It was a telling artistic decision on Wagner's part to have Wotan, the central figure in the story and the mover behind every development in the plot, absent from the final piece in the tetralogy. We only hear about him indirectly from Waltraute. Or is Wotan perhaps not the most important character after all, and that distinction should go instead to the disgraced and banished Valkyrie Brünnhilde? In a moral sense, she surely is. Wotan is a fallible god who violates the treaties inscribed in runes on his spear: sacred contracts over which he himself is the custodian. The pure, noble and courageous Brünnhilde, on the other hand, is a living memento of the command "Be worthy". When she leaps onto Siegfried's funeral pyre with her steed, Grane, this is not death but rather the ecstasy of a final reunification. After having portrayed Siegfried as invulnerable, the marvellous German heldentenor Stefan Vinke will now present him as being vulnerable, and the role of Brünnhilde will be played by Catherine Foster. With his dark vocal cords, German singer Albert Dohmen will bring a granite-hard character to his portrayal of Hagen. The international production also features many outstanding Hungarians in the cast, for example, with Károly Szemerédy taking the Müpa Budapest stage as Gunther and Polina Pasztircsák as Gutrune and Third Norn.

Presented by: Müpa Budapest