Katherine Syer, ‘Ring’ in the New Century

In Kasper Bech Holten’s production of Wagner’s Ring, Woglinde raises a glass to us, the audience – a festive gesture that also celebrates the first complete Ring cycle in Copenhagen since 1912. The production is already under way when the scrim rises on the set of the tetralogy’s beginning, placing us in terms of design in the 1920s or early 30s. During the Prelude, we have seen Brünnhilde amidst books and relics in her father’s library, with intertitles that set up a flashback of fifty years as she begins probing the strange history of her family and the path that led her to betray Siegfried.