Royal Opera - Die Walküre

Gods and mortals battle in the second chapter of Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Conductor Antonio Pappano and director Barrie Kosky reunite to continue the mythical adventure that began with Das Rheingold in 2023.

Love and death, gods and mortals, heroes and villains: it’s all here, in the thunderous second chapter of the Ring cycle.

Following the glittering triumph of Das Rheingold in 2023, Barrie Kosky and Antonio Pappano plunge back into Wagner’s mythic universe.

Christopher Maltman’s Wotan returns alongside an international cast including Elisabet Strid as Brünnhilde, Natalya Romaniw as Sieglinde and Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Siegmund.

Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) is the second work of Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen; it follows Das Rheingold and precedes Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

It has become the most performed opera of the cycle, loved and admired for its nuanced and intelligent exploration of complex family entanglements, expressed through music of astonishing power – perhaps nowhere more so than in the glorious music for the incestuous lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde.

Wagner’s fortunes improved dramatically when the young King Ludwig II ascended to the throne in Bavaria in 1864.

Captivated by Wagner’s operas, the King employed him on a permanent basis, settling the composer’s debts, and installing him in a state of luxury at the Villa Tribschen on Lake Lucerne, where Wagner composed the famous Tristan und Isolde. 

Wagner subsequently founded the Bayreuth Festspielhaus: a theatre specially constructed for the demands of the Ring cycle, which hosts annual festivals of Wagner’s music to this day.

Totalling fifteen hours of music, Wagner’s Ring cycle is a colossal masterpiece composed over the course of 26 years, from 1848 to 1874.

It consists of four epic operas which fuse ancient Norse mythology with German and Scandinavian folk tales to tell the story of an all-powerful ring, and its pursuit by the leader of the gods, Wotan. It is the culmination of Wagner’s ambition to create opera that unified text, music and drama in a Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’.