Peter Konwitschny directs Siegfried in Dortmund

Dhe covers will fall. Anyone who saw Valkyrie a year ago at the Dortmund Theater, with which Peter Konwitschny began his Ring des Nibelungen, and now returns to the hall after the second break of Siegfried, will be touched and excited, because he knows how that will be. The six harps have been moved to the seats on either side of the proscenium, where they created and embodied the fire magic at the end of the first evening of Richard Wagner’s stage festival. The filigree golden monsters are still wrapped in their black sacks, which protect them from dust. #

The director could also have ordered the harps and harpists to be moved from the wings to the edge of the stage just in time for their performance. But Konwitschny’s theater is a world where the means to produce magical effects are ready and not hidden.

Just as the legendary Stuttgart “Ring” was entrusted to four different directors a quarter of a century ago, Konwitschny, who delivered “Götterdämmerung” in Stuttgart, works with four different production teams in Dortmund. Frank Philipp Schlößmann built three eat-in kitchens for the “Valkyrie”, one larger and more luxurious than the other.

When the curtain rose on the second act, the scheme was understood and people looked forward to the third. Johannes Leiacker’s stage design for “Siegfried” also brackets the three elevators with a recurring element from the theater model kit. It is the container, the primal box of a modular construction that saves all ornamentation.

The Hort is already in the picture

Mime, the blacksmith, who lets his craft skills degenerate and his foster son run wild because he is obsessed with the idea of ​​making a miracle weapon out of scrap metal, lives in such a box, which is lined with forest panorama wallpaper. A second white container with a white door slides into the picture on the right. One suspects: This must be the gold deposit of the giant Fafner, the only place in the world that interests the toolmaker, who is caught up in instrumental thinking. The path through the forest requires no space on stage.

The Hort a container: That fits. First of all, because Fafner and his brother Fasolt (the Dortmund “Rheingold” is coming up next season) grew up in the construction industry. Above all, however, as an image for Wagner’s critique of capitalism, for the lack of imagination of the total material rule of abstract property. The withdrawn gold is invisible like an oligarch’s art collection in a Swiss free storage facility, useless and ugly, a mere balance sheet value protected by ugly security measures.

In Konwitschny’s disposition, however, the container is more than a concept, not just a grid that can be filled with the viewer’s associations in his interactive variant of director’s theater. At the beginning of the second act – the scene has shifted to the right – the white metal wall as a background unfolds an enormously dramatic effect. Alberich hangs around Fafner’s cave and has nothing to do but let himself drift. A sequence of mugshots from movement studies is thrown onto the wall, a dismembered silhouette: great expressionist cinema, made only of light and shadow.