Met Opera's New Ring on Hold

NEW YORK — The Met Opera will not launch Richard Jones’s new staging of the Ring in 2025. The coproduction with the English National Opera, which the Met announced in February 2021, is endangered now that ENO’s funding has plunged into uncertainty beyond the current year.

“With the ENO not being in a position to continue with the production of its Ring Cycle,” Met General Manager Peter Gelb told the Associated Press, “it obviously makes it impossible to help produce it with them." The original plan was to launch the cycle in 2025 and do full cycles in 2026-27.

The ENO has already staged Jones’s Die Walküre, in November, 2021. Das Rheingold is scheduled to open on February 18, but the company said yesterday that it will not go ahead with the Siegfried planned for next season due to the funding issue. (Arts Council England, until a few days ago, indicated it would be dropping the company’s funding; the recent compromise restores funding, with a nine percent cut, but only for one year.)

“The delay in confirming our financial status has meant that our plans for the season ahead will inevitably have to change,” said the ENO, “including the postponement of a number of new productions as well as our current Ring Cycle, in partnership with the Met, which was due to continue with a new production of Siegfried next season.

“We do remain concerned that this only gives audiences and our workforce one year’s reprieve, and still leaves a huge amount of uncertainty regarding the ENO’s future," the company said.

The Met's last Ring Cycle was staged by Robert Lepage and made its debut in 2012. Revived in 2013 and again in 2019, it was largely viewed as an extravagant farce. New York critic Alex Ross wrote of it, “pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.”