The Stuttgart Ring, 1999–2000

It is not the custom of this house to introduce projects to the public so far in advance of their realization. We are making an exception at this time for two reasons: the magnitude of the project of a new "Stuttgart Ring"; and the perhaps atypical approach to its realization, an approach which manifests itself here, in that, alongside the general music director Lothar Zagrosek, there are four stage directors sitting with me at the table: Joachim Schlömer, Christof Nel, Jossi Wieler, and Peter Konwitschny.

The early exposition of this project, which will be completed in March 2000, seems necessary to us to preclude from the outset possible speculation that could perhaps unproductively burden our house's work. Thus we would now like to present the thoughts that have brought us together at this table.

We are approaching a new millennium; the transition to the year 2000, beyond its magical aura, will be a decisive moment in that it will challenge us to look back upon the past. The backward glance is first and foremost one of farewell, a farewell to the unprecedented will and impetus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries towards the homogenization and bundling of power, capital, and knowledge. The recognition of the untenability of a totalizing claim to the cooptation of the world, as exemplified in the belief in progress—which in turn served as the basis for further perspectival rationalizations—had profound consequences for the concept of utopia. It is no longer possible to ignore the victims exacted by the practical realization of this utopia. The models with which one previously sought to explain both the world and art have been discarded as obsolete and long-established positions classified as suspicious ideology. With the complete retreat on many fronts of the term Enlightenment, terms such as dream, wholeness, enchantment, and sublimity resurface, but this time used only as a feeble elucidation of escapist dreams which reveal themselves as history's junk heaps.

In such a situation, to think about the largest undertaking of nineteenth-century music theater means to confront this farewell (as a question) with this enterprise; it means, precisely there—as part of our past—to ask of this movement of thought: what does it mean today to tell, through the Ring of the Nibelung, a story from beginning to end, when both a beginning as well as the teleology of history—this goal-oriented nature of historical development—have become so questionable?

Thoughts of realizing Wagner's Ring are tied up with problems of economy, planning, and possible casting, if one accepts that for the year 2000 the question of feasibility, of completing the Ring as a work within the operatic repertoire, takes precedence over the question of the meaning of the whole. The awakening Wotan continues to dream in the second scene of Rheingold in view of Valhalla: "Vollendet das ewige Werk . . . Stark und schön / steht er zur Schau; / hehrer, herrlicher Bau!" [The eternal work is completed . . . strong and beautiful / it stands for view / oh beautiful structure!] This tin-clad "eternal" does not, however, stand unconditionally as a work on display, as the dreamer still desires: there will be no stopping the work, as the last piece of the tetralogy will show, conclusively. From the score of the Ring and Wagner's work as a director it emerges that what matters—and no one knew this better than Wagner—is not the presentation [Darstellung] of a completed work in and of itself as truth, but rather that the theatrical has as its goal the performance of pieces as difference [Veränderung]. And yet, no one rallied more emphatically against this than Wagner. The institution of Bayreuth is the place where the disposition, the essence, is staged—where the eternal, where repetition is guaranteed. Although, at the beginning of his work on the Ring, Wagner wrote that after a complete performance, "the individual dramas, which ought to stand as independent pieces, can be produced," toward the end of his work on the tetralogy he once expressed his wish to see the Ring performed...