Keith Warner, ‘A Theatre of Generosity’: The Ideas Behind His Production of the ‘Ring’ at Covent Garden

Could I begin by asking you to formulate your basic conception of the Ring: what you were trying to do, how you approached it?

I think that in the twenty-five or so years I’ve been working I’ve moved further and further away from conceptual productions – productions that are only about one thing and in which every detail is driven towards one goal. So in a way it’s weird trying to talk about what that goal might be, because it’s something I’ve tried to avoid in preparing the cycle: I wanted it to be multifarious in its possibilities. However, I think it is true to say that there has been one idea which has driven my own interest in examining the whole piece as opposed to the four individual operas, which is this: when Wagner talks famously about the Ring being an epic tale that contains the beginning and ending of the world, what he’s talking about is not a Tolkien-type fable: he’s talking about something that pertains to the development of man at a specific point in the 19th century.