Between October 2023 and February 2025, the new Munt Ring will be forged by music director Alain Altinoglu and director Romeo Castellucci – who began his opera career at the Munt with Parsifal in 2012. Anyone who recently experienced our production of Requiem knows how the Italian creator can penetrate to the essence of a stage work. And our music director showed that he feels Wagner's scores in every fiber during Lohengrin (2017), our staged production of Tristan und Isolde (2019), and earlier this season during a concert performance of Parsifal. It is therefore for us the ideal house duo to, on the one hand, bring the theatrical drama in the music to life, and on the other hand, distill the universal themes from Wagner's saga opera and bring them to the stage.
The last time this grand opera tetralogy was staged in Brussels was in the 1980s. Then Gerard Mortier engaged the team of Sylvain Cambreling and Herbert Wernicke for Der Ring des Nibelungen. Bernard Foccroulle's project with Antonio Pappano and Willy Decker failed in the 1990s for artistic reasons. It is high time, then, for a new tetralogy tailored to our house and in line with the spirit of our time.
Das Rheingold premieres in October 2023, Die Walküre follows in January 2024. Siegfried (September 2024) and Götterdämmerung (January 2025) fall in the final season of current intendant Peter de Caluwe.
"I insist on bringing together two essential pillars of the opera repertoire in my final season at the Munt: Richard Wagner and Claudio Monteverdi. Their works are fundamentally about the quest for the divine in mankind, and vice versa. The conflict between power and love is central to both composers and forms a perfect reflection of our contemporary spirit. The preservation of the world order created by humans continues to take precedence over the place and needs of the individual. The Monteverdi trilogy and the presentation of Wagner's tetralogy represent for me – together with the many world premieres we still have in store – a perfect conclusion to what we have achieved in Brussels over the past decades. I look forward with great anticipation to the realization of these ambitious projects that will continue to keep our house in the international spotlight", says Peter de Caluwe, general and artistic director of the Munt.
