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GERMANY: MUNICH
The advance buzz around Andreas Kriegenburg's new staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen for Bayerische Staatsoper was huge, and the second cycle (Jul. 10-15) was warmly received by a sold-out house, with only one incident of fairly intense booing in Die Walküre, aimed at Kriegenburg. His vision embodies a very human Ring, dispensing with a fixed set except in Götterdämmerung and instead using supernumeraries to go through various contortions and combinations to create the bare scenic essentials to tell the story. In the opening scene of Das Rheingold, for example, the supers, clad in flesh-colored underwear, act out the undulating waves of the river; they later reappear fully clothed in black for Siegfrieds river journey to the Gibichungs in Götterdämmerung, White-clad men on wires appear in Act II of Siegfried to form trees in the forest, one of me more whimsical moments of the Ring.
Kriegenburg got high marks for his audacious, bodydriven vision and there were other nice visual touches - for example, the tuxedoed men servants in Act II of Die Walküre, one of whom offers...