All’s Not So Fair in Love and War: There’s violence aplenty in Paris, as Roland Matthews discovers

Review of Die Walküre, directed Bieito, conducted Heras-Casado, Opéra Bastille, Paris, 2025.

March 2026, Volume 20, Number 1, 58–60.

Fabled bad boy of European opera Calixto Bieito may have fallen out of favour in the UK after his series of iconoclastic productions for English National Opera in the noughties, but in France his star shines seemingly ever more brightly, and he has now been entrusted with the Opéra Bastille’s new Ring. For his first cycle Bieito has largely abandoned the earthy, scatological gestures for which he is best known. It is not so much that Wagner has recently elicited a more sober response (his 2022 Tristan und Isolde for Vienna featured prolific nudity); rather that, like many a radical director before him, he understands that undue intervention often becomes counter-productive in Wagner’s cosmology. This Paris production, though, has much that is unorthodox still.