A couple brought together by music, Korea and now Wagner

French conductor Adrien Perruchon led the Bucheon Philharmonic Orchestra in a four-hour concert version of Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle — four operas that run about 15 hours when performed in full — earlier this month. Singing the role of Brunnhilde was his wife, soprano Lee Myung-joo. It was the first time Perruchon had conducted the work in any form, and the first time Lee had sung the role.

"Der Ring des Nibelungen" is among the most demanding works in the classical repertoire. The four operas, drawn from Norse and Germanic legend, that Wagner spent more than 25 years writing before the complete cycle premiered at Bayreuth on Aug. 13, 14, 16 and 17, 1876. The cycle turns 150 this year, with opera companies around the world, including Bayreuth itself, marking the anniversary.

Compressing "the Ring" to a single evening took several months. Lee watched her husband work through it alongside bass-baritone Samuel Youn and Kim Jeong-ho, CEO of the production and management company Arts&Artist. The small team decided how many singers the piece could carry, then which characters and relationships to keep.

In the performances on Aug. 8 and 14, the Bucheon Philharmonic and 14 singers filled the stage, including Youn (Alberich, Hagen) and Kim Ki-hoon (Donner, Gunther), who also sang this year in "Ring" productions with the Berlin Philharmonic and Salzburg Festival. Rounding out the cast were Choi In-sik (Wotan), Kim Jae-hyung (Siegfried), Lee (Brunnhilde), Park Seung-joo (Loge) and Kim Seung-jick (Siegmund).

"It was a process of constantly revising the casting and the connections between scenes, matching the harmonies, dialogue and even the number of measures, one by one," Perruchon said.

The team didn't want to compress the opera's scale. Wagner conceived "the Ring" as an unbroken score, and Perruchon leaned on the orchestra to bind each surviving scene to the next.

"The whole concept of why it's so gigantic is to have this total work where, from the beginning to the end, you take the hand of the listener and you don't release until the end," he said.

With only so many singers, he added, "We really focused on the main characters and their relationship with each other. That's, I think, the best way to tell the story."

Lee, 44, built her career largely in Europe. After graduating at the top of her class from Seoul Arts High School and Seoul National University, she received a DAAD scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service to Munich's University of Music and Performing Arts, where she finished early, before spending seven years as a principal singer at the Landestheater Linz in Austria.

But this was her first major Wagnerian role.

She said she was drawn to Brunnhilde's psychology before she had even opened the score. The character is a warrior who gives up her divinity for love, then turns against the gods to protect it.

"I thought, this is a woman I want to play," she said. Vocally, the role suited her well, drawing on the weight of a dramatic soprano while allowing her unusually strong upper register to cut through the orchestra without forcing volume.

Perruchon, 43, said he deliberately gives his wife little musical direction, a policy that extends to his other singers. "Working with a singer is no different, and working with my wife is no different," he said, comparing his job to finding a common denominator among an orchestra of 80 personalities. "My job is to support 100 percent, once the work is vocally possible."

Orchestra members told Perruchon afterward that the performance felt like living an entire lifetime compressed into one sitting — the same comparison, he noted, that listeners sometimes make about Mahler symphonies. The piece opens and closes with the same musical material, giving it, he said, "a full circle."

The couple met in 2010 at a dinner following a Seoul Philharmonic performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection," where Perruchon played percussion under conductor Chung Myung-whun. They were introduced by Chung Min, one of Chung's sons and a conductor himself, and sat next to each other for much of the evening without formally speaking.

Saying goodbye that night, they learned they were both about to leave the country within days -- Lee for an opera post in Linz, Austria, and Perruchon for Paris. They dated long-distance for about seven years before marrying.

Lee later introduced her husband, then still an orchestral musician who wanted to become a conductor without returning to school, to her own mentor, conductor Kim Duk-ki, who immediately began mentoring him.

Perruchon, in turn, credits his late father, Etienne Perruchon, a composer who never conducted his own works, with instilling in him the belief that a composer needs an interpreter — and, indirectly, with reshaping his wife's career.

After both of their fathers died in close succession just before the pandemic, Lee went through a prolonged crisis, doubting her voice and nearly quitting singing. Perruchon told her something his father once said, after a journalist found him at home listening back to his own music: If I don't love it, why would I have written it?

Lee said the story changed how she heard her own voice. "That's when I started to think I should love my voice, too," she said.

Perruchon became the principal conductor of the Bucheon Philharmonic in April 2025 and has served as music director of France's Orchestre Lamoureux since 2021. A former Dudamel fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he has guest-conducted orchestras including the Cleveland Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Perruchon said he never quite thought of himself as having left Korea in the first place. He kept conducting here regularly even after he stopped playing in the orchestra in 2015. But building something long-term, the way the Bucheon post let him, wasn't something he expected back when he first left as a young musician.

"I didn't imagine that would be," he said. "To have nowadays this chance to make a life here — call it destiny, or just good serendipity — I feel extremely fortunate that I can keep making music here with some of the people I met from the very first days I came."

Perruchon's tenure at Bucheon will continue next season with a new Mahler symphony cycle, which he revealed will open with a program titled "The Beginning." He said he hopes the next decade brings a little more balance between music and life outside it.

Lee agreed. "Before we got married, we were both running like racehorses," she said. "Since then, we've had a little more room to breathe."