Wagner's "Siegfried" as Staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov: A Bit Better Than His "Rheingold" or "Walküre"

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

Last night (Sunday, April 19) my husband Charles and I made it through the third installment of Dmitri Tchneriakov’s misbegotten production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Berlin Oper Unter den Linden in 2022. The Berlin Oper Unter den Linden was officially the state opera company of East Germany during the partition from 1945 to 1990. Last night’s opera was Siegfried, designated by Wagner as the “Second Day” of the cycle, since he regarded the first of the four Ring operas, Das Rheingold, as merely a “Vorabend” (“prologue”). Tcherniakov was hired to direct and design the Ring by the company’s former music director, Daniel Barenboim, before he stepped down as conductor of the Ring in 2022 and retired altogether the next year. The directorship was taken over by Christian Thielemann, who assumed the post of music director for the entire company in 2023 on top of his directorship of the Bayreuth Festival. Tcherniakov’s whole conception of the Ring was to have it take place in a giant scientific research lab called E.S.C.H.E. (the word is the German for “ash,” as in “ash tree,” from which the Norse god Odin, whom the Germans called Wotan, cut a twig to form a spear, onto which he carved runes expressing the knowledge for which he’d given up one of his eyes, though E.S.C.H.E. is spelled like an acronym but we’re never given a clue as to what the acronym stands for) in which various behavioral experiments are going on with both animal and human subjects. This meant, among other things, that Tcherniakov filled up the stage with a lot of silent characters as well as the speaking (or singing) ones Wagner created, and frequently had some of the named characters appear in enclosed catwalks as they looked down on the action in scenes in which Wagner had not called for their participation. Siegfried suffered from Tcherniakov’s bone-headed conception less than the two previous operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, had, but that’s praising with faint damnation.

Tcherniakov set the first act of Siegfried, like the first act of Die Walküre, inside the frame of a modern-day house, though without side walls so the audience could see what was going on inside. The opera actually begins during the orchestral prologue (during which Wagner expected audience members to be filing into their seats as the music played) with extreme close-ups of a rather sullen-looking child who we assumed will grow up to be the young Siegfried (Andreas Schager) playing with giant-sized Lego blocks. (One movie idea the world really didn’t need: The Lego Siegfried.) When the curtain rises we see Mime (Stephan Rügamer), brother of Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle) and Siegfried’s foster-father, even though Siegfried can’t stand him. (Mime and Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger are the two characters in Wagner in whom his anti-Semitism gets in the way of appreciation even for a diehard Wagnerphile like me.) Mime got to be Siegfried’s foster-father after the events of Die Walküre, in which Siegmund (Robert Watson) met his long-lost twin sister Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė) and had a one-night stand with her even though, as Anna Russell put it, “she’s married to someone else, which is immoral; and she’s his own sister, which is illegal.” The next day Siegmund got killed in a duel with Sieglinde’s husband Hunding, and Sieglinde was ready to kill herself until the Valkyrie Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe) persuaded her that she needed to keep herself alive for at least the next nine months so she could give birth to her and Siegmund’s child Siegfried. Brünnhilde told Sieglinde she should hide out in the forest where the giant Fafner (Peter Rose) had turned himself into a dragon and was guarding the treasure the Nibelungs had accumulated for Alberich in Rheingold. Sieglinde did as instructed but died in childbirth as Siegfried was born, and Mime took the baby in, deciding to raise him and use him as an instrument of vengeance against his brother Alberich. Siegfried also inherited the fragments of Nothung (“Needful”), the sword his dad had used in his duel with Hunding until Wotan, secretly intervening on Hunding’s side, had broken it with his spear.

Mime, who as a metalsmith had created the magical ring from the gold Alberich had stolen from the Rhinemaidens in Rheingold, tries in vain to create a sword Siegfried couldn’t break. Mime also has been fending off various questions from Siegfried about who he really is and where he came from, including telling him, “I am both your father and your mother.” Siegfried has spent enough time out in nature to know that that’s nonsense; he’s noticed that animals pair off with each other and produce offspring that resemble them, and he assumes that he must have had both a father and mother and Mime wasn’t either of them. At one point Siegfried runs off into the woods to get away from Mime, and while he’s out the god Wotan shows up in the guise of “The Wanderer.” Together they go through one of the maddening recitations of the backstory that plague the Ring and remind us that Wagner originally planned a stand-alone opera called Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), then decided it needed a prologue called Der Junge Siegfried (“Young Siegfried”), and by the time he finished writing the texts he’d written all four in reverse order and never went back to eliminate the now-superfluous parts giving the backstory. Wotan leaves Mime hanging, almost literally (the rules of the contest allowed the winner to kill the loser once he got a question wrong), over who will reforge Nothung and use it to kill Fafner. Then Siegfried returns and decides that rather than attempt to piece the old Nothung back together, he must file it down to shavings and melt it down completely, making a new sword of the old metal. He does this to the accompaniment of some of the greatest music Wagner (or anybody) ever wrote, the “Forging Scene” and “Hammer Scene,” and at the end of the scene Siegfried tests the power of his newly forged sword by splitting the anvil on which he shaped it. At least that’s the scene as Wagner wrote it, but Tcherniakov had other, worse ideas; Siegfried celebrates his forging of the sword (which we never see in restored form) by taking his hammer and smashing to smithereens just about all of Mime’s furniture as well as his Lego set and the rest of his boyhood toys (putting away childish things, get it?). The second act is supposed to take place in Neidhöhle, the forest where Fafner is hiding out, and Mime takes Siegfried there ostensibly to teach him fear. Tcherniakov presents this wonderful act as a series of six steps in a research assignment:

Phase 1 – Relaxation (Forest Murmurs)
Phase 2 – Immersion in Meditation
Phase 3 – Search for the Inner Helper
Phase 4 – Contacting the Inner Helper
Phase 5 – Confrontation with Conflict. Reaction to Danger.
Phase 6 – Realisation of an Unconscious Desire

The “Inner Helper” turns out to be Wagner’s Woodbird, who in the original sang in incomprehensible birdsong until Siegfried literally tasted Fafner’s blood after killing him (did I spoil it for you?), after which she sang in comprehensible German and warned Siegfried not to trust Mime (Mime had prepared a poisoned drink to knock off Siegfried after Siegfried killed Fafner) and also told him that there was a woman waiting for him sleeping on a rock surrounded by a wall of fire only a hero who had never known fear could go through. Tcherniakov turned the Woodbird into a Black (should I call her “African-German”?) lab assistant (Victoria Randem) who manipulates a toy bird to be Siegfried’s “Inner Helper.” My husband Charles had been wondering how Tcherniakov would stage Fafner in dragon form, and the answer was he didn’t try; instead he had two orderlies bring out Fafner, strait-jacketed and wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask but still recognizably human (and later in the act Siegfried also tries on the Lecter mask for some reason). The third act takes place in various locations in the already established lab sets, and Siegfried has his big confrontation with Wotan in which he’s supposed to break Wotan’s spear with his sword and thereby end what little power the gods have left before he makes it through the flames, finds the sleeping Brünnhilde, says, “Das ist kein Mann!” (“That’s not a man!”) – which has been called one of the silliest lines in all opera – and sings a 35-minute duet with her. The big scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, in which he feels fear for the first time, was supposed to take place on her fire-encircled rock; instead Tcherniakov set it inside a sterile white room labeled “Schlaf Labor” (“Sleep Lab”), and preceded it by having Brünnhilde escorted by Wotan, who lays her on the lab table and even gives her a fatherly kiss. (In Wagner’s original he hasn’t had any contact with her at all since she defied him over Siegmund’s fate in the Walküre duel.) Wotan shows up along with some other extraneous characters watching from a catwalk as Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing the final phrases of their duet and pledge their love to each other for eternity [spoiler alert! It doesn’t work out that way in Götterdämmerung]. In the Siegfried/Brünnhilde duet the man who lets the side down is not Tcherniakov but his conductor, Christian Thielemann, who slows down some of the most intensely erotic music of all time to a virtual crawl. Listening to this sort of Wagner performance, one can understand Arturo Toscanini’s famous jibe about the similarly extended length of the love duet in Act II of Tristan und Isolde: “If they were Italians, they’d have had seven kids by now!”

I haven’t yet mentioned the quality of the singing, which I would describe as serviceable. Andreas Schager as Siegfried is obliged to spend the entire opera (except for a brief scene in which he’s allowed to doff his jacket and wear a white T-shirt under it) in a powder-blue sweat outfit that doesn’t do much to show off his masculine charms. My dream image of an ideal Siegfried would be one who looked like Paul Richter (who played Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s 1923 film, based not on Wagner but the original Norse myths Wagner had also used) and sounded like Lauritz Melchior; Melchior was vocally incomparable in the part but he fully lived up to Jonathan Tolins’ jibe in the play Twilight of the Golds that “you’re supposed to believe this guy is a superhero when he looks like Ed Asner in a loincloth and a blond wig.” (In the 1930’s, when Melchior was at his peak, the joke would have been “like Eugene Pallette in a loincloth and a blond wig.”) I give Schager credit for sheer stamina; his voice sounded as strong at the end of Act III as at the beginning of Act I, which hasn’t been true of a lot of live-performance Siegfrieds. He doesn’t get to wear a loincloth or a blond wig, and he’s attractive enough he doesn’t look like Ed Asner but he’s hardly a hunk to die for either. Stephan Rügamer is properly annoying as Mime and Michael Volle is strong as the Wanderer a.k.a. Wotan, though I still think his best performance in the cycle came in Walküre because he got to play a genuinely conflicted character. In Rheingold he was a Trump-like con artist and here he’s portrayed on an unrelieved level of world-weariness. Peter Rose as Fafner got to do little but get dragged on in his straitjacket and get stabbed (in the back, though Wagner clearly wrote the text to say Siegfried stabbed Fafner in the heart, and in the hero quotient it makes a big difference whether you kill your adversary in the front or in the back). As Erda the Earth Goddess, with whom Wotan has a dialogue after he wakes her up (three characters – Fafner, Erda, and Brünnhilde – are all awakened from powerful, dream-filled sleeps) and with whom he’s already produced 12 children (the nine Valkyries and the three Norns, whom we will hear from at the beginning of episode four, Götterdämmerung, though we’ve already seen them doing a lot of lurking around in one of Tcherniakov’s many bad ideas) – Anna Kissjudit looks as strong as she could given the shapeless light blue dress outfit Tcherniakov has her wear throughout. I for one would much rather have seen her as “a green-faced torso that pops out of the ground,” as Anna Russell described her in her infamous spoof of the Ring. But then that would have required a special effect, something Tcherniakov avoids like the proverbial plague. The Brünnhilde, Anja Kampe, sang with real power and authority but her appearance in a light blue top and skin-tight black jeans was hardly the stuff of which legends are made.

I actually liked the one Tcherniakov production I’d seen before this, Borodin’s opera Prince Igor at the Met, but it’s possible that since Borodin was Russian and so is Tcherniakov, he was more respectful of an opera from the home-town team. It also helped that Borodin died before he finished Prince Igor, and the standard edition was put together by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov from Borodin’s notes and their memories of parts of the opera Borodin played them before he croaked. This gave Tchneriakov the latitude he thought he needed to rewrite the opera and use bits from other Borodin pieces to create an ending gloomier than the one Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov had supplied. In 2015 Tchneriakov staged a Canadian production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in which he decided to make all the characters part of Donna Anna’s extended family and, instead of having the statue of the dead Commendatore come to life and drag Don Giovanni to hell at the end, he had Don Giovanni’s family stage an intervention at the end with an actor made up to look like the Commendatore. Tcherniakov did this because he hates supernatural plot twists in opera, which made him a strange choice to direct Wagner’s Ring because so much of its plot is dependent on the supernatural. The singing in this Siegfried was strong enough it overcame Tcherniakov’s silly staging ideas most of the time, but it’s a real pity that since the passing of Birgit Nilsson the world has been singularly bereft of the kinds of heroic voices needed to make Wagner work. The best era for Wagner singing was between the two world wars, when you had sopranos like Frida Leider, Kirsten Flagstad, Lotte Lehmann, Helen Traubel, and Astrid Varnay; tenors like Lauritz Melchior, Max Lorenz, and Franz Völker; baritones like Friedrich Schorr, Rudolf Böckelmann, and Josef Herrmann; and basses like Alexander Kipnis, Eduard Habich, and Emanuel List. There’s no one here who stands out the way Jonas Kaufmann (the world’s greatest living Wagner tenor) did as Parsifal in the Met’s 2013 staging, though that production by François Girard was so atrocious Tcherniakov’s hatchet job on the Ring seemed respectful by comparison. In my moviemagg review, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/03/wagner-parsifal-live-from-met-in-hd.html, I wrote an account of how much I disliked the production: the singing was spectacular throughout (far better than what Thielemann got from his cast here!) but the staging was even sillier.