Siegfried at Opéra Bastille

It is Brünnhilde herself who, at the end of The Valkyrie, names the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, the long-awaited hero Siegfried. The second day of the Ring cycle shows him in his turbulent early years, a headstrong youngster, tamer of bears and slayer of dragons. At the heart of the Ring, between the adagio appassionato of The Valkyrie and the grandiose finale of The Twilight of the Gods, Siegfried has always been seen as the scherzo, a joyful and carefree work. And the hero before us has nothing of a mystic knight or the saviour of a whole people: he is the "real and naked" man in whom Wagner sees with delectation "all the pulsing of the blood, all the contraction of strong muscles, in the freest movement; in a word, the true man, meaning the handsome young man in the resplendent freshness of his strength who is at the origin of all primitive legends".