When the E flat major sounds of the horns that mark the bottom of the Rhine rise from the depths of a lonely piano bass, Richard Wagner's “Rheingold” prelude becomes a kind of gloomy raindrop prelude. At the beginning of the evening before, the audience looked at the “Ring des Nibelungen” in the Great House of the Wiesbaden State Theater. Its artistic director Uwe Eric Laufenberg brought Wagner's tetralogy to the stage there from 2016, as before in Linz. The resumption of the "Ring", which will be shown in front of an audience in Wiesbaden in two performance cycles after the resumption of play, must, however, make a major compromise with the pandemic conditions. Because the Hessian State Orchestra does not participate in the performances.

There is no question about it: the physical effort alone, playing the two and a half non-stop hours of the “Rheingold” on a piano, deserves the greatest respect. Pianist Alexandra Goloubitskaia, who shared the orchestra pit with Wiesbaden's general music director Patrick Lange, mastered this mammoth task with the greatest possible degree of adaptability and creative drive. Nevertheless, the cropped performance of Wagner's total work of art in this form proved to be musically unacceptable. Because everything that Wagner uses in sound magic, including overwhelming dramaturgy, cannot be easily replaced beyond a rehearsal situation. There was some long dry spell in this "Ring" start. And that the powerful appearance of the generously gesticulating giants Fafner and Fasolt started like a silent film scene,was involuntarily comical.

Musical boundaries

While the singers, some of whom had already participated in the premiere five years ago, had to adjust to completely changed performance conditions in a very short time, Laufenberg's production, which made Germania's gods wait in the desert tent for the move to Valhalla, essentially remained unchanged.

Even Donald Trump was allowed to haunt Falko Sternberg's video projection again.

Some of the singers tried to vocalize the impression of a large opera reduced to a small format;

This was best achieved by the highly present, polished and agile box of tenor Thomas Blondelle, but also by the baritone Benjamin Russell (Donner), whose lyrical urgency benefited from his experience as a song interpreter.

With others, the musical framework showed limits: Egils Silins intoned and articulated too imprecisely as Wotan, while Margarete Joswigs Fricka and Alberich by Thomas de Vries seemed to strive to fill the space above an orchestra.

This is what conductor Patrick Lange will find in his next “Rheingold” -dirigat, on Saturday at the Opera Festival in Munich, in front of a sold-out Bavarian State Opera, after only a fraction of the admitted spectators who were placed in a checkerboard pattern had come to Wiesbaden.

The first "Ring" cycle is completed on July 2nd and 4th, the second cycle begins on July 13th.