Review: The Met Opera’s Next ‘Ring’ Will Be a Sea Change

Richard Jones’s bleak staging of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” in London offers a clean break from the extravagance of the Met’s most recent production.

LONDON — It’s never a good idea for a critic to make predictions, but I’ll venture one: When the Metropolitan Opera’s next staging of Wagner’s epic “Der Ring des Nibelungen” arrives in New York in a few years, there won’t be any stories about the set.

The last time the Met unveiled a “Ring,” 11 years ago, there were hardly stories about anything but the set: Twenty-four massive, seesawing planks conceived by the director, Robert Lepage. Splashed with projections, those planks shaped themselves into the sprawling four-opera cycle’s various locales, from the heavens to the depths. And “the machine,” as it became known, kept making news, with its 45 tons, its technological sophistication, its phenomenal expense, its creaks and malfunctions.

It worked, the Met insisted, more than it didn’t. But working or not, the machine was always the focus — not the music, the characters or the intellectual themes of Wagner’s deeply human, politically charged magnum opus.