Video enters the Gesamtkunstwerk: Wayne Gooding is stimulated by the visual and theatrical components of the Valencia ‘Ring’

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed La Fura dels Baus and Padrissa, conducted Mehta, Valencia, 2009.

There’s nothing new about opera on film and video, but there was an exciting sense that La Fura dels Baus’s staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the June 2009 Festival of the Mediterranean in Valencia pushed the creative use of film and video in opera to a new threshold. The video is only one element of a thrillingly theatrical production that relies as much on circus acrobatics, mime, hand and mechanically driven stage machinery to engage the audience as it does on computer technology. But the video component – used for both scenic presentation and dramatic development – is as much of a connecting link between the four operas as the music.