Halfway through the collection of “Legendary Performances” released by the Met this year, several surprises came to the fore. One was how poor the chorus at the Met was in the 1940s and 1950s. It was as if they dragged folks in from the street to have a go at the Pilgrim’s Chorus. Apparently the […]
My first exposure to Mozart’s delightful singspiel, Die Zauberflöte, was in 1976 when I saw the TV film by Ingmar Bergman. I was young in my Mozart appreciation development, and learned an enormous amount by Bergman’s treatment of the overture. He did it as a 7-minute long segment in which the face of a young girl […]
We forget that the author of Die Meistersinger could be a very funny guy. My sister, early on the Wagner curve but of a tenacious ear, sent me a 200th birthday tribute with its sophisticated tongue firmly in its cheek. Have good laugh on the Meister: Happy Birthday Tristan!
The London Review of Books features in its 11 April 2013 issue a musing by Nicholas Spice titled “Is Wagner bad for us?” The breadth of Spice’s inquiries prohibits useful capsulization here, but an early passage of the article is so trenchant that I hoped readers would find it stimulating. The question posed was “about […]
One of the several Wagnerian whimsies that I have collected on my bookshelf is a 1931 translation by Hannah Waller of a 1912 book by Julius Kapp originally titled Richard Wagner Und Die Frauen: Eine Erotische Biographie (tempered in the American translation to The Women in Wagner’s Life). It’s one of those confident admixtures of myth, devotion, scholarship and popular literature...
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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