Siegfried review: Spellbinding Schager is the greatest Siegfried of our age ★★★★★

We are now three-quarters of the way through the Royal Opera’s Ring cycle, and it’s the turn of Siegfried: the boring one, as it can all too easily become. The final half-hour duet between Brunnhilde and the opera’s eponymous hero is some of Wagner’s most ecstatic music, but to reach it one has to endure the preceding three and a quarter hours of music, which can make Rossini’s quip that Wagner’s operas contain some beautiful moments but some terrible quarters of an hour seem all too accurate.

But director Barrie Kosky, conductor Sir Antonio Pappano and a flawless cast have achieved a near miracle: Siegfried is spellbinding from start to finish. Throughout this whole cycle to date it’s clear that Kosky is focused on the intimacy of the interactions between the various characters rather than on the broader spectacular that the Ring can sometimes feel like. In the inherently dramatic Rheingold and Walkure, that offers an extra dimension that is often missed, and in this new Siegfried it means that the very thing that the opera is often criticised for becomes its strength.

Every character is so finely drawn, so well acted and so beautifully sung that nothing drags. Even the objectively interminable quiz between Wotan and Mine in Act 1 becomes – just about! – bearable. The linking thread of this cycle is an environmental catastrophe seen through the eyes of Erda, the Earth goddess, who has been present on stage throughout. But Kosky is too good a director to throw this into our faces. It is, instead, simply the mechanism through which the cycle progresses, and in Siegfried Rufus Didwiszus’s grey sets start to change to reflect this. The dragon Fafner’s lair is a hut on a snowy plain, while Act 3 is set in a Wizard of Oz-like field of colourful flowers. Indeed Fafner himself, in a spectacular gold lamé costume, looks like something from The Wizard of Oz.

Kosky is never afraid of humour and some of this is laugh-out-loud. The confrontation between Wotan and Alberich reminded me of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon. They sit next to each other on a park bench whiling away the time arguing. At one point Wotan offers Alberich a crisp from the packet he is munching.