Tchneriakov's "Götterdämmerung": His Fourth and Final Desecration of Wagner's "Ring"

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

Last night (Monday, May 4) my husband Charles and I watched Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, fourth installment in the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”), in a frustrating staging by the Berlin Oper Under den Linden (the last part of the name refers to its location, and during the split of Germany between 1947 and 1990 it was in East Berlin) conducted by Christian Thielemann (after the original conductor, Daniel Barenboim, withdrew for health reasons – he is in his 80’s, after all!) and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Dmitri Tcherniakov is a youngish (born 1970, which would make him 55) Russian stage director with a terrible reputation for making hash out of great operas. Among his problems as an opera director are an aversion to supernatural plot elements (which makes me wonder whose idea it was to have him direct Wagner’s Ring, which is full of supernatural plot elements!) and an acute allergy to anything resembling a special effect. Before watching this Ring as part of a Fanfare review assignment, I’d seen only one Tcherniakov production before, a Metropolitan Opera staging of Borodin’s Prince Igor from 2014 which I actually liked. I suspect one of the reasons I liked his Prince Igor is that, though he updated the story, he didn’t do so obtrusively. He also was working with a Russian opera, and he’s Russian, so he might have had a home-field advantage. It also helped that Prince Igor is an unfinished opera; Alexander Borodin was a chemical researcher by profession and composed as a hobby, and he didn’t have time to create a final shape for his opera before he died. The standard version of Prince Igor was created by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov after Borodin’s death based on the fragments he’d left behind and things he'd told them about his plans for the piece, and Tcherniakov took parts of the Prince Igor manuscript Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov hadn’t used in their version as well as some of Borodin’s instrumental music, notably a piece called “The River Don Floods,” to give the opera a more downbeat ending than the standard version’s.

Alas, in Wagner’s Ring Tchneriakov was working with a well-established text whose composer (who was also his own librettist) not only lived to finish it but actually directed the premiere. Tchnerniakov had the looney-tunes idea to stage the Ring in a giant medical research complex called E.S.C.H.E.; he never specified what the initials stood for but it was clearly a reference to the World-Ash Tree (“Esche” is the German word for “ash,” as in a species of tree) where the characters are being watched 24/7 by a group of mad researchers who manipulate them in ways designed to test their … well, Tchneriakov isn’t very specific as to who these people are or what they’re testing the subjects for. Götterdämmerung opens in the corridors of the establishment, where the three Norns, the Norse equivalents to the Fates in Greco-Roman mythology (Noa Beinart, Kristina Stanek, and Anna Samuil), are spinning the rope of destiny – only there is, of course, no rope. All the Norns are mobility-impaired; two are using canes (one has a four-legged extension so it can stand up, one doesn’t) and one has a portable chair that doubles as a walker. The Norns are watching Siegfried (Andreas Schager) and Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe), who united at the end of the immediately previous opera, Siegfried, in bed together, only Brünnhilde gets up before Siegfried does and starts making them coffee. Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing the so-called “Dawn Duet” in which she calls out to him to go forth and do new heroic deeds in her honor. Then they exchange presents: Siegfried gives Brünnhilde the Ring of the Nibelung and in exchange Brünnhilde gives Siegfried Grane, the magic flying horse she used to ride into battle during her days as a Valkyrie until she lost that job at the end of Die Walküre by siding with Siegfried’s father Siegmund (Robert Watson) in a duel over Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė), Siegmund’s long-lost twin sister as well as his girlfriend and Siegfried’s mother. Grane is one of Tcherniakov’s worst ideas; instead of either a real horse or a mock-up of same, he’s a plush toy horse less than a foot long, even though Siegfried and Brünnhilde pass it back and forth and address it as if it were a real horse either of them could ride. Then Siegfried takes off on the Rhine Journey, which Wagner composed as an instrumental interlude and Tchneriakov and his TV director, Andy Sommer, gave it to us as precisely that, shooting the orchestra in the pit rather than sticking some stupid visual sequence before our eyes.

He arrives at the castle of the Gibichungs, ruled by brother Gunther (Lauri Vasar) and his sister Gutrune (Mandy Fredrich) and their half-brother Hagen (the formidable Mika Kares, who’d already sung two roles in this Ring cycle before, as Fasolt the giant in Das Rheingold and Hunding, Sieglinde’s cuckolded husband, in Die Walküre). All three of the characters had Gibich’s wife Grimhilde as their mother, but whereas Gunther and Gutrune were sired by King Gibich, Hagen’s father was Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle in all three operas in which he appears), the dwarf who stole the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens in the first part and thereby set the entire plot in motion. Hagen has the idea that Siegfried would make a good husband for Gutrune and Brünnhilde an equally good wife for Gunther, only Gunther is too fearful to make it across the barrier of flames (which, of course, doesn’t exist in Tchneriakov’s production; the closest we get is a series of jagged red lines drawn with a scarlet Sharpie to suggest fire). So Siegfried agrees to use the Tarnhelm, the shape-shifting and teleportation device Alberich’s brother Mime (Stephan Rügamer) invented in Rheingold, to impersonate Gunther and kidnap Brünnhilde on his behalf. In Wagner’s original, Siegfried is induced to do this by being given a magic potion that makes him lose his memory and fall instantly in love with Gutrune, but in Tcheriakov’s rewrite the “potion” is an ordinary bottle (or series of bottles) of white wine and Siegfried is the only one of the party who doesn’t drink any – which makes his immediate forsaking of his vows to Brünnhilde and near-rape of Gutrune even more inexplicable than it was in Wagner’s original. I was also bothered by the way in which the characters smoked cigarettes; in Siegfried Siegfried smoked twice, once in the first act and once in the third, and in Götterdämmerung not only does Siegfried smoke, so do Gunther, Gutrune, and Hagen. This suggests that Tcherniakov has reset the story in the 1970’s, when it was still common for health-care workers to smoke on the job, but a later scene in which the characters all display modern-style cell phones marks it as 21st century.

There’s also a confrontation scene between Brünnhilde and her sister, fellow Valkyrie Waltraute (Violeta Urmana, one of the few people in this cast I’d heard of before; she played Aïda in a 2009 Met production that was telecast, and she did so quite well) in which Waltraute brings her up to speed on what’s been happening in Valhalla while Brünnhilde has been in exile. Apparently Wotan (Michael Volle), the head of the gods, has lost his will to live and has stopped eating the golden apples that make the gods immortal. Instead he’s ordered the world-ash tree to be chopped down and the twigs stacked around Valhalla waiting for a spark to start a conflagration and burn down Valhalla and all the gods with it. Waltraute wants Brünnhilde to give the ring back to the Rhinemaidens, Woglinde (Evelin Novak), Wellgunde (Natalia Skrycka), and Flosshilde (Anna Lapovskaya), from whom Alberich stole the gold to make it in Rheingold, in hopes that can lift the curse on it and get Wotan and the other gots interested in life again. But Brünnhilde refuses to part with the ring because it was Siegfried’s love token. Then Siegfried shows up in Gunther drag and kidnaps Brünnhilde. In Act II, Siegfried brings Brünnhilde back to Gibich Land, only Brünnhilde catches on that he’s betrayed her and immediately plots with Gunther and Hagen to kill him. They take the famous Oath on the Spear, which in this production is the Oath on a Bunch of Cell Phones. In Act III Siegfried is wandering around and meets the Rhinemaidens, though in Tcherniakov’s production this happens in the so-called “Stress Laboratory” where they work as nurses or something. They ask Siegfried to give them back the ring, but he refuses. Instead he keeps walking into a basketball court (in the immortal words of Anna Russell, who vividly parodied the Ring in one of her most famous routines, “I’m not making this up, you know!”) where Hagen is leading a game.

In Wagner’s original, Siegfried, Hagen,and the Gibichung vassals (Götterdämmerung is the only one of the Ring operas to contain a chorus, and they do the usual opera-chorus things, commenting on action we’ve just seen and therefore don’t need to have explained to us) are on an outdoor hunting trip, and Hagen first gives Siegfried an antidote to the potion he took in Act I that enables him to remember the whole story about how he killed Fafner the dragon (Peter Rose) and crossed the magic flames to rescue Brünnhilde. Then, just as Siegfried is remembering his whole backstory, Hagen kills him with a spear. In Tcherniakov’s production, once again Siegfried doesn’t drink the bottled water that supposedly contains the potion, and Hagen has no spear since he’s playing basketball (the team are wearing matching green polo shirts and dark blue shorts) instead of hunting. Just as I was beginning to wonder how Tcherniakov was going to have Hagen kill Siegfried, he had Hagen pick up a standard with a flag on the end of it and stab Siegfried in the back with it. (I wondered if Tcherniakov had got the idea from the use of flagstaffs as weapons by some of the January 6, 2021 rioters who staged an action at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to keep Congress from certifying the 2020 election so Donald Trump could stay in power. Remember that this Ring was staged in 2022, during the Joe Biden interregnum between Donald Trump’s two Presidential terms.) Siegfried’s corpse gets put on a hospital gurney and pushed back from the basketball court to the stress laboratory next door. Gutrune gets her big mad scene as she anxiously awaits the return of her beloved Siegfried, not realizing until she actually sees his corpse that he’s been killed by her half-brother Hagen. Brünnhilde sings the famous Immolation Scene, which in Wagner’s original is supposed to set off a fire that spreads from the Gibichung territory to engulf all Valhalla and kill off the gods once and for all, only once again Tcherniakov, in one of his most stupid ideas, dispensed with a flame and had Brünnhilde survive the incident; as the orchestra plays the grand postlude that was supposed to accompany the fire that took out Valhalla and the gods, she stands stage center as the text for one of the earlier versions of the Immolation Scene scrolls behind her. Wagner actually wrote no fewer than seven versions of the text for this scene as his philosophical views grew and changed, and the version Tcherniakov picked for his big crawl was the one in which Brünnhilde said, “I saw the world end.” Then the white text on a black background crumbles into dust and blows away, in what Tcherniakov with his fabled allergy to special effects came as close as he was going to get to one.

Götterdämmerung is a schizoid opera anyway because Wagner wrote the text over two decades before he composed the music. He originally planned it in 1848 as a stand-alone work called Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), and had it not been for his involvement in the 1848 Dresden revolution he probably would have composed it right after Lohengrin and in much the same style. When the revolution failed Wagner had literally to flee for his life; he spent the next 16 years mostly in Switzerland and decided that Siegfrieds Tod needed a prologue, Der junge Siegfried (“Young Siegfried”), to explain how Siegfried came into the world in the first place. Then he decided that needed another prelude to explain how Siegfried’s parents, Siegmund and Sieglinde, got together and conceived him. Finally he decided he needed a prologue to the whole work to explain who Wotan and the gods were, who Alberich was, and all about the Rhinegold and the Rhinemaidens who had custody of it until Alberich stole it, renounced love, and used its power to try to take over the world until Wotan tricked him into giving it up, only to lose it again to the giants who built Valhalla for him. By the time he finished composing the Ring, Wagner was stuck with a text that really didn’t fit his operatic ideal as it had evolved over the years, and especially since he’d broken off midway through the third act of Siegfried to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, two operas he rather naïvely thought would be easier to produce and make him some money, and didn’t resume composing the Ring for 12 years.

I don’t automatically dislike modern-dress permutations of classic operas, but I suspect that a work set in or near the time it was written and dealing with realistic situations and emotions is a better candidate for updating than a work like the Ring with a mythological or legendary setting. Among the modern-dress opera productions I’ve liked are Peter Sellars’s version of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which worked because he found modern-day equivalents to the social and class conflicts of the original characters (his Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte didn’t work for me because he was just trying too hard to be “different” and not taking the same kind of care he had with The Marriage of Figaro); a stunning 1983 New York City Opera production of Bizet’s Carmen that not only moved the setting to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s but (unlike the Met with a later production) actually incorporated the war into the plot (Carmen and her gang were smuggling guns to the Loyalists, and the army from which Don José deserted was Franco’s); and Michael Mayer’s 2013 Met production of Verdi’s Rigoletto that moved the setting to 1960’s Las Vegas and made the characters Frank Sinatra and the “Rat Pack.” Tcherniakov’s Ring was full of absolutely silly ideas (like the toy Grane and the Hannibal Lecter mask Fafner wore in Siegfried), and its biggest sin was it did absolutely nothing to illuminate the character conflicts in Wagner’s original. Even Stewart Goodyear, who successively reviewed the four operas as they were originally presented “live” and liked the production considerably better than I did, admitted at the end, “I’m just still not very sure how they add up to a whole and say anything profound. An experiment, if you like, with a hypothesis, a method, and some results, but to me, no real conclusions.”