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 performances but all too often delivers competent run-throughs; I found myself thinking of him as an Erich Leinsdorf of our time — his performances are always tight and well organized but almost never emotionally driven, compelling renditions of the music. This makes him an odd choice indeed to be music director at Bayreuth, a festival devoted to the music of perhaps the most ’out-there’ Romantic in the history of composition; Wagner’s music demands passion, commitment and drive, and from Thielemann it gets polite accuracy.” I was even more nervous about Tcherniakov’s participation because I’ve read that he hates having supernatural elements in his opera productions and frequently rewrites works containing them to eliminate them. When he did Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, he cut out the final appearance of the ghost of the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father and victim of the murder Don Giovanni commits in the opening scene, and instead made the opera a sort of intervention pulled on Don Giovanni by the Commendatore’s family. So that made him an odd choice indeed for a cycle that is largely driven by the supernatural. The American composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote an article about Wagner which called Die Meistersinger “the perfect fairy-tale opera,” which always seemed odd to me because Meistersinger is the only one of the 10 Wagner operas in the Bayreuth canon that does not contain any supernatural elements in its plotting.

Tcherniakov’s “solution” to his non-problem was to relocate the Ring to 1970’s Germany and set it inside an elaborate multi-level medical lab (in the immortal words of the great Wagner satirist Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”). In the opening scene, in which Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle) is supposed to be swimming around inside the Rhine river chasing after the three Rhinemaidens, Woglinde (Evelyn Novak), Wellgunde (Natalia Skrycka), and Flosshilde (Anna Lapkovskaja), in this production he’s strapped to a chair inside a lab with a headdress of electrodes stuck on him. The Rhinemaidens are nurses, and though Wagner wrote the scene with just the Rhinemaidens and Alberich on stage (and in his premiere production at Bayreuth in 1876 he had the Rhinemaidens lying on their stomachs inside a merry-go-round device to create the illusion that they were swimming), Tcherniakov filled the stage with others, including other males, who stood around and did their best to look busy. Indeed, the appearance on stage of people who weren’t supposed to be there, including three women who hang out in the facility’s waiting room and, like most of the other characters, smoke like chimneys (as I’ve written before, it’s fascinating to watch movies from the 1930’s, 1950’s, and even the 1970’s showing doctors, nurses, and patients alike puffing away in what today are strictly enforced no-smoking environments) – I suspect they’re going to turn out to be the Norns in Götterdämmerung – is a hallmark of this relentlessly silly production. When the Rhinemaidens helpfully explain to Alberich (and us) the curse on the Rheingold – it will make its owner master of the world, but only if he first renounces love – Alberich responds by pulling apart all the antique computer equipment in the room before he breaks the glass enclosure with a medical standard and escapes. When scene two begins, we’re in the middle of an otherwise empty lecture hall in which Wotan (Michael Volle) is sprawled out asleep on one of the audience chairs, looking for all the world like Donald Trump nodding out at a Cabinet meeting. His wife Fricka (Claudia Mahnke) strolls in and wakes him up, and the two ultimately adjourn to an Apprentice-style board room to discuss the plight of the gods. It seems that Wotan rashly promised his sister-in-law Freia (Anett Fritsch) to the giants Fasolt (Mika Kares) and Fafner (Peter Rose – Charles chuckled about his name in the credits given that the other Pete Rose is famous for being first a baseball player and then a disgraced retiree from his involvement in sports gambling, not that that’s considered such a big deal anymore) in exchange for building him a new palace which he names Valhalla.

Now Wotan, again like Trump (I can’t help but think this production, made during the blessed four-year Biden interregnum between Trump’s two Presidencies, is filled with on-purpose references to him), wants to figure out a way to renege on the deal. He calls in the trickster god Loge (Rolando Villazón, a Mexican-born lyric tenor who’s the only person in this cast I’d heard of before) to advise him, and Loge sings a beautiful narration explaining how all the world loves love except for Alberich, who stole the Rheingold from the Rhinemaidens and renounced love in exchange for power. Fasolt and Fafner enter, not alone as in Wagner’s original libretto, but with four enforcers who look like a drug cartel’s hired thugs. It turns out they have an ulterior motive for taking Freia; without her, the gods will lose the golden apples they eat regularly to remain immortal. Without her unique knowledge of how to tend the tree on which the golden apples grow, the gods will get old and die. Wotan and Loge promise the giants that they’ll come up with an alternate form of payment – incidentally Fasolt is dressed in a lime-green jacket and purple pants like the Joker in the Batman comic books, and once again I’m assuming that’s an intended reference on Tcherniakov’s part – but the giants take Freia as hostage until Wotan does that. Wotan and Loge descend to Alberich’s realm, Nibelheim, and in textually accurate productions that’s an elaborate descent down caves. In this production all they have to do is take an elevator to a basement lab that’s labeled, “Investigation of Human Behavior Models in a Test Group.” The Nibelungs, who in Wagner’s original were a race of dwarves but here look like standard-issue proletarians, lament that they used to make jewelry just for fun but now they have to do it under Alberich’s lash (literally in Wagner’s original; here Alberich wields what looks like a nightstick or club) in what Tcherniakov obviously thinks is a metaphor for the primitive accumulation under early capitalism. (George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite, a book he originally published in the 1890’s and reissued with revisions in the 1920’s, is an analysis of the Ring in anti-capitalist terms, and I suspect it’s led a lot of modern stage directors to re-imagine the Ring in a 19th or 20th century setting.)

The Nibelung Alberich is hardest on is his own brother Mime (Stephan Rügamer), who makes him a Tarnhelm, a magic helmet that will allow the wearer to become invisible and also to shape-shift. Mime was hoping to use this gimcrack to escape Alberich’s domination, but Alberich catches him, confiscates the Tarnhelm, and uses it to make himself invisible so his domination can be even more total. (For some reason Tcherniakov made the Tarnhelm look like the monitoring device Alberich was wearing in scene one.) Wotan and Loge descend into Nibelheim and trick Alberich into turning himself first into a serpent, then a toad, and when he’s in toad form Wotan and Loge capture and bind him, then take him back to the gods’ headquarters. Amazingly, Tcherniakov doesn’t actually try to dramatize any of this; when he’s supposed to be invisible, a serpent, or a toad, his Alberich looks exactly the same. In the opera’s fourth and final scene, when Alberich is supposed to be bidding his minions to ascend with the treasure they’ve accumulated for him, there is no treasure and, indeed, no activity of any kind. We’re just supposed to take on faith that all this is happening. The way Wagner wrote the scene, Wotan is forced to give up first the treasure, then the Tarnhelm, and then the ring when Fasolt laments that he can still see a glint of Freia’s blonde hair through a crack in the pile of treasure (needless to say, this Freia is dark-haired – were the Berlin wig shops out of blonde wigs that week?) – only we don’t see any of that. Thielemann’s professionally competent but rather mopey conducting matches Tcherniakov’s idiotic modern-dress production, which systematically destroys any chance of creating the sense of wonder Wagner kept trying to create with his music. For the last scene, Tcherniakov has Loge and Froh (the Black singer Siyabonga Maqungo; I’m O.K. with him being Black but not so much with them picking a singer who looks so much like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) do simple ordinary sleight-of-hand tricks any stage magician can do.

This Rheingold was so abominably produced I didn’t notice much about the singing, except that none of the cast members managed the kinds of authority mustered by their counterparts in Georg Solti’s 1958 studio recording of Rheingold – arguably the best ever. Solti’s and producer John Culshaw’s cast – particularly Kirsten Flagstad as Fricka (in the last professional work of her career), George London as Wotan, Set Svanholm as Loge, and the remarkable Gustav Neidlinger as Alberich – is unsurpassable. Most defenders of this modern-dress Regietheater approach to opera production say it’s needed to make the old works “relevant” to a modern audience. That’s just a bunch of B.S.; anyone looking at the box-office profits from Peter Jackson’s film of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (a work which owes a great deal to Wagner’s Ring, both structurally – they’re both in four parts, a shorter introductory work and three extended episodes – and thematically) can see the evidence, literally in black and white, that a modern audience can cherish a work set in legendary times without demanding that it be remodeled into the appearance of today. While there have been modern-dress productions of classic operas I actually liked – Frank Corsaro’s 1983 version of Bizet’s Carmen from the New York City Opera, which reset the piece to take place during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and actually worked the war into the plot; Peter Sellars’s edition of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (decidedly not his Don Giovanni or Cosi fan Tutte!); Michael Mayer’s staging of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Met in 2013 (which relocated the action to Las Vegas c. 1960 and made the Duke of Mantua Frank Sinatra and his courtiers the Rat Pack) – those have taken care to find modern (or recent) equivalents for the class conflicts within the original material. It’s all too clear that Dmitri Tcherniakov couldn’t have been bothered with that kind of faithful translation; his Rheingold (and, I fear, the rest of his Ring) is a bizarre fantasy of his own to which only he holds the key.