Trojan Horse or White Elephant? Wayne Gooding finds the technology of the Met ‘Ring’ more impressive than its dramatic content

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed Lepage, conducted Luisi, New York Met, 2012.

November 2012, Volume 6, Number 3, 74–9.

There are a couple of lines in Wagner’s Dream, Susan Froemke’s documentary about the making of the Metropolitan Opera’s latest staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen, where the iconic revolving, 24-plank unit set is referred to in terms of ‘a poisoned gift’ and ‘a Trojan Horse’. Both epithets may have been intended as tongue-in-cheek (the ‘poisoned gift’ line is director Robert Lepage’s), but in the end they may prove serious assessments. The much-heralded cycle (‘visionary’ as Met General Manager Peter Gelb likes to promote it) has taken a critical drubbing with the release of each instalment over the past two years, and reaction to the complete cycles presented this spring was hardly more positive.