The Metropolitan Opera broadcast season winds up this month with the second installment of director Robert Lepage’s much-heralded new production of Wagner’s four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. The approximately five-hour performance of Die Walküre, conducted by James Levine, airs on Saturday, May 7, beginning at noon.

The Met has assembled a stellar cast for the new production of the Ring cycle: Bryn Terfel is Wotan, lord of the gods, in his first performances of the role with the company. Deborah Voigt adds the part of Brünnhilde to her extensive Wagnerian repertoire at the Met. Jonas Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek star as the Wälsungen twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Stephanie Blythe is Fricka.

“The Ring is not just a story or a series of operas, it’s a cosmos,” says Lepage (La Damnation de Faust), who brings cutting-edge technology and his own visionary imagination to the world’s greatest theatrical journey. Levine, who has conducted every complete cycle of Wagner’s masterpiece performed by the Met since 1989, adds, “The Ring is one of those works of art that you think you know, but every time you return to it, you find all kinds of brilliant moments that hadn’t struck you with the same force before.”

On May 7, Violeta Urmana and Joyce DiDonato star in Richard Strauss’s brilliant opera-within-an-opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. Fabio Luisi conducts Elijah Moshinsky’s witty production.