A small but mighty Brattleboro opera company takes on Wagner's epic ‘Ring.'

Boston Globe

15 hours ago

'We didn't want to be the musicians that we are, and go to our graves never having touched this stuff,' Keelan said in a recent phone interview. 'So we determined that we would take, let's call it our Wagnerian fate, into our own hands and do the work that we wanted to do, with the people we wanted to do them with.'
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This is how a town with population 7,500, 90 minutes away from the nearest major airport, has ended up playing host to the only full production in the United States this year of the 'Ring of the Nibelungen,'. Wagner's epic four-opera saga based on Norse and Germanic mythology.
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It gave the world 'The Ride of the Valkyries' and the historically inaccurate image of Vikings in horned helmets. The cycle began on Aug. 18 with 'Das Rheingold,' the shortest and most compact opera in the saga. Wednesday, Aug. 20, it continues with 'Die Walküre,' and 'Siegfried' follows on Aug. 22 before the spectacular six-hour finale of 'Götterdämmerung' on Aug. 24.
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Though TUNDI was established with Wagner operas in mind, the 'Ring' cycle wasn't initially in its sights, Keelan said. First up was 'Tristan und Isolde,' Rae and Keelan's personal favorite opera, from which the company took its name: T-UND-I. But in the aftermath to that 2019 debut production, Keelan said, they realized that some of their audience could be 'much more easily described as Ring-heads than lovers of the other operas.' What's more, 'there were support systems available in the world around us' should they embark on a 'Ring' cycle, he said.
The pandemic shut down live performance just a few months after they began planning for the 'Ring,' and Keelan and Rae refined the company's mission – aiming to confront Wagner's 'awfulness and nastiness' as a person, including his history of anti-Semitism, while embracing his 'shattering creative, philosophical, and aesthetic impact,' Keelan said.
In doing so, 'there was very much this casting away of assumptions about Wagner, and Wagnerian singing and production manner, that we went through,' Keelan said. 'We wanted to be a profoundly collaborative space for the artists that we choose to work with.'
That meant seeking out musicians who wanted to approach the 'Ring' from an open-minded and curious perspective, rather than preconceived notions of what Wagner should be. Across three summers of two 'Ring' operas each, from 2022 to 2024, TUNDI built an intergenerational network of performers, of whom many returned for this year's complete cycle. Rehearsing has been an 'exercise in building the thing from within with the real people who are working on it, page by page and act by act,' Keelan said.
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Wagner opera is already a cornerstone of the resumes of some TUNDI singers, such as mezzo-soprano Sondra Kelly, who has been singing various roles in the 'Ring' cycle since the 1980s, when she was drafted to cover a Valkyrie at the Metropolitan Opera after being heard as an apprentice artist in Santa Fe. With TUNDI, she has sung the roles of Fricka and Erda; this year, she's only singing Fricka in 'Walkure.'
Unlike most of the other companies she's sung with, TUNDI is 'very, very interested in the singers' opinions' about the music and the characters, Kelly said. The company doesn't have a stage director on its creative team, so when Kelly and her colleagues arrived, they 'discussed who they thought their characters were, and their relationships' with the other characters. Then they blocked their own scenes, which evolved throughout the rehearsal process. It's 'very different from any 'Ring' cycle – actually, any opera – that I've ever done,' Kelly said.
As a seasoned Wagnerian singer, Kelly is eager to share her four decades of insights with newcomers to the repertoire.
The class of newcomers includes Ohio-based soprano Kirsten C. Kunkle, who makes her Wagner debut as the Rhinemaiden Wellgunde in 'Rheingold' and 'Götterdämmerung' while also understudying a Valkyrie. When she was a doctoral student in her mid-20s, Kunkle's teacher predicted that her lyric soprano voice would expand later into the dramatic heft required to sing Wagner, and assigned her some art songs and role study, but she never sang his music outside of the classroom. Now in her 40s, Kunkle became interested in 'just dipping my toes into Wagner and seeing how it felt again' through some smaller roles. 'It's taken me time to develop into a larger voice. I want to make sure it was right,' she said.
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Now, after weeks rehearsing in the intimate, collaborative environment of TUNDI, which she compared to 'opera camp,' she said she has a better idea of what her Wagnerian future might look like. 'I would love to do more, I don't foresee myself doing some of the enormous, big roles, but maybe a Sieglinde in the next couple of years would be right up my alley,' she said, referring to one of the major roles in 'Die Walkure.'
For rehearsals and performances, TUNDI's home base is Brattleboro's historic art-deco Latchis Theatre, which typically serves double duty as a performance venue and movie house. A full Wagnerian orchestra wasn't possible with the size of the theater and TUNDI's comparatively shoestring budget, but Keelan trusts his 'smoke and mirrors capacity to give large-scale Wagner sounds with a smaller number of people.'
Having tackled the 'Ring,' already a white whale for so many companies, where does TUNDI go next? Another 'Tristan und Isolde' is the plan, but 'we're avoiding saying we want to 'return'' to it, said Keelan.
It's more of a coming back round - much like a ring.
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at