It’s official — San Francisco Opera is bringing back The Ring.
Richard Wagner’s monumental four-part, 15-hour opera cycle will return to the War Memorial Opera House in June 2028. Directed by Francesca Zambello and conducted by Eun Sun Kim, the full Ring of the Nibelung cycle will be performed three complete times — exactly 10 years after the production was last staged at San Francisco Opera, in 2018.
The principal cast includes Tamara Wilson making her company debut as Brünnhilde. Brian Mulligan, currently performing as Amfortas in Parsifal at the War Memorial Opera House, is cast as Wotan. (Mulligan performed as both Donner and Gunther in SF Opera’s 2018 production of the Ring.) Simon O’Neill, recently seen onstage in San Francisco as Tristan in Tristan un Isolde, will perform the role of Seigfried.
This will mark Eun Sun Kim’s first time conducting the full Ring cycle. As a lead-in, she will conduct its four parts separately: Das Rheingold in June 2027, Die Walküre in the fall of 2027, and Siegfried and Götterdämmerung in the spring of 2028 before the rotation of full cycles. (Kim has undertaken an initiative to conduct Wagner in each season, starting with Lohengrin in 2023.) The chorus director will be John Keene.
As in previous stagings of The Ring in 2011 and 2018, San Francisco Opera plans a Ring Festival with ancillary programming around the performances.
