The Stuttgart Ring on DVD: A Review Portfolio * The Stuttgart Ring

In the 1950s Wieland Wagner used the Württembergische Staatsoper in Stuttgart as his “winter Bayreuth,” staging works he could not do in the Festspielhaus—from Rienzi to Fidelio to the music dramas of Carl Orff—and trying new approaches to those from the Wagner canon that he could do. Since that time, Stuttgart's reputation as a producer's house has been continued intermittently by Klaus Zehelein and by then-director Albrecht Puhlmann's showcasing the work of the radical Catalan stage director Calixto Bieito (Jenufa, Hollaender, Fanciulla). With the background of his prizewinning dramaturgical work in Frankfurt and Hamburg, Zehelein's coup, for his millennium Ring cycle, initiated in March 1999, was to deliberately choose four separate production teams to each stage one of the Ring operas using four completely different casts. Only music director Lothar Zagrosek and his orchestra would have the experience of performing the complete cycle. The so-called unity of the Ring, on which Wagner had labored for more than a quarter of a century, was set aside at a single stroke.