Ask most opera lovers what comes to mind when they think about Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, and they’ll likely mention the huge voices and lush, booming orchestras of the so-called golden age of the 1930s and ’40s—not the transparent, mellow instrumental sounds and light, flexible voices typical of period-instrument performances. Indeed, when I mentioned to friends that I’d recently attended a memorable historically informed performance of Siegfried, the third opera in the Ring cycle, I was met with bemused looks.
Beginning in the mid-20th century, the historically informed performance (HIP) movement led to dramatic reinterpretations of Renaissance, baroque, classical, and some Romantic era music. Proponents relied on period instruments (or replicas) and scholarly research to convey the stylistic norms and sounds of those earlier eras. In general, this led to swifter tempos and thinner textures; musicians used vibrato and portamento (the smooth gliding transition from one note to another) sparingly, if at all.
Although of less interest to the HIP movement, Wagner has been performed on period instruments. Simon Rattle led the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Das Rheingold at the 2004 BBC Proms. The following year, the Harmonia Mundi label released a period-instrument interpretation of Der Fliegende Holländer. But performing a complete, historically informed Ring cycle on period instruments would have seemed far-fetched in 2016, when the conductor Kent Nagano joked with a musician from Concerto Köln, his period-instrument ensemble, that they should attempt just such a thing.
What began as a joke led to the period-instrument performance of Siegfried I saw on June 14, at the Dresden Music Festival, with the Festival Orchestra collaborating with Concerto Köln. (It was a concert performance—just instrumentalists and singers—not a staged one with costumes and sets.) Nagano’s initial goal was simply to publish findings about Wagner’s interpretative ideas. “It’s been quite a bit of detective work,” he told me over coffee before the performance. Wagner was influenced by Italian bel canto opera, which featured light, nimble voices and virtuosic ornamentation—in stark contrast to the heavier, more sedentary voices that are usually cast in Wagnerian roles. But after musicologists scoured the composer’s original scores and extensive writings about performance, they realized that he also wanted his musicians to use vibrato sparingly and only as a form of ornamentation.
In light of some of the testier debates that have unfolded over the decades about the “correct” manner in which to perform baroque music, Nagano emphasized that he is not trying to enforce his HIP Wagner as the “right” way but simply as “another way.”
Jan Vogler, artistic director of the Dresden Music Festival, has proved an open-minded collaborator for Nagano. For the past few years, the Festival Orchestra and Concerto Köln have presented an installment from the Ring cycle—Das Rheingold in 2023, followed by Die Walküre in 2024. The 2025 schedule included concert performances of Siegfried in Prague, Paris, Cologne, Dresden, and Lucerne. In 2026, which marks the 150th anniversary of the Ring’s premiere at Bayreuth, the joint ensembles will perform Götterdämmerung, the final work in the cycle. Meanwhile, scholars at the new Richard Wagner Academy (built in Dresden under the auspices of the Music Festival) will continue to delve into Wagner’s scholarly writings and attempt to better understand his intentions.
Wagner was born in Leipzig but spent most of his childhood in Dresden, its culture strongly influencing his development as a composer. He returned for periods as an adult, writing Tannhäuser and Lohengrin there and working as the conductor at the Royal Saxon Court. Several of his operas received their premieres in the city. Given that Wagnerians—and indeed, opera lovers in general—can be a finicky crowd, Vogler expected more resistance in Dresden to the HIP approach. But, he said, the performances haven’t provoked scandal, presumably because the audience found much to appreciate. I certainly did.
For the instrumentalists, the process of relearning Wagner on original instruments (or replicas) has proven revelatory. A few days before the Dresden performance of Siegfried, the bassoonist Lyndon Watts described the experience to me as “spine tingling” and a rare chance to create “the sound world that Wagner intended.” Referring to the opening bars of Siegfried, he said, “It’s dark, it’s grungy, it’s scary, it’s spooky. It’s slimy. In really close muddy thirds, the bassoons descend to the depths, right to the muddy bottom of the instrument.” Using a period instrument allows both performer and listener to “really feel the dirty madness, which is what Wagner wants.”
That growly, primeval bassoon sound was indeed startling at that June 14 performance. The mellow sound of the winds and brass complemented the ethereal timbre produced by the gut strings, far less bright than the sound of today’s metallic strings. The sparse use of vibrato resulted in a lean, transparent sound that was very different from the lushness we have come to associate with Wagnerian performances.
As the horn player Edward Deskur says in a YouTube video about the HIP Rheingold, “People think Wagner is always loud and bombastic, but that’s not really true.” Compared with his modern horn, he says in the video, “you can play insanely quietly” on a period instrument.
In clips of the HIP Walküre and Rheingold, the period instruments are subtle, with both winds and strings producing an alluringly mellow sound. Period instruments are notoriously temperamental when it comes to tuning, but Watts said it’s crucial to “embrace their quirkiness.” Though modern instruments are more reliable, Watts believes this reliability can result in a slick homogeneity. The challenge for the Dresden orchestra has been to learn how Wagner used the characteristics of the earlier instruments to create moods and set scenes. The composer “created a suspense that you may not feel with a homogeneous modern setting,” said Watts. “The raw emotions are absolutely more brutal because of the brutality of the instruments. If I push hard on my instrument, it becomes quite bright and buzzy very soon.” On the other end of the emotional spectrum, he said, when he plays “really softly, it enters into a world that I can’t quite reach on my modern instrument and has more nuance.”
According to Alexander Jani-czek, concertmaster of the Festival Orchestra and a collaborator with the period-instrument pioneer Roger Norrington (who died in July), “Playing period instruments is an exploration of boundaries and limitations. And it’s particularly exciting when you notice that the modern instrument actually has more limitations. The period instrument allows you to enter another world. It’s not easy, but it’s motivating.”
Nagano and his team of musicologists and linguists have focused equally on instrumental and vocal elements. The Swedish soprano Åsa Jäger, an expressive Brünnhilde in Dresden, said during a lunch interview that Nagano’s emphasis on textual clarity resonated with her. “I’ve always been very text driven and very keen on being audible.”
Wagner wanted his singers to roll their Rs, she said, meaning that burg becomes burrrrrrg—something that feels natural to Jäger since there are rolled Rs in Swedish. The textual clarity was impressive throughout the Siegfried performance in Dresden, where surtitles were projected in English and German. The tenor Thomas Blondelle sang with impeccable diction (and rolled Rs) in a superb interpretation of the title role. He never flagged during the performance, which clocked in at about four and a half hours (instead of the usual five) because of Nagano’s quicker tempos. The cast also included Daniel Schmutzhard as a sinister Alberich and Simon Bailey as a powerful Wotan.
One advantage of the HIP approach: The singers didn’t have to strain to be heard. It’s easier to project over the “mufflier sound world created by the gut strings and the woodwinds,” Jäger said, than over a modern orchestra. Given that Wagnerian singers make up an exclusive club, could the HIP approach enable a wider range of voice types to enter into this world?
Wagner didn’t compose operas with concert performances in mind. His philosophy of Gesamtkunstwerk—a word that roughly translates as a “total work of art”—incorporates music, drama, poetry, and the visual arts. I’d rather experience a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk than a concert performance. And I certainly wouldn’t give up the thrilling sound of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at full throttle. But as Nagano said, we don’t have to pick a side. After all, we can enjoy Bach on the harpsichord or the piano and Mozart performed by both HIP ensembles and modern orchestras. Why not Wagner? In light of the revelatory experience of hearing Nagano’s interpretations, I am convinced: The idea of a fully staged, period-instrument Ring may have started out as a joke, but it’s only a matter of time before it happens.
