Der Ring des Nibelungen (DVD): Patrice Chéreau, Pierre Boulez, Donald McIntyre, Gwyneth Jones

One of the most important opera productions ever

One of the most important opera productions ever is still great music theatre more than 30 years after its premiere. It is not easy to understand that this production could cause such a scandal in 1976. Götterdämmerung almost had to be stopped two times because reactionaries whistled during the performance. In the end it developed into the Bayreuth Festival's greatest success, with the final Götterdämmerung curtain call lasting for 85 minutes.

The video filming and editing is superb (something that can't be taken for granted these days), but rather grainy compared to contemporary standards.

The Pierre Boulez / Patrice Chéreau Ring on Amazon

Reviews and comments

The stage-sets and costumes for the Ring are impossibly bizarre as far as I 'm concerned - but this kind of parody, blasphemy desecration of the temple is obviously what people want today - I'm never going to understand it!.
Winifred Wagner (quotation from Winifred Wagner - a Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth)

This is some of the most passionate Wagner one will ever see and hear. Boulez’s phenomenal ear clarifies textures yet, like Karajan, he is perfectly willing to broaden the scale and to intensify the emotional level when required. There is a host of other memorable performances, not least Donald Macintyre’s Wotan and Gwyneth Jones’s Brünnhilde. Yet it is the epoch-making nature of the production, resulting initially in death-threats for Boulez and Chéreau, which truly makes this mandatory viewing. Chéreau’s Personenregie is more or less unrivalled. His connection of the drama to its nineteenth-century political and social context is never didactic and often, even now, quite revelatory. Joachim Herz may have done something not entirely dissimilar in Leipzig but now the rest of the world had the opportunity to witness a searing mythological, historical, and contemporary drama, which unfolds mesmerizingly from the opening mise-en-scène (designer: Richard Peduzzi) of a Rhenish hydroelectric dam. Wagner production was transformed forever.
Mark Berry

Whether by luck or foresight, the decision to hire French director Patrice Chéreau was among the most important and courageous of Wolfgang Wagner´s entire tenure at the Bayreuth Festival.
[...]
Together Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez created a Centenary Ring in the truest meaning of the word: Simply the finest Nibelungen Ring production in the Centenary history of the work. Even after more than 30 years the power and freshness of this staging is virtually undiminished. As directorial concept and execution it remains unsurpassed, the closest competition, at least on DVD, being Harry Kupfer and Daniel Barenboim´s later Bayreuth Ring.
Mostly Opera

Pierre Boulez / Patrice Chéreau Ring on Amazon

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Der Ring des Nibelungen on DVD

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