A casually dressed man wanders across the stage, snapping some of the graffiti that litter the gods’ urban walkway. A factory worker takes a meter- reading in the power plant that is Nibelheim, oblivious to the presence of Mime and Alberich. Three children lark about as the gods enter Valhalla, playfully re-enacting the violence that saw Fasolt murdered and the ring wrenched from Alberich’s finger.

At times the Bayreuth festival’s new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen seems to inhabit parallel worlds, à la Harry Potter. It is never clear when reality and the supernatural are going to intersect, or what the consequences will be. All we can glean from this version of Das Rheingold, the preliminary evening to The Ring, is that the events depicted in Wagner’s mighty tetralogy are never- ending, because the delusional desire for power remains a constant of humanity. The gods may be half-anachronistic, half- futuristic creatures, but they wander around like vagrants in today’s metropolises. They have the mythological power to pass through stone walls, as Wotan does to inspect Alberich’s store of gold, but in reality – the invisible world of love and greed and self-preservation – they are no different from the photographer, the factory worker, the children or ourselves.

As with all legends, what we see in this Rheingold is entirely recognisable, for all that it is presented in a strange guise. But is it a powerful enough vision for a new Ring? The next few days will tell, as The Ring is brought full circle.

Wednesday’s opening performance showed that this staging by Tankred Dorst, a respected 80-year- old German dramatist, makes no bid for the boundary-breaking impact of earlier Bayreuth productions by Patrice Chéreau or Harry Kupfer. But it is too intelligently sung – by a cast led by Falk Struckmann’s aristocratic Wotan and Andrew Shore’s reptilian Alberich – to be lightly dismissed. And it is magnificently conducted by Christian Thielemann, who knocks spots off Simon Rattle’s microscopic Rheingold at Aix earlier this month. ★★★☆☆

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