Russian Designer/Director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2022 Demented Demolition of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Friday, April 10) my husband Charles and I watched a truly weird production on Blu-Ray of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold , first episode in the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). I’d been sent a boxed set of Blu-Rays of the complete Ring by Fanfare magazine for review purposes, and I was a little (or more than a little) nervous when I noticed that the conductor was Christian Thielemann and the stage director and scenic designer was Dmitri Tcherniakov. Though Thielemann is the current musical director at the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth, Germany, I had watched his performance at the Wagner 200th birthday tribute concert at Bayreuth on May 22, 2013 and been unimpressed. In my moviemagg review of it ( https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/06/wagner-200th-birthday-concert-bayreuth.html ), I’d written, “The odd thing is that Thielemann talks good perf...