A Ring with Two Masters: Touring Germany’s opera houses, Matthew Rye creates his own, itinerant ‘Ring’ cycle and catches a pair of ‘Meistersinger’ performances en route

Reviews of Das Rheingold, directed Münstermann, conducted Huber, Pforzheim, 2018; Die Walküre, directed Peters-Messer, conducted Ishii, Magdeburg 2018; Siegfried, directed Neidhardt, conducted Vestmann, Oldenburg, 2018; Götterdämmerung, directed Stöppler, conducted García Calvo, Chemnitz, 2018; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Mottl, conducted Lange, Wiesbaden, 2018; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Lowery, conducted Soddy, Mannheim, 2018.

March 2019, Volume 13, Number 1, 70–76.

A smattering of one-off productions and continuing ‘episodes’ in ongoing Ring cycles lent themselves last autumn to a peripatetic, self-contrived tetralogy, visiting four widely spaced German cities over a two-month period. Two were indeed standalone productions, with no indication that their theatres would be following up with a complete cycle; the other two were the latest stages in continuing projects, the last the conclusion of a four-director cycle – what my own cycle effectively became.

The itinerant Ring didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts, though.