Atlanta Opera is building a Ring Cycle over the next several seasons – the city’s first – and has made an auspicious start with Das Rheingold – again, the city’s first. It is an exciting and promising project. Rheingold was staged by the organization’s General & Artistic Director, Tomer Zvulun. When he appeared in front of the curtain before the performance began, he greeted the audience as...
Psychoanalysts Steven H. Goldberg, M.D., and Lee Rather, Ph.D., have edited an enjoyable collection of essays under the title “Opera on the Couch: Music, Emotional Life, and Unconscious Aspects of Mind” (Routledge 2022). Three of the essays address Wagner characters: Senta, Walther and Tristan. L. Eileen Keller, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst in private practice in California, authored...
Very high musical and production standards in a jaw-dropping theatre
So many aspects of the Wagner festival in Leipzig were gratifying that it is difficult to report on them all. The production level of all 13 performances was very high. The music-making by the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester was consistently brilliant. The city of Leipzig is very attractive and of heightened interest to music lovers – we had the opportunity to hear the Mass in B minor in one of...
Miscellaneous Notes: Ironically for a festival of all of Wagner’s works, no production in Leipzig featured a Wagner Curtain. Three types of front curtain were used: a traverse curtain (parting in the middle and pulled along a track to the sides of the stage, first revealing the center of the stage set), a drop curtain (pulled upward as a whole and first revealing the bottom of the stage set)...
The Wagner Blog is a forum for discussion of contemporary themes arising from the works of Richard Wagner. Discussions relating to Wagner’s musical, literary, theatrical, philosophical, political and theoretic work are all appropriate for this forum.