Kiddos, do new stuff! That was Wagner’s message to his perhaps over-reverential apostles on an occasion memorialized in the diaries of his wife, the redoubtable Cosima. Directors love to quote the line, but how often do they truly break new ground? The current “Ring” in progress at the Royal Opera House, London, may be one of the rare cases. According to backstage observers, the director Barrie Kosky and the conductor Antonio Pappano are collaborating so closely as to figuratively finish each other’s sentences. Unlike the grand maestros of old, whose Holy Grail was the “long line” of the score, Pappano underscores its brokenness, complementing Kosky’s focus not on Fate as the driver of the action but on the characters’ unpredictable swerves of will. The single most striking touch so far has been the constant presence of a naked, octogenarian Erda before whose eyes the epic unfolds. In Wagner’s scenario, Erda—a sleeping sibyl whose dreams are all that happens in the world—is seen and heard in only two scenes, both pivotal. In Das Rheingold, she intervenes of her own accord to get Wotan to yield the accursed ring. In Siegfried, the installment now on view in London, Wotan awakens her, presuming she can tell him how to prevent looming cosmic disaster. But his actions have thrown everything so far out of joint that she can tell him nothing. It’s Wiebke Lehmkühl we’ll hear in Erda’s deep, bardic music, shattering the illusions of Christopher Maltman’s Wanderer (as Wotan is called in this opera). Andreas Schager is Siegfried, the hero who breaks all the rules. Elisabet Strid is the fallen Valkyrie Brünnhilde, who in Götterdämmerung, will go on to redeem the world. —Matthew Gurewitsch