Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about Siegfried is that he’s an impulsive oaf. Well, duh. Have you never met (or if you’re really unfortunate, been) a teenage boy?

Wagner could hardly make it more clear. Siegfried’s upbringing has been toxic. He has been isolated from humanity, and his only inkling of love has been brutally transactional. He’s the eternal disposable male; valued only for his future ability to fight and die for people more cynical than himself. Wagner, true (as ever) to nature, portrays Siegfried’s blossoming, chaotic instincts as a life force that finds its natural purpose in his union with Brünnhilde – herself an anxious and vulnerable beginner at this whole impossible business of being human.

The shocking entitlement of Huw Edwards

There is nothing more embarrassing than a Davey-Starmer love-in

The Foremans can’t blame the UK for their imprisonment in Iran

Apologies for going on like this, but the point........

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