Admin

Organization

Conductor

Léo Warynski

Stage director

Antoine Gindt

Brémaud

Élodie Chadmauret

Dramaturge

Aleksi Barrière

Translator

Set designer

Elise Capdenat

Lighting designer

Daniel Lévy

Costume designer

Fanny Brouste

Singer

Tenor

Marc Haffner

Siegmund

Soprano

Anna Sohn

Sieglinde

Bass

Martin Blasius

Hunding

Cécile De Boever

Brünnhilde

Baritone

Ivan Ludlow

Wotan

Nora Petrocenko

Helmwige

Melody Louledjian

Gerhilde

Mezzo-soprano

Cheri Rose Katz

Waltraute

Cité de la Musique-Philharmonie

I Teatri di Reggio Emilia

Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg

Théâtre de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

Die Walküre -  (The Valkyrie)

Reggio Emilia

Italy

Teatro Municipale Valli

Private

Public

The Valkyrie

Approved

What is Ring Saga
It is an adaptation of Wagner's great opera, The Ring of the Nibelungen , made in 1990 by the English composer Johnathan Dove and the English opera director Graham Vick.
It was commissioned by the City of Birmingham Touring Opera, a facility dedicated to the production of works in reduced format.
The aim of the project is to get out of traditional opera institutions and allow a wider audience to meet these works, taking up - with new impetus - the Wagnerian idea of ​​Festival
 
 
The Ring of the Nibelung, one version
 
It took four years of preparation (of obstinacy, sometimes) and perseverance, to make Ring Saga , this scenic festival in four works that we could also have titled Der Ring des Nibelungen, a version : since it is our version, at the same time faithful to the Wagnerian text, free from the conventions of its time, and naturally - starting from the reduction established by Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove in 1990 - in search of its own form. Once the taboo of "adaptation" is overcome, the question of Richard Wagner's work is posed: is there a coherent life beyond the original form, and what is the form of this work?
 
This show is an artistic bet for us; the comparison between the lyric grail and the means of realization, which we wanted to keep faithful to our knowledge and skills. It resides especially in the desire for collegiality and responsibility, which are founding principles.
 
By choosing “Scenic Festival” as the subtitle of the Nibelungen Ring , Richard Wagner indicated beyond the gigantism of the opera, his desire for a moment of exception, a parenthesis in ordinary life, at least in that of the ordinary music addict. In dedicating ourselves to Ring Saga we throw ourselves into a complete and unprecedented adventure, which we also want to be “itinerant”.
 
The version made by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick in the early 1990s has garnered praise from all observers, including the most skeptical about the opportunity to reduce Wagner's masterpiece in terms of length and orchestral staff. The tale of the epic and the musical strength are intact. The solutions adopted in the dramatic and musical conduct are coherent and effective.
 
Thus, even if reduced to nine hours and to an orchestra of 18 musicians, the score retains a real immeasuration, however, opening up new possibilities that motivate our project.
 
The first is to rediscover the initial idea of ​​"festival", concentrating the four works in a short period. Jonathan Dove's version actually allows you to cross the epic in a weekend (three consecutive days from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon), and thus give the viewer this unique moment imagined by Wagner: immersion in the heart of the saga of Nibelungen. The second possibility, more technical but no less fundamental, is that of the vocal style. Since the voices do not have to compete with a very large orchestra, an original recruitment of singers is made possible, most of whom we have met in our other projects.
 
Parallel to these new possibilities, our conception feeds on our reflections and our practices on musical theater and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is commonly admitted that the Ring is the final outcome of the nineteenth century opera, a sort of hyper-torphy of the musical, poetic and theatrical means of the time, a fulfillment of the composer's genius, of his obsessive and boundless ambition. We will consider the work keeping in mind the legacy of what has happened to it, stylistically and conceptually, that is, effectively as a re-creation.
 
Approaching it in this way, more modest only in appearance, with an instrumentation marked by the typical ensemble of the twentieth century, opens up further theatrical avenues: unique and evolutionary stage set, attention focused on the relationship between narration and action, use of today's image technologies to create the extraordinary sensation of enveloping the spectator in the scene ... We set ourselves the aim of fulfilling the function of art defended by Wagner himself: to weld a community around an exceptional event, whose main themes are more topical than ever: conflicts generational and power, problems of transmission, looting of common goods for the benefit of private interests, culture of catastrophe and fear ...
 
Antoine Gindt , register
 
 
 
About Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick's version
 
The English composer Jonathan Dove re-orchestrated the Tetralogy for a formation of 18 instrumentalists, preserving all the sections that make up Wagner's orchestra, but reducing them in size. The woods are one: flute (and piccolo), oboe (and English horn), clarinet and bassoon. Each brass family is represented, with two horns, a trumpet, a trombone, a tuba. Percussion, a harp and an organ are added. Finally the strings are reduced to the sextet: two violins, a viola, two cellos, a double bass. The actual therefore follows the configuration of a chamber orchestra usual in the musical production of the twentieth century, and that Wagner himself had experimented in his famous Siegfried-Idyll, a piece which also incorporates a large number of leitmotifs present in Tetralogy . The Wagnerian language, of contrapuntal essence, fits perfectly with this type of lighter ensemble.
 
The lightening of the orchestral texture also makes it possible to approach with greater ease the technical constraints placed in Wagner by the balance between voices and large orchestra. It is of great interest to take advantage of this version to rediscover a vocal style closer to the bel canto that was practiced at the time of Wagner, when the performance tradition of specialized, large and powerful voices did not yet exist, to which his works are now entrusted. .
In addition, this configuration, which is less heavy and tiring for the singers, allows the distribution of several similar roles by weaving to the same singer without risk.
 
The challenge posed by the arrangement consists in following closely the choices made by Wagner in his orchestration, and in making sure to regain the expressive breadth of the original great orchestra. Properly speaking, Dove does not re-orchestrate Wagner, because he almost always retains the timbres of the original score. To give more space to the sound of the ensemble, Jonathan Dove adds an organ. The reduction involves a rebalancing of potential forces. When he cannot keep the original orchestration, Dove takes care to safeguard the original idea with an instrumentation as close as possible to the original model. Furthermore, the amplification possibilities eliminate any balance problems that the orchestra might encounter.
 
The orchestral condensation work is matched by the contraction in the duration of the four works, created in collaboration with the playwright and director Graham Vick. In order to preserve coherence while reducing the duration, the arranger shortened some orchestral pages (the beginning and the orchestral transitions between the prologue scenes), suppressed scenes of secondary dramatic interest (for example, the mistreatment that Alberich inflicts on Mime in the prologue), condensed episodes without scratching their meaning (as in the monologue of Wotan / Viandante in Siegfried ). Down to the smallest detail, Dove has kept the original musical discourse without changing a single note. Elisions and contractions are therefore imperceptible to those who do not know the text in depth.
 
Léo Warynski , conductor

English

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

Crew

Co-Producer