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.

The Ring fascinates me on several levels. First of all, it’s a work carried by some remarkable female characters, such as Fricka, Erda and Brünnhilde, who are notable by their strength of character and independent nature. It is also a extraordinary family saga where Wagner dissects the complexity of intimate ties, exploring love, traumas transmitted from one person to another and the collective tendancy to self-destruct.

Lastly, this saga resonates powerfully with contemporary society. Behind the storyline we see a system of patriarchal, capitalist domination destined to collapse. That is where human will and the force of nature meet head on. The men strive to build colossal edifices to prove their domination but nature will always win. This is demonstrated in the set of Siegfried: an immense inverted forest, trees suspended over our heads, rising and falling, transforming itself into a powerful machine.

When we started to brainstorm we thought of hierarchical structures, Wotan’s power and his desire to control the world. We immediately envisaged the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin, one of the great symbols of the German Democratic Republic. For decades it was the nerve centre of political authority and the confidence of a regime which became irrelevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I was fascinated for years watching it being dismantled, it was like the collapse of an entire system, to the point where there were just a few fragments left, remnants of a perished city. This image is the point of departure of our Ring. In Rhinegold, Wotan commissions the building of Valhalla, symbol of a system based on hierarchy and control. The architecture develops with the story: in The Valkyrie, the residence is shown as an immense wall which cracks under the effects of war; in Siegfried, nature reasserts itself, leaving mere ruins, traces of a fading civilisation; in Twilight of the Gods, the architecture loses all logical form as the world tips into a radically different state.

What I’ve always loved about Wagner is how he perceives the metamorphosis of space in his music: he introduces these changes into the score, giving the scenery time to travel from one world to another. He calls it Verwandlung, transformation, which is central to my work. I’m only captivated by a set if it transforms before my eyes in symbiosis with the voices and the score. This synergy raises emotions to unimaginable heights.

One of the main challenges has been the postponement of the production because of Covid restrictions: we feared that a ten-year-old project might no longer be relevant today. But our initial concept, that of an enormous metallic Valhalla, was actually very flexible. We made it a gigantic data centre riddled with cables, mirroring the growing influence technology has on our everyday lives.

We soon realised we needed to rethink the set of Twilight of the Gods. The world has changed immensely these last ten years: there are more wars and we can no longer rely on established values, such as democracy. This last episode is therefore a reflexion on collective amnesia and the loss of memory where elements of the previous operas only reemerge in the form of ruins of a lost world.

The richness of a project such as this owes everything to the collaboration between the different members of the artistic team and the synergy of their work. The Valkyrie is a good example. When lit, the aluminium panel has a fascinating presence: it can reflect like polished silver then change dramatically to profound darkness. The perforated panels can both let light through, disappearing to reveal a hidden world behind this monumental creation, and serve as a video screen. We found a common language where every element supports the others, interweaving to create an infinitely larger entity.

I come from the video art world, and everything around me influences my work: contemporary art, literature, art history. I first heard Wagner’s music in the cinema – it’s been used in over a hundred films – and The Ride of the Valkyries is inextricably linked with Apocalypse Now. There’s nothing anodine there, this music is connected with war and destruction, we have to deal with that heritage.

Representing it in video form is an honour for me, working on these interludes has given me the chance to create actual musical films which complement the action on stage. The Ring interests me now as it tells the story of the end of a system based on power, possession and domination. It represents a Zeitenwende – a change of era – and it’s what we’ve been living since the covid pandemic: wars, profound political change, we can no longer take nothing for granted. In our version of the Ring, gold is a metaphor for artificial intelligence. We see it already in Rhinegold and its power continues to utterly transform the world all the way to oblivion. While Wotan clings onto the old, outmoded system and sacrifices his children to save his own interests, Brünnhilde understands that she needs to sacrifice herself to return the Ring to the Rhine and break the vicious circle of past errors. She is a figure of hope.

Videos are never used to illustrate a scene or provide a set. They add a layer of interpretation which intensifies the work’s dramatic meaning and shows that which the stage cannot: memories, emotional states, metamorphoses, history, places.

In our Ring, technology is central to the concept and video is omnipresent in projections on the set but also directly on the stage. Nowadays, a camera is also an instrument of control and surveillance. From the very beginning of The Valkyrie, Siegmund flees across a polluted landscape, caught in the lens of a CCTV camera. The cameras lurk on stage, too, as if nothing can ever escape their attention.

I also use a thermal imaging camera, the type that hunters use to locate a prey’s body heat. This tracking device then becomes an artistic tool: Siegmund and Sieglinde appear as hunted animals but also as the last creatures who still emanate heat and love. They represent the last remnants of heat and life in the middle of an otherwise dead world.

We’ve been working on this Ring for eight years and the world has changed significantly in that time. Before lockdown we had a different concept. Then covid interrupted the rehearsals. We subsequently put up Lohengrin in Berlin in an empty auditorium with the premiere on livestream. The world was deserted, we couldn’t go out, we had to make do with ourselves. After that difficult period, we felt we couldn’t tell the story of the Ring the same way. What followed was charged with new urgency. Our common language was refined over a number of years.

The video aspect is lodged between the set and lighting design: Rebecca Ringst created the sets with Calixto Bieito, I inserted the video and Michael Bauer developed the lighting in conjunction with the film. With Calixto, we often work against the music. Where Wagner unleashes all his forces, I often chose the opposite: calm, silent images in slow motion. This discrepancy creates an interesting tension between moving pictures and music. And sometimes in rehearsal we found that, all the stage elements – the set, video, light and music – despite their differences finally converged in a one and single direction allowing the whole meaning to burst forth.