Below the Gold Standard: Mark Berry has reservations about the Aix ‘Siegfried’

November 2008, Volume 2, Number 3, 73–5.

I was at something of a disadvantage in seeing this, the third instalment of the Aix Ring, without having seen the first two parts. (The dramas are being staged in turn year by year, repeated at the following season’s Salzburg Easter Festival.) Siegfried is arguably the least well suited of the four dramas to viewing in isolation. There may also have been visual references I failed to pick up. However, I suspect that such references were few, given the minimalist quality of the staging. Knowing, for instance, that Brünnhilde was put to sleep on the chairs on which we subsequently discovered her was unsurprising but unilluminating.