A Ring cycle is the pinnacle of ambition for any opera company. The 15 hours of Wagner’s tetralogy consume money, time, expertise and energy on a scale that stretches even the resources of the Met, La Scala and The Royal Opera. All of which makes the achievement of Regents Opera still more remarkable. At York Hall in East London, the company will stage two Ring cycles in February, as the climax of a four-year project which has seen successive instalments produced in venues around London.
The cycle has won plaudits as it has gained confidence and profile, year by year. In The Observer, Fiona Maddocks lavished praise on last year’s Siegfried as “small-scale Wagner with big ambitions and high musical standards”. Such standards have not been achieved overnight. Conductor Ben Woodward founded Fulham Opera in 2011 and rebranded it in 2022 as Regents Opera in time for Das Rheingold. He led a pocket-sized Ring from the piano back in 2014, and since then has conducted productions of Verdi’s Don Carlos and Strauss’ Die ägyptische Helena, to equally enthusiastic reviews.
Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, talked about the “workshop” – Werkstatt – as the physical and metaphorical space where a Ring is formed and forged over time. Where large-scale houses such as the Met are effectively opera factories, Regents Opera has by contrast built a company around loyalty and collective goodwill. “Even more than anywhere else I’ve experienced,” says soprano Catharine Woodward, “we’re a proper family. I’ve never been as close with as many orchestral members as I have on this project, because you can’t just turn up and play it as a unionised job. Almost all the players have been the same across the entire project.”
As Elisabetta in the Fulham Don Carlos (“superb” according to Opera magazine), as well as partner to conductor Ben, Catharine Woodward has been central to the growing reputation of the company, and the Ring production, since its inception. “It took the Covid lockdown to turn me into a Brünnhilde,” she says. “We made a silly video in our living rooms of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. All the other Valkyries had been bagsied, so I took Brünnhilde. That was literally how I sang my first bit of the role. Doing that gave Ben the idea of doing a Ring, because he realized he had a Brünnhilde. He already knew he had a Wotan.” That was Keel Watson, who formed “the still point around which everything else revolved” in Das Rheingold, according to Opera magazine’s Peter Reed, but who died suddenly in November 2023, before he could take Wotan’s final bow as The Wanderer in Siegfried.
There must have been more to the beginning of this Ring than a funny internet video, surely? “I think, like a lot of companies,” says Woodward, “when we couldn’t perform, and we couldn’t make any art at all, we all wanted to make the loudest, biggest piece of art possible.” Her voice has already pitched her into the larger-scaled roles of the dramatic-soprano repertoire, but the central figure of the Ring presents unique challenges. “Brünnhilde in Die Walküre is almost a mezzo, with a couple of really important top notes, and then she is suddenly a soprano in Siegfried. She was a goddess, and then she’s a girl. Götterdämmerung is a melding of the two, where you have to have the metal and the height all at the same time.”
When we talked on a call from her home in Berlin, Woodward was in the midst of grappling with this final and most taxing part of the Ring (in any soprano’s repertoire, perhaps). She distils it succinctly: “The first scene is a love scene between Brünnhilde and Siegfried. It has to be so true, and so iridescent and glorious, that his betrayal is enough for her to give Hagen the tools to stab him in the back. And that’s a big shift for the most honourable character in the Ring, up until this point.
“Brünnhilde steps out of her lane in Die Walküre. She defies her father, the king of the gods, because she does what he wants, rather than what he says: she betrays her own father through love. She has already taken this incredible step, effectively in order to save Siegfried and allow him to exist. Then she becomes human, and falls in love with Siegfried. She blesses him so that he becomes invulnerable. She gives him her shield and her horse: everything that made her Brünnhilde, in her former Valkyrie life, she gives to Siegfried. And then she has him killed. All of that… and she brings about the end of the gods. I mean, it’s a lot!”
Quite apart from the vocal challenges of the role, Woodward must negotiate her own path through some dramaturgical traps for Brünnhildes of the past: for example, not bidding farewell to her lover as he embarks on his “new deeds” – “Zu neuen Taten” – like an aunt packing off her nephew on a school trip, or sounding too much like a shrill avenging angel in the grand-opera ensembles of the Second Act. Woodward laughs, pauses, and replies carefully: “I’m going to put some of the weight of that problem on men’s ears. I don’t think women see her that way! We’ve just had an election where a convicted criminal was elected over a decent, educated woman. It does feel like there’s a lot of that in the world. But yes, it can still be difficult not to go to a place where all you are is rage.”
Through the course of the Regents Opera Ring, Woodward has reached deeper into her role with the help of the director Caroline Staunton. “She has the best relationship with the text that I’ve ever experienced from any director. She leads us all into a deeper understanding of the text, and then we take that into what we’re doing on stage.” Singer and director have already discussed various aspects of Götterdämmerung despite having not started the rehearsal process, but “nothing will be fixed until it’s in the room.”
Woodward shares with Staunton an appreciation for the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, which sheds light on the Ring from an oblique angle. After all, Wagner’s original intention, or so he once stated, was to build a house to stage it, and then burn the thing to the ground. “I went to a show, here in Berlin. There was a wonderful matchbox. It said: Use all but the last match to destroy all art. The Ring is like that. It is art of ideas, and anti-art, and it always asks the question of what art is. There are questions about art throughout our production. Alberich steals the gold, which is artworks. It’s art. There’s a lot of questioning, most explicitly in Das Rheingold, about the idea that once you’ve framed something, once you put it on a plinth or on a stage or onto a record, what does that do? Does that change the relationship with the person observing it?”
The Regents Opera Ring is, for Woodward, one step (albeit a momentous one) on a longer journey which has already seen her sing on the stage at Bayreuth: last summer, when she took the role of Gerhilde. “I’m so glad that I get to experience being one of the sisters, not just Brünnhilde. There is nothing quite like being in a girl gang! Brünnhilde is quite lonely, even though I get on really well with my sisters in our Regents Opera production.”
She will return there next summer, as almost an old hand when it comes to dealing with the unique Bayreuth triangle of stage, pit and theatre. “The set for the Valkyries scene is quite far back on stage. [Conductor] Simone Young was tiny, but the audience were in a different world.” She recalls her audition. “I didn’t know who was on the panel. I couldn’t see what was going on at all, and I just had to sing. But when it was empty, just me and a piano, it was like a little fairy came with a cushion and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take all your words.’ And then carried out my consonants to the back of the theatre. It felt very easy, like a pin could drop.”
In this and other respects, Bayreuth is a world away from the intimate London venues which have hosted parts of the Regents Opera Ring. Even the orchestral reduction can play its part in bringing audiences closer to the drama. “I don’t think any of us are singing it differently because of the size of the orchestra,” says Woodward. “It doesn’t feel like a small orchestra. It feels like a really exciting sound. York Hall is a 900-seat venue in the round.” As she points out, consistent to any Ring experienced live, is “the weight of the words and the music and the fact that they are so coherently interlocked in Wagner. And what’s lovely is to get the sense that the audience share that feeling. You feel them being pulled into this story. That pact between audience and performers is what makes it a performance. The sense that it’s not just about the people making the sounds feels even more intense in this situation.” For everyone present, on and off stage, a Ring is a life-changing experience.
Regents Opera performs Wagner’s Ring at York Hall, London from 9th–16th February and 23rd February–2nd March. Single tickets are still available.
This article was sponsored by Regents Opera.
