Richard Wagner was an artist and a revolutionary nationalist. A fundamental rationale for his work was its function as a mythic summons to the volk – the German people – to remember their common and distinct heritage. He saw the Ring, in particular, as the great story of the roots of the German people, resonating […]
Over Christmas I was sitting in front of the fire while my son fooled with the TV remote, flipping between two football games while checking his texts on the iPhone, and played with his two-year old daughter while offering enthusiastic and unsolicited advice about how cool Amazon Prime is. People my age ought to be […]
It’s one thing to impose an external “konzept” onto a dramatic work and shove the piece unwillingly through it. American audiences refer to the results as “Eurotrash,” and I would choose the recent, unlamented Bayreuth production of Tannhäuser – staging the work as a divertissement for the workers of a biogas factory in order to investigate […]
The knight Walther is too often experienced by the audience through Eva’s eyes – handsome, strong, rebellious within acceptable boundaries, virile, dashing, a born artist and a hell of a tenor. A recent performance of avid McVicar’s insightful Gyndebourne/Chicago/San Francisco production, and a careful listen to the Reginald Goodall English-language recording, suggests that the truth […]
About ten years ago, during a road trip through South Carolina, a dear friend from England began talking to me about a dream he’d had. Oh stop, I implored. Please don’t even start this. Dreams are by their nature indescribable. They are subliminal events, fruit of the id, and any attempt to render them into […]
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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