By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy.

‘All he can say is, “Go, then. I can’t hold you any more,’’’ says Christopher Maltman, who has sung the role of Wotan throughout the Royal Opera’s current Ring cycle, and brings it to completion when Siegfried opens later this month. ‘It says in the score, “He fades into darkness.”’ The final opera is called Götterdämmerung, ‘Twilight of the Gods’, but Wotan never appears. How does a performer handle the final, devastating fade to black of a character who has dominated three vast dramas – a role which Maltman has compared, in its scale and complexity, to Hamlet or Lear?

‘Wanderer is a very different person from the Wotan of the earlier operas,’ Maltman says. ‘Well, I say he’s different, but he keeps all of the arrogance and pig-headedness that he displays in Rheingold, and especially in Walküre. But it’s tempered by this knowledge that everything is slipping away from him.

‘And so there’s a world-weariness – a sadness, I think, to the Wanderer. There’s a line in his scene with Alberich: “I’ve come to observe, not to do.” And that’s his arc for the whole of Siegfried.

‘He’s actually quite impotent. He’s always standing on the periphery, poking people and asking questions, but he never really accomplishes anything. At the end, it’s like all things that are catastrophic in our lives. We can anticipate the event, but as soon as it happens, the experience in reality is always an order of magnitude more devastating than we ever........

© The Spectator