A Journey Completed: Jaap van Zweden on Götterdämmerung and the HK Phil’s Ring Cycle Finale
Four years. Four epic music dramas. One extraordinary orchestra transformed by the weight of the world’s most demanding compositional achievement. On January 18th at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Maestro Jaap van Zweden and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra bring their landmark Der Ring des Nibelungen journey to its shattering conclusion with the premiere of Götterdämmerung — the Twilight of the Gods.
AN ORCHESTRA REBORN THROUGH WAGNER
The journey did not merely produce performances. It produced transformation. Van Zweden speaks of the HK Phil’s growth with the quiet pride of someone who has watched something rare unfold before his eyes. “This orchestra has grown so tremendously,” he reflects. “It has cost us a lot of energy and a lot of sweat — but it gave us so much back.”
The proof arrived at the Beijing Music Festival, where the orchestra’s performance of Die Walküre drew rapturous attention from audiences and critics alike. They were, van Zweden recalls simply, “the talk of the town.” For an ensemble that has spent four years excavating the most technically and emotionally demanding music in the operatic canon, such recognition feels not like a destination, but a confirmation of what was always there — waiting to be unlocked.
“If you open this orchestra and look at it as a treasury,” van Zweden says, “I think with this music, we have put some extra diamonds in that box. That is a treasure this organization is going to carry with them for the rest of their existence.”
THE ART OF LETTING GO
Götterdämmerung is no ordinary finale. All the leitmotifs woven through Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried return here — amplified, transformed, and driven forward with what van Zweden describes as a “turbo.” Mastering this music demands months of relentless preparation. But van Zweden’s philosophy of performance reaches beyond preparation into something more elusive: liberation.
He invokes the story of Rudolf Nureyev, whose teacher drilled technique into him with ferocious discipline, then — at the moment of performance — issued one final instruction: forget everything. “Know forget everything I told you. Go on stage and dance.” Van Zweden seeks exactly that moment for his orchestra: “I hope that we are really ready to let it go. Let it flow from the heart.”
WAGNER BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH
What gives Wagner his singular, enduring power? Van Zweden chooses his words carefully, knowing that music ultimately resists translation into speech. But his answer is precise: Wagner “likes to maneuver between hell and heaven all the time.” Where Mahler explores the emotional terrain of earthly existence — grief, jealousy, ecstasy — Wagner possesses the rare ability to navigate between the material and the transcendent, between greed and glory, between the darkness of the Ring’s narrative and moments of eternal, luminous beauty.
It is this navigation — made audible through the architecture of leitmotifs — that keeps audiences suspended in a state of anticipatory wonder. “Just before something happens,” van Zweden explains, “you already hear it in the music.” Wagner arrives at the emotional moment before the moment itself does.
A CHORUS OF THREE NATIONS
Götterdämmerung demands more than an orchestra. It demands voices on a monumental scale. Three choruses — the Hong Kong Philharmonic Chorus, the Bamberg Symphony Chorus, and State Choir Latvija — unite for this production under a chorus master drawn from the Bayreuth Festival itself, the global epicenter of Wagnerian performance. Van Zweden’s relationship with this distinguished figure stretches back to their collaboration on Lohengrin in Amsterdam — a foundation of trust that makes his presence here feel both earned and significant.
The cast assembled for the occasion is equally formidable: Gun-Brit Barkmin as Brünnhilde, Daniel Brenna as Siegfried, Eric Halfvarson and Michelle DeYoung among them. “The biggest risk we can take as musicians,” van Zweden says with characteristic conviction, “is not to take risk.”
ART AS FOOD FOR THE SOUL
Beyond the stage, van Zweden speaks of something larger: the responsibility of art. Music education for children, he insists, is not a luxury but a necessity — not merely for the sake of music, but for the formation of a more human world. “Art is food for the soul,” he says. “If we realize that with our children, we will without any doubt create a human race which still loves music.”
“Siegfried’s Funeral March” — music described as too grand even for popes and presidents — awaits on January 18th. For those who have followed this four-year journey, Götterdämmerung is not simply a premiere. It is a reckoning.
