Philippe Olivier, The ‘Ring’ in France 1911–2006

Is France a land of contradictions? In spite of Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau’s era-defining Ring at Bayreuth from 1976 to 1980 the erstwhile grande nation has shown in its constant inclination towards abstraction and theory an enduring inability to stage a decent home-grown production of the epic. This article is concerned solely with those Wagner productions in the land of Michel Foucault which bore fruit, between 1911 and 2009, in complete stagings of the tetralogy.