Brünnhilde’s Dream: how our new show turned Wagner’s heroine from icon to everywoman

At the end of Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, the eponymous Valkyrie Brünnhilde is laid to sleep on a mountain rock by her father Wotan, ruler of the gods.

In Wotan’s view, his favourite daughter has disobeyed him by attempting to shield her brother Siegmund, whom Wotan’s consort Fricka has insisted be put to death for his incestuous adultery with his twin sister Sieglinde (from whom he was separated in childhood. It’s a complicated family).

Brünnhilde sees it differently, believing she had acted according to Wotan’s own innermost wishes. But she succeeds only in having her sentence commuted: instead of being left to be found by any passing mountain hiker, Brünnhilde persuades her father to surround her with a ring of fire so that only a fearless – if emotionally unreconstructed – alpha-male, presumably with fire-fighting skills, can wake and claim her.

Our monodrama Brünnhilde’s Dream, a new work to be performed at the Wigmore Hall later this month by the ensemble Counterpoise (of which I am co-director with my wife, Deborah Calland) and sung by acclaimed mezzo-soprano Rozanna Madylus, attempts to realise the vortex of emotions to which such a woman might be subject.

Confusion, bewilderment, anger with her father, fear of what the future may hold. I have long been struck by the degree of insight demonstrated by Wagner into the mind of his female characters and his ability to see that the world could be so much better if its affairs were conducted with a more feminine sensibility.

Our Brünnhilde speaks, to some extent, for Everywoman: we go beyond the confines of Die Walküre to contemplate the injustices done to women through the ages. As our director, Cecilia Stinton, puts it: “Instead of presenting Brünnhilde’s mythological context, our staging connects her experience in the Ring cycle with those of the women who came after her. In particular, this is presented through the voices of the 19th and 20th-century female composers whose works are represented in the recital. In our staging, the sentiments expressed in their songs merge with Brünnhilde’s subjectivity.”

As well as writing a linking text for Brünnhilde, I have translated the texts of the songs, the better to highlight the specificity of the themes and imagery they incorporate, from mountain peaks, snow, fir trees and dreams, to a ring representing love, and a woodbird who has strayed in from the Ring, where he tells the hero, Siegfried, where to find Brünnhilde.

The sequence begins with two beautiful songs by Fanny Mendelssohn, followed by Szymanowski’s Slumber Song and a song by Alban Berg about love and longing. Then, in Schubert’s exquisite song about the waif Mignon who longs to be with the angels, we have an astonishing leap forward from Goethe in 1795 to our own non-binary age: Mignon longs for the time when people won’t ask whether she’s a man or a woman.

Wagnerians will also recognise this as a “Das ist kein Mann” moment, when the hero Siegfried belatedly notices that the armoured figure he’s about to waken on the mountain top is not that of a man. I’m also pleased to be including a song by Vilma von Webenau, a talented but forgotten female pupil of Schoenberg, and one by Johanna Müller-Hermann, an accomplished but marginalised pupil of Zemlinsky, which looks forward to the bliss of a relationship based on love.

The staging at the Wigmore Hall will necessarily be a minimal one, but it will present Brünnhilde, as Cecilia puts it, “as a woman of the past confined in a sanatorium to ‘recover’ or be ‘cured’ of the rebellious, patriarchy-slamming ideas she enacts in the Ring cycle. Brünnhilde’s Dream explores the ways in which radical ideas relating to female creation and emancipation have been repressed, diminished and obscured.”

Madylus says that “the challenge was to do it in a way that was convincing and naturalistic, without turning her into a caricature. Cecilia’s rather ingenious direction helped me to marry up the different voices of the 19th and 20th-century composers.

Unlike portraying Alma Mahler in The Art of Love – my previous project with Counterpoise – a real person for whom there was a wealth of material I could research and on which I could base a more specific interpretation, what we have with this Brünnhilde is a fresh, exciting and unique colourful patchwork quilt fit for the 21st century.”

In the other half of our programme the great Wagnerian bass Sir John Tomlinson sings and acts the part of Shakespeare’s King Lear in a drama, The Shackled King, written specially for him and commissioned from John Casken by Counterpoise. In The Shackled King, Rozanna plays all three of Lear’s daughters (as well the Fool) and found it helpful “to draw upon the parallels between Brünnhilde and Cordelia ­– both the favourite, both abandoned by their father”.

Tomlinson’s Lear is an extraordinary performance that has been described as both “titanic” and “heart-rending”. Knowing we’d have Sir John, the greatest Wotan of my lifetime, with us to sing The Shackled King, it was too great a temptation not to ask him to open Brünnhilde’s Dream for us with Wotan’s moving farewell to Brünnhilde from Die Walküre.

More ill-informed prejudices are held about Wagner than about any other composer in the history of music. Recent productions of his works, however, have validated the view that in matters of sexual politics he was in many ways ahead of his time. Brünnhilde’s Dream takes such a reading of her character as a starting point.

Brünnhilde and her sister Valkyries may, in the Ring, ride through the skies doing their father’s bidding. Our Brünnhilde bravely leaps into the future to inspire the sisterhood, and indeed all of us, to challenge oppression wherever it rears its head.

Brünnhilde’s Dream/The Shackled King at the Wigmore Hall, 26 January; wigmore-hall.org.uk