Over the next few weeks, almost 50 hours of opera will play out on the stage of Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre, starting from Friday.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle is made up of four standalone operas – Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung – which together tell a sweeping, tragic story of gods, greed, love and grief. Collectively it’s over 16 hours of performance, and Melbourne Opera will be running the cycle three separate times with an all-Australian cast.

It’s one of the most grand, epic and ambitious projects an opera company can take on, and this is only the fifth time it has been staged in full in Australia. “It’s the biggest thing you can undertake in the performing arts,” says Melbourne Opera producer Greg Hocking.

He’s not exaggerating. Staging just one of the operas in the ring cycle is a big ask – the logistics of staging all four together are almost impossible to comprehend. Not for Suzanne Chaundy, however. The director has been working towards this since 2019.

The final week has been a hectic – but precisely calibrated – flurry of rehearsals for singers, orchestra and tech. Chaundy speaks to The Age in a brief break between checking lighting cues for one opera and a chorus rehearsal for another.

In addition to keeping four separate stories straight in her head, she needs to ensure that rehearsals are spaced out enough to maintain the vocal health of singers, while making sure that everyone from lighting through to make-up is across every tiny detail of each opera. “I’m ready to take over the defence force,” she says with a laugh.

She has staged two of the operas previously, sticking with a classic approach, allowing the drama of the stories to speak for themselves.