How Directors Mine the Gold at the Heart of Wagner’s ‘Ring’

Is it oil? Is it youth? Is it tactile? Invisible?

For Wagner, the magic gold that is stolen from the bottom of the Rhine at the start of his four-opera “Ring” cycle, setting the plot in motion, was a tangible, shiny nugget.

It is embedded in the riverbed, his libretto says, and its gleam fills the water until the dwarf Alberich, mesmerized by the powers it can unleash, rips it from the rock, to the despair of its guardians, the three Rhine Daughters. Shaped into a ring that circulates among different characters over the rest of the 15-hour cycle, the gold confers authority but also wreaks havoc, inspiring envy, betrayal and death.

Over the past 50 years, directors — including Calixto Bieito, whose staging of “Das Rheingold,” the first “Ring” installment, opens at the Paris Opera today — have interpreted the gold not as an actual piece of metal, but as an embodiment of whatever is the most precious (and corrosive) resource in the world of a given production. In a free-associative 2013 staging at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where Wagner first presented the “Ring” in 1876, Frank Castorf suggested that the gold was the fossil fuels that flow through and degrade virtually every aspect of contemporary society.

This is part of a decades-old trend toward treating Wagner with audacious freedom — viewing his librettos as allegorical starting points, and updating and transmuting his plots and props to highlight certain themes and steer well clear of the old horned-helmet-and-breastplate clichés.

“Lohengrin” might take place in a laboratory rather than medieval Antwerp; the title character of “Parsifal” might be dressed like a Latter-day Saints missionary. Bieito said in an email that in his production, the gold is depicted, in part, as cryptocurrency, a component of his staging’s allegory of the ever-continuing rise of Big Tech.

Bieito’s Paris “Ring” takes its place among a burst of major productions of the cycle around Europe, some still unfolding. I spoke to the directors of cycles in London, Munich, Brussels and Bayreuth about their approaches to the almighty gold, illuminating some of the vast range of possibilities when it comes to staging the most influential epic in opera history. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.

Barrie Kosky

Royal Opera, London

The gold comes from the earth, and it’s a part of nature. But Wagner also makes it a bit outside nature: It’s glistening in the water, it’s not of the water. We chose to present it in the beginning as a kind of fluid that comes out of an old, burned-out tree. I wanted to give this sense that the gold is like fat from the tree, like the blood from the veins of the earth. I wanted it to have a very organic feel, a sort of gold goo, like gold blood.

And we make very clear that this tree also reflects part of the body of Erda — Mother Earth — who guides us through our “Ring.” In our production, Mother Earth is dreaming her dream, which is also our dream, so the gold comes from her body and flows out of her body and is stolen from her body.

It’s a metaphor of what we’ve done with precious metals for thousands of years. To extract metals from stones, pan gold from water, find diamonds, we’ve literally ripped these elements out of the earth’s body. And of course they’re beautiful, but they’ve also been instruments of greed and evil. Whether that evil is the gold mines or diamond mines in Africa, or whether it’s what people have done for gold, what has happened to them — that’s the brilliance of Wagner’s metaphor, it’s timeless. Especially with the “Ring,” you have to find something that is both archaic and contemporary. That is the challenge of Wagner.

Romeo Castellucci

La Monnaie, Brussels

As a symbol, the gold means many, many things. But in my opinion, the main meaning is about desire. The gold, at least at the beginning of the “Ring,” takes the place of sexual energy, sexual attraction, the sex drive. The first image in our production is the female body covered in gold: the Rhine Daughters, who are naked and painted in gold. There is a lot of water falling from the ceiling, and the water washes away the gold, which melts off the bodies and goes all over the floor. Alberich tries to hug the body of one of the women; he tries to embrace them, and makes himself dirty with the gold but can’t really embrace it.

You cannot touch this gold. It’s everywhere, in a way — like desire. It’s an idea, it’s not an object. It drives you in a direction, but it’s not an object. It comes from the water and it’s still a kind of water, completely liquid. It changes shape; it’s constantly in transition. The shape of the gold is the shape of yourself. It’s kind of an energy — a dangerous one, because everyone who touches the gold dies, in a way; you cannot truly realize desire. I don’t think it has anything to do with capitalism. It’s much more profound, more symbolic. It’s not so simple, in my opinion.

Tobias Kratzer

Bavarian State Opera, Munich

For me, the gold is not just a symbol for money, which is probably the most likely interpretation. I wanted to give it a more magical touch. For me, it’s almost a source of magic that can’t be controlled, not by the gods or the mortals. And everyone has to deal with it somehow.

In the first scene of my “Rheingold” — it’s all set in an old church that’s being renovated — the Rhine Daughters are teenagers, dressed kind of like in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” who have found something underneath the floor. A universal power, one might say. It gives them magic abilities; they can change into different shapes. One turns into an old woman, one turns into a goat, one turns into a young girl.

I never show it as gold. It’s more of a golden fog, but it can materialize as gold water, or an object. But it’s more of an element — not the element of gold, exactly, but something that can be used. And it’s a little tongue-in-cheek, how Alberich is catching this fog in kind of a plastic bag. It is then in a glass tube in the second scene, acting like something of a secret power. It’s more of an ingredient: If you bring it into contact with other objects, it transforms them or gives them other qualities. But by the end, it can also be used to do the only thing that neither gods nor men can do: to change time, to reverse time, to fast-forward time.

Valentin Schwarz

Bayreuth Festival

The “Ring” is not so much about a given prop, an object, but about the carrying of the thoughts and emotions of the characters who own these objects and who put their wishful projections onto them. The “Ring” is about generational conflict, about putting trauma onto the next generation, and unresolved conflicts and questions. And it’s about dominance and power and influence. So it was a kind of epiphany: We thought of the innocence of a child. After all, the ring itself is quite useless in “Rheingold,” like a child.

So we came up with this idea of the gold being a child, who is stolen in “Das Rheingold” and over the course of the cycle gradually ages into the character of Hagen, who enters the plot in “Götterdämmerung.” And at the end of that opera, our Hagen realizes that the child of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, who is not in Wagner’s libretto but who we invented, is threatened with the same fate, the same abuse, that he experienced.

A child can’t speak at first, but develops feelings and grows. At a certain point, it was important that this child becomes a part of the cycle, develops consciousness, and becomes a character in his own right. But Hagen is not the end. With the child of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, these ideas and traumas perpetuate; they go on and on. There is no end to a “Ring.”