Richard Wagner’s relationship with the Opéra de Paris did not start well. The 1861 performance of Tannhäuser was a fiasco, and the composer’s operatic ideals diverged drastically from the accepted norms of 19th-century Grand Opéra.
From that inauspicious start, Wagner eventually grew in popularity in France as he did elsewhere, and there have been plenty of performances of his works in Paris. However, performances of full Ring Cycles have been infrequent, to say the least. After the first at Palais Garnier 1911 and the following cycles in 1957, a full Ring wasn’t seen until the Philippe Jordan/Günter Krämer cycle in 2013.
So on 5th March 2019, the announcement that Jordan would be conducting another full cycle in November 2020, to be directed by Calixto Bieito, was met with delight by Parisian Wagner fans. But the course of true Wagner never did run smooth. First, Covid made the planned cycle impossible, so Jordan conducted an audience-less broadcast version in December, which was well received, with Lise Davidsen’s Sieglinde a highlight. Then, in 2021, Jordan’s tenure as musical director ended.
With the pandemic behind us, the plans for Bieito’s staging were resumed, with Das Rheingold reaching the stage of Opéra Bastille in January this year. The other operas are under way: by the time you read this, Die Walküre will have opened, with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung to follow. Now, the Opéra have announced a “Ring Festival 2026” to take place in November 2026 and to comprise two full cycles.
Wagner intended the Ring to be performed on four successive nights. However, opera houses today agree that it’s impossible (and possibly dangerous) for a soprano to sing Brünnhilde at full quality on successive nights, so you can either make the unpalatable choice of using a different Brünnhilde in Siegfried, or opt to spread the operas over a longer period. Most houses choose the latter, and that’s what Paris have done for the festival, going for a longer-than-usual eight days, with the cycles to take place on 6th–13th and 15th–22nd November.
With Jordan gone, the Paris Opera’s General Director Alexander Neef has chosen his trusted long-time Pablo Heras-Casado, who conducted a Covid-struck Ring himself in Madrid and has recently conducted Parsifal in Bayreuth. Heras-Casado describes the necessity for a conductor to become a storyteller by means of the orchestra; he also points out how a Ring must morph according to the current political and societal context: with six years having passed since he conducted his previous cycle, this one will needs to be different.
The cast list will be packed with experienced Wagnerians. For Die Walküre, Paris audiences will be familiar with Tamara Wilson (Brünnhilde), Stanislas de Barbeyrac (Siegmund) and Elsa van der Heever (Sieglinde), who all sang their roles in a favourably reviewed concert performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 2024. Wotan is in the safe hands of Iain Paterson. Bachtrack’s Ako Imamura was describing Andreas Schager as a sensational Siegfried as long ago as 2016. In Götterdämmerung, the pivotal part of Hagen goes to the huge (and, in this role, demented) bass voice of Mika Kares, who impressed in the role at Bayreuth in 2024.
Neef considers that the Ring is such an enormous project and such a monumental challenge to the audience that there are few stage directors who are able to cope with its sheer scale. That challenge will fall to Calixto Bieito, whom Neef praises for his “ability to bring together a team of singers and make them do entirely unexpected things”. Bieito says that he considers the Ring to be something of a “chamber piece”: of how a small cell of a huge, enormous family can be destroying the world and at the same time creating a new world which is destroying itself. He wants to explore human neuroses, he says, and to see what is behind the myths.
Bieito can be a divisive director. In recent years, two of the Spaniard’s productions of very different pieces have been extremely popular: his Carmen is now a regular in countless major houses around the world, and his Exterminating Angel has also been greatly lauded. But Bieito likes nothing better than to provoke. In an interview with us this year, he related how one of his productions was “a disaster, an enormous scandal” in one house and “an enormous success” the following month. You never quite know what you’re going to get until you see it – although you can be very confident that floaty dresses and horned helmets will not be a feature.
The Ring Festival will be filled out by a programme of talks, as well as an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France which focuses on the revolutionary aspects of the tetralogy, both musically and in terms of the political and cultural context of its time. Neef says that whoever puts on such a Festival is tasked with creating “a moment out of the ordinary”. Wagner certainly provides the Opéra de Paris with the means to do just that.
Tickets are now available for Paris Opera’s Ring Festival 2026, which runs in November 2026 in two cycles: 6th–13th and 15th–22nd November.
Ticket packages are available now: pass Wotan (€224, early bird offer of −10% for the first 300 buyers), pass Freia (€120 for under 28 years old), and pass Brünnhilde (€212, −15% for 2025–26 subscription holders).
Die Walküre runs individually until 30th November 2025, and Siegfried runs from 17th–31st January 2026.
See upcoming events from Opéra national de Paris.
This article was sponsored by Opéra national de Paris.
