Stuttgart Spins the Saga: Arnold Whittall gives a cautious welcome to an innovative cycle

This Stuttgart Ring was first staged in 2002–3 and issued on DVD by TDK in 2004. In 2007 the DVDs were re-released by EuroArts, to coincide with a special-price CD issue of the cycle from Naxos.

The Stuttgart Staatsoper has had a place of honour in the Wagner Pantheon since serving as Wieland Wagner’s ‘winter Bayreuth’ in the 1950s. Fifty years on, it sought to share in the post-Wieland vogue for a production style which not only sets aside the composer’s instructions but also calls into question Wieland’s main post-Appia aspiration: to be ‘true to the music’ (see Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 286). Of course, what being ‘true to the music’ actually implies is a subject of endless and often fruitless debate.