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Uwe Eric Laufenberg sets his new staging of Wagner's final opera among the persecuted Christians of the contemporary Middle East – but avoids preaching.

Rewarding performances by Matthäus Schmidlechner as Mime and Lars Cleveman in the title role, plus Elena Nebera as Brünnhilde, made Richard Wagner’s Siegfried at the Landestheater Linz a joy.

Some beautiful singing from Michael Bedjai as Siegmund and Brit-Tone Müller as Sieglinde set a high standard in this Landestheater Linz production of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre.

Gerd Grochowski made a stunning Wotan and Michael Bedjai a cheerful Loge in Landestheater Linz’s production of Das Rheingold.

The world ended again last night. It ends fairly frequently in performances and in recordings, and that schedule tends to innoculate us against Richard Wagner’s political and philosophical messages. If ever there were to be a performance to transcend that, it would come at the Proms, at the conclusion of its first full performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Wagner’s Lohengrin was the last work the master completed before settling into a mid-career six-year slump. During this compositional hiatus, he wrote the poems for his Ring operas and ruminated in print on various topics, musical and otherwise, but work on the music dramas essentially ceased.