of you. Tonight it burns.
This performance added two farewells on top of Wagner’s. The cast slip inserted into the programme told us that tonight we were bidding goodbye to Sir Donald Runnicles after 17 years as General Music Director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. And in the same breath, it noted the retirement of Johannes Petersen, principal cellist of the orchestra, after 36 years of service. The house said goodbye to a man who had shaped its musical identity across more than a decade, and to the lead voice of the section that carries Wagner’s most intimate grief. The timing felt too perfect to be coincidence. In an opera where everyone loses everything, the Deutsche Oper itself was losing irreplaceable things.
I sat down in my second-row seat — the same seat I’d occupied across all four evenings — and thought: Wagner would have appreciated the symmetry: He constructed the Ring backwards, beginning with Siegfried’s death and excavating toward the causes. Now the finale had arrived, and it would bury its dead with full honours. The programme’s chosen epigraph is the First Norn’s opening question: “Welch Licht leuchtet dort?” — “What light shines there?” By the time I left the building five and a half hours later, I understood that question as something far more personal than mythological.
The World as a Crime Scene
Götterdämmerung is the Ring’s original impulse — Wagner wrote the prose sketch for “Siegfried’s Death” in 1848, before any of the preceding three operas existed. In structure, it is the most conventionally operatic of the four: it has a chorus, a grand wedding scene, a political intrigue, a double betrayal, and a climactic conflagration that destroys everything. It is where myth crashes into the world of humans and it has all the scheming we love in Opera.
The Prologue opens with three Norns — daughters of Erda, weavers of fate — spinning the rope of destiny. They report that Wotan’s great ash-tree, damaged when he broke a branch to carve his spear, has finally died. He has had it felled and piled as firewood around Valhalla, where he now sits with his shattered spear, waiting for the end. The rope snaps. Their knowledge ends. Brünnhilde wakes beside Siegfried, gives him her wisdom and her horse for protection, and sends him into the world. He leaves her the ring.
Act One drops us from myth into society. Alberich’s son Hagen holds the court of the Gibichungs in his grip — manipulating his weak half-brother Gunther and his credulous half-sister Gutrune, both unmarried, both useful. His plan: Siegfried, drugged with a potion that erases all memory of Brünnhilde, will be made to desire Gutrune, then disguised as Gunther to retrieve Brünnhilde from her rock for Gunther to marry — thus giving Hagen access to the ring. It works. Gunther and Siegfried swear blood brotherhood. Brünnhilde is abducted. Siegfried, entirely under the potion’s erasure, has no memory of any of it.
Act Two is the great betrayal scene. At the Gibichung wedding, Brünnhilde sees Siegfried at Gutrune’s side and recognises the ring on his finger. She publicly accuses him of treachery; he publicly swears on Hagen’s spear that it isn’t true — a perjury he commits without knowing it. Humiliated and enraged, Brünnhilde reveals his one vulnerability to Hagen: his back, unprotected because he could never turn away from an enemy. The murder is agreed. Gunther, Hagen, and — in her fury — Brünnhilde herself sign the death warrant.
Act Three is the reckoning. The Rhinemaidens warn Siegfried to return the ring; he refuses. Hagen restores his memory with a counter-potion, and Siegfried dies mid-sentence, remembering Brünnhilde. In his final breath he sends her his love. Hagen kills Gunther over the ring. Then Brünnhilde appears — not as the betrayed woman but as the knowing one, the only character who finally understands the whole story, from Alberich’s theft in the Rhine to Wotan’s original sin against the World Tree. She builds the pyre, pronounces judgement on the gods, rides into the flames. The Rhine floods, the Rhinemaidens drag Hagen under, and Valhalla burns. The very last sound is not fire. It is the “Redemption through Love” theme, rising from the orchestra — the melody born in Walküre, on Sieglinde’s lips, when she was told she carried the world’s greatest hero.
Not triumph. A question. A hope.
The Music: The Sum of Everything
Götterdämmerung is compositionally the Ring’s most mature, most densely argued, most symphonically dense achievement. Wagner set aside the score after Act Two of Siegfried, wrote Tristan and Meistersinger, and returned to it in 1869 a changed composer. Sir Donald Runnicles describes this in the programme with characteristic precision: the Ring grows increasingly symphonic as it proceeds, and Götterdämmerung demands a synthesis of every motif introduced across seventeen hours. “Within a few bars, we hear Wotan’s whole life pass before us,” he notes of the passage before Brünnhilde’s final monologue.
The score begins in the dark, with those two clashing E-flat minor and C major chords — a collision of the old world and the new — and navigates across six hours through some of the most intensely varied music Wagner ever wrote. Act One includes Hagen’s sinister “Watch,” a bass aria of malevolent stillness, all rumbling double-basses and barely suppressed menace. Act Two contains the great double-accusation scene and the shattering oath trio, the most overtly Grand Opéra moment in the Ring — massive, blazing, Meyerbeerian in its public spectacle. Act Three opens with the Rhinemaidens’ seductive F-major birdsong, then coarsens into the hunting party’s E-major swagger, then fractures as Siegfried’s memory returns, key following key in a kaleidoscope of half-recollected motifs: what Runnicles calls the “Schleier lüften,” the lifting of a veil.
And then the final twenty minutes. Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene is the Ring’s longest, most complex solo scena — a woman moving from grief to understanding to active agency to sacrifice, the orchestra tracking each shift with terrifying accuracy. The “Redemption” motif swells, wordlessly, in the final bars: the same melody as Sieglinde’s “O hehrstes Wunder!” from Walküre, now returned as the cycle’s last statement, over the sound of fire and water meeting. As dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach notes in the programme, Wagner himself decided not to set the most philosophically explicit strophes of Brünnhilde’s closing text to music — he trusted the orchestra to say what words could not.
Under Runnicles, the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra played the Immolation as if the 17 years were channelled into those bars. The strings in the Redemption theme were, without qualification, the most beautiful orchestral sound of the entire cycle. Whether Petersen, the retiring principal cellist, led that line with particular intensity, I cannot say — but I thought of him as I heard it.
The Opera House Eats Itself
Herheim’s greatest structural coup saves itself for this final evening. The Norns’ Prologue is set not in the suitcase landscape but in a replica of the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s own foyer — complete with the famous kinetic metal cloud sculpture, George Baker’s Alunos-Discus, which has hung there since 1978. The refugee collective, now dressed as modern gallery-goers or concertgoers in suits and cocktail dresses, have become the audience. The myth has arrived in the present tense, in this building, in this city, tonight.
Herheim’s conversation with dramaturg Jörg Königsdorf in the programme makes the logic explicit: “In Götterdämmerung the action shifts into a modern-seeming, secularised public sphere.” The Gibichung hall is literally the opera house foyer; Gunther, Gutrune, and Hagen are not barbarian chieftains but contemporary social climbers, networkers in evening wear, with champagne glasses. Hagen moves between the stage and the stalls, planting himself in the audience for his Watch — killing the fourth wall with a single act of Brechtian menace. At one point he sits in the front row next to Waltraute, who leaves to confront Brünnhilde while he remains, watching, among us. It is deeply uncomfortable, which is the point.
The white silk sheet returns throughout — as bridal gown, as death shroud, as Valhalla’s burning, as the flood of the Rhine. Its simplicity is more powerful now than it was in Rheingold, because we understand what it can become. The blood-stained white garments appear again on the Gibichung vassals — the cycle’s sustained argument that power always produces bodies in their underwear, that every court and every contract ultimately comes back to flesh and damage. When Gunther and Siegfried swear their blood brotherhood by stripping down together, the gesture that in Act One of Götterdämmerung should feel like comradely adventure now reads as exposure, vulnerability, a fatal removal of protection.
Alberich wears his Joker mask throughout, appearing in the stalls, haunting the edges, smearing his grease-paint onto Hagen’s face — an act of contamination that makes literal the inherited corruption. When Siegfried is killed, he falls wearing the conductor’s white tie, having briefly become an “artist,” a creator. He dies as the thing this production has always argued the Ring is about: the person who thought they were free and was always a piece in someone else’s game.
The final image — Brünnhilde at the piano, the instrument she has been moving toward across four evenings, then the fire, then the water, then the Redemption theme rising over a stage that is no longer the foyer or the rehearsal room or the myth, but simply the theatre we are sitting in, the floor and piano being cleaned — left the house silent for a moment before the applause began. We were busy trying to remember where we were.
The Cycle Finds Its Verdict
The critical consensus on Götterdämmerung — and on the cycle as a whole — is warmer than the individual instalment reviews might suggest, precisely because the accumulated effect matters as much as any single evening. Seen and Heard International called the 2024 revival “perhaps the most uniformly well cast I have ever seen,” and praised the cycle’s navigation between “ongoing rite and something explicitly contemporary” as its most durable achievement. The Norns scene in particular was singled out for the choreographic precision with which the refugee collective formed the rope of fate — the same people who opened Das Rheingold as wanderers now embodying destiny itself.
OperaWire found the Prologue staging — refugees in the opera house foyer, the Norns blindfolded, the immigrants rippling as flames — genuinely striking, while expressing some fatigue with the accumulated theatrical business by the cycle’s close. The reviewer’s sharpest observation: Hagen’s departure into the audience for his Watch was “chillingly effective,” but some of the later image-recycling — silk sheet as bridal gown, silk sheet as fire, yet again — risked becoming habitual rather than revelatory.
On that departure into the audience, it was real treat for me as I ended up sitting on seat to the right behind him. I had already wondered about the lady in green in front of me looking familiar, but then Hagen descended stage right and came down the first aisle, causing Waltraute to enter stage the stage to sing the finale of the first act. The beginning of the second act was personally even more riveting as Hagen ended up singing from his seat right in front of me.
The wagneropera.net review praised Albert Pesendorfer’s Hagen as one of the cycle’s true revelations, noting his ability to sing Fasolt with long, legato warmth in Rheingold and then harden every attack for Hagen four operas later — a demonstration of what it means to act with the voice. Bachtrack noted that Clay Hilley “brought the house down” in the memory-restoration scene in Act Three, the moment where Siegfried, freed from the potion, recovers his love for Brünnhilde just in time to die for it. The Berliner Zeitung’s verdict on the complete cycle was a useful shorthand: “szenisch und orchestral gerundet wie kaum eine andere Produktion” — staged and orchestral, unified as few productions are.
For our 2026 performance, Catherine Foster stepped into the Brünnhilde role — a singer whose assumption of the part in Weimar was praised for full commitment, beautiful tone, and dramatic conviction. She brought a directness and formal authority to the Immolation that, after the accumulating tragedy of the preceding four hours, felt both earned and shattering. Michael Sumuel’s Alberich, present throughout the cycle from his devastating Rheingold through to Götterdämmerung’s shadows, gave one of the sustained vocal and theatrical performances of the whole run — a character who begins as a victim, becomes a monster, and ends as an architectural principle. And Albert Pesendorfer, whose Hagen has been called a career-defining assumption, commanded the room in a way that made Hagen feel genuinely terrifying rather than merely villainous: a man who understands the system better than the gods who made it.
The Bottom Line
Götterdämmerung is where Herheim’s entire concept — the suitcases, the piano, the refugees, the self-consuming theatre — finally earns its weight. The production’s most consistent argument, mounted across all four evenings, is that the Ring is not a story that ended in 1876. It is being performed right now, in this building, by people who are also refugees, also wanderers, also complicit in structures they did not choose and cannot fully escape. When the opera house becomes the Gibichung hall, when the audience becomes the complicit crowd, when Hagen sits down in the front row among us — Herheim has been building to this moment since he first struck that E-flat on the piano in Rheingold.
Does the production entirely pay off the promissory note? Not perfectly. The accumulated theatrical busyness in Acts One and Two of Götterdämmerung occasionally feels like habit rather than meaning, and some choices that felt revelatory in the earlier operas become wallpaper by the fifth or sixth repetition. But the final twenty minutes — Brünnhilde at the piano, the fire, the flood, the orchestra left alone with the Redemption theme — are among the most moving I have experienced in an opera house in a long time.
And then there is the other layer, visible only on this particular evening in May 2026. After the curtain calls, the orchestra rose to its feet. The house gave Runnicles a standing ovation that lasted minutes. He turned to the orchestra, and then to the audience, and then back to the orchestra. He had been saying goodbye across seventeen hours of music. There was nothing left to say.
Wagner, eternal revolutionary, once asked whether the opera was possible at all. Tonight’s answer was: yes. But only barely. And only like this — the whole world in a suitcase, a piano that becomes an altar, a fire that becomes a question.
Pack light. Bring opinions. Come back.