‘Salzburger Marionettentheater’

For a century, the Salzburger Marionettentheater has entranced audiences with operas in miniature, with the parts played by puppets. The puppeteers give the puppets human traits and more emotion than you would have believed possible. Unlike flesh-and-blood singers, the puppets can fly and turn summersaults - everything, in other words, that even the most fabulous libretto can ask. The Salzburger Marionettentheater has now compressed Wagner’s magisterial epic Der Ring des Nibelungen into one evening-long performance. From more than sixteen hours of drama, the director Carl Philip von Maldeghem has made telling choices that take nothing away from the power of the music or the story. On the contrary: this is anything but “indigestible” Wagner - there is even laughter. The surprisingly modern puppets enter into a dialogue with two actors who are outside the framework of the puppet theatre; together, they make this Ring a thoroughly topical production. The puppets are given the voices of some of the greatest singers in operatic history, as immortalised in legendary recordings by the Vienna Philharmonic under Georg Solti.