CHICAGO — David Pountney is hardly the first director to assert that his production of Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle will focus on telling the story, rather than telling audiences what it means. Yet is it possible to tell any story without interpreting it, even inadvertently?

Mr. Pountney admits as much in a program note for his new production of “Das Rheingold,” the first installment of a complete “Ring” for the Lyric Opera of Chicago (in a coproduction with Teatro Real, Madrid). It opened here on Saturday night, with a strong cast and Andrew Davis conducting a lean-textured and urgent performance. (The next three operas in the cycle will be presented, one per season, through 2020.)

Though he has a long record of acclaimed work in opera, Mr. Pountney had never directed the “Ring” when Anthony Freud, the Lyric Opera’s general director, asked him to take on this challenge. The most compelling elements of “Das Rheingold” arise when Mr. Pountney’s few interpretive ideas come through.

The production sets the opera in the skeleton of an old theater, with wood scaffolding on both sides of the stage. (The set designs by Johan Engels, who died in 2014, were developed and carried out by Robert Innes Hopkins.) Three ghostly old women, perhaps the spirit guides to this theater, appear from the wings. They unpack a frayed travel bag to begin the opening scene of the opera, which takes place at the bottom of the Rhine. To suggest the river’s flowing waters, the women unfurl large swaths of billowing blue cloth.