(Photo credit Raftermen Photography)

Your reviewer spent childhood in the hills about fifty miles west of Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta then and Atlanta now constitute two different places. In the before-time that preceded the internet, Georgia’s small-town folk with their gaze fixed towards the rest of the world viewed Atlanta as the portal to everything else, not least by way of its airport, then merely sizable rather than the busiest on the planet. In Atlanta, one could find bookstores, record stores, arts organizations, museums, research universities, and abundant retail, including cuisines beyond Southern United States and Mexican. But the population counter on Peachtree Road had barely passed 2.5 million residents in the metro area. Atlanta’s 1996 Summer Olympics had not yet taken place, nor even those in Barcelona in 1992, featuring opening ceremony appearances by Montserrat Caballé and José Carreras.

In the 1980s, Atlanta’s opera company was still a bit of an upstart, frequently headlined by the eminent baritone Timothy Noble, but squarely a regional company. If you wanted to see Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” you would have to find your way, via that airport, to Seattle, San Francisco, or New York. And those places seemed much farther away back then. Your reviewer first experienced a live Wagner opera at the Metropolitan, during graduate school. Seeing “Siegfried” in Atlanta seemed flatly impossible. “Tosca” or “Don Giovanni,” sure, but a “Ring Cycle?” Nope.

What a difference four decades make. Metropolitan Atlanta has surpassed a 6 million-resident count, and thereby outpaced Philadelphia and Washington DC. In many parts of Atlanta and its concentric expanse of suburbia and exurbia, transplants outnumber native Georgians. In 2009, The Atlanta Opera (TAO) departed the Woodruff Center for the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, which still seems nearly-new in 2025. The company achieved Opera America’s coveted ‘budget one’ status in 2024, thanks to the preternatural fundraising jiujitsu worked by General Director Tomer Zvulun. After a successful “Das Rheingold” in 2023 and “Die Walküre” in 2024, TAO is now set complete the quartet with “Götterdämmerung” in 2026. A few decades ago in the Deep South an embarrassment of Wagnerian riches this fulsome would have seemed as remote a possibility as the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons winning the Super Bowl (they still have not). The Met apparently gave “Siegfried” on tour in Atlanta in 1917, just before the First World War made German opera temporarily ‘verboten.’ So the Peach State has only had to wait 108 years for another “Siegfried.”

Ein starker Helde naht

Zvulun et alia structured the 2024-25 season with the theme of Western art’s durable commonplace, the Hero’s Journey. One prior show ended in a failed hero’s journey (“Macbeth”) while another concluded in a pleasantly gender-diversified triumph (“Die Zauberflöte”). But the monomyth rarely arrives in as elemental a form as it does in “Siegfried.” Wagner sources all the ingredients with farm-to-table directness, among them orphandom and surrogate guardianship, the pursuit of knowledge from an older man and a woman, do-it-yourself coming of age, journey to the darkest region of a proto-Freudian forest, assistance from an unanticipated helper in the wilds, and lots of fire and blood. “Siegfried” makes a fine Exhibit A in an Introduction to Literature course; in attuning sophomores to the archetypes, one would not even have to assign Joseph Campbell.

A paragraph frequently appears in reviews of “Siegfried” defending the work, or occasionally, attacking it. Such defenses tend to cite the opera’s mythological wholeness, the loveliness of the “Forest Murmurs,” the freshness of the Forest Bird’s appearance, the astonishing orchestral density of Act Three, and the opera’s crucial part in Brünnhilde’s long developmental arc. Detractors swing several worn clubs from which Wagner regularly weathers blows with adjectives like ‘dark’ and ‘boring.’ It is true that Act One can drag, with its length and its three male characters only. But saving the three women for the second half of the opera brings such brilliant light by contrast. “Siegfried” reminds of Henryk Górecki’s luminous “Miserere” (1981) in which the shaft of light issuing from the women as they make their first appearance midway through the piece could not possibly elicit the same effect had the men not solely occupied the first half.

Nor is “Siegfried” angular in the pendulous effect of all the sociopolitical problems with Wagner, relative to the other nine canonical operas/music dramas. If there is an antisemitic undercurrent in the characterization of Mime, surely Beckmesser in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” is far worse. And even if the titular hero was too readily appropriated by the Nazis for propagandistic purposes, at least he does not sing about Teutonic nationhood as people do in “Meistersinger” and “Lohengrin.” One wonders if people would feel the need to defend or naysay “Siegfried” as strenuously were its sibling “Die Walküre” not as perfectly composed a work as humanly possible. In program notes for TAO, Julia Simmons argued that ‘”Siegfried” is the heart of Wagner’s “Ring.”‘

Tauch’ aus dem Dunkel und sieh’

For all these plaudits, the production team still has to craft stage-play in ways that buoy the audience’s attention span while dudes talk about stuff in Act One and early Act Two. With this “Siegfried,” Zvulun, not yet fifty years old, celebrated his one hundredth production, thirty-five of which have taken place in Atlanta. Each production of his that I have experienced evidences clearly recognizable fingerprints. Nearly every moment of the staging looks like the result of a conscious decision, bidding the viewer to wonder how limited rehearsal time can produce such density of deliberate choices. These choices become layered in ways that engage both a novice viewer who might need proof that opera is exciting, and the seasoned viewer who has seen a particular opera ten or fifty times and desires for things to unfold differently this time around.

Another hallmark is the skillful integration of video projections, often by Erhard Rom, which never fail to augment rather than distract from the singers’ acting. Among opera’s audience there number many aging fans, and industry insiders of various ages, who maintain a ‘prima la voce’ stance — your reviewer among them. But we live in an ever more visual world, and I would wager at least ninety percent of the audience cares far more about theatricality than whether the soprano nailed that messa di voce, as she ought to have, and supposedly would have done whenever the Golden Age supposedly occurred. Most of the audience that we are attempting to attract want to use their eyeballs. Zvulun’s productions not only give your retinas a workout, but they also take viewing into meta-consideration. Photography, portraiture, and characters actively watching other characters are common motifs.

This “Siegfried” succeeds visually to an even greater extent than its companion “Rheingold” and “Walküre.” For decades directors have struggled to make coherent comments in the arena delineated by George Bernard Shaw’s Marxist reading of “Rheingold” in “The Perfect Wagnerite,” about 19th Century industrialization and social class. That reading works well for “Rheingold” but peters out during “Walküre,” and industrial readings of the Ring prove tough to sustain for fifteen hours. Brian Staufenbiel’s “Rheingold” made a bit of a mess of this, attempting to digitize the allegory with mixed results. Zvulun intelligently cordoned off images of machinery, pipes, gears, and steam to the act in the Ring that actually foregrounds metalworking: Act One of “Siegfried.” This makes a subtler comment about modernity and the story unfolding in the Ring: coming-of-age mythology still applies to the mechanized present we have experienced since Wagner’s lifetime. Mime and Siegfried’s metallurgy ended with impressive pyrotechnics.

Carmen and the dragon in “Siegfried”

The good visuals in Act One transitioned to great ones in Act Two. As in “Walküre,” Rom’s set design employed a foreground scrim paired with rear projections at the back of the stage, creating depth of field. A gargantuan pile of skulls outside Fafner’s lair — a jagged opening at stage rear —  recalled photographs of the victims of the Khmer Rouge, but some of the fossils in the pile came from mammals larger than humans, with colossal ribs that were, perhaps, tusks. A ribbon curtain sometimes descended to catch light and projections in contrasting ways from the fore-scrim.

Robert Wierzel’s lighting design transitioned several times during the act, beginning with nocturnal, sickly gray lightly tinged with green. This turned to fluorescent emerald during Siegfried’s showdown with the dragon, who morphed back into Alexander Köpeczi as Fafner once fatally wounded. This probably gets repeated less in Europe, but North American Wagner fans love quoting Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera’s General Director from 1983 to 2014, about the difficulty of staging Act Two. Jenkins repeated this at so many lectures and talkbacks that a single verbatim rendering becomes a textual problem, but it goes like this: ‘There are two things in opera the audience is never satisfied with because they all show up with a preconceived notion of what it is supposed to look like. Those two are Carmen, and the dragon in “Siegfried.”‘ Jenkins and company pulled off a magnificent dragon in Seattle’s famed “Green Ring” of 2001-13, and Atlanta has made for the best I have seen since then.

Beneath projected red eyeballs issued a cycloptic green alien, bipedal with long arms and protruding dorsal bones, and flanked by three cycloptic ‘mini-me’ gremlins, all operated by well-hidden puppeteers and ‘movement specialists’ Alexander Hudson, Jimez Alexander, Bailey Jo Harbaugh, Brandon Nyguen-Hilton, and Myric Andreasen. All these red eyeballs once again recalled Zvulun’s directorial preoccupation with sight and gave the impression that Siegfried had been spied upon for some time —  the dragon did not simply pop out of hiding once threatened, nor when called by the young hero’s horn. Think of some other “Siegfried” dragons. Sometimes they even lack eyes, like the dark expanse of tentacled fabric in the famed Otto Schenk “Ring” (1986-2009) at the Met. This constituted a moment of greater self-actualization for Siegfried. He has been surveilled his whole life. Wotan/Wanderer is waiting for him to achieve adulthood while Mime hovers over him creepily. When he finally meets a woman, Brünnhilde’s philosophical language uses the verb ‘siehen’ multiple times. Combat with Fafner therefore seemed like Siegfried defeating a sylvan, Grimm’s fairy-tale version of “The Truman Show.”

In the projections, a circling bird descended as Amber Norelai, installed way up in the catwalk atop the auditorium, made her cameo as the Forest Bird. In rear projections, a tree canopy replaced Fafner’s front door, green leaves snowing on the stage and soft, golden hour light issuing from a gobo that imitated the way tree cover lets shafts of light reach the forest floor. Lamenting his loneliness as the bird appeared, Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried addressed a skull, alas-poor-Yorick style.

Act Three began in near darkness, Erda’s and the Wanderer’s dialogue backed by the ribbon curtain in shadow. As the shadows broke for the Wanderer’s final scene with his grandson, the base of Brünnhilde’s mountain emerged: grey, corrugated, and desolate, the way the Toiyabe Range in Nevada looks from an airplane just after sunset. After Siegfried’s ascent, Lise Lindstrom’s Brünnhilde lay in a spotlight, exposed in front of the same rock from “Walküre,” the scene turning to daylight only gradually in the minutes leading to her awakening. In every respect, the staging pleased the eye, and the hardest element to get right, the dragon, proved the optic highlight of the entire night.

Was hast du gar für’nen großen Hut?

Mattie Ullrich’s costumes weren’t quite as impressive as those seen in the first two installments, but they did not need to be, since “Siegfried” takes place in an already decaying world. Lindstrom’s gown in which her character completed her quarter-century nap qualified as the showpiece: a shimmering, nearly bridal, floor length golden white. Greer Grimsley’s Wanderer clearly had not changed since putting his daughter to sleep, but had collected a mournful sombrero from the Sergio Leone collection somewhere along the way. As Alberich, Zachary Nelson wore a shredded costume clearly meant to mirror Grimsley’s as the Wanderer, but sloppier, underlining the textual references that make Alberich and Wotan mirrors of each other — another way in which the Shavian reading of the gods as capitalists and the giants and dwarves as proletarian loses momentum after the contest over Freia and the gold. As Fafner, Köpeczi’s costume visually hearkened to the jagged dorsal bones of the dragon. And in Act One, Anne Nesmith’s hair and makeup design gave Rodell Rosel’s Mime a bit of a Guy Fieri-esque shock of peroxide blonde above his leather overalls. Nesmith gave Lindsay Ammann’s Erda a rooty headdress and snaggled long hair falling onto her dark brown gown. Norelai, offstage, required no costume, appearing in street clothes for her bow.

Oh, herrlicher Knabe!

The performance was generally well sung, the senior singers managing their vocal resources appropriately. Like Tannhäuser, Siegfried is a nearly impossible role. He is onstage the entire opera, taking short breaks only when the other characters conduct a heated discussion about him with each other, or in Mime’s case, at the audience. Tenor Stefan Vinke retained more power in this role during Seattle’s last “Ring” a dozen years ago, and tends towards sprechstimme in some passages. He is better at mezzoforte and louder these days, more anchored on the body than during quieter passages. But the size of his voice is appropriate for the role, and his acting strikes the right balance between playing the character’s naïveté straight and humorously. You cannot make Siegfried too much of a doofus or the piece gets irritating, and Vinke calibrated his sales job of the comic moments well.

Vinke’s odd couple snarking with Mime throughout the first act culminated in a pleasing duet of sword-smithing and carrot-chopping in time. His attitude towards his surrogate parent betrayed more thoughtless exasperation than active contempt as he kicked food Mime had cooked away and mocked him, mouthing silently as tenor Rodell Rosel reminisced about taking care of little Siegfried years ago. You could tell they had had this exchange 150 times before. In one of Vinke’s funniest bits, at the close of Act Two, he returned to collect his neglected belongings, having left the Tarnhelm atop one of the skulls, and his sword in the middle of the stage. In the duet with Lindstrom, he spent some time on his stomach with his face on his hands and his legs gently kicking behind as though she were reading a bedtime story to a kid.

Maestro Roberto Kalb ably helped Vinke out, with appropriate pacing and dialing the orchestra back in spots to protect his heldentenor. Siegfried’s antagonists acquitted themselves well. Mime is an incredibly difficult character to make sympathetic. Indeed, since little antisemitism or other ethnic prejudice makes it into the operas themselves, the most difficult thing to endure while taking in a Wagner opera is a male character whining about how put upon he is and how badly he is suffering. It is endless, in fact. Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Tristan, Alberich, Siegmund, Amfortas, Klingsor, Wotan in places — on it goes. Mime is cut from this cloth. Rosel did about all one can do with this unsympathetic role, making sure the dynamic between him and his surrogate son was not entirely hateful, and making the comic moments funny enough, in an inoffensive timbre. After that odd passage where Mime asserts a sort of hermaphroditic totality — ‘I’m both your parents’ — Vinke put Rosel in a hammerlock and gave him a noogie. As Mime’s brother Alberich, baritone Zachary Nelson portrayed wide-eyed terror of Fafner and palpable mistrust of the Wanderer. His steely timbre contrasted both his brother and the incognito sky god. And in the brief role of Fafner, bass Alexander Köpeczi used his immersive, chocolatey sound to apprise Siegfried, who had just slain him, of the danger posed to him by the diminutive, poison-bearing dwarf.

“Wand’rer” heißt mich die Welt

Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley has continued performing Wotan/Wanderer now for seven years, and counting, past the age at which his legendary colleague James Morris retired the role, with astounding durability and vocal health not enjoyed by many singers in their 40s and 50s. He is arguably Morris’ equal in these three roles, and like Vinke and Lindstrom, he possesses a deep reservoir of muscle memory in “Ring” performance. Nevertheless, Time is undefeated, and in Atlanta, I have wondered if this will be my last chance to hear Grimsley as Wotan. His magnificent performance here last year, bidding his stage daughter Christine Goerke farewell, broke me. But we knew we had this year to look forward to. The Wanderer skulks off in such an understated way that his exit from the cycle, after hours and hours onstage, feels abrupt. As Grimsley paced away with his broken spear, I hoped it was not the last time I wouldd hear him in the “Ring.” Perhaps a complete cycle in Atlanta, late in the decade, will roster him, but it is too soon to know. That large voice and cedar timbre have held up remarkably well.

Outside of his morose interrogation of Erda, Grimsley’s Wanderer seemed to be having fun. He worked Mime over with glee. He enjoyed jousting with Alberich even more. And he even took pleasure in scolding his grandson Siegfried, before the line about how if Siegfried knew who he was, he would not speak to the older man that way. “Siegfried” is no longer Wotan’s story. But a great Wanderer makes you miss the first two installments of the cycle. And there is not a greater Wotan/Wanderer singing the role in North America than Grimsley, at least not yet.

Wer, nach der Frau dich zu sehnen?

In 2003 the film director Lars von Trier made an odd documentary, “The Five Obstructions,” in which he forces his mentor Jørgen Leth to remake his own picture “The Perfect Human” five times, each time with some weird obstacle imposed by von Trier. This sounds like something Werner Herzog would do, and Herzog has directed opera. In the waning moments before a repeat viewer knows that the Forest Bird soon arrives, “Siegfried” feels like this sort of stunt: Herzog compels Hans Zimmer, say, to write a five-hour opera featuring no female voices until the fourth hour. Seems a manageable task compared to hauling a ship through the Amazon rainforest. But gosh, that is tough on an audience.

Amber Norelai arrived as the celestial refreshment that the Forest Bird is supposed to provide, her dusty gold timbre floating somewhere in Cobb Energy’s ceiling. She must have been placed in an optimal spot, because her voice filled the 2400-seat house. The beauty of that moment in “Siegfried” never ceases to amaze. Zvulun’s marketing of the Hero’s Journey theme for the season recalled archetypal topoi of “Siegfried,” so the Bird makes gender interesting. The protagonist, a younger man, is required to seek knowledge from three primary sources, nature, an older man, and a woman. “Siegfried” plays with this by the gendering of a woman’s voice. Even though Siegfried checks off nature (the Dragon and the Bird), the older man (Wanderer), and the woman (Brünnhilde), nature comes in gendered packages: a dragon who is a bass and a bird who is a soprano. The beauty of Norelai’s cameo, her ‘here, finally, is a woman’ moment, drew attention to this facet of the Hero’s Journey.

Wotan thirsts for knowledge, too, and consequently goes to a woman to find it. Mezzo-soprano Lindsay Ammann, whose voice your reviewer had not heard since a Maddalena at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis six seasons ago, now sounded nearly a full contralto. Kalb’s orchestra gave a thrill in the Act Three music preceding Grimsley calling for her in one of his strongest passages of the night. With a covered but rich sound, Ammann acted blindness well, with pallid affect. She demonstrated the sky god’s follies one last time, placing him in rhetorical impotence.

Golden State Valkyrie

Lise Lindstrom’s voice, still remarkably pliant after the heaviest of heavy repertoire, brings a light of a different kind. If you have not heard her live, she possesses a highly distinctive instrument. But her timbre does remind of one singer of the past, one of the greatest Brünnhildes, Hildegard Behrens. One of the most ravishing things one can do with the human voice is to simultaneously communicate vulnerability and strength with the voice. Renée Fleming is superlative at this, but she also has the advantage of being a full lyric, which lends itself better to vulnerability. Behrens did that. And like Behrens, Lindstrom somehow achieves this as a dramatic soprano. Lindstrom sings with an instrument like an embroidered laser. Outside a steel-cutting core, there is a secondary resonance landing softly on the ear. This laser has a soft wrapping. The listener feels comforted. How, from something so sharp-edged? Her voice is a beautiful paradox.

Her Brünnhildes, all three, are informed by intense care in study, analysis, and deliberate thought. She articulates a clear understanding of the character’s arc over three music dramas. That has paid off. Most of the time, my brain parses opera singers as distinct from their characters, even if they are acting the character well. We do this to singers because we evaluate their singing, sometimes apart from their dramatic existence. Here is Domingo as Hoffmann, here is Baltsa as Carmen, etcetera. But when Lise Lindstrom sings Brünnhilde, I forget for stretches that Lindstrom is not actually Brünnhilde. I just see and hear Brünnhilde. I believe she is Brünnhilde.

Kalb’s orchestra introduced the last scene with gripping dynamics, the fire giving way to a cerulean backdrop and white clouds as the harps ascended. Vinke approached Brünnhilde, er, Lindstrom, reverently, removing the sleeping Valkyrie’s breastplate gingerly, as the lighting design seemed to make the light issue from her person. Jonathan Dean’s titles, intelligently, do not translate ‘Das ist kein mann’ — the screen stays dark for that line. Nonetheless the audience responded with uproarious laughter just before he said it, as though they were anticipating a known punchline while Dave Chappelle kicked dirt all over Charlie Murphy’s white sofa. Apparently, there is nothing you can do with ‘Das ist kein mann’ when an American audience is involved. Vinke did a good job of acting discombobulated at the sight of her Petrarchan aura and the human species’ dimorphism. As principal clarinetist David Odom played with beautiful tone, Vinke retreated behind the rock to watch.

Linsdstrom authored a slow build vocally with her three part greeting to the world as she awoke, that embroidered laser cutting through an eventually full-throated orchestra with ease. The “Siegfried” Brünnhilde is tough to pull off. Lindstrom struck the right balance of quasi-maternal concern for Siegfried, and the girlish glee she somehow manages throughout “Walküre.” She seemed viscerally offput by his contention that she alone could teach him fear. She projected authority when Brünnhilde insists that she has always loved him because she alone understood Wotan’s idea for him. She managed to communicate that Brünnhilde engages in some projection of her own desires onto this man who is a bit of a stock character. Her facial and vocal gestures transmitted deep knowledge of each line of the libretto, even, as Ned Flanders says of the Bible, ‘the parts that contradict the other parts.’ After her last soaring C6, which zipped to the back of the house, they smooched and ran off.

Merk’, wie’s endet!

While the Dallas Symphony put on a very well-sung complete “Ring Cycle” in concert last year, TAO’s 2023-26 performances are the only fully staged production of the 2020s in the United States at a major house. Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production ran aground on the shoals of the pandemic, Virginia Opera had to cancel a “Götterdämmerung,” and Seattle Opera, once called “America’s Bayreuth,” has so far offered only a semi-staged “Das Rheingold” borrowed from Minnesota Opera since their last iteration of the “Green Ring” in 2013. Even the new “Ring” by Yuval Sharon at the Metropolitan, while being phased in piecemeal in the late 2020s, will not appear complete until 2030. The Atlanta Opera’s streaming service makes it easy to access their productions for a reasonable price, but Ringheads have few options in the States for hearing the cycle live. With the first three music dramas, TAO has raised expectations for “Götterdämmerung” — styled more accessibly as “Twilight of the Gods” — in June 2026. And Lise Lindstrom will return for the final episode. Your reviewer will not miss it.