Wagner's "Die Walküre": Tcherniakov's Second Demolition Job on a Wagner Masterpiece

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 12) my husband Charles and I watched the second episode in that rather odd production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen from the Berlin Staatsoper at Unter den Linden, Die Walküre. The production was staged in October 2022 and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, a Russian Regietheater guy who among other things has an utter hatred of the supernatural in opera, which makes him a strange person indeed to stage a work so heavily reliant on supernatural plot elements as Wagner’s Ring. Tcherniakov’s conceit was to set the entire Ring in a giant medical laboratory in 1970’s Germany, with the various characters either experimenters or subjects. For the first episode, Das Rheingold, this resulted in a lot of silly vistas of cells dividing, brains mutating, and the like projected on a giant video screen that hung over the action, while Alberich became a lab rat (which suggests that Tcherniakov might be a better director for Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, in which the title character literally is a human guinea pig for various medical professionals). For Die Walküre, at least the first half thereof, Tcherniakov used a more “normal” setting; Act I and the first half of Act II take place inside a large frame set representing a house, albeit a house without any walls, windows, or doors. This is supposed to be the residence of Hunding (Mika Kares, who also played the giant Fasolt in Das Rheingold), who lives there with Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė), a woman he kidnapped and forced to marry him. In Tcherniakov’s production, Hunding is dressed as a German police officer (though his greatcoat and his line of military decorations across his chest make him look more like a minor officer under the Nazis) and Siegmund (Robert Watson), Sieglinde’s long-lost twin brother and eventually her lover, is depicted as a fugitive from justice who escaped police custody when the transport van he was in had a collision with another vehicle. Hunding’s home has a water faucet that actually works – we see Hunding wash his hands under it – and also a toilet in front of which Mika Kares had to mime the action of peeing, though fortunately having the toilet actually flush (and the singer really piss) was beyond even Tcherniakov’s demented imagination.

The action more or less follows Wagner’s original dramatic plan: Siegmund collapses on Sieglinde’s doorstep (though at that time he calls himself “Wehwalt” – “Woeful” – because he’s had a life of misery since his father, who unbeknownst to him is the god Wotan, disappeared and his mother died when enemies burned down her house), asks for a drink of water, tells Sieglinde his tale of woe – he was surrounded by enemies when he tried to save a woman from being forced into marriage with a barbarian man she didn’t love and barely knew – and says that in the fight he lost both his spear and shield and is now weaponless. Hunding arrives and recognizes Siegmund as the leader of his sworn enemies; he pledges to give him shelter for the night but then says in the morning they will fight a duel to the death. Siegmund laments that his father hasn’t come through on his pledge to provide him a sword when he needs one. Fortunately the sword is right there; in Wagner’s original it’s stuck in an ash tree growing through Hunding’s living-room floor, but in this version it’s just stuck on the upper part of a framework that’s supposed to represent a wall just under Hunding’s ceiling. As Siegmund and Sieglinde are getting the hots for each other, Siegmund spots the hilt of the sword and pulls it out (this is the sort of symbolism that has led some writers to call Wagner an intellectual ancestor of Freud) while Sieglinde is spiking Hunding’s nightly drink so the two can get it on without Hunding noticing. Oddly, the man who let the side down on Act I was not Tcherniakov but his conductor, Christian Thielemann (who stepped in at the last minute to replace Daniel Barenboim, artistic director of the Berlin Oper unter den Linden, who’s in his 80’s and is pulling back from the arduous work of actually conducting). He plodded through an act that’s one of the most stunning and intensely romantic scenes in all opera, making it sound almost boring. At least he had good singers: Robert Watson isn’t exactly going to efface memories of Lauritz Melchior, Max Lorenz, or Franz Völker (the greatest Siegmunds of the period between the two world wars, which was the acme of great Wagner singing on records even though the only recordings we have from it are studio excerpts and live broadcasts) but he has the right tonal qualities for the role. Vida Miknevičiūtė isn’t exactly in Lotte Lehmann’s league, either, but she’s equally strong as Sieglinde despite a tendency to overact, which becomes worse in Act II and Sieglinde’s brief appearance in Act III.

Tcherniakov chose to have the first half of Act II take place inside the same frame house as Act I, and we see Siegmund and Sieglinde hurriedly packing as they prepare to flee and presumably live in the woods together. Siegmund carelessly packs in one of those large and flimsy plastic bags they sell you in supermarkets, and he even more carelessly treats his precious sword “Nothung” (“Needful”), throwing it around the room and waving it around like it were a baseball bat. There he stages the great confrontation between Wotan (Michael Volle); Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe), (one of the nine Valkyries, product of an extra-relational liaison between Wotan and the earth goddess Erda whom he’s pressed into service to recruit dead heroes as a palace guard for Valhalla against any attempt to conquer it, which Wotan expects to come from the dwarf leader Alberich); and Fricka (Claudia Mahnke), Wotan’s wife. (Both Volle and Mahnke repeated their roles from Das Rheingold.) At first Wotan assigns Brünnhilde the task of protecting Siegmund in his duel with Hunding, since Siegmund’s very existence is part of an elaborate plot by Wotan to get back the ring of the Nibelung, the magic object that can make its owner the master of the universe if he first renounces love. Alas, Fricka sees through the deception immediately; Siegmund is not an independent actor but merely a tool of Wotan to get back the ring from the giant Fafner, who grabbed it from his brother Fasolt after killing him, turned himself into a dragon, and now guards the Nibelung treasure. She orders Wotan to side with Hunding not only because Hunding is the aggrieved-upon spouse whose wife is having extra-relational activity with her own brother (thereby committing both adultery and incest) but because part of her job in the Norse pantheon is to protect traditional morality and punish sin. Unfortunately, when Siegmund and Sieglinde reappear in flight from Hunding’s wrath, they turn up in the same animal research lab that served as Alberich’s underground realm Nibelheim in Das Rheingold.

Matters plummet from there as we don’t even get to see the big fight at the end, in which Brünnhilde, impressed by Siegmund’s refusal to accompany her to Valhalla after Hunding kills him because he loves Sieglinde and won’t leave her behind, intervenes for Siegmund. Wotan in turn honors his commitment to Fricka and thrusts his spear, made from the world-ash tree and for which in normal Ring productions he gave up an eye for the wisdom engraved on it, in the way of Siegmund’s sword, shattering it. Alas, we don’t get to see any of that happen; we hear it entirely from Sieglinde’s point of view until the absolute end of the sequence, in which Wotan, disgusted by the whole situation, literally orders Hunding dead with a brief arm gesture. He does this while Siegmund is standing up and looking on (in Wagner’s original Siegmund is already dead by then), and later Siegmund is dispatched not by Hunding himself but by five anonymous thugs from his gang set. Matters get even worse in Act III, which for some reason Tcherniakov set in the same lecture hall in which scene two of Rheingold took place. The Valkyries mill in to the famous music Wagner used to abstract the “Ride of the Valkyries” for concert performance (in order to raise money to premiere the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, he gave fund-raising concerts all over Europe of orchestral excerpts from the Ring – “his Kickstarter campaign,” Charles once called it), and it’s momentarily uncertain as to how many of them there are. There are supposed to be nine, including Brünnhilde (eight without her), but at various points I counted two, four, six, and nine without Brünnhilde. The Valkyries are all dressed in black pantsuits and none of them are riding horses (though of course Wagner’s original libretto says they are). Some of them are listening to music on portable players and some of them are carrying around things that look like briefcases. At least one of them has short, dark hair and looks decidedly butch, though I suspect that wasn’t Tcherniakov’s intention.

Wotan enters the scene snarling with rage at Brünnhilde for having defied him, Brünnhilde pleads with her sister Valkyries to defend her, of course they want nothing to do with her, but one of them suggests that she take Sieglinde, who has fled with Brünnhilde even though with Siegmund dead she just wants to kill herself, to Fafner’s realm in the East because it’s the one place in the universe to which Wotan does not dare go. Brünnhilde sends Sieglinde on her way after telling her she can’t die for at least another nine months yet, since not only is she pregnant by Siegmund but the child is going to grow up to be the great hero Siegfried, who will kill Fafner and recover the ring. (Siegfried will also grow up to be Brünnhilde’s boyfriend even though she’s his aunt.) Wotan sentenced her to be stripped of her godhood and the immortality it conveys, and left alone on a rock to be the property of whichever man claims her first. Brünnhilde pleads that this would be way too humiliating, and ultimately she gets Wotan to compromise: he’ll surround the rock with a ring of magic fire so only the bravest of heroes, one who has not known fear, can penetrate it and win Brünnhilde’s love. Properly produced, this scene is one of the most stunning in all opera, but Dmitri Tcherniakov can’t be bothered. While Wotan and Brünnhilde are arguing they’re both throwing the chairs around the lecture hall and then picking them up again, to no effect, and when it comes time for Brünnhilde to be put to sleep and surrounded with the magic fire, all Tcherniakov can think of doing is to have poor Anja Kampe draw jagged lines on the chairs with a red Sharpie to indicate that there’s a fire surrounding her (and it only gets worse when Brünnhilde, instead of lying down, is standing up on one the chairs). Both Charles and I started laughing out loud when Brünnhilde got out the Sharpie and started making lines on the chairs.

The most frustrating thing about this entire Ring, or at least the first half of it, is the infuriating contrast between the grandeur of Wagner’s music and the banality of Tcherniakov’s modern-dress settings. It occurred to me that an opera originally set in the time and place where it was composed is a better candidate for this sort of modern-dress updating than one set in historical, legendary, or mythical times. That’s the conclusion I came to when I wrote my review of Das Rheingold and listed modern-dress opera productions that had especially impressed me (Peter Sellars’s The Marriage of Figaro, Frank Corsaro’s 1983 Carmen from the New York City Opera, Michael Mayer’s 2013 Rigoletto from the Met). At least the singing this time around seemed better than it had in Rheingold, which is partly because in Michael Volle’s case he was dealing with a stronger, more complex and dramatically interesting version of Wotan. In Rheingold, especially as Tcherniakov re-imagined it, he was an unscrupulous Trump-like schemer throughout; here, especially in his unexpected veerings between anger and support for Brünnhilde, Volle found more to work with and turned in a much more intense and moving performance. Robert Watson was a quite good Siegmund – he didn’t efface memories of past greats in the role, but Volle didn’t either – and Vida Miknevičiūtė, despite her mouthful of a last name, was a capable Sieglinde even though she overacted relentlessly in the last two acts. (I hadn’t realized until last night that Wagner, as much as he upended the operatic conventions of the 19th century, still couldn’t resist writing a mad scene for his soprano.) Anja Kampe was properly authoritative as Brünnhilde, and she made at least a stab at doing the notated trills in her entrance at the start of Act Two (that’s been a sore point with me since I reviewed Laila Andersson-Palme’s 1987 Walküre for Fanfare and she made a big to-do about singing the notated trills, which most Brünnhildes either only approximate or ignore altogether), but I’ll have to wait for the two other operas in the series (especially Götterdämmerung, in which her role is considerably longer) to judge her fairly. I liked Mika Kares’s Hunding; for the most part he avoided the outright piggish villainy with which this part is usually played (Hunding is a brief role and lots of basses snarl through it at what the makers of This Is Spinal Tap would have called 11), and Tcherniakov deserves at least some credit for trying to make the other eight Valkyries come off as individuals instead of a mass opera chorus. Once again, though, this was a frustrating production that failed to satisfy, largely because of Tcherniakov’s relentless prejudice against anything that might even remotely qualify as a special effect.