Higher powers are at work here: Siegmund, Sieglinde, and Hunding are depicted as figures on an oversized light panel, at the mercy of their creator. Wotan is invisible in the first act; only later does he appear as a puppet master, like in The Truman Show , decisively determining when each of his marionettes is allowed to move. Then he has the formerly oversized light panel in front of him on his workbench, in its actual size. All the characters are his miniature figurines. This Ring of the Nibelung , conceived for Hamburg between 2008 and 2010 by director Claus Guth and his set and costume designer Christian Schmidt, is at its core a laboratory setup. The political fable about power and its cost is already distilled to its crucial essence in Die Walküre , which is being presented this season as an autonomous standalone piece: The focus of this…