The Olympics of opera is coming to Brisbane

From dragon slayers to demigods and aerialists to apples, Opera Australia’s new production of Richard Wagner’s The Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen) is destined for a curious and contemporary audience.

Performed over the course of a week – yes, I said a week – this isn’t your granny’s staid obbligato. It’s the Olympics of opera, 15 hours of it, and like the great games, it’s not really meant for amateurs.

Come December, Ring Heads – the uber dedicated fans who follow this particular Wagner production like Deadheads follow Jerry Garcia’s cult American rock band – will descend upon Brisbane.

They’ll find a Brisbane that’s positively hopping with energy. It seems like half the construction cranes in Australia must be here; mechanical elephants’ trunks picking up their burdens, hoisting them high with ease, placing them just so.

A busy city this is, sprucing up for the eyes of the world. It’s readying itself for more visitors come 2032, but it’s always been a hub for culture and arts – probably more so than most would be aware of. The secret’s out.

QPAC, as everyone calls the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, is not only easily accessible because of its CBD-adjacent location but is also one of the few theatres in the country where a production the size of The Ring Cycle can be performed.

To stage this spectacle, 90-110 musicians populate the orchestra pit. Dancers, 21 of them, churn and emote to honour the director’s brief, calling for them to be ‘explosive and powerful’.

There are 70 in the chorus company, 30 principal characters and a handful of distortionate performers with skills in martial arts and circus. The artistic team itself comprises creatives from five continents, though auditions aren’t finished, and there’s still time to make it seven.

“Sometimes it’s otherworldly, sometimes it’s (he pauses) … ominous, but it’s always quite spectacular.”- Matthew Barclay, assistant director.

The Ring Cycle, though. What is it? Well, it’s a series of four epic musical dramas written by German composer Richard Wagner over a quarter of a century, premiering, finally, in 1876. His contemporaries called him arrogant, scoffing at his hubris.

Yet today, many operaphiles believe that the ambition required to conceive of this feat on such a grand scale hasn’t been (nor will it ever be) surpassed, calling it “the Complete Artistic Achievement” and the “Holy Grail of Opera.”

Think of it as a heroic saga told in four parts that’s ultimately, as Barclay says, is about “love and power, arguing that love is redemptive and expands the universe, while power ultimately corrupts.”

Should reconsider how the world is changing? Should we prepare for a new hybrid existence just around the corner? How different and complex our futures will soon be. It’s a theme that’s every bit as relevant today as it was in the late 19th century; he who holds the ring holds the power over all creation.

Inspired by the same source material drawn on by Tolkien in that other ring story (you know the one) it’s told in a completely different way. With whispers of traditional German legend, Norse mythology, Scandinavian saga and maybe even a bit of Stephen King, the story goes that Tolkien got tired of being asked about the similarities between the two, his novel and Wagner’s musical drama, declaring with some frustration, “both rings are round. That’s the end of it.”

Delayed by a worldwide pandemic (again, you know the one) this particular production of The Ring Cycle has been many years in the making. Director Chen Shi-Zeng’s vision is, to put it mildly, grand – some might even say Olympic-sized.

He crafts this story to present new mythology for a new millennium, reinventing and reimagining it to make sense of the present. He’s well-qualified, too, with experience in traditional Chinese opera, Western opera, performance dance theatre in New York (where he lives) and commercial theatre for Disney.

Utilising both Eastern and Western theatre techniques, his cutting-edge translation breaks new ground. The costuming aims to be a modern primordial mesh that defines characters, with tribal furs and aristocratic finery sitting next to mechanised body armour inspired by military-grade exoskeletons.

Special screens create digitised cyclorama-style backdrops but so much more. On tracks, they shift shape and pattern, create walls and intimate spaces, hover and fly to and fro. Gliding in and out, they present visual ideas by exploring themes within the scene, taking us to dramatic locations like the subterranean earth and the galactic realm of the gods.

Digital content director Leigh Sachwitz worked on the highly technical specifications of this spectacle for more than three years, the computerised files so immense they had to be shipped over from Berlin on multiple hard drives.

The Ring Cycle’s four parts, Das Rheingold (The Rheingold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) could be experienced separately or out of sequence with little danger to the viewer missing of out on the plot, but it was Wagner’s intention that the extraordinary scale of the performances be conducted successively.

It’s a commitment to be sure, be it by the opera company brave enough to attempt it, the audience that will seek to soak it all in, or the performers that push the limits of what’s possible with their (unamplified) voices. The rewards are mammoth if the company can pull it off.

Opera Australia is presenting it as it was meant to be, in sequence, with a night off in between each part for the singers to rest their voices.

QPAC’s Lyric Theatre will host three sessions of The Ring Cycle, with tickets sold for the entire series of four parts only. Tickets range from A$520-$2360 (NZ$567-$2575), and the event will run from December 1 to 21, 2023. See:

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