Michael White enjoys an environmental Rheingold, a quest for happiness and an epic celebration of Stephen Sondheim.
As someone put it to me last month, Wagner’s Ring is “fairy tales with music”. But it’s more: a history of the world from start to finish, told by somebody with an agenda and some questionable prejudices, but a moral compass too. In the four operas of his mighty operatic cycle he surveys the whole world order – humans, gods and things between – and finds it wanting. Lacking love, driven by greed, en route to self-destruction. Though con- ceived in the mid-19th century, none of this is hard to recognise today. There was a time when stage directors liked to read the Ring with hindsight as a horror story about Nazi Germany, and smother it in swastikas. More recently the horror has become environmental. The Rheingold that has just begun the new Royal Opera Ring, directed by Barrie Kosky, indicates that climate change and despoilation of the earth are going to be central issues as the Cycle unfolds.
