The Wagner Society of New York — the largest in North America — reserves its Anton Seidel Award for the rare artist whose achievements in Wagner’s music have reached historic status. Past honorees have included James Levine, Birgit Nilsson and Plácido Domingo. This week the Society has announced a new honoree: The orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera. And well-deserved...
A subscriber writes: Since its premiere in 1882, countless thousands of words have been written about the meaning of Wagner’s most challenging work, Parsifal. The text has been scrutinized and analyzed by devotees and detractors alike. These discussions are nearly always fascinating, often confusing, and occasionally ill-informed, and to their number I am certainly unequal […]
As part of its series of Wagner works conducted by Marek Janowski, Pentatone Classics has released a recording of a live concert performance of Tristan und Isolde that took place in the Berlin Philharmonie on March 27, 2012. I enjoyed all of it very much and a great deal of it was revelatory. Janowski seems to […]
Considering that Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt Bülow Wagner was the person most responsible for framing the role of Wagner in 20th Century German cultural and political life, it is remarkable that Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth, by Oliver Hilmes, is the first serious academic study of her life. On that ground alone the volume […]
In his recent book, Sorcerer of Bayreuth, Wagner expert Barry Millington comes down hard on Wagner the anti-Semite. He rejects the “misapprehension that Wagner’s anti-Semitism is like a superfluous integument that can be peeled away from his oeuvre without leaving a trace, when in fact it is so intrinsic to his aesthetic that it is no […]
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.