Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, 1 October 2025
Richard Wagner: Siegfried
What would Siegfried be without Andreas Schager? The man is truly a phenomenon. Ever since his international breakthrough he has seemed to sing the great, punishing Wagner roles without pause, on every major stage, with undiminished brilliance. At first one might have wondered how long he could keep this up. But now it’s been at least sixteen years, and the 54-year-old still sings without the slightest sign of wear.
After his sensational Tristan in Bayreuth, he now returns as the fearless hero in the Berlin State Opera’s revived Ring, where he had already sung at the 2022 premiere.
Siegfried is his role: he doesn’t merely play him, he is this cocky youth who knows no fear, and he even manages to bring the best out of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging, with all its eccentric trademarks.
Unlike in Die Walküre—where the singers can live through their characters with gripping emotion in harmony with the libretto, without being forced into bizarre stage business—the direction here becomes far more absurd.
Much of the movement looks at best random, often ridiculous—such as when Wotan leads Erda (superbly sung by Anna Kissjudit, the best of our time in the role) into the room, only to wake her from “deep sleep” one minute later. And the endlessly rotating stage grows tiresome, especially when it adds technical noise, as in the Prelude to the Neidhöhle, where it distracts from the sinister tremolos in the lower strings, the menacing interjections of the timpani, and the ghostly exposed intervals of the contrabass tuba.
Beyond that, it remains unclear what Tcherniakov is actually aiming at with his forced attempts to squeeze the drama into his staging concept. A kind of “Truman Show” about a sinister system that monitors, controls, and exploits people at every step could have been an intriguing idea. But the five “phases” in the test lab don’t fit—neither the “relaxation phase” of the Forest Murmurs, nor Siegfried’s “search for an inner helper” with a kindly naturopath in a white coat replacing the forest bird (a slim, attractive soprano: Kathrin Zukowski).
For all that, Schager clearly enjoys himself as the brash, rough-edged troublemaker: teasing his foster father Mime, making noise, casually smoking a cigarette, telling the annoying old man his unvarnished opinion. Mime, whom Stephan Rügamer gives a striking, eccentric profile with his distinctive timbre, fails to reforge the broken sword Nothung.
Schager’s Siegfried then wrestles with Fafner—here staged as a Stone Age monster—powerfully embodied by Peter Rose. At 64, Rose still commands a deep, versatile bass, and here appears even more robust than in Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau earlier this year, where he sang the fragile Captain Morosus.
Next Siegfried must face the Wanderer, a visibly aged Wotan (once again magnificent: Michael Volle, with his sonorous baritone and flawless diction). He blocks Siegfried’s path to Brünnhilde’s rock, but after only a few exchanges he has to yield before the superior hero, who mocks him with open disrespect.
At the center of it all stands once more the Berlin Staatskapelle under Christian Thielemann, laying down the atmospheric foundation. Tubas, horns, and woodwinds shine repeatedly with exposed solos, but the beating heart of the orchestra is the string section with its warm, dark, beautiful sound.
And I counted six harps in the pit this evening—their moment comes in alliance with the tender violins when Siegfried reaches the “sunlit height” and awakens Brünnhilde (‘Heil dir Sonne! Heil dir Licht!’).
What a joy that Anja Kampe, at this point and in the moving ‘Ewig war ich, ewig bin ich,’ produces her finest tones. She masters her Brünnhilde admirably, with only minor, forgivable sharpness in some of the fiendish fortissimo high notes. But apart from legendary heroines of a long-past era—Kirsten Flagstad or the incomparable Birgit Nilsson—hardly anyone today can truly do it better.
By the end, it seems almost as if Kampe and Schager, so perfectly attuned to each other in every respect, are trying to outdo one another in the final bars of their triumphant love duet, ‘Leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod’ Remarkable! You don’t experience that every day.
