BRATTLEBORO-We set out on a fierce act of protest.
This month in Brattleboro, beginning on Aug. 18, TUNDI brings Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung to the center of our lives in Brattleboro - not as an epic or monumental artwork, nor as a museum piece, nor even as an opera or myth, but as a raw confrontation with the systems that are being rigged to fail us, with outrageous benefits to a corrupt oligarchy.
This cycle that we perform holds up a shattered mirror to a world ruled by hoarded power, broken contracts, liars, truth-tellers who are punished, and environmental plunder. In The Ring, the gods lie and the mortals pay.
And in 2025 America, it's searingly close to home.
Wagner's four-part music drama tells the story of a corrupted world spiraling toward collapse. Its gods and giants are not fantasies; they're stand-ins for the authoritarians, billionaires, climate deniers, and power brokers of our own day.
This is not some mythic fairy tale. It is a study in decay. A long, slow, operatic scream.
TUNDI's Ring does not offer escapism. We let this unfathomable work do what it was built to do: disturb, transform, overwhelm, and burn to the ground.
* * *
Wagner was many things, including a contradiction. But in The Ring, he achieved something rare: a mythic cycle that dares to imagine the end of a poisoned order. It doesn't promise easy redemption. It doesn't patch the system. It burns the whole thing down.
And here's the most important part: That final fire isn't despair. It's hope, radical and costly. Hope that something truer might emerge when the lies are gone.
We perform The Ring now, in 2025, because we feel its urgency in our bones. We live inside its questions. Who holds power, and at what cost? What happens when women refuse to obey? When nature is treated as commodity? When gold becomes a curse?
We invite our community not to be entertained, but to participate in transformation.
* * *
TUNDI will present the only Ring Cycle in the U.S. - Wagner's four interconnected operas - in 2025.
• Das Rheingold (The Rheingold), on Monday, Aug. 18 at 7 p.m., is an origin-story prequel, centered on a ring forged from gold stolen from the depths of the River Rhine.
• Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), on Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 4 p.m., shows love beginning to make its beautiful claim in the face of toxic power. Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie, discovers herself and tells the truth, only to be isolated, and fearfully punished.
• Siegfried, on Friday, Aug. 22, at 4 p.m., tells of the title character's boyhood journey to manhood, with sequences of extraordinary stillness as he makes his pathway through the forest to slay Fafner the dragon and release his love Brünnhilde from the magic ring of fire.
• Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), starts at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 24. The cursed ring is returned to the Rhine's depths by Brünnhilde after suffering in her new human condition, finally returning to the wisdom of the Earth Mother, and sacrificing herself in an ultimate act of self-immolation.
Each performance (except Das Rheingold) breaks for two intermissions appropriate for a meal.
Please visit TUNDIProductions.org for tickets to participate in our large-scale act of protest.
Hugh Keelan, a world-renowned and acclaimed pianist, conductor, composer, and arranger, is cofounder and musical director of TUNDI Productions, which has created the Wagner in Vermont Festival since 2019. The Commons' Deeper Dive column gives nonprofits in the region elbow room to write in first person and/or be unabashedly opinionated, passionate and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This Arts column was submitted to The Commons.