A picture for the gods: The giants Fafner and Fasolt are sitting, like two Alm-Öhis doing their Sunday cleaning, just below the ceiling on the picture frame of a landscape painting with the Walhall Castle they built “on the mountain’s summit”, as Richard Wagner put it .

The picture and the castle are really for the gods, because these – above all Wotan and Fricka – have gathered in front of it to look at the completed work.

And, yes, one has to say that, the magnificent building boasts magnificently!

But then one of the giants bursts through the screen from behind and the joy is gone: payday, Wotan!

The father of the gods is broke.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Andreas Homoki, director of the Zurich Opera House and at the same time director of this new "Ring des Nibelungen", has decided to bring Richard Wagner's tetralogy, which was largely written in Zurich, back to the time when it was written.

And just as Wagner described himself in a letter to Theodor Uhlig dated July 27, 1850 – “I go down in house skirt and bathe in the lake” (original spelling) – we also see Tomasz Konieczny as Wotan in house skirt, like Wagner used to wear it.

“Dieu, que ça lui ressemble!” the unforgettable Juliette Gréco once sang.

And this "God, that looks like him!" pulls through your mind when the jovial beau Konieczny as Wotan in the Wagner look of his colleague Patricia Bardon as his wife Fricka,

Like Theodor W. Adorno in his "Essay on Wagner", Homoki does not seem to trust the "revolutionary" Wagner.

Wagner was only revolutionary in his art.

To a large extent, he didn't give a damn about the material and social conditions in which they came into being and the surrounding environment.

The excellent Zurich program booklet quotes letters from the time of Wagner's exile in Zurich, to which he had had to flee in 1849 because he had taken part in the Dresden May Uprising as a barricade fighter.

And then one reads lines like these: “I, artificial human being, can only thrive now in luxurious comfort.” Or: “I can’t live like a dog, I can’t bed myself on straw and refresh myself in booze: my very irritable, fine, immensely covetous, but immensely delicate and tender sensuality, must somehow feel flattered,

The story of the critic of capitalism, which for a long time served as a paradigm of left-wing relief in order to make Wagner capable of discourse again after being contaminated by National Socialism, Homoki in Zurich only believes with a wink.

What remains is a witty, polished, bourgeois conversation piece that is pointed despite the slow narrative pace, with which Wagner grasped his own situation in an honest and brilliant way.

The singers in Zurich show great joy in the language, above all the flexible, vocally and playfully highly intelligent Matthias Klink as Loge, who perhaps now and then only needs a little more precise interventions from the conductor, the Zurich music director Gianandrea Noseda.

Christopher Purves as Alberich, even as a non-native speaker, sings an idiomatically perfect German and vocally maintains the necessary balance of greed and clumsiness when he sings "the licking slipper" of the Rhinemaidens (sylph-like in white silk pajamas: Uliana Alexyuk, Niamh O'Sullivan, Siena Licht Miller). rushes through the bedroom.

As elegant as Konieczny is as an appearance and sings, his strong vocal discolorations are just as unattractive – as was the case in Bayreuth last summer.

Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke gives his mime like an offended Rumpelstiltskin:

Gianandrea Noseda conducts a “Ring” for the first time.

With the balance in his "boutique theater", as he calls it, he is not yet on the best of terms.

The deep metal burps and creaks quite awkwardly, even more than it should.

Solo flute and solo oboe sometimes stretch out of the ditch, as if they were artificially amplified.

Experience will certainly correct that.

The lindworm is super and the hopping toad really great in the beautiful, functional equipment by Christian Schmidt.

This is how the new Zurich "Ring" begins in a funny way, but at the same time with the current question of art's involvement in guilt through sponsorship: because - hall lights on!

– we are all sitting in Valhalla.