DIE WALKURE Comes to the National Theatre in Prague This Month

Die Walkure comes to The National Theatre in Prague this month. The performance is set for 9 March 2024. 

Richard Wagner’s opus magnum, the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, will for the first time be heard in line with the principles of historically informed performance, with the use of period instruments and in the style the composer himself deemed ideal. The conductor Kent Nagano, Concerto Köln and a team of scholars have reconstructed the instrumental, vocal and linguistic practice of Wagner’s era. In November 2021, the Kölner Philharmonie hosted a concert of the cycle’s first part, Das Rheingold. The project will come to an end in 2026, when 150 years will have passed since the first performance of the complete Ring in Bayreuth.

In 2024, the Dresdner Festspielorchester and Concerto Köln, conducted by Kent Nagano, will perform Die Walküre in European cities boasting an illustrious Wagner tradition. Their tour will commence on 9 March in Prague, which in the second half of the 19th century became of the major Wagner centres, outdoing even Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin.

The cult of Wagner was particularly nurtured by the legendary Neues Deutsches Theater (NDT, today the State Opera) director Angelo Neumann, an ardent admirer and friend of Wagner, who chose Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for the theatre’s festive inauguration, on 5 January 1888. Richard Wagner’s operas dominated the NDT repertoire throughout its half-century history, with the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen having been given regular performances.

Wagner granted Neumann the right to perform the cycle, and Prague productions of the Ring were thus actually authentic interpretations authorised by the composer. 

Die Walküre was first presented in Bohemia on 20 December 1885, at the Estates Theatre in Prague by Gustav Mahler. The NDT staged the opera on 12 December 1888, a mere month after its opening. Of all the four parts of the cycle, Die Walküre was performed most frequently at the theatre, also in the form of stand-alone Acts. The most recent such event in Prague was the performance of Act 1 on 16 November 2017 at Forum Karlín by the State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Andreas Sebastian Weiser and featuring Andreas Schager in the role of Siegmund.

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