Gold Struck Once Again in Victoria: Barry Millington reports on the revived ‘Ring’ in Melbourne

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed Armfield, conducted Inkinen, Melbourne, 2016.

March 2017, Volume 11, Number 1, 77–80.

At precisely the time Wagner was working on Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in the early 1850s, Melbourne was in the throes of a goldrush. Gold had been discovered there in 1851 and within a couple of years thousands of prospectors had descended on the state of Victoria in search of a glittering fortune. Like Alberich, many of them were initially willing to give up connubial pleasures, though before long women were being recruited to carry out domestic and procreative functions. An exhibition on the Victorian goldrush at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne current with the revived production of the Ring there last November offered food for thought about the parallels – down to the settlement just over 100 miles to the east of Melbourne which became known as Walhalla. Wagner, who was always well versed in current affairs, could hardly have been unaware of the goldrushes in Victoria and California. He would also have known that gold was actually being discovered in the Rhine too in his lifetime, as a result of a huge hydraulic engineering project.

All of which provides some sort of local context for the stated environmentalism of Neil Armfield’s production, first seen in 2013.