Quarts into Pint Pots: As Matthew Rye discovers, no German theatre seems too small or unambitious to stage Wagner’s most demanding music dramas

Ever since Angelo Neumann first took Wagner’s Ring beyond the confines of Bayreuth and out on tour in the 1880s, smaller theatres have been staging the composer’s more personnel-demanding dramas. This summer offered an opportunity to experience how two of Germany’s most bijoux operatic venues, both of them former court theatres, coped with the issue of squeezing a Wagnerian quart into a theatrical pint pot.