A Wagnerian Masquerade and Nothing More

David McVicar's second Ring production begins with a broad-brush Rheingold at La Scala, Milan, plus a pristine revival of Harry Kupfer's Rosenkavalier

Hehe, you nixies! Olafur Sigurdarson (Alberich) and Rhine-maidens: Andrea Caroll, Svetelina Stoyanova, Virginie Verrez Picture © Brescia e Amisano

In David McVicar’s new production of Das Rheingold at La Scala, Milan, Wagner’s gods wear masks proclaiming the eternal youth supplied by Freia’s golden apples. When the goddess of love, beauty and fertility is abducted by Valhalla’s construction team, the giants Fasolt and Fafner, the composer/librettist directs that the gods should visibly age. McVicar has them merely taking their masks off, revealing faces aged between early 40s and mid 60s. In other words, he pays lip service to Wagner’s idea but in a literal, uninteresting way.

At home and internationally, the Scottish director has scored many successes in the course of a 30-year career in opera. I have admired his work for Scottish Opera more-or-less consistently, from Idomeneo in 1996 to Il trittico in 2023, including a La traviata (2008) which I count among the most intelligent and successful stagings of this work. At ENO and Madrid’s Teatro Real, his Britten stagings have been among the most involving I have seen anywhere.

His forays into Wagner, however, have raised doubts: a toytown Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Glyndebourne (2011) and an anodyne Tristan und Isolde in Vienna (2013). What both of these missed was the kind of detailed Personenregie (literally, direction of the characters) and a coherent concept that made his Covent Garden production of Le nozze di Figaro so compelling.