Forty years after reporting on my first visit to Bayreuth, the city in the time of Covid is, in many respects, eerie. Familiar shops and restaurants have gone out of business from the cancellation of last year’s Festival, and the reduction of this year’s visitors by half meant an unsettling lack of queues. From the yellowing paper in the window of the closed wine store Süsse Quelle on the...
Robert Lepage’s brilliant production of the Ring was revived at the Metropolitan Opera this Spring and Mr. Lepage has had the last laugh. The run was sold out, the “machine” came to life, the singers were sensational, and it was an almost unadulterated triumph...
Lyric Opera of Chicago is building a theatrically exciting, musically impressive Ring Cycle. The addition of Siegfried in November 3, 2018, confirms the persistence of creative vision and the assuredness with which the project has been planned and executed, and makes one eager of the full Cycles in April 2020. Without any sense of either comparing or competing, I don’t think there has been, or...
The action of Lohengrin is like a set of nesting dolls. As I wrote previously, the overarching action of the play is Henry the Fowler’s effort to persuade the Duchy of Brabant to join with the Saxon armies to defeat an invader from the East. Within this is a simultaneous story of Ortrud, whose false […]
The second installment of the new Lyric Opera Ring was, if anything, even more gratifying than the excellent Rheingold that I attended a year before. Sir Andrew Davis, celebrating his 30th season at Chicago, led a charged, nuanced and richly romantic reading of the score, and the instrumentalists of the orchestra responded with impeccable musicianship. […]
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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