New Yorkers of a certain age remember a front page headline of the New York Daily News when the federal government refused to “bail out” New York City, which was on the brink of default: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD!” Well, that’s sort of what has happened with the Bayreuth Festival and the loyal Wagner […]
Before her appointment to co-direct the Bayreuth Festival, Katharina Wagner was quoted as speculating that her great-grandfather’s juvenalia, Rienzi, might claim a place in the repertory of the house. Soon after her appointment, her production of Rienzi in Bremen was greeted with skepticism and dismissal. Yet a recent production of the work directed in Berlin […]
Siegfried is often termed the scherzo of the Ring – the light and playful internal movement of a great symphony. Each time I have the privilege to see it, though, I leave quite shattered – hardly the response to a scherzo. The performance at the Metropolitan Opera on October 27, 2011, had this effect and […]
Adophe Appia was a visionary Swiss theatre theorist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His ideas of stage space defined by light rather than by painted sets had a profound influence on Edward Gordon Craig, David Belasco and other early 20th century practitioners. But never have Appia’s theories been so triumphantly vindicated as […]
In the supplemental material to the Opus Arte DVD of Katharina Wagner’s recent Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger, she relates: When my father asked if I were interested in directing it here, I asked myself as I would with any work anywhere: “Does it have a story I’m interested in telling?” It would appear that […]
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.
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