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In Siegfried, the third part of The Ring of the Nibelung, the narrative definitively reconnects with the medieval heroic legend of the Nibelungenlied, Richard Wagner’s original point of departure. Siegfried has become a young man in search of his true identity, eager to set out and discover the world and, as befits a “hero,” slay a dragon, rescue a maiden, and win a precious treasure. In accordance with Wotan’s secret plan, Siegfried is the “free hero,” capable of reclaiming the ring of power on his behalf. The gods, by contrast, have had their day. Only Wotan himself still roams the world, incognito under the name of the “Wanderer.” While he no longer reveals himself as the most powerful of the powerful, he continues to behave like a “god” intent on manipulating and controlling everyone.

For the tetralogy of The Ring, Calixto Bieito and his team opted for a discontinuous mode of storytelling, in which past and future intertwine. The composer himself referred to this as the “visualization in the present” of “premonition” and “memory” that is, the anchoring of foreshadowing and retrospective moments within moments that are always present. Our journey to the heart of The Ring began in Das Rheingold with big data, set in the darkness of the “light” of total information and total surveillance of private life, and continued in the militarized cosmos of Die Walküre, where the digital world collapses at every level as a result of war—an apocalypse in which love nonetheless blossomed amid destruction.

“At the end of Die Walküre, the world is contaminated,” Bieito explains. “A toxic orange smoke spreads everywhere, the computer of Valhalla is blown apart, Wotan, the artist of destruction, disappears into chemical poison, and Brünnhilde is frozen in time. The poison has contaminated the forest. It has not destroyed it, but mutated it. Mutation is the direct consequence of the collapse of the system. Nature has lost its code. The forest in which Mime and Siegfried live has not been cleared, burned, or felled. It has been reprogrammed. The trees fall with their crowns downward, piercing space horizontally like lances; they emerge from the ground distorted and move as if they were the joints of a machine an organism whose most fundamental structure has been altered. This is the literal definition of a mutation. Gravity no longer works. Verticality no longer exists. Symmetry disappears. Ecological logic is broken. Nature no longer responds to itself.”

In this distorted world, Siegfried grows up in complete isolation. He knows only his adoptive father, Mime, and the strange mutant creatures that survived the apocalypse. But Mime has raised Siegfried solely so that the boy will kill Fafner, allowing Mime himself to seize the Nibelung treasure. Siegfried knows nothing of the world or the past. It is through observing nature that he has, on his own, come to understand what love and family are. He can no longer accept that Mime has until now hidden his true origin. In an adolescent questioning of himself and in rebellion against his adoptive father’s schemes, Siegfried is desperate to know: Who am I? Wagner here depicts a complex father-son relationship, characterized by mutual dependence, manipulation, love and hatred, rejection and need. “Siegfried is a kind of Kaspar Hauser,” says Calixto Bieito, “a hero, a complex being who behaves at times like an animal, at times like a human. He may even be a post-human existence, becoming truly human only at the end, through his encounter with Brünnhilde, through the discovery of love. Mime, by contrast, has survived the catastrophe like a rat and seeks only to use Siegfried for his own ends.”

From the perspective of the work’s creation, we have reached a turning point in The Ring tetralogy, because Richard Wagner interrupted the composition of his magnum opus in 1857, halfway through Siegfried, after completing the second act, and did not resume it until twelve years later. Between these two phases lie not only the poetic writing and the composition of major works that push the limits, such as Tristan and Isolde and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, but also decisive political and personal upheavals for the composer. The reasons why Wagner interrupted Siegfried without being certain he would ever resume it have been widely debated. Were they private reasons? His affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of his important patron during his exile in Zurich, who had hosted and financially supported him for many years, and the scandal that ensued? Or philosophical influences? In 1856, reading the works of Arthur Schopenhauer plunged Wagner into a kind of existential crisis. Moreover, the chances of seeing his work performed were slim for a composer living in exile and sought by the police. In any case, Wagner did not return to The Ring until twelve years later, after finding a new benefactor: Ludwig II of Bavaria, who later even commissioned him to build his own Festival Hall in Bayreuth.

It should be noted that Wagner interrupted his composition precisely at the point in the story where the young Siegfried is on his way to finally dethrone Wotan, his corrupt grandfather, and thus bring an end once and for all to the old unjust system. Indeed, for the composer, Siegfried embodies “the spirit of man in the fullness of his supreme and immediate strength and his undeniable charm,” the long-awaited “free hero.” The fact that Siegfried discovers love and desire with Brünnhilde, and that this encounter briefly hints at the utopia of a better future, is something Wagner could compose only after completing Tristan. In his scene with Erda at the beginning of Act III, Wotan, the Wanderer, also alludes to this potential transformation for the better and, in doing so, already hints at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung:  

« Ce doux héros éveillera
l’enfant que tu m’as donnée, Brünnhilde :
en s’éveillant, ton enfant si sage
accomplira l’exploit qui sauvera le monde.
Dors tranquillement, ferme les yeux :
contemple ma fin en rêve !
Quoi qu’il advienne, le dieu s’efface avec joie
devant l’éternellement jeune ! »

Even though we know that Verdi had to endure the ordeal of censorship, I consider his final version where the action no longer concerns King Gustav III of Sweden but the Governor of Boston to be the most coherent. Moreover, Verdi was not seeking deep psychological analysis in this work: at this point in his life, unlike what motivated him in Simon Boccanegra, he aimed to portray powerful emotions rather than to address political despair.

Here, the enlightened ruler embodies the symbol of buon governo, good governance, which from Act I onward in the governor’s audience chamber reveals his unwavering benevolence, despite the bass voices that, as in any nineteenth-century melodrama, represent traitors and conspirators. We also see the appearance of Oscar, the innocent face of fate, the messenger through whom good news arrives news that will ultimately prove fatal. The existence of Ulrica is likewise mentioned in this first act, so that traitors are shown to coexist within a world presented as harmonious.

Often in Verdi’s works, such characters are entrusted with embodying society’s outcasts. Ulrica belongs to that realm of intuition we have repressed, and in my staging this world is represented by a chorus of women, priestesses of a cult whose symbol is the serpent. Within this universe, it seemed interesting to me to portray Ulrica as a priestess of the voodoo cult.

The theme of the magical plant that grants forgetfulness the plant Ulrica invites Amelia to pick can already be found in Shakespeare, and this power of plants is also familiar in the Western tradition, with the myth of the mandrake, believed to spring from the final spasm of the hanged… When the governor, Riccardo, decides almost as a bravado to consult Ulrica, we clearly perceive the difficulty of this role: on the one hand, he is a “positivist,” as one would have said in Verdi’s time, yet within him there is also a taste for entertainment, and within the same character a blend of the comic and the tragic, as was already the case with the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto: a frivolity mixed with gravity that Verdi delights in exploring.

The composer plays with this duality just as he plays with the irrational, in much the same way that today we mock horoscopes in magazines. Nevertheless, in her “off-kilter” vision as a marginal figure, Ulrica has sensed the presence of the conspirators… A single, pared-down set represents the audience chamber. I do not claim that this governor, Riccardo Warwick, is meant to resemble President Lincoln, but the set should evoke a spiritual elevation, of which the eagle is the symbol pride included. In this sense, it is a political set, though not a small drawing room where one waits for dispatches. I wanted it to be something larger and more lyrical.

As for its opposite side, there are no longer architectural elements, nor a glossy black floor, but rather the earth, a realm where the serpent having taken the place of the eagle is the totem, the symbol of a dark psyche: Ulrica’s domain, which the characters of the first tableau visit for entertainment. The eagle represents reason and power. The serpent represents the power of the night, darkness, and also the feminine, the chthonic. These are symbolic beliefs that have been obscured in our culture by historical pressures, yet have not disappeared. The true subject of this work is impossible love the deepest despair in love, stemming from the fact that, as in Tristan and Isolde with King Marke, the rival is one’s closest friend, and such a friendship cannot tolerate betrayal.

Thus, when the governor is stabbed during the ball, everyone becomes aware of this contrast: the utmost outward display of social life confronted with the most intimate realms of love and friendship. The result is that three lives are destroyed in the end. The darkness of tragedy prevails the hidden side, the black eagle. One curious detail appears in the cast list concerning Renato, who is described as “Creole.” Creole, that is to say, born in the United States. It is also specified that Creoles are present at the ball. Did the librettist have mixed-race characters in mind? What remains, in any case, is that through his intransigence toward his wife—bordering on sadism and through his jealousy, which is not without recalling Otello, Renato directly reflects a psychology characteristic of the nineteenth century.

In depicting this passion, it is as though Verdi were searching for a new form, even abandoning a grand entrance aria for Amelia, as if the very idea of the prima donna had already become obsolete in his eyes. One senses here that Verdi is moving toward his great works: Don Carlo, Otello, Falstaff… The great lyrical moments of Act II are supremely beautiful, when the music becomes most absolute an outpouring of lyrical emotion. As with Mozart, one ends up wondering whether one prefers the recitatives or the arias. But I never choose between the expression of feeling and what drives the action forward. To my mind, every cubic meter of the stage must be filled with drama and music. Such is the lesson of my old master, Strehler.

Carmen is back to the Bastille Opera in a legendary production by Calixto Bieito. The stage director shares with us his own vision of Bizet’s work and Carmen, a complex woman with a thousand faces.

Your production of Carmen has been touring throughout the world for about twenty years. Do you remember how you first approached this opera?

Calixto Bieito: In directing Carmen, I wanted above all to free this opera from clichés. I didn’t want to imprison it in myth, especially not that surrounding femininity. I approached Carmen like a universal human character, like those of Shakespeare.

How would you describe “your” Carmen?

C.B.: My Carmen is made of flesh and blood. She embodies nobody but herself: she’s a woman of her time with her own DNA. She’s a very concrete character, as is Don José also. Getting back to her humanity meant underlining her numerous contradictions, the sombre and the luminous aspects of her personality.I think it would be a mistake to see Carmen as a femme fatale; she is simply a complex woman with many faces, all of which are revealed by Bizet’s music.

It has been suggested that your Carmen was a prostitute…

C.B.: I am wary of the labels critics apply to my productions. Carmen is not a prostitute, any more than are Frasquita or Mercedes. She does sometimes lead the soldiers on, get them drinking, give herself to them if she feels like it, however brutal they are, and take part in a bit of trafficking as well… But she is above all a solitary creature, not particularly educate, simple. She wants to love, to feel desired, to run, to fly…

The Carmen and José couple you present gives the impression that you go beyond the "fait divers" to focus on a more societal and systemic form of violence…

C.B.: José is a tormented and violent man who battles with himself, with his duty, with his mother’s influence and his obsessions. Through him, I wanted to underline a daily and contextual form of violence. We live in particularly cruel times, in which intolerance and violence affect the social, economic and, of course – I think here in Spain – domestic spheres.

The final murder is presented in a very stark manner…

C.B.: Yes, I contest the idea that Carmen seeks her own death and provokes José in order to be killed. Carmen wants to live and feel alive.

Carmen is one of the world's most widely performed operas. How does one handle that kind of shared preconception, that level of audience expectation? How does one free one’s self from it?

C.B.: Although I am from a family of musicians and was immersed in opera from an early age, I did not want to tackle Carmen weighed down by tradition. I had no image in my head; my work was constructed by listening attentively to the music. For this production we have created different lighting effects that refer as much to Goya or Zurbarán as to the light one might savour in the Moroccan desert. We don’t refer to a precise period: this could be the end of Franco’s dictatorship just as it could be the early eighties… The quintet contains a parodical reference to traditional Spain: I wanted it to be disjointed, sarcastic and cynical. Mercedes and Frasquita wear flamenco costumes that remind us of what the tourists come to see in Spain. Of course, this is heavy with irony.   

In your rereading, the theme of frontiers is widely present. A theme that resonates strongly today…

C.B.: Yes, although given the importance in the media of the immigration question, it might seem opportunist to describe it today as an essential element in a production created nearly twenty years ago. Carmen is a frontier, in a literal sense: physically as well as metaphorically. And when I created this production eighteen years ago, this issue was not as global or as unavoidable as it has since become. The geographical issue is, by the way, emphasised by the treatment of the stage as a desert area. The bull is not an image of virility: it evokes the idea of the solitude belonging to such places. It is just like the bulls that line the roads of Monegros, in particular, near Zaragoza. Mountainous landscapes inhabited by those giants that are visible from miles around. rony.

Interview by Marion Mirande and Simon Hatab

With his Bayreuth theatre, did Richard Wagner anticipate cinema? Often compared to the Wagnerian Gesamkunstwerk on the strength of its all-embracing dimension, the art of cinema has regularly drawn on the unequalled musical and dramatic substance ofThe Ring of the Nibelung.

“The most famous, the most performed, the most thrilling, and the most recorded opera cycle”: these eulogistic words are from a promotional text for the video release of Richard Wagner’sThe Ring of the Nibelung by the Metropolitan Opera of New York (2010 – 2012). This same text boasts, amongst other things, of the hundreds of thousands of people that watched performances of the Ring Cycle, not only at the Met., but above all in cinemas the world over, via satellite broadcast^[1]. This emphasis on a technological dissemination of Wagnerian opera harks back to one of the objectives of the earliest promoters of the audio-visual industries. Indeed, from the period of the pioneer Thomas Alva Edison at the end of the 19^th century onwards, the eventual possibility of linking up the apparatus for recording both sound and image had nourished the dream of offering remote populations the most spectacular of urban entertainments. As for the public demonstration on 6^th August 1926 of Vitaphone’s motion picture sound process, it took place exactly fifty years after the first performancein 1876 of the complete Ring cycle for the inauguration of the Festpielhaus in Bayreuth. The specific arrangements of the Wagnerian stage (darkness, a concealed orchestra, the focus on the “stage image”, the illusion of depth by the bringing forward of the proscenium...) prefigure certain characteristics of the cinema auditorium equipped with loud-speakers.
This vision of Wagner as a prophet of cinema^[2]has influenced aesthetic reflections on the filmic medium. Such reflections have been inspired by the concept of the Gesamkunstwerk, as it is presented in Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft(The Artwork of the Future) (1849) or Oper und Drama(Opera and Drama) (1851), to signal the emergence at the heart of technical and scientific modernity of a great “synthetic theatre”, bringing about a “renaissance of Tragedy”^[3]. Echoing the frustration experienced by Nietzsche regarding the staging of TheRing at Bayreuth^[4], as well as certain reservations on the part of the composer himself^[5], these theoreticians saw in cinema a way of overcoming the supposed limits of stage production. As the critic Emile Vuillermozclaimed in 1927, “... If he had been born fifty years later, Wagner would have written his Ring cycle not for the stage but for the screen. [...] If he had had free recourse to the prestigious resources of cinema, he would have built, not a theatre, but a cinema at Bayreuth.”^[6]The film-maker Abel Gance took a more ironic view: “A new formula for opera will be born. We will hear the singers without seeing them, oh joy, and the Ride of the Walkyries will be made feasible.”^[7] By this argument – still regularly put forward today in this numerical age – the techniques of cinema are capable of realising the slightest nuances of a dreaming poet-musician’s imagination, more particularly in the Ring cycle, underwater pursuits, air-born gallops, fantastic combats, beings that become invisible and the progressive transformations of the sets. But the cinema has above all furthered the ideal of dynamic stylisation which animated, at least with the work of AdolpheAppia onwards, the majority of renovators of the Wagnerian stage. As the experiments of a film-maker like S.M. Eisenstein (director of the 1940 Bolshoi Walküre and inventor of a “vertical” production closely linking musical and visual gestures) demonstrate, cinematic procedures aim to provide directors with a vast iconic palette, as subtle, malleable and poly-expressive as the music itself.

The model of Wagnerian opera profoundly inspired the codes of large-scale cinema productions, which were established during the silent movie period through showings using symphony orchestras. The release of Der Nibelungen(Fritz Lang, 1924) in this context represents a major event. Although far removed in conception from the Wagnerian version of the legend, the film’s early showings worldwide,which were accompanied by extracts borrowed from the Bayreuth master, made constant references to the Ring cycle. More generally, the symbiosis between drama and music, as championed by Wagner, occupied pride of place amongst narrative procedures that have continued to dominate, even today, the production of films. The use of leitmotif was thus imposed on the musical system established in Hollywood during the thirties and forties by composers emerging from European post-romantic culture (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman)^[8]. A French Wagner specialist and contemporary of these composers enthused over their work: “... anyone who wanted to analyse the Ring cycle bar by bar to compare it with such accomplished film scores [...] would no doubt be astonished to discover that Wagner’s music was, so to speak, written for the cinema”.

This alliance between artistic idealism and the cultural industry, as the more radical critics denounced it^[9], has manifested itself in contemporary blockbusters such as the Star Wars franchise (on-going since 1977) and, more directly still, Lord of the Rings (based on Tolkien, 2001-2003) that ally narrative breadth and large-scale spectacle. Not only do the internationally popular symphonic scores for these productions make thorough use of leitmotif, but their narratives draw on the mythological world already reinvented in The Ring of the Nibelung^[10].
This relationship between the mass media and the work of Wagner also appears in the fragmentation of the operas into individual numbers, that is, the selection from them of “greatest hits”, on the traditional model of concert arias or song anthologies. Numerous films have indeed had recourse to extracts from the Ringcycle in the most diverse contexts (from drama to cartoons, as well as burlesque, documentaries, science fiction etc.) in order to offer an epic or dramatic counterpoint to the visual action. A memorable shot from Birth (Jonathan Glazer 2004) testifies to this. The camera focusses at length on the face of the heroine (Nicole Kidman), who is watching a performance of Die Walküre. Although it echoes personal preoccupations that are completely divorced from the musical storm raging off camera, the tormented Prelude to act I is marvellously adapted to the expression of her inwardly troubled state.

The poignant, funereal harmonies relayed by the best-known passages of TheRing have for many years imposed a morbid vision of Wagner, stamped with a sombre solemnity. Whilst some have sought to appropriate this musical power, others have reduced it to swingeing ideological caricature, harking back unfailingly to Hitler’s infamous appropriation of Wagner. Thus Siegfried’s Trauermusikin Götterdämmerunghas been associated just as easily with the first leader of the Soviet Revolution in Three Songs about Lenin (D. Vertov, 1934), or with the Arthurian heroes of John Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur, as with the implacable attitude of the Nazi officers in American fiction from the forties onwards, in which intensive use is made of Siegfried’s leitmotif to qualify the German aggressor, particularly in the propaganda films of Frank Capra. Over and above their function in ridiculing the robust phenotype of Wagnerian heroines (from Bugs Bunny to Fellini), the rousing accents and galvanising virtues of the Ride of the Valkyries haspunctuated the cavalcade of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), then the German and Japanese air raids during Axis news footage during the Second World War, before culminating in a more ambiguous manner – the music being broadcast by the protagonists themselves – during the celebrated helicopter attack in Apocolypse Now (F. F. Coppola, 1979).

Over and above such totalitarian connotations, cinematic references to Wagner have also evoked the mythical backgrounds of his music dramas. More than anyone else, Jürgen Syberberg, in both his theoretical writings and his films, sought tirelessly to explore the multiple facets of the great composer in order to secure his redemption. His complex portraits of King Ludwig (1972) and of Hitler (1977) are peppered with extracts from the Ring Cycle illustrating as much the emphatic perversity of oppressive powers (the Funeral March from Siegfried, the Descent intoNibelheim...) as the resurgence of the romantic ideals perverted by the 3^rd Reich and by the materialism of capitalist societies (the abundantly lyrical finale of Götterdämmerung)^[11]. More recently, in The New World (Terrence Malick, 2007), the Prelude to Das Rhingoldsignalled the ambivalent attitude of the first settlers on American soil, ranging from romantic pantheism to the conquest of virgin territory. As for the Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla from the same opera, in Alien Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017), it marks the triumph ofan artificial being’spretentionsto divine status of. All these instances demonstrate the extent to which TheRing remains influential in the troubled imagination of the 21^stcentury, whether to evoke the weight of history or to reflect on the stakes involved in an eminently technological future.