Taste Triumphs over Drama: Mark Berry reviews the final two instalments of the Guy Cassiers ‘Ring’

Reviews of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, directed Cassiers, conducted Barenboim, Schillertheater, 2013.

November 2013, Volume 7, Number 3, 73–6.

And so, the Berlin State Opera’s Ring reached completion. Nothing has changed with respect to the bafflingly vacuous production served up by Guy Cassiers and his coleagues from the Antwerp Toneelhuis. It is not that ideas are banal or underdeveloped; rather, there seem to be no ideas at all, a truly extraordinary state of affairs with respect to Wagner of all dramatists. The production apparently aspires to the condition of something one might see or have seen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, whether Otto Schenk or the still worse Robert Lepage, albeit with ‘refined’ visual taste. Quite why anyone would think tasteful Wagner desirable is unclear. There are pretty stage effects, sometimes from video, sometimes not, but effects without cause they remain.