Siegfried

About

Following the success of Wagner's Die Walküre last year, the Dresdner Festspielorchester and Concerto Köln, under the baton of Kent Nagano, will perform the next part of the famous Der Ring des Nibelungen, Siegfried, in 2025 in European cities with a long Wagnerian tradition. The tour will open on 1 April in Prague, which became one of the most important Wagnerian centres in the second half of the 19th century, surpassing even Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin. Paris, Cologne, Dresden and Lucerne will follow.

Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen will be performed for the first time in a historically informed interpretation and on period instruments. In November 2021, the first part of the tetralogy, Das Rheingold, was presented in this way at the Cologne Philharmonic. The entire project will be completed in 2026, the 150th anniversary of the first performance of the Ring in Bayreuth.

Wagner's Siegfried was first performed in Prague in 1887 at the Estates Theatre, which at that time still served German theatre productions. In the history of the National Theatre, Wagner's Siegfried has been performed only twice before, in 1932 under the baton of Otakar Ostrčil and then in 2005 under the direction of John Fiore. Siegfried returns to the State Opera after a much longer period of time. Its predecessor, the New German Theatre, which was instrumental in making Prague one of the centres of the Wagnerian tradition at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the following century, staged Siegfried in two productions, the first shortly after its inauguration in 1888 in a complete performance of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy, and in a new production by Alexander Zemlinsky in 1923.