Airs Saturday, February 11 at 11:00 a.m. The 2011-12 Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcast season continues with a live broadcast of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi leads the performance, which stars Deborah Voigt in the central role of Brünnhilde. Jay Hunter Morris, who stepped into the title role of Wagner’s Siegfried to great acclaim earlier this season, will sing the role of the doomed hero. The distinguished company of Wagnerians also includes Hans-Peter König as Hagen, Waltraud Meier as Waltraute, Wendy Bryn Harmer as Gutrune, Iain Paterson as Gunther, andEric Owens as Alberich; all singers but Paterson are making their house role debuts with this new production by Robert Lepage. Götterdämmerung will be heard live over the Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network at 11 am CST on Saturday, February 11. The performance will also be transmitted worldwide to more than 1,700 movie theaters in 54 countries as part of The Met: Live in HD series.
Luisi leads his first Met performances of Wagner’s epic conclusion to the Ring tetralogy. Earlier this season, he led the new production premieres of the third opera in the cycle, Siegfried,as well as Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He will conduct the first two complete cycles of Lepage’s Ring staging beginning this April. His future Met engagements this spring also include the new production premiere of Massenet’s Manon and a revival of Verdi’s La Traviata. Lepage’s Ring production features a unique, technologically groundbreaking single set that can assume countless configurations and transform through video projections into the mythic locations specified by Wagner’s stage directions. The premiere of the first opera, Das Rheingold, opened the Met’s 2010-11 season; the new productions of Die Walküre and Siegfried followed in April and October 2011.
Voigt, long acclaimed for her Wagner performances at the Met, is singing her first Brünnhildes in this production of the Ring. Götterdämmerung is 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. This fall, with a week’s notice, Morris took over the title role in the new production premiere of Siegfried and had a major success in the demanding part. Last season, he sang Siegfried in complete Ring cycles with the San Francisco Opera. He has also sung in numerous world premieres in his career, 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.
The intermissions will include live backstage interviews, as well as the popular Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera Quiz, featuring soprano Angela Meade.