Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, 28 September 2025
Richard Wagner: Die Walküre
So much for the claim that Wagner’s music dramas are mostly about loudness, as is often wrongly asserted. Anyone who heard Christian Thielemann with the Staatskapelle Berlin will have been struck instead by how, in Die Walküre, when performed properly, it is the quiet passages that dominate.
The drama may open with a stormy and stirring prelude, but already in the first meeting of the Wälsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, the mood is charged with a quiet intensity. Eric Cutler and Vida Miknevičiūtė work well together as the Wälsung pair, living through their roller-coaster of passion, pain, hope, and despair with full commitment and radiant presence. Only at times in the upper register does his tenor sound a bit narrow. But as singer-actors they shine, expressing emotion first in glances and small gestures, before desire finally bursts forth in ‘Winterstürme‘, which Cutler delivers with impressive tone.
Above all, this performance will be remembered for its tenderness and delicacy, which again and again interrupt heated dialogue: when Brünnhilde assures the deeply dejected father of the gods of her loyalty after his bitter marital quarrel (‘Wer bin ich, wär‘ ich dein Wille nicht’); when she explains first hesitantly, then with growing assurance, the reasons for her disobedience (‘War es so schmählich, was ich verbrach?’); or when Siegmund takes one last look at his beloved before his fateful battle (‘Leblos scheint sie, die dennoch lebt’).
In such moments, the attentive listener hardly dares to breathe, sharing in the plight of these luminous figures who stand on lost ground, fighting selflessly for love, forgetting for a time that they are in a theater at all. Soon enough, though, revulsion sets in toward the characters who show no humanity—whether Claudia Mahnke’s sharply drawn Fricka, a moralizing hysteric who forces Wotan to sacrifice his son, or Hunding, portrayed by Mika Kares with his dark coloured bass as a callous villain beyond compare, who orders his wife to put Siegmund, the unwelcome, unarmed intruder, in chains so he cannot escape vengeance.
And just as Michael Volle explores every layer of Wotan—at times the most believably sorrowful of gods, bound by contracts and no longer free, at other times the most irascible of dictators, merciless toward his proud, daring child—he, too, elicits more rejection than sympathy at points.
A better Brünnhilde than Anja Kampe could hardly be imagined at his side. The two meet on equal terms, with great radiance, profound command of the text, and strong stage presence. The most moving moment comes before Wotan’s final farewell, when father and daughter lie in each other’s arms, saying goodbye in tears to the longing music from the pit. A deeply touching, reconciliatory close to a long and grueling conflict.
And the orchestra? It unfolded the score in all its splendor, full of color, with the finest dynamic shadings, just as the night before. Only in the Ride of the Valkyries did Thielemann unleash the full force of sound. In between, one could marvel at how quietly and clearly, amid the marital strife, a single horn intoned a brilliant solo (‘Nur eines höre’). Trombones, horns, and tubas sounded solemn and majestic, while the clarinet’s plaintive lines, full of soul, wrapped tenderly around the humiliated Brünnhilde. And when she reached perhaps her most beautiful line—‘Der diese Liebe mir ins Herz gehaucht’—it felt as though light itself broke into the darkness.
At the end, Wotan and Brünnhilde drift ever farther apart on stage, until the music dies away. A chamber-like drama of such intensity is rarely experienced. What an evening. Grand theater!
