Body Building the ‘Ring’: Tash Siddiqui is deeply impressed by the new Munich ‘Ring’ cycle, yet ultimately disappointed by the lack of a larger vision

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed Kriegenburg, conducted Nagano, Munich, 2012.

November 2012, Volume 6, Number 3, 67–72.

Under the umbrella title Rund um dem Ring (Around the Ring), Andreas Kriegenburg’s Ring cycle was irradiated by a range of accompanying projects. For example, in Wagnerin the Berlin director Sven Holm and a cast including Dame Gwyneth Jones compared Wagner’s female characters to the Wagner family’s womenfolk. Then there was ‘The Ring with Spencer Tunick’, a human body installation in which about 1700 ‘art lovers’ posed nude in the city centre. Moving from the delectably camp to the deadly serious, in Hacking Wagner the unofficial ban on Wagner in Israel was explored by the Israeli choreographer Saar Magal and her German and Israeli dancers. To see the Ring cycle in Munich, self-styled ‘Richard-Wagner-Stadt’, undoubtedly adds a certain historical frisson to the proceedings. It was, after all, in this very theatre – then the Königliches Hof-und Nationaltheater – that Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were first performed in 1869 and 1870. Munich was also, of course, ‘Hauptstadt der Bewegung’, and it was past this very theatre – yearning for heroic action and inspired by their Siegfried-style ‘stab in the back’ legend – that Hitler and Ludendorff marched as their 1923 Putsch fizzled out. How would the Munich team engage with this complex, messy work and its history?