Scandal in Munich: God is dead, Wagner is alive

It is clear that Wagner never intended his Rheingold to be scrapped in a ruined church whose graffiti announces the death of God, but it is likely that he would welcome such a reading after looming like a ghost over the summer performances of the Munich Festival.

The abject grandeur of this production by Tobias Kratzer at the Bavarian State Opera lies not in honoring the fetish of myth, but in violating it. In returning the "Ring" cycle to the primitive violence of greed, power, and plunder . No harps, no romanticism, no freshwater nymphs. Here, souls are trafficked like someone reselling a password to the underworld of the deep web. And the goldsmithing of gold doesn't shine: it corrupts, intoxicates, degrades.

Kratzer, that talented heretic who had already dismembered Tannhäuser in Bayreuth, doesn't offer an opera: he proposes an attack. The curtain doesn't open, it tears. The spectator doesn't attend; he appears unarmed. And he does so before a universe in ruins, where the Rhine nymphs behave like idiotic adolescents, where Alberich isn't a fantastical gnome, but a miserable, scorned wretch, and where Wotan—embodied by a majestic, imposing Lawrence Brownlee— resembles a CEO in the throes of an identity crisis rather than a Norse god.

Kratzer transfers the Wagnerian cycle to the dunghill of contemporary times. Here, violence is negotiated in bleak offices.

The result is a profane ceremony , a descent into the sewers of power, where the gods have lost their dignity, men their innocence, and the Rhinegold no longer shines: it corrodes. Kratzer transposes the Wagnerian cycle to the dunghill of contemporary times. No sacred trees or brass armor. Here, violence is negotiated in soulless offices. Torture is practiced in garages. The plot is implanted as a suburban dystopia in which nightmares are not dreamed: they are suffered. There is no refuge for the symbol. Nor nostalgia for the legend. Wagner's fable becomes a social report. A settling of scores. A terminal newscast where the original crime is not the theft of the gold, but systemic abuse.

The set is rabid, uncomfortable, contaminated. A burning church that worships a dead God. It has the texture of concrete, the stench of burnt plastic. An aesthetic somewhere between Blade Runner and a provincial notary's office. The staging is a battlefield. Explosions, surveillance cameras, military uniforms, red neon lights, and lots of grime. A lot. There's no room for beauty, because Kratzer refutes it in an allergic sense. He replaces it with horror, with bewilderment, with an aesthetic of collapse that Wagner anticipated, unwittingly or knowingly. The Rhinegold is not a treasure: it's a virus. And Jurowski's musical reading conveys this with bacteriological precision.

Because Vladimir Jurowski doesn't direct, he dissects. He sculpts a surgical, tense, fat-free reading. No romantic languor or mannerism. Here there is tension, electricity, thunder. The pit becomes a living organism, breathing with panic and fury. Jurowski pushes everything toward the abyss, aware that the Rheingold is not a ceremonial overture, but a declaration of war.

Jurowski extracts a physical, immediate sound from the pit with the precision of a forensic scientist. The music builds and breaks down without ornamentation, without rhetoric. The cyclical nature of the score is perceived as a latent threat , like a biological pulse. Nothing in its direction suggests consolation. The Rheingold doesn't sound like a prologue, but rather like a contained explosion. Each transition is a cut, an incision. Each crescendo drags a shadow with it. The result is an opera that doesn't advance, it rushes.

In this landscape of moral collapse, Lawrence Brownlee's Wotan is a revealing anomaly. His clear, round voice, less cavernous than usual in German theater, gives the character an unknown vulnerability. Wotan no longer enforces the law; he seeks shortcuts. He makes deals. He postpones. He becomes entangled in his own cunning with the cynical smile of someone who knows he has lost his aura.

Brownlee embodies a pragmatic god, a retreating seducer, someone who has already accepted the erosion of his power without completely abandoning his formality. He doesn't need to raise his voice. He simply measures it out. Insinuates. Suggests that authority, like gold, also rusts.

And Loge, his squire, glides through the folds of this decadence. Sean Panikkar sings of him with a mixture of poise and disbelief. His character doesn't seek to resolve the conflict, but rather to understand it, exploit it, and ironize it. He's the only character who isn't outraged. The only one who remains cool, lucid, a little above it all. Loge knows that the world isn't built on principles, but on interests. And he moves through it with the lightness of someone who has given up believing.

The goddess Fricka, played by Ekaterina Gubanova , bursts forth like a centrifugal force. There is no trace of hysteria or complaint. Her presence has the solidity of the irrevocable. She doesn't argue, she decrees. She is the conscience of the pact and the discomfort of duty. The only truly tragic figure in this traumatic inaugural episode. The character who desires nothing, except for others not to forget what they swore. Her song has something of a judgment. And her figure imposes even in silence.

The entrance to Walhalla is more reminiscent of a bankrupt shopping mall than a celestial Olympus. Glory is no longer desirable.

The fall of the gods is staged without solemnity. There is no fog, no rainbow, no promises. What we witness is a bureaucratic procession toward a decrepit building, watched over by fake lights, escorted by cheap fireworks. The entrance to Valhalla is more reminiscent of a bankrupt shopping mall than a celestial Olympus. Glory is no longer desirable. All that remains is the empty gesture of conquest. A liturgy that no one believes in anymore.

In fact, Kratzer doesn't illustrate the work, he vampirizes it. He turns it into a dirty mirror. He strips it of all idealization. His Rheingold doesn't pose enigmas or propose conclusions. He stages defeat: that of the gods, that of men, that of any form of innocence. The opera collapses from its original premises. And in that collapse lies Wagner's true modernity. Not as a prophet, but as a notary. Not as a mystic, but as a chronicler. What happens on stage doesn't belong to the world of fiction. It is an x-ray of reality. Of power that lies. Of greed that corrodes. Of art that, finally, stops embellishing and begins to tell the truth.