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A New Production of Wagner's Götterdämmerung Opens at Met Opera 1/27

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A new production of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner's cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, will open January 27 in a performance led by Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi and directed by Robert Lepage. The central role of Brünnhilde will be sung by Deborah Voigt in her Met role debut. Jay Hunter Morris, who stepped into the title role of Wagner's Siegfried earlier this season to great acclaim, will again take the role of the doomed hero in this final installment of the Ring cycle. The company of Wagnerians also includes Wendy Bryn Harmer as Gutrune, Waltraud Meier as Waltraute, Hans-Peter König as Hagen, Eric Owens as Alberich, and Iain Paterson as Gunther; all but Paterson are making their house role debuts.

The February 11 matinee of Götterdämmerung will be transmitted live around the world as part of The Met: Live in HD series, which now reaches more than 1700 movie theaters in 54 countries.

Luisi will lead his first Met performances of Wagner's conclusion to the Ring tetralogy. Earlier this season, he led the new production premieres of Siegfried and Don Giovanni, and he will conduct the first complete cycles of Lepage's Ring staging beginning this April. His future Met engagements this season also include the new production premiere of Massenet's Manon and a revival of Verdi's La Traviata. Lepage's Ring production, which features a technologically advanced set that can assume many configurations and receive video projections to realize Wagner's stage directions, opened the Met's 2010-11 season with the premiere of Das Rheingold; the new productions of Die Walküre and Siegfried followed in April and October 2011.

Voigt, acclaimed for her Wagner performances at the Met, is singing her first Brünnhildes in this production of the Ring. Götterdämmerung will be the seventh Wagner opera in her Met repertory, which also includes Brünnhilde in Siegfried, both Brünnhilde and Sieglinde in Die Walküre, Isolde in Tristan und Isolde, Elsa in Lohengrin, Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, and Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer.

Earlier this season, Morris took over the starring role in the new production premiere of Siegfried with a week's notice, and had a major success in the demanding title role. Last season, he sang Siegfried in complete Ring cycles with the San Francisco Opera. Throughout his career, he has starred in numerous world premieres, including John Adams's Doctor Atomic, Howard Shore's The Fly, Elliott Goldenthal's Grendel, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, and André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire.

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